by veni vici vidi
How the Pyramid Stands is a psychological portrait of a man learning to read the world accurately for the first time, and finding that the accuracy costs something he is still calculating. It refuses easy judgment in both directions: Chen Hao is not redeemed, and he is not simply corrupt. He is a person who discovered, through catastrophe, that the rules he had been living by were always a partial account of how the game was scored — and who acquired, in the process of learning the fuller account, a set of capabilities and a corresponding set of questions about what those capabilities are for. The novel's central tension is not between good and evil but between two kinds of knowledge: the kind that tells you how systems work, and the kind that tells you what to do with that understanding. Chen Hao arrives at the end of the year with the first. The second remains, like the Q4 plan page in his notebook, still blank — not because he has given up on it, but because he is still walking toward it.
