The Incrementalists
Incrementalists • Book 1
by Steven Brust, Skyler White
Why You'll Love This
What if 200 immortals have spent 40,000 years nudging human history forward — and they still can't agree on anything?
- Great if you want: cerebral fantasy blending immortality, memory, and quiet moral conflict
- The experience: slow and idea-dense — more philosophical dialogue than plot momentum
- The writing: dual authors trade perspectives fluidly, keeping voices distinct and charged
- Skip if: you need strong narrative drive over concept-heavy conversation
About This Book
Imagine a secret society that has quietly nudged human history for forty thousand years—not through grand revolutions, but through small, deliberate interventions designed to make the world incrementally better. The Incrementalists follows Phil, one of two hundred near-immortals who share memories across lifetimes, as a new woman is recruited to carry on the consciousness of a recently deceased member. What unfolds is part love story, part philosophical argument, part mystery—with Las Vegas as a surprisingly perfect backdrop for questions about identity, free will, and whether good intentions are ever enough.
What makes this novel distinctive is its unusual dual authorship: Brust and White write from alternating perspectives, and the two voices genuinely feel different—suspicious of each other, attracted to each other, incomplete without each other. The central concept of "meddling"—accessing a shared psychic garden of memories and emotion to nudge human behavior—is rendered with enough internal logic to feel genuinely strange rather than hand-wavy. Readers who enjoy fiction that trusts them to sit with ideas, ambiguity, and complicated relationships will find this one lingers.
