Lame Gods
The habitat which the former occupants of the formerly hospitable planet Earth call home is orbiting space station called CIEL. It is a name that does not immediately convey any context at all. Fortunately, there is irony attached:
"CIEL, on Earth, was the name for an international environmental organization, but also for a young person's video game before the Wars, before the great geological cataclysm...Now it's what we call our floating world. What lame gods we've made."
The Dictator
The ruler of CIEL is a power-mad authoritarian figure with fascist tendencies. He started out on Earth as an "opportunistic showman" who weaseled his way into becoming a television celebrity who used the power of propaganda to make his transformation into an opponent of all things democratic. Maybe this backstory does not seem ironic now, but we can imagine that in 2016, when the author was busy writing the novel, it was definitely intended as unthinkably demoralizing irony.
Covid Irony
On April 13, 2020--almost exactly three years to the day after the novel was published--President Trump announced the U.S. would no longer fund the World Health Organization just as the Covid-19 pandemic was about to launch into the stratosphere. Remember now, the book was published several years before almost anyone had ever heard of hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, or injecting people with bleach to treat deadly viruses. All of which makes the following observation all the more ironic in retrospect:
"The fastest way to drive living begins mad, then as today, is to confine them to a small, stimulus-less place and deprive them of any interaction with their species."
Death at Fifty
CIEL requires the execution of every person upon reaching their fiftieth birthday. This is mandated because of a limited supply of water. It feels sort of ironic, however, in light of the fact that another aspect of life on CIEL is the inability to reproduce. Which seems to raise what one would imagine would be a vital question to have answered: Where is all that new demand for water coming from that people have to be killed off in order to preserve it?
Plot Twist
There is a big and hugely ironic plot twist at the end concerning the true nature of Jean de Men. Suffice to say that the first name turns out to be far more appropriate than the last name.
