2018 Notes
Wild Seed
Notes:
Every time I read a new Octavia Butler book, I find myself shocked that I don’t just get everything she’s ever written and read it all at once. She weaves questions of history, power, race, humanity, love, and community together in astonishing and provocative ways, and her pacing and characterization are as masterful as any writer in the 20th century.
Doro is immortal, born in the Nubian region of Africa some 4000 years ago. He has been jumping from body to body ever since, and cannibalizing the soul and body of whomever he takes over. He has been trying to make others like him by breeding promising humans to produce super-normal abilities. In the late 17th century, he discovers another immortal like himself, Anyanwu an Igbo woman who has lived for 300 years in western Africa. Unlike Doro, her power allows her to perceive and alter her own body down to the cellular level, and the bodies of others to a lesser extent. Thus, she can choose whether to age, can change shape, and is immune to most disease and injuries.
The rest of the book follows Doro and Anyanwu as they travel to upstate New York, where Doro has been building a breeding community in an effort to make more powerful beings. He rules his community with power, violence, and manipulation, and the tension between his patriarchal long-term plan and Anyanwu’s humanism leads them into conflict.
As a student of history, I have always appreciated Butler’s ability to weave in complicated historical forces into her work, not just as a backdrop. Slavery, the War of 1812, race prejudice, and the strictures of colonial and early Federal gender roles all form significant plot devices and setpieces in this novel. And this is in addition to the ways in which Butler uses her characters to meditate on power, community, inequality, race, and love. And along the way she has created a frightening and ugly character in Doro, whose millenia-long lonliness has led him to view almost everyone around him as an abstract means to a selfish end. The fear he engenders pervades every character in the book, and yet it is no accident that he first appears as a captain of a ship trading in Enslaved Africans. There is a subtle but powerful allegory of the Transatlantic trade here, all of which was implement by people who saw themselves as well intentioned, and working toward good ends. So Doro is a monster, but he is a monster in a world of mundane monsters and Butler’s genius is to view his horrific acts through Anyanwu’s eyes; she is someone who can both understand why he behaves how he does, and still be horrified at his methods and the implications of his plan.
Time to go buy more Octavia Butler books…
Adults in the Room
Notes:
This book is a confession, an explanation, a call to action, and a political thriller all rolled into one.
If you’re reading this, you probably know Yanis Varoufakis–the eccentric academic who rose to the occasion of Greece’s political and economic strife to become the Finance Minister for the Syriza government, which was elected to push back against the economic austerity imposed by the European Union, the European Central Bank, and the IMF. This book documents his time during the whole ordeal, including all of his experiences trying to analyze the crisis prior to the election, his meetings with Alexis Tsipras who convinced him to run, his battles with the representatives of the EU/ECB/IMF, and his ultimate side-lining by his party when and his resignation.
The book is very detailed in its recounting of everything that happened. Varoufakis clearly has some scores to settle, and the book reads as though he had recordings or transcriptions of his conversations with almost everyone involved. He makes his feelings about the whole process and all the individuals involved very clear, and one wonders what some of the other people in these conversations felt and observed during these interactions. This also makes the book a bit tedious to read in places, as it is clear that Varoufakis wants to make sure that the reader understands exactly what was said in a given conversation, so that he can be seen to be in the right. It also means that he sometimes goes on at length of his analysis of a given situation, and gives little credence to other perspectives.
But of course, Varoufakis is not some mundane observer–he’s a left-wing economist with an extensive scholarship on the problems of economic crises. When he finally gets a chance to implement that understanding, he repeatedly indicates that he is not dogmatic–he wants a practical solution that gets Greece to pay its debts back. What he finds, time and time again, is the creditors (namely the French and German banks, the IMF, and the European Central Bank) do not actually want a sustainable solution. What they want is to use Greece as an example to other impoverished EU countries, and to cover up for their own mistakes in the 2008 financial crisis. Thus, Varoufakis is put into an interesting situation where he wants to find solutions to the problems of his country, but can get no traction or alternatives.
The book is almost Le Carre-ian in its extensive political intrigue. Varoufakis documents disagreements within the Syriza cabinet, shaky alliances broken by circumstaces, and the long game being played by Europe’s most powerful economic elites to keep Greece from getting out of its situation. Ultimately it is politics, not economics that undoes Varoufakis' position, as the members of his cabinet (likely inspired by frustrated Europeans who sat opposite him) decide that he is too much of a liability in the negotations and sideline him, events which ultimately lead to the 3rd Greek bailout that ends the book. There are also appearances by important international figures including President Barack Obama, English Chancellor George Osborne, and former treasury secretary and Harvard president Larry Summers.
Finally, the book ends with Varoufakis' decision to form DIeM25–a pan European political party dedicated to ending neoliberal European economic policy that led to Greece’s downfall in the first place. Despite his association with ‘Grexit’, Varoufakis insists throughout the book that what he wanted was a fairer, more economically just Europe with Greece as a strong part of that, and his final conclusion is that only a pan-European alliance can implement such a future.
The Weird
Notes:
I was drawn to this collection for its appearance of being an authoritative anthology of a (sub?) genre that I really like–weird, sci-fi/horror fiction. I’ve been reading Lovecraft since I was an early teenager, and because much of Lovecraft existed in edited collections, I branched into reading people like Clark Ashton Smith, Algernon Blackwood, and later descendants of that tradition like Thomas Ligotti, and Laird Barron. For me, the best weird stories are those that use ambiguity and incomprehensibility as story elements, and where the authors create a mood with their prose, rather than with plot and characters going from a to b to c. In short, I like “The Colour out of Space” more than “The Call of Cthulhu”.
What I found was that it was better than an authoritative history of weird fiction, and way more revelatory than I first expected. Whatever one thinks of the individual selections, this is a monumental achievement, and a really great resource for those of us in love, and fascinated by, the history of weird fiction. I have now read all 1100-odd, double columned pages, and though it was definitely a long journey, I’m glad I took it.
A few scattered thoughts, followed by a list:
The book itself is massive–110 stories, 1100+ double-columned pages, and almost 3 pounds. I am glad to have a physical copy, but definitely found myself reading a kindle version many times when I didn’t feel like lugging it around.
Jeff Vandermeer (who co-edited this with his wife Ann) has picked “his” history of Weird fiction, rather than “the” history. There’s a real emphasis here on what might be called ecological weirdness–landscapes, diseases, animals, bodies, fungi, and other kinds of physiological or environmental strangeness. That’s not really a knock on the collection as a whole, but just to indicate that all anthologies are selective and from a perspective, even authoritative ones like this.
The collection is notable for its inclusions outside of Euro-American canon. Lovecraft is here, and Blackwood, and Ray Bradbury, and China Mieville, and Thomas Ligotti. But it is clear that Weird fiction is a global phenomena of the 20th century, and the anthology addresses that by including eastern European, African, and East Asian authors, most of whom I had never encountered before and am delighted to be introduced to.
As with all anthologies (even one as massive as this), there’s stuff that grabbed me, and stuff that didn’t. There’s also stuff I knew already, and stuff that I had heard of and been excited by, and also pieces that were completely out of left-field. I gravitated to stories that maintain ambiguity and are subtle in their weirdness, though there are certainly pieces that are outrageous, shocking, or colorfully descriptive. What follows are stories that I didn’t know, and are still with me, in some cases, despite having read them months ago:
- Algernon Blackwood–The Willows. I knew of ““The Willows”” from Lovecraft’s glowing praise for it, in his essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature” but it took this printing to get me to actually read it. I was shocked at how modern, strange, and creepy it was. Vandermeer’s Annihilation feels VERY indebted to this story’s fusion of journey-narrative, eco-weirdness, and unreliability.
- Margaret Irwin –““The Book””. A stately, formal supernatural possession story that pulls the great trick of slowly unfolding itself before the readers eyes, rather than giving away all the cards. Good on the Vandermeers for including quite a few great women, given the very masculine bent of much weird fiction.
- Jean Ray –““The Mainz Psalter””. Not sure how to describe this masterpiece about the disturbing journey of a group of sailors, except to say that its part of a European tradition of weird fiction with which I’m not familiar, and that there are images and phrases in here that still haunt me.
- Shirley Jackson - ““The Summer People””. Jackson is, of course, famous for “The Lottery” that is a high school English class staple used to teach about plot twists. But this story is so subtle as to be almost mundane, except that an aura of dread permeates every sentence. By the end, she’s constructed an astonishing prison for her characters that feels both obvious and startling.
- Michael Bernanos - “The Other Side of the Mountain”. One of the longer pieces in this book, really a novella. Bernarnos is another new discovery for me, though this work in particular has apparently become quite a cult classic. It’s hard to describe this hallucinogenic journey, except to say that it involves cannibalism, living trees, and a god frozen in the earth.
- Robert Aickman–“The Hospice”. As with Blackwood, I had heard of Aickman and used this book as an opportunity to find out more. I was not disappointed. Like Jackson, the subtle weirdness and unnerving characters turn this simple story of a man seeking shelter during an auto breakdown into a masterpiece.
- M John Harrison - “Egnaro”. I had read Harrison’s recent sci-fi, and an older post-apocalyptic novel called “The Committed Men”, but this short novel takes the Lovecraftian trope of the dangers of forbidden knowledge into a modern context. There is no real antogonist in this strange story, only a sense that the world is holding together uneasily, and what sits underneath is unknowable and completely alien.
- Elizabeth Hand -“The Boy in the Tree”. I’ll read anything Elizabeth Hand writes, after being completely taken in by her short novella ““Wylding Hall.”” This story is really a character study of a brother and sister that gradually reveals itself to be about something much more sinister and fantastical.
- Karen Joy Fowler - “The Dark”. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve traded a love of Lovecraft’s outrageous, descriptive prose for more austere and minimalist writers like Laird Barron and Thomas Ligotti. This piece is in the latter vein, using the tunneling strategies of the Vietcong as a platform for thinking about upbringing, fate, and what makes us human (or inhuman).
- China Mieville -“Details”. I like Mieville’s novels, but often find that his imaginative setups write checks his follow-through doesn’t cash. This piece is the perfect sweet spots of strange, funny, and creepy. It’s a modernization of Lovecraftiana, with monstrous forces visible in the literal cracks in the walls.
- Brian Evenson- “The Brotherhood of Mutiliation”. Another novella, with a plot that is classic detective fiction, but with a setting and characters that are grotesque and unsettling.
- Reza Negarestani- “The Dust Enforcer” Formally the strangest story in the collection, and excerpted from Negarestani’s longer novel. “Dust Enforcer” reads like an encyclopedia entry, but on that describes a reality filled with ancient monsters, contemporary resource conflicts, mythology, alchemy, and terror. I was so taken with it that I bought the novel, despite its rather inscrutable form and concept.
Its time to fight dirty
Notes:
A short and biting book that is unsparing in the challenges that progressives face to enact legislation, and the steps they will need to take to do so.
Faris argues that since the 1990s, conservatives have wages what he calls a “procedural war” in Washington, D.C., exploiting ambiguities in the constitution and procedural norms that are otherwise un-codified, to enact a regressive agenda. Faris argues that progressives will need to focus on addressing these deficiencies if they want to get anything done.
Faris’s procedural wishlist includes the following:
- Statehood for Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico, netting additional likely Democratic senators and electoral votes.
- splitting California into 7 states, each of which would likely produce 1-2 Democratic senators.
- dramatically expanding the size of the house of representatives.
- enacting ranked-choice voting for congress, the senate, and the presidency.
- adding additional jurists to the Supreme Court and instituting a retirement-lite procedure for existing jurists.
- enacting a sweeping voting rights package to ban Voter ID, creating a national holiday on election day, extending early voting, and allowing easier automatic registration.
The book is written in a snarky, biting style that may turn some off, but his analysis of the state of play in American politics is spot-on (i.e that democrats run on policy while republicans run on anti-policy and wage procedural fights). As to his prescriptions, it’s hard to say how successful they will be or how easy to implement, but they strike me as moving in the direction of a more representative, engaged, and just nation. "
Come Closer
Notes:
A short, horrific novel of demonic possession, love, and memory.
Amanda is comfortably married and comfortably living in an isolated but pleasant warehouse loft apartment with her husband Edward when strange things start happening. She writes obscene notes to her boss that she doesn’t remember writing. She finds dark or violent or sexually explicit thoughts going through her head unbidden. And she starts having dreams (and then daydreams, and then hallucinations) of an imaginary friend named Naamah, who may or may not be an ancient biblical demoness.
What follows is a terrifying story of the choices we make, the way that our relationships with others ground us, and the degree to which we have power over our actions and lives.
I found it pretty gripping, and unsparing, and a great read right as October begins to ramp up to Halloween.
The Shining Girls
Notes:
What a strange time to read a book like this, when the question of what patriarchal violence looks like, and how to resist it is so front-and-center of all of our consciousness.
The book starts with a drifter named Harper Curtis in the US Great Depression acquiring a key to an abandoned house. In the house he finds…well, a lot of things, but mostly a room filled with objects from the future. These objects belong (or will belong) to women who ‘shine’–they stand out, against the grain of the world they are in. When he opens a closet door in the house, he discovers that he can travel through time and space to find these women, and he uses this ability to murder them. The book is the story of these women, scattered across the 20th century, and of one in particular named Kirby Mazrachi, who survives when she’s young and grows into an adult in the 1990s filled with a burning desire to find him and stop him.
All time travel stories are complicated, and this one is no exception. There are time and causality loops, and chapters frequently start with extreme changes of perspective and context. This would make the book a slog if Beukes' writing and characters weren’t so interesting, complicated, and well-written. Even the monster, Harper Curtis, feels alive and motivated, if only to violently murder women. And Kirby is a force of nature, driven to stop him by her own assault, but also clearly a person trying to live a life–there are great references to the early 90’s Chicago music and art scene, a world in which she’s trying to find solace and companionship, while still keeping the fire blazing to solve her own impossible attempted murder.
In summation, a really great book about male violence that uses time travel as a mechanic to examine how American society has treated women over the course of the 20th century. Not a pleasant picture, but a really engaging and unsparing book.
Trail of Lightning
Notes:
This was a really delightful and exciting debut novel from Rebecca Roanhorse. Roanhorse is Ohkay Owingeh (Pueblo) and utilizes the folklore, culture, and history of Dine/Navajo people in really wildly creative ways. She’s also an amazing storyteller and the book (which is the start of a longer series) really pulled me along with its energy, characters, and creativity.
Maggie Hoskie opens the book by hunting a monster that has been stealing children from the land of Dinetah, the Navajo nation that has protected itself from the rest of flooded world by building a huge wall. Maggie has both clan powers that allow her to hunt and kill such monsters (or anyone) with great strength and speed, as well as training and skill given to her by the legendary mythical Dine hero Neizghani, who abandoned her (and broke her heart) prior to the start of the novel. The rest of the book unfolds from Maggie’s hunt and sees her confronting her past trauma, fighting for what she believes to be right, and learning about who she is and of what she can do.
The book uses Dine culture as a rich and creative source for urban fantasy, and the book is peppered with Dine words, ideas, and wonderfully rich characters (I particularly liked the elder Tah, who was both funny and charismatic, and the god Coyote, whose appearance herald both comedy and danger throughout the novel).
And Roanhorse has created a complicated and interesting hero in Maggie. She’s a powerful woman, but also someone whose life has been wrecked by the very things that gave her such power. Thus, a big part of the novel is Maggie’s story of trying to survive and live with the consequences of what was done to her, and what she’s done to others. She’s not always likable, in a lot of ways, but that makes her way more interesting.
I’m looking forward to following these characters and this world into Roanhorse’s next novel in the series. Very cool stuff!
Old Gods New Enigmas
Notes:
This masterful collection of recent essays by Mike Davis combines his long-time interests in labor history, urbanism, and ecology. The centerpiece essay is his commentary on Marx, using his vast knowledge of 19th and 20th century labor history as a kind of practical exploration of Marx’s theory of class struggle. It’s long, and rich, and I’d like to read it again. Framed as a series of theses, he argues for agency, contingency, and organizing as the prime motors of the history of class struggle.
However, the other three essays are equally rich, as is the incredibly funny introduction where he writes a humorous intellectual biography of his abortive attempts to read Marx as an activist and academic. The second essay on Marx’s theory of Nationalism is particularly timely given the resurgence of racial-nationalist politics in Europe and the United States. Davis doesn’t link his analysis to contemporary political struggles, focusing more attention on the 19th century French nationalism that so captivated Marx, but I think there’s really something in here about the ways in which nationalism is mobilized and constructed out of constellations of power relations within and between classes.
The last two essays are more ecologically focused. The first outlines Piotyr Kropotkin (Russian anarchist and geographer) and his early discoveries and proclamations of long-term climate change as an engine of human history. Davis’s storytelling and narrative shines here, as he links up 19th century debates about climate and weather with arguments about race and adaptation, the culture of geographer-explorers of the 19th century, and the enthusiasm for explorations of martian and extra-terrestrial life. It’s a wild and interesting piece of intellectual history.
The last essay was perhaps the most emotional and profound. It is a discussion of global warming politics and its repercussions, split into two halves. The first half lays out Davis’s case that we have already failed to halt a dramatic and epochal transformation of our planet, which will lead to untold human suffering and dislocation. This part of the essay is harrowing, both for its sketch of the destruction that CO2 rise will cause, and for the absolutely monumental (and thus fur, ignored) efforts that will be necessary just to stave off its worst excesses, let alone arrest the whole process. The second half of the essay is based on the very real truth that the most significant driver of global warming has been 20th century urbanization. What Davis argues is that there is a strong connection between the reduction of CO2 emissions and the degree to which cities are democratically planned as healthy, egalitarian spaces. He sees the profit and speculatory motives that have dominated much neoliberal urban planning as being the most disastrous to the global climate bank and argues for heroic, ‘impossible’ efforts to re-shape the urban landscape around a more just and democratic framework.
I will read anything Davis writes, but this book was particularly rich and spicy.
Akata Witch
Notes:
“A delightful and strange book that has the wonderful effect of starting out weird and getting progressively weirder.
Sunny is a Nigerian (Igbo) teenager and an outcast both for her upbringing in America, and for her albinism. A chance encounter with some other outcasts at her school leads her to discover that she is a Leopard Person (a magician), and has latent magical abilities. Along with her friends, she trains and hones her abilities while trying to keep her newfound abilities secret from her family, navigate teenage life, and fight back against a serial killer who has been plaguing both the magical and non-magical (““lamb”") communities.
I loved the first two Binti novels, which are future-focused and put a smart, creative west African girl into an alien situation (literally and figuratively). Akata Witch shares this sentiment, but uses Sunny’s shock and exploration of her new situation as a proxy for the reader’s introduction to the whole world that Okorafor has created. In this sense (and I know that she hates this comparison) it operates a bit like the first Harry Potter novel, where the reader gets to know a magical world hidden behind the one we know along with the reader.
It’s also clear that Okorafor’s genius to draw on west African (particularly Igbo) folklore and mythology as background in the way that medieval European mythology undergirds much of the Fantasy tradition. I felt like I wanted a book on west African folklore next to me as I was reading, not because what she wrote was confusing (she’s a very clear and imaginative writer), but because it was clear to me that there was so much I didn’t know but wanted to!
Ostensibly, this is supposed to be Young Adult fiction, but I loved it despite being well past my young-adulthood. "
Newtons Wake
Notes:
I liked it, even as I’m pretty sure that a good 15-20% of it was over my head.
A few hundred years after ‘the hard rapture’ when a bunch of AI became sentient and killed a huge percentage of the human race before departing for parts unknown, the humans that remain have spread out into the galaxy. The groups they have formed each have their own ends, goals, and methods. The Carlyles are an extended family/gang of scottish space pirates who use their monopoloy of a series of gates called the Skein to travel across space, find exotic or alien technology, and re-purpose or sell it. When they find a planet inhabited by humans who had flex the hard rapture and been thought lost, they stumble into a series of events that force all humanity to rethink their relationship to machines, and to each other.
This sounds very serious, but it’s told with a light-hearted and funny tone that I wish I could capture as well as Macleod does. One of the running subplots involves an over-dramatic theatre director who stages epic Shakespearean-type plays about important historical figures…like Leonid Brezhnev, George W. Bush, and David Koresh. To assist him in capturing the zeitgeist of the early 21st century for his new production, he re-corporealizes two folk singers who were killed in the Hard rapture, and who provide a wonderful ‘fish out of water’ commentary on the insanity of the 24th century. There’s also an eccentric billionaire who lives hermetically on a sentient spaceship which is also his lover, a renegade Israeli consciousness trapped in a spacesuit, futuristic Samurai (the ““knights of Enlightenment”"), terraforming communists, and all kinds of other craziness.
This is tech-heavy hard sci-fi, but fun, exciting, and thought-provoking enough to keep me interested even when I wasn’t exactly sure what was happening.
Loaded
Notes:
A harsh, unsparing book where standard pro and anti-gun readers alike will find little support or purchase. Dunbar-Ortiz draws on her deep understanding of US history, politics, and culture to explore why simplistic readings of the Second Amendment to the US constitution fail to capture it’s real historical importance. In essence, she argues the Second Amendment is neither an anachronistic entrenchment of State militias now superceded by the National Guard, nor is it an unmitigated or unabridged right of any citizen to own firearms. Rather, it is an attempt to enshrine the elite social position of White men by giving them access to the means to violently protect it.
She traces the origins of the Second Amendment and it’s simultaneous concern with individuals and militias to colonial militia raiding parties that invaded, scattered, and destroyed indigenous communities. These militias were essentially non-state armies, only loosely related to colonial governance. Such militias were also deployed, as she later notes, to police and re-capture escaped Africans and African-Americans enslaved on plantations in the South. These two roles–killing Indians and patrolling for slaves–form the crucial historical nexus from which the Second Amendment drew its legal, political, and economic meanings. In essence, she argues that the right to own guns was a non-military means of conquest and control, with the State shifting the responsibility for such conquest onto individual White men through the granting of rights of gun ownership. She later traces such emphases into various cultural and historical domains including Westward expansion, late-20th century conservative politics, and modern Nationalist ideologies. All in all, it shifts the terms of the gun debate in the US into very uncomfortable but largely necessary areas, re-thinking the simplistic regulation-focused debate into something much more complex and historical, but truthfully resonant.
So, why three stars? I am loathe to judge so rich a book by its organization and editing, but it’s really poorly edited and not very focused in making its point. I counted at least two incomplete sentences and a few slighter grammatical errors. Additionally, the chapters are very rambling in their argument, with subjects often turning on a dime into a related but distinct subject. I had a hard time following the overall flow of the argument, even as individual discussions, anecdotes, and analysis were very interesting. I suspect that the book was not given a firm editorial hand, because a decent editor would hone this thing to a fine point, and caught the grammatical errors that I saw.
So, a good book, though not necessarily an easy read, both for its difficult subject matter, and also for its rather poor structure and rhetoric.
Winter Tide
Notes:
Exactly the kind of Lovecraft revisionism that I love–it takes Lovecraft in his totality, focusing equal attention on his complicated and creative mythology, his racism, and the times in which he wrote and gives all equal focus as planks of a compelling and interesting narrative.
Aphra Marsh is one of two survivors of an internment camps set up by the US government to house the denizens of Innsmouth, Massachusetts, who are actually Deep Ones. Part of how she survived was by befriending the Japanese families that were forcibly relocated to said camps during WWII. Now, a decade or so later, she has an opportunity to return to New England from San Francisco, along with her adopted Japanese sister, and her boss, an antiquarian bookstore owner with who she has been trying to recreate some of her ancestral magical knowledge. She is asked to return by a representative of the US government, who wants her to go to Miskatonic University to figure out whether magic is being used as a weapon in the Cold War.
There are so many wonderful and clever moments and sections of the story. It manages to draw on many of Lovecraft’s disconnected creations, particularly from “The Thing on the Doorstep”, the “Haunter in the Dark”, and “The Shadow out of time”. Part of how Emrys was able to link such disparate stories is to recast them as unreliable retellings of true events, the actual truth of which is both less horrific and richer. But what really sold me was Emrys' insistence on grafting that mythology to real historical forces and processes. For example, because Miskatonic University was given all of the printed materials taken by the government during the Innsmouth raid, Aphra finds herself in the position of being granted access to her family and community’s archive, but not being able to recover it. This mirrors broader issues regarding cultural property, repatriation, and museum politics, particularly as they relate to Indigenous communities in North America and around the world.
Devotees of Lovecraft will find some clear forks with his style and interests. For instance, there is a real insistence in the story on showing the complicated emotional contours of human relationships, even between beings that are non-human or more distantly human. This puts in stark contrast with Lovecraft who was largely indifferent to human motivation beyond fear. Additionally, (and sadly for me) there is none of Lovecraft’s complicated interest in and animacy of landscape, despite the story taking place in Lovecraft’s native (if fictionalized) New England.
The cast is big, though sometimes it felt a bit unwieldy. Audrey, a young and curious college student from an elite background is a particular delight, as is Professor Trumball, whose body is serving as a host to a member of the Great Race of the Yith. At the same time, many other characters are introduced but given little focus or depth.
Still, the story is compelling, and the reconfiguring of Lovecraft’s mythology is both really clever and profoundly welcome.”
Black Reconstruction
Notes:
If I start summarizing this monumental, important work, I’d go on for pages. So, I’ll just say this: This book was seven hundred pages long, and I couldn’t put it down. The writing is rich, informative, and gorgeous. Each chapter ends with a poem summarizing or commenting on the content. The bibliographic essay at the end, usually a thing to skip in works of non-fiction unless you are a specialist, is vitriolic in its condemnation of historians who marginalize African-American contributions to American history.
This is a book that seeks to put Black people back into Reconstruction, a period of history in which they were the central protagonists, but in which their protagonism was actively challenged at the time, and continued to be challenged or marginalized by people who came after.
Du Bois’s rich alignment of Marxism with a penetrating racial analysis allowed him to write a history of reconstruction as a labor history, where the forces of labor and capital are all jockeying for political control before, during, and after the civil war. Indeed, Du Bois argues that reconstruction was a short-lived and ultimately toppled period of labor dictatorship in the south, and was undone by the accommodation of Northern and Southern Capital, and Southern capital to southern White labor at the expense of Black labor. He goes into rich detail into how this occurred, drawing on primary and secondary sources and often letting the voices of the time speak for themselves, regardless of their political orientation. It’s not a history beholden to theory, but rather a history in which the human story is itself constructing the processes that he analyzes.
The book also makes clear why it was so revelatory for me, an educated White guy, in the 21st century–a generation of historians wrote works on reconstruction that were indifferent to or actively hostile towards African-Americans and the role they played in Reconstruction. So I learned of Reconstruction as a failed event, undone by Northern-inspired corruption and the inability of Black people to govern properly. Du Bois puts a lie to all those ideas, showing that the new African-African state governments made judicious laws, re-built the economy of the South, and were no more corrupt than the White governments that preceded and followed them, and were in many cases less so. Indeed, in one of his most searing passages, Du Bois argues that the animosity of southern White elites to reconstruction was its success: “If there was one thing that South Carolina feared more than bad Negro government, it was good Negro government.” (428) The tragedy of reconstruction was that it heralded a re-organization of political power towards working people, both Black and White, and it’s ultimately crushing held back a more just society for everyone concerned.
I wish I had read it years earlier. I wish it was taught in schools. I wish that its lessons were more broadly understood and embraced. "
The Book of Jhereg
Notes:
This is the omnibus edition, collecting the first three books in the Vlad Taltos series.
Vlad Taltos is a cynical, snarky assassin and gangster. He’s also a family man, married to Cawti, another assassin. His best friend, and familiar, is a wise-cracking talking dragon named Loish. He maintains cordial friendships and professional relationships with some of the most powerful elite people in the city of Adrilankha, where he lives and works. These books are his story.
The first one in this omnibus (Jhereg) didn’t impress me much. It read like a first novel–all energy and exposition, and with a first person narration that was a bit too eager to explain things to the reader. But the plot was fun–a murder mystery in reverse, where Vlad has to figure out how to assassinate someone without breaking the social conventions of his elite nobility friends.
The second book (Yendi) takes place earlier in Taltos’s life and mixes two stories. The first is a kind of gangster story about how Taltos expands and protects his own territory in Adrilankha from another upstart gangster. The second concerns a conspiracy to change the line of succession of one of the more powerful nobles in the city and the Empire. These two stories are interrelated and by the end, Taltos has settled himself into power, married a woman who was hired to murder him, earned the thanks and respect of some powerful people.
The third book (Teckla) is my overwhelming favorite. It’s basically the story of a peasant rebellion in Adrilankha, and focuses on the beginnings of a social movement to overturn the aristocracy in the city. Vlad gets involved because his wife has decided to join this movement and teach peasants how to read, and so much of the “Politics” of the story is told in very heated arguments between Cawti’s radical idealism and Vlad’s pragmatic pessimism. Wonderfully, Brust doesn’t settle these arguments one way or the other, but gives both characters (who are stand-ins for broader arguments between liberals and radicals) an equal chance to make their case.
All in all, the characters are fun, the world is strange and interesting, and the themes are complicated, nuanced, and engaging. I’m all in.
Anarchists guide to historic house museums
Notes:
Much more practical and inventive then the bomb-throwing title would have one believe.
The book is a how-to for re-configuring and revolutionizing the world of Historic House Museums. Each chapter focuses on a different them of the Historic House Museum world, and asks questions that are designed to get Museum professionals to recenter community and relocate their museum’s mission.
As a museum professional myself (though not in a Historic House context), I welcomed the jolt of energy and practical guidance lurking in this book. The overall purpose is to recenter visitor experience and community engagement, even if some of the old pillars of Historic House Museums have to fall by the wayside (e.g. standardized guided tours, authenticity in architecture and material culture, Periods of Interpretation, etc…)
Into the Drowning Deep
Notes:
A pretty great B-movie with an eclectic and interesting cast of characters that gets better towards the end.
An “History Channel”-type entertainment company sets out to make a fictional documentary about mermaids, only to have the ship they send out be discovered much later to be abandoned. Footage aboard the ship suggests that it was attacked by something not dissimilar to what it was seeking. Years later, the sister of the ““host”” of the show has devoted her life to finding out what happened, researching into mapping interpreting underwater sounds. She’s approached by a rep from the same company who are planning a second expedition. She joins a crew of researchers, sailors, soldiers, and entertainers, who head to the deepest part of the ocean to see if the mermaids of legend are real.
I didn’t really like the book for the first third or so. Parts of the writing bothered me, and I felt jarred by the tonal shifts from following characters to following news reports to descriptions of videos to narrations by the monsters. My initial thought was at that point was ““this would be better as a short story, but I want to see where it goes.
But a few things clicked for me about a third of the way through. One was that the cast of characters was interesting, unusual, and all of them needed time and space to breathe on the page. There’s Tori (the main character) driven by the pain of losing her sister in such a horrifying way, but also Dr. Toth, the world’s expert on the mermaid creatures, enjoying being taken seriously. Holly and Heather are two deaf twins, each of which have special skills related to the mission, as does their older hearing sister, Heather. Olivia is the beautiful and smart host of the new expedition, and is also neuro a-typical. Michi and Jacques are the muscle–a big game hunting couple for whom violence is a kind of joy. And I could go on and on–the characters are fun, interesting people, and provide a rich engine that keeps the story moving.
There are other nice touches–global warming is a kind of microwave background radiation of this story, and it’s clear that all of the action is playing out in a world where climate change has dramatically altered the planet, and that it has adjusted the lives of every human (and non-human) in significant ways. Adaptations by humans and fauna have produced new kinds of relationships, but also new contradictions and problems.
Finally, the whole book has a kind of visceral horror to it. Lovecraft is clearly in the mix here, particularly at the very end, but more generally Grant’s love of (and clear knowledge of) biology allows for a lot of really shocking and surprising moments of weirdness in the bizarre creatures that rise up out of the Mariana trench and the whole ecosystem in which they are lodged.
So…all in all, I think I had to find this book’s wavelength in order to tune in properly. But I enjoyed it when I finally did.
Straight
Notes:
A fun, fascinating, and thought-provoking book that questions some pretty fundamental, commonsense, and everyday ideas and activities in our world.
Hanne Blank shows how much of what we think is eternal and fixed about human sexuality is really much more amorphous and historically specific. The term “heterosexual” emerged in the 19th century as a way of differentiating against homosexual behavior, but even that term (often defined as an innate desire for sexual intercourse with members of the opposite sex, primarily for procreative purposes) presents all kinds of explanatory problems, as Blank points out (what about intersex individuals? what counts as intercourse? what about non-procreative sex? etc…) Additionally, as Blank notes, prior to the 19th century, the idea of an innate orientation or desire for the opposite sex did not really exist. What characterized descriptions of sexuality were largely acts, and usually acts that deviated from religious or moral edicts, like Sodomy. Blank uses this history to touch on a wide range of behaviors, ideas, and cultural practices, including dating, psychology, biology, feminism, orgasms, childcare, and a lot more.
I found the early chapters a little tedious–once I accepted the idea that gender and sex are socially constructed concepts, I wanted Blank to get on to her specific cases and examples, and the book dragged a bit. Still, I’m comfortable with those ideas, and so perhaps the book belabored the point about the social construction of gender for readers who are not so comfortable.
In the end, this was a wonderfully smart and fascinating piece of popular non-fiction, straddling history, sexuality, psychology, biology, and more, and provides a lot of food-for-thought regarding our current world.
All Systems Red
Notes:
“A short, fun Pinocchio story, if Pinocchio were a murderous, enslaved security cyborg.
The story is told by SecUnit, a security/bodyguard cyborg rented from a corporation by a group of humans doing a survey on an uninhabited planet. SecUnit has both secretly turned off its ““governor”” component, which requires it to follow orders given it by any human, and also has secretly downloaded a huge archive of soap operas and TV adventure shows, whose plot, characters, and themes pop up periodically throughout the novel. The story starts with SecUnit saving the humans from a monstrous creature they encounter on their survey and this event spurs the two plots–the humans gradually beginning to trust SecUnit, and a mystery as to why much of the data they have about the planet seems to be incomplete or outright false.
SecUnit is funny, sarcastic, and nervous around people, despite being a nearly indestructible killing machine, and I really liked its ongoing attempts to avoid human beings, even as it was clear that it was both coming to like them, and becoming more like them.
Annihilation
Notes:
A really stunning, strange, and delightful novel about biological catastrophe, exploration, and love.
The narrator is a biologist who is part of a team that is investigating “Area X”, a region somewhere in America. The team is only most recent iteration of several other teams which have gone into Area X, but have either not returned, or who have returned changed in some way. What becomes clear is that she is following or inspired by her husband, who had been on a previous expedition. What she finds on the other side of the border (itself only traversable through intensive hypnosis and memory alteration) is bizarre and not wholly explainable in any rational way, but which makes for a shocking and engaging story.
The story is in part, about the Biologist’s own feelings about her husband. She’s clearly a strongly introverted personality, which may have been why she was chosen for the expedition in the first place. It’s also suggested that her husband was outgoing, gregarious, and otherwise her opposite. But what becomes clear is how, despite her introversion and emotional reticence, she really cares for him. It was an interesting depiction of what was clearly a complicated but rich relationship.
I’m excited for the movie, and for the subsequent books in the trilogy.
Home
Notes:
Man, this series just keeps getting better.
Binti (the main character who, in the firs book, allowed herself to be transformed through and injection of alien DNA), returns back to Earth from Oomza University to visit her family. She brings her friend Okwu, an alien Meduse. What she discovers is that, for all of the strangeness of her life while at Oomza, her own family’s history is even more harrowing and life-changing.
Okorafor’s world is full of so many wonderful details that leap off the page–the Root, Binti’s ancestral home, built from an ancient tree; the cultural differences between the Khoush, the Himba (Binti’s people) and the Enyi Zinariya, whom the Himba refer to derogatorily as the ““desert people”” but whose secrets Binti eventually discovers in a profound way; the astrolabes, a kind of communication/computing device, made with skill by Binti’s father. Everything is so rich and interesting, as well as unapologetically African.
I finished this just as the final Binti book was released, and can’t wait to grab a copy.
All Yesterdays parties
Notes:
Not really essential, but interesting. It’s generally understood that the Velvet Underground were obscure in their own time, but became legendary after the fact. But they didn’t exist in a vacuum and ““All Yesterday’s Parties”” reveals some of the ways they were understood and perceived at the time.
A few take-aways.
1.)the Velvets always knew what they were doing was interesting and forward-
thinking. They were always smart and self-aware. They had self-described peers,
and they had people to whom they were compared, but they understood that they
were doing something different (Sterling Morrison’s rant about Frank Zappa is
one of the highlights of the book).
2.)It’s clear there was a ““live”” Velvets and a ““recorded”” Velvets and the
two were different beasts. From the early days of the ““Exploding Plastic
Inevitable”” with its film projections and whip dancers, up to the raw and
focused band that took the stage for a residency at Max’s Kansas City, the
Velvet Underground were a sight as much as a sound. Reading this book made me
even more greatful for the few live documents that have surfaced. Also, and
building off this, it’s clear how important Maureen Tucker was to the band as a
drummer and heartbeat, and I often feel like the studio albums, for a variety
of reasons, don’t show that off.
3.)Lots of people liked the Velvet Underground, and understood them to be ahead
of their time. I suppose it’s possible that Clinton Heylin left out any bad
press, but almost all of the reviews, interviews, and articles in this
collection are positive to ecstatic about the Velvets. It’s also possible that
they were loved by critics but otherwise largely ignored–certainly the saga of
their attempting to play at the Filmore and Bill Graham’s rejection of them
suggests that there were people who absolutely hated them, and refused to engage with what they were doing.
I probably won’t read this again, and I have to say that pages and pages of enthusiastic championing of the same band got a little old. Still, this was an interesting read as a historical document, and as a love letter to one of the 20th century’s great artistic groups.
Blindsight
Notes:
A mind-bending, hard science fiction story about first contact, perception, free will, and consciousness.
After a bizarre extra-terrestrial landing by an unknown series of probes on Earth, a crew is sent to locate the source of the signal they transmitted, somewhere in the Oort cloud at the edges of the solar system. The narrator, Siri Keeton, is a synthesist, whose surgery at a young age and cybernetic implants have given him the ability to extract, organize and synthesize vast amounts of information. The ship is captained by a vampire, genetically resurrected from the Pleistocene, and is crewed by a cybernetically enhanced soldier, a woman who was surgically altered to give her multiple cooperative personalities, and a biologist who has been altered to give him enhanced perceptive abilities. The plot jumps around between Keeton’s youth and his family life, including his mother’s uploading of her consciousness into a virtual reality simulation known as ““heaven””, as well as his eventually abortive relationship with a psychologist and speaks to his inability to process emotional input.
Upon arriving at the source of the signal, they discover a strange and alien (in both senses of the word) ship floating around a small gas giant. Their attempts to learn anything about it, either to communicate or to defend against a possible attack, form the bulk of the book. So we have a book where non-humans are trying to talk to non-humans, all while floating around a distant, dying star.
Perhaps the only science fiction novel I’ve ever read with an extensive bibliographic essay, complete with citations from academic journals. This is a bonus, actually, as it helped me clear up some of the things that the narrative made so confusing. The book is dense, fascinating, and in some cases almost incomprehensible in its complexity. I loved its weirdness, and its fundamental questioning of basic concepts of humanity like consciousness, free will, and perception.
