2022 Book Notes
Future home of the living God
Notes:
A devastating, thoughtful, and deeply human dystopian novel about motherhood, colonialism, the violence/weakness of men, and the fraught nature of faith.
Cedar is an Ojibwe woman who was adopted by a liberal White family when she was a baby. Now she is an adult, and pregnant, and the book presents her letters to her unborn child. Over the course of these letters, she narrates the collapse of the world around her, beginning with a climate change, and a genetic disruption that seems to mutate or kill offspring of humans and animals alike, and escalates into a Christian-nationalist (and natalist) takeover of the United States. Along the way, Cedar meets (and comes to love) her lineal Ojibwe family, lives with (and is ultimately separated from) the father of her child, and comes to find herself in a kind of family with other precarious pregnant women who are targeted and imprisoned by the aforementioned totalitarians. It’s a harrowing narrative that sees the complexities and pitfalls of all kinds of family relationships, the ways that they can both ground us and completely destabilize us, sometimes to the point of destruction.
The book is somewhat ambiguous in its treatment of what is happening in the world, and other reviewers found this to be a confusing deficiency. But I actually thought of it more like a prophecy, where signs and portents appear seemingly at random, and their very randomness bespeaking our inability to comprehend the true nature of where we are and where we’re going. Cedar is a devout Catholic and frequently references Catholic writing, including Hildegarde von Bingen whose life was structured by mystical visions.
The book is not an easy read–Erdrich paints a dark picture of an easily discernable world–but it is gorgeously written, with lush, thoughtful prose and powerfully emotional passages. I felt myself breaking into tears at the end, when she describes a joyful memory of playing in the snow as a child, and lamenting that her unborn child may be the last person to see snow fall. The characters are interesting and rich, by turns funny and broken, driven and completely phony.
Stonefish
Notes:
“A dark and bewildering cosmic horror novel, in which the only power we ultimately have is in the small acts we do for ourselves and each other.
The first half of the novel is set in a Philip K. Dick-ian future earth stitched together by an all-consuming computer network called the Noonet (umlaut over the second o) and in which this great convergence has ultimately led to environmental degradation and broad social transformation or even collapse outside of those who can access it. Jones drops the reader into this world without much exposition, and the terms and concepts unfold in a frankly bewildering fashion. It took me a while to figure out was going on in the world.
In this slowly degrading world, a reporter named Den Secord is sent on a ““Heart of Darkness”” type hunt for an elusive billionaire tech mogul named Gregor Makarios who disappeared hunting for cryptids in the pacific Northwest. The first third to half of the book documents this investigation, with a stopover in indigenous Haida territory and the beginnings of a sense that Makarios' investigations were something broader than blurry pictures of bigfoot. Once Secord actually finds Makarios, after a harrowing night camping in an ancient forest, the book essentially turns into an extended monologue about the futility of existence in the face of powerful forces, stretched over a skeleton of cosmological horror. Ultimately, in the face of such powerlessness, the characters are defined by the small choices they make, even if the outcome is laughably small.
The book is electrically written, with wild and elaborate descriptive passages. Jones plays on the Lovecraftian trope of the inability to perceive cosmic forces, giving a kind of coy explanation for why the legendary photos or videos of cryptids are so blurry and shaky. Sometimes the language was really overwhelming and I found myself getting lost in what was being described or explained, but perhaps that’s a rhetorical trick that he’s deploying. For me, this made the book feel somewhat stumblingly paced, as the characters wander from encounter to hallucinatory encounter. This isn’t helped by the breaking up of the narrative, both through periodic intrusions by Secord, who is writing this account in retrospect, and from the insertion of Secord’s continual attempts at journalism once he finds Makarios, in the form of interviews and descriptions of videos. It took me quite a while to finish because I kept losing the narrative and having to retrace my steps. Still, the overall mythology and the elaboration of it is beautiful and existentially terrifying, and the intrusions of that mythology into the lives of the characters are by turns shocking and grotesque. Jones clearly knows the tropes and ideas of the Lovecraftian and weird-fiction traditions and elaborates and complicates them in really engaging ways.
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The Runaway Restaurant
Notes:
“A rich and evocative collection of fantastical short stories that explore the ambiguous edges of relationships and identity.
The stories in this collection deploy many familiar concepts or imagery from fantastic fiction: futuristic technology, witchcraft, ghosts, apocalypse. But these commonplace devices provide a vantage point through which Yang explores the difficult and uneven terrain of close relationships; the lines that run between lovers, parents and children, or seemingly inseparable friends. One of the common themes that lurks in these stories is that natural or supernatural limits force us to reckon with who we are to ourselves, and to others. In ““Others Like You””, a coven of witches are drawn to an eastern seaboard tourist town, only to find themselves mystically trapped there, and stewing in their own interpersonal frustrations as much as in their own power. In ““Runners””, two newly parentless teenage cousins begin to invade the empty homes of their neighbors, trying on new identities from the mundane trinkets they steal, but increasingly hemmed in by the tensions and contradictions of their unstated competition and the echoes of their relationships to their missing relatives. Yang’s characters learn who they are and what they want through the walls they build, or that are built for them by forces either interpersonal or alien.
Yang’s prose is rich but unpretentious. One character ponders “the unsolvable riddle of love and resentment that have curdled until one is indistinguishable from the other”. Another woman, recently deceased, describes her ghostly body as “a sensation like double doors bursting open, admitting air and light and music into the shuttered room she’d become during those final, wretched days.” Yang is clearly delighted by the weird situations in which she plots her characters, but her most delicate and thoughtful exposition comes in probing who her characters are, how they feel, and what they want. As an archaeologist, I was intrigued by the evocations of material things that are scattered throughout this collection. Many of these stories revolve around the secret meanings of simple or anonymous objects. A worn and well-used college dorm room wardrobe periodically emanates maple leaves. Abandoned cars left in an old barn give meaning and purpose to the ghosts that haunt it. “Wonder in her Wake”, my favorite story in the collection, follows a hoarding mother and son who collect refuse and ultimately reconfigure it into magic. This latter is a subtly (or even explicitly) Lovecraftian story, where every character, in their own way, seems to be seeking some forbidden or mysterious knowledge.
It’s really delightful when your friends make wonderful art. I was given an advance copy of this book by the author in exchange for an honest review. Knowing Tessa, and having read her work before, I figured it would be good but it exceeded my already high expectations. This is a great collection, strange and heartfelt and insightful and wide-ranging. Fans of fantastic and speculative fiction will find that it treats old friends in new ways, and more literary-inclined readers will appreciate Yang’s subtlety, rich characterization, and inviting prose. ” Back to ‘2022’
Autonomous
Notes:
A wonderfully strange book about humans, technology, and the thin, fuzzy line that separates the two. Set in a future earth in which sentient robots and artificially modified humans (along with varying continua between these two) live together in a kind of corporate oligarchical world, where copyright and patent law supersedes almost any other consideration, including human welfare or happiness.
The book focuses on two main characters: Jack, a kind of patent pirate scientist who uncovers a flaw in a new corporate medication designed to make drudging office work more pleasant, and Paladin, a sentient robot mercenary whose firm has been hired by the corporation to track her down and stop her from revealing the truth.
Newitz central theme hovers around the question of what sentience actually means, and they make the rather provocative claim that sentience, consciousness, or whatever are less a binary state of being and more a series of relationships and obligations that we enter into with other sentient beings. This allows Newitz to highlight all kinds of interesting relationships in the book, including across lines of biology/technology, lines of freedom and enslavement, and lines of gender and sex.
This was a really wild book in terms of its ideas about biohacking, technology, and corporate power, and its easy to compare it to something like Gibson’s Neuromancer. But it was also an incredibly thoughtful and emotionally resonant, with a genuine focus on characters and their relationships with each other.
Wonder And Glory Forever
Notes: “A well-curated collection of (mostly) modern Lovecraft-inspired stories, with a couple of great classics thrown in for good measure. I’ve read a lot of Lovecraft-derived anthologies, and they range all over. The ones I like the best take some specific thematic or tonal aspect of Lovecraft’s work and use it as a medium for expanding beyond the confines that he set, often into unexpected or counter-intuitive places. This collection ranks with the best of those, drawing on Lovecraft’s penchant for using the experience of sublimity and awe as a medium for expressing horror. My favorite piece in this is probably Michael Cisco’s ““Translation””, a wonderful story of archaeology and language where knowledge gradually overwhelms the protagonists (not an atypical plot for a Lovecraft-inspired story). I also loved Victor Lavalle’s ““Ghost Story”” which is as subtle and sensitive a piece of Lovecraftian fiction as I’ve ever encountered. Plus, the two classics in here are worth the price of admission alone–Lovecraft’s legendary and electrifying ““Shadow over Innsmouth””, and Clark Ashton Smith’s bizarre tale of dimensional travel and otherworldly warfare ““the City of the Singing Flame””. "
Medallion Status
Notes:
“A thoughtful and funny meditation on the silliness and absurdity of fame, how it changes one’s priorities, and what happens to a person when it dissipates.
John Hodgman’s great skill has always been finding humor or insight in almost innocuous things. In this book, he turns that focus onto his own strange and uneven rise into the bottom rungs of US cultural fame, and then his slow descent from it back into the gentle embrace of family life. In the process, he writes about the sorts of unusual and astonishing ways that fame is supported, propped up, outside of the standard images of money and media attention. He waxes poetic about gamified airline mileage programs, swag tables at awards shows, boutique hotels and their amenities, and Hollywood parties with flash-in-the-pan or obscure honored guests. But in a kind of inversion of the ““tell-all memoir””, Hodgman makes clear that the earnestness with which these kinds of perks and experiences are offered to even the most modest famous person is what makes them so bizarre and unsettling. He throws himself with abandon into getting enough miles in his favorite airline mileage program, even as the rewards that he gets from leveling up are more and more mundane. He wonders at the kind of person who would take a blender or toaster from a subterranean awards-show swag table. And all the while, he talks about how the travel and promotion of his short-lived TV career make him feel distant from his family and his friends, and that the small rewards and perks in his category of fame give him a greater and greater sense of alienation.
Against this backdrop, he writes about the rise of Donald Trump and the rightward turn of American politics towards a man for whom the trappings of fame and celebrity superseded his actual possession of either. This provides a thoughtful counterpoint to Hodgman’s humorous accounts of anonymous awards and ridiculous perks. Implicitly, he seems to be asking about whether American society can stand having so silliness thrown at such unimpressive people (himself included!) without in some way coming unglued and that Trump is a symptom of that broader fracture. Hodgman is a great writer, self-aware and self-critical while still poetic and lyrical. This was a funny, nostalgic and heartfelt book and I couldn’t put it down. Also, I listened to the audiobook which Hodgman reads and performs in a truly wonderful way. "
The Postmortal
Notes:
“A dark novel that manages to make a dystopia out of a cure for death. Written as a series of (sort of) blog posts, this witty and sardonic book imagines a future where death by aging (and eventually by disease) is eradicated through gene therapy. The consequences of this range from the interpersonal (the near-end of monogamy) to the global (large scale wars over resources, particularly land and food). Ultimately the book is about how our relationships with people are structured, organized, or warped by the time we have with them. In that sense, the book is both sad but also hopeful, as the main character loses and finds friendship, love, and family. I think I like Magary’s next novel ““The Hike”” slightly better–this book drags a bit in the back half and the ending ties things together a bit too neatly for my test. But it’s still a wonderful and haunting novel, maybe the darkest dystopia I’ve read in a while. "
Claire Dewitt and the City of the Dead
Notes:
“A genuinely weird, stylish, and heartfelt mystery that I couldn’t put down.
I’ve read Sara Gran’s horror novel ““Come Closer”” and found it to be creepy and unsettling, not to mention a subtly incisive book about patriarchy, sexism, and the forces that hem and suppress women’s desire. I had heard that she had pivoted to writing mysteries, and I bought this book for my wife a year or so ago. She loved it, and recommended it to me and I finally got around to reading it. The eponymous Claire Dewitt is a private detective who follows the teachings of a legendary French detective named Jacques Silette, whose book ““Detecion”” is a kind of philosophical treatise on investigating crime, and whose abstract and ruminative words are regularly quoted throughout the book. Dewitt uses Silette’s methods that rely on interpreting coincidence, chance, and seemingly miraculous events as means of unraveling mystery. In that sense, Dewitt’s attempts to solve mysteries function as a kind of meditative or spiritual practice, and like such practices, they take over the lives of people who embrace them, for good and for ill, as the novel reveals.
The novel involves Dewitt’s attempts to locate a lawyer who disappeared from New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, but the book unspools Dewitt’s life backwards to her origins as a detective (in the disappearance of a close teenage friend), and to her tutelage in Silette’s methods during her previous residency in New Orleans. The novel also provides a tour of a city ravaged by disaster and institutional abandonment, and Gran’s descriptions of the landscape, particularly of the flood-ravaged wards of New Orleans, are haunting and gorgeous.
Dewitt is a complex and fascinating character–equal parts hardened gumshoe and lost soul seeking redemption through the solving of puzzles. She embraces danger and runs from it, abuses and relies on friends and acquaintances, and trusts the real world and the invisible world in equal measure. It’s clear that solving mysteries is a bandage that thinly holds her body together and there’s always a sense that it’s only the solving of puzzles that keeps her from completely unraveling.
It’s hard to capture in a review, but the tone of this book is weird, in the best possible way. There are dream sequences that fade into and out of reality, miraculous events recounted or described as fact, and an intense focus on signs and omens. Silette’s ““Detection”” is also cast as a kind of philosophical or even magical text that can itself be used to recover clues or organize them into theories. The setting adds to this weirdness, with post-Katrina New Orleans being a place that feels both haunted and survived-in. I really liked this book and can’t wait to keep moving through the series. "
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Tropic of Kansas
Notes:
A harrowing but ultimately hopeful dystopia that pitches a violent nationalist conservative government against freedom fighters, anarchists, and geeks.
The book jumps back and forth between Sig, the son of a radical family who has been living an almost feral, mobile life in the wake of a totalitarian social breakdown in the United states, and Tania, his adopted sister who works for the same government as an investigator into high-dollar fraud and business crime, who sets out to find him. Sig is a bit of a cypher. He’s a kind of a wild child who has learned to live off the land and escape from the increasingly overwhelming incarceration and policing of the government. Tania has made peace with the work she does, as it provides her with some protection against the same violent system, but as the story opens, she quickly learns how thin that protection has become.
The real main character is the ambiguously recognizable landscape of the United States, which Brown takes us through using the viewpoints of these two characters. It’s a dark mirror of our current world, but an eminently believable one, and Brown provides a number of historical hints as to where it diverged from our history (namely successful assassination of Ronald Reagan). The landscape that emerges from this history is fractured and uneven, with some places under militant federal control, other places patrolled but not controlled, and still other places (especially the radical stronghold of New Orleans) forming kind of autonomous zones of limited freedom.
The book casts a hopeful vision for the ability of people to both rebel against oppression and also collectively organize something better (though the ending is somewhat ambiguous about the extent to which that organization becomes stultified or co-opted). Brown is clearly in dialog with anarchist theory and practice, and there are references to anarchist ideas and concepts throughout the book. All in all, it’s a hopeful vision for a future that could be ours, for good or ill.
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We’ve got People
Notes:
“An inspiring journalistic narrative about the forces of local and national organizing lurking in the Democratic party as well as the forces arrayed against them. A few brief notes:
Grim starts the book in the 1970s after the opening up of the primary process following the riotous 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. Every book has to start somewhere, but this strikes me as being both short-sighted and under-explained. ““Activists”” have been influencing the Democratic and Republic parties since the 19th century. What made 1968 different? Grim says that the opening of primaries paved the way, but it isn’t really explained how this happened.
The book is written in a journalistic, narrative style that felt relatively un-cited to my scholarly eyes. Many of the footnotes are just asides rather than citations and multiple sections of the book are simply relayed as written. This is just a different rhetorical convention than I’m used to, but for a book that’s ostensibly a ““history”” of the democratic’s party’s flirtations with democracy, you might think it’d be a little more scholarly. The book is genuinely inspiring, recounting, often from firsthand accounts, how individuals have organized and connected with their communities and genuinely spurred political change. It also makes clear how much of the Democratic party is invested in a top-down, high-dollar donor approach to politics, and how this manifests in organization, rhetoric, policy, and attitude towards such inspiring individuals. Worth reading for the lefty-inspiration and hope in a dark time, though it begged questions that I didn’t see answered. "
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The Deficit Myth
Notes:
A good introduction to Modern Monetary Theory. The opening chapters are perhaps the most useful to neophytes, exploring how Modern Monetary Theory turns more traditional visions of money and government spending on their head. Later chapters focus on specific American social problems and concerns (education, health care, the environment, etc…) and how MMT could be used to address them. The main wall I hit was that, while MMT replaces a resource constraint with an inflationary one (in terms of how much money the government can spend), the book is cagey on the question of how to determine that inflationary constraint. At some moments, Kelton seems to suggest that determining inflationary rates with which to measure spending is difficult or impossible, while at others, she argues that we should be constantly pushing ahead with spending without fear of inflation. So I came away buying the idea that the government cannot run out of money, but I was less clear about the inflationary risks involved in government spending of money.
Tomorrow’s Cthulhu
Notes:
“A good collection of modern Lovecraft homage, with a focus on imaginary futures crashing into the Cthulhu mythos. Stories I liked: The Stricken By Molly Tanzer–takes ““Herbert West Re-Animator”” to its logical conclusion in a zombie apocalypse, and re-orients it around a bold and funny female descendant. Tekeli-Li, They Cry by AC Wise–““At the Mountains of Madness”” but with genuine human sadness beating at the heart of it. A Pathway for the Broken by Damien Angelica Walters–One of the most genuinely creepy stories in the collection, about an old man trying an experimental treatment for Alzheimers, and wondering whether he’s wasting from the disease or from some supernatural force acting upon him. Advanced Placement by Richard Lee Byers–The horrors of standardized testing meet other horrors more ancient. Really smart and creepy. The Judas Goat by Robert Brockway–Another genuinely creepy story that eschews direct reference to Lovecraft’s mythos in favor of a more unknowable and overwhelming cosmic dread, where stars blinking out one by one heralds the coming of horror. Chunked by Matt Maxwell–Cthulhu meets the whaling trade. Grimy and fun. The Great Dying of the Holocene by Desirina Boskovich–climate change affects human and elder god alike.
Harrow the Ninth
Notes:
A dark, complicated and messy book about trauma and the lengths to which we’ll go to avoid reckoning with it.
I had both this and Gideon the Ninth on my shelf and I was so delighted with Gideon that I immediately picked this up and started it. But this book is VERY different, to the point where I almost stopped reading a few times, and contra Gideon which I read through with enthusiasm. For me, the key difference is structural. For all its astonishing world-building and rich cosmic and necromantic mythology, Gideon is kind of like an Agatha Christie novel–eccentric characters stuck in a big house (or castle) trying to figure out who is killing them when they start dying. The tragedy of the ending of that book spurs the fractured narrative of the second novel, which jumps in time (sort of) and also re-tells a different version of the story of the first novel (sort of). Thus, Harrow the Ninth feels more Philip K Dick, where you always know that something that you’re reading isn’t quite right and waiting for the floor to drop out from under you. I personally found the experience of reading it really jarring and difficult, especially compared to the delightfully propulsive first book.
What kept me reading where the wonderful characters, and the rich, lush prose. Muir is a beautiful writer, who imbues her characters with complicated and conflicted inner lives and difficult moral and social choices. Even the characters of God and Lyctors (God’s personal guard) are making their way through immortality in petty and deeply human ways.
And of course, the world of the Locked Tomb is astonishingly strange, where each new revelation about the history, mythology, and structure of the universe begs new questions and broadens what has already been revealed. So, a very different book from Gideon the Ninth, and not really to my taste, but still filled with some of the stuff that made that first book so enticing.
Gideon the Ninth
Notes:
“A sprawling, sad, and funny piece of speculative fiction about the weight of tradition, the complex and volatile emotions of close relationships, and the lines we draw between means and ends. Also skeletons, snarky humor, and murder mysteries.
Others have written better descriptions of this book than I ever could–Charlie Stross said it best with his blurb ““Lesbian necromancers explore a haunted gothic palace in space! Decadent nobles vie to serve the deathless emperor! Skeletons!”” Suffice it to say, I loved it. I loved the strange and rich world, full of warring and scheming galactic politics spread over millennia, ruins of ancient buildings that show glimmers of earlier times and people, and a complex system of magic and science that gives just enough plausability to make it feel real and lived in. Tamsyn Muir does not hold your hand through any of this, and I found myself checking back to earlier pages to refresh myself on characters, places, and events. Still, better that than long pages of forced exposition so common to world-buildy fiction these days.
I loved the funny, sad, and deeply human characters, whose witty repartee throughout the book elicited regular chuckles from me as I read, as well as deep rushes of sadness and affection during moments of danger, heroism, or emotional honesty. The beating heart of this story is the relationship between the snarky loner Gideon and the heavy-headed inheritor of the crown Harrow, who are so close, for reasons the novel unfolds, that they both love and hate each other, as they love and hate themselves and the roles into which they’ve been forced. I loved the prose, which was rich and beautiful without feeling over-wrought. Muir is a very skilled prose stylist, evocative and detailed, and with a keen gift for shifting the tone, from funny to terrifying to exciting to sad, etc… without jolting the reader. The book was real joy to read, in edition to being a great yarn. Come for the Lesbian Necromancers in a haunted space castle, stay for the rich world and the beautiful depiction of a complicated friendship. If that’s not enough, as soon as I finished, I couldn’t stop myself, and so went to my bookshelf and grabbed the sequel. "
Fledgling
Notes:
“A gorgeously written reconfiguration of the vampire novel that focuses on race, power, and freedom. A few thoughts:
1.)The choice to put the main character in the body of an 11 year old destabilizes our new cultural vogue for ““sexy vampires”” and return the discomfort and unnerving sentiment of the 19th century originals. It also muddies and complicates the obvious power relations between the Ina (vampires) and their human thralls (symbionts). Race also lurks in the background of these relationships, and comes to the emphatically in the end in the prejudices of the extended community of vampires.
2.)Butler’s prose is always a treat; propulsive but meticulous. The trial at the end could have been a boring, administrative slog, but in her hands is a gripping and tense yarn, punctuated by interludes of genuine thoughtfulness between the main characters about the proceedings.
3.)As with all of Butler’s work, there is a complex investigation of the relationships between the dominated and the dominators, and conversely how degrees of control and freedom are embedded in every emotional relationship. The symbionts are emotionally and biologically bound to the Ina, and Butler explores the complicated emotions and moral politics that arise in this situation for both for the humans and the vampires involved. Butler manages the great task of giving a deeply human account of deeply inhuman relationships, in a similar fashion to ““Lilith’s Brood””.
4.)The book was satisfying, but not profound for me, certainly not in the same way as masterpieces like Kindred or Parable of the Sower. It is always a joy to read Octavia Butler, and sometimes much more than a joy, but for me this was just the former, not the latter.”
