Cameron’s Book Reviews: Late 2021

Another quarter gone by, another load of books read. I'm not quite as voracious as Edgar, and there's some crossover here. I'm only including some of what I've finished here: there's a good half-dozen that I started and didn't finish. So the ones I did finish are largely quite good.

Revenger by Alastair Reynolds.

I’ve never really had a lot of luck getting through an Alastair Reynolds book – hard science fiction, while generally interesting to me, is always a bit of a rough ride, due to how dry it can be. Renvenger, though, the first in a new series, is much easier to get in to than most examples of the genre. Set in the distant future, the world of the novel is a swashbuckling space opera that Reynolds has designed to be (nearly) completely congruent with contemporary understandings of physics: in the solar system that e story takes place in, all of the planets have been demolished and reconstructed into artificial habitats, each one a thin shell of stone around a “swallower” – a tiny black hole, perfectly balanced to provide earth-like gravity at the surface. The routes between these worlds are plied by sunjammers – ships propelled by vast arrays of solar sails, used to move people and cargo, or to go on archaeological expeditions to recover artifacts of one of the millions-years-dead civilizations that occupied the solar system.

It follows sisters Adrana and Fura Ness, who go to space to try to help pay down their father’s mountain of debts. They serve as “bone readers”, using ancient skull-like artifacts (or perhaps actual skulls) to communicate faster than light. It follows most of the beats of a swashbuckling novel quite competently, expertly transposed into the space-opera setting: the end result is a delightful read that is well worth your time.

The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter

The Long Earth is a collaboration between another hard science fiction writer – Stephen Baxter – and the guiding light of comic fantasy – the sadly departed Terry Pratchett. It takes place in a world where, with the proper equipment, people can “step” from out universe to two right next door, and can keep going, moving further and further afield with each step. The whole set up is like a “ring” of earths about the sun in a fourth spatial dimension.

The story itself follows Joshua Valienté – a latter-day Davy Crockett-type – and Lobsang, who is either an eccentric Artificial Intelligence or a Tibetan man reincarnated in a computer. They are making a journey into the distant reaches of the “Western” Long Earth, and make a series of remarkable discoveries in the process.

It’s a solid book, and there are a lot of ideas underneath the surface that make it quite enjoyable. Fundamentally, the question that motivated the whole experience was “how would people react if want was suddenly removed from their lives?”, but it feels as if Baxter and Pratchett shied away from the question in this first book and wrote a kind of adventure story on the original foundation, which is perfectly fine: they’re good writers, and the story is no poorer for being an adventure than a novel of ideas, and there are four more books in the series I haven’t read, so maybe they did both. We’ll see.

Network Effect by Martha Wells

While normally we do series books together, I’m going to look at these separately and briefly, because I’ve got two murderbots on here, and I’m trying to limit my reading of series.

Network Effect is the first novel-length Murderbot outing, and Edgar covered it here. It’s an extremely competent story, as all of the entries in this series are. It’s a good three times as long as all of the other entries, and is a fairly straightforward adventure story: Murderbot and his human “guardian”’s child are kidnapped by a shuttle associated with “ART” from Artificial Condition, the second novella. The shuttle is crewed by a group of humans that have been augmented in a way that our hero has never seen before.

Frankly, it felt a little bit like a side quest from a Mass Effect game – though much better, because Wells is a great writer, and Murderbot, himself, is a great character. The shift from novella to novel format exposed some weaknesses in the formula used, but I think it was a necessary experiment for the series as a whole. The increased space allowed Wells to begin to explore ideas that were only nascent in the series previously.

Spoilers in the next paragraph – this might ruin the first half or so of the novel for you if you mind about such things.

Possibly the most interesting part was less the exploration of aliens in this setting – which I’m usually a big fan of – and more the “romance” between Murderbot and ART. Neither characters have anything approximating human gender, and only one of them is in anything like a human body, and they are both fairly abrasive. It’s an interesting problem because of the fact that it casts the masculine-presenting and stereotypically “hypermasculine” Murderbot in something like the stereotypically feminine role.

In short, the best part of this novel – which is a great adventure story, I stress – was the exploration of the relationship between gender and artificial intelligence.

The Angel’s Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

The second of the “Cemetery of Forgotten Books” series. I read the first, Shadow of the Wind several years ago, and greatly enjoyed it. The Angel’s Game is a far darker and more gothic story, set a generation before and follows David Martin, a pulp writer with dreams of literary stardom, covering essentially his whole life in more or less detail.

It goes from his youth writing for the newspaper The Voice of Industry, where he is taken under the wing of an older writer, Pedro Vidal, and falls in love with the daughter of Vidal’s chauffeur, Cristina.

As time goes on, Martin oscillates between good fortune and bad, as he loses Cristina, finds her again, becomes embroiled in a series of interlocking conspiracies, finds out that they are imagined, and then finds evidence that they are not. Over it all looms the figure of the French published, Andreas Corelli, a Satan-figure that has a plan for David that presages the fascist turn that will wash over Spanish Politics between this story and the earlier-written but later-published Shadow of the Wind.

It’s a good story. Zafón is a great writer, and it’s fairly easy to say that there’s a Borgesian angle to his writing, though I think he probably has more in common with his contemporary, Haruki Murakami – at least in Murakami’s more surreal and suggestive works, though Zafón never goes quite so far. However, if someone mentions having loved A Wild Sheep Chase, or The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, or Kafka on the Shore, I might recommend that they try out Zafón’s work – and vice versa.

The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

The first in a series of books translated from Chinese, I’ve heard many mentions of The Three-Body Problem, but knew very little about it other than that it was (a) a hard-science fiction story, (b) about alien invasion, that (c) was centered on China instead of Europe or America. I’m glad I gave it a shot, though some aspects of it were difficult to deal with – which may have to do with my lack of familiarity with the conventions of Chinese literature, the translation, or simply Liu’s perspective on things.

The story is kicked off by straight-laced engineer Wang Miao being asked to cooperate with an investigation led by a crass and unpleasant investigator, Shi Qiang – apparently, there has been a plague of suicides among the intellectual elite. This is no murder mystery, though, it’s an existential terror: iterations of the same particle accelerator experiment have yielded wildly and incompatibly different results, which suggests that the foundation of the physical universe is not an orderly, knowable system, but chaos.

It is fairly quickly established, though, that this is not actually the case: there is a third party out there causing this situation, attempting to convince humanity that their pursuit of the sciences is futile, and to lock us into the developmental phase we are currently in.

It’s a good story, one part murder mystery, two parts existential horror, three parts political thriller and four parts hard science fiction. I’ll most likely sit down and read the two following novels at some point, but I’m given to understand that they’re among the grimmest stories that one can read.

The Freeze-Frame Revolution by Peter Watts

Peter Watts, the author of Blindsight, provided the next thing I read – more existentially terrifying science fiction. This is actually the second book in the series in question, though it stands fine on its own.

Sunday Ahzmundin is part of the crew of the starship Eriophora, which is on a mission to build the infrastructure necessary for humanity (and eventually, post-humanity) to colonize the galaxy. It’s a slow ship, and the crew goes into cryogenic freeze for centuries or millennia between jobs: they wake up for three days or a week to work, and then sleep the remainder of the time.

But Sunday begins to notice discrepancies. People missing, things not where they should be, and then there’s the timespan: she knew she would be out here a long time, but some back-of-the-envelope math shows that they’re several million years overdue for retirement, and the ship refuses to consider it: it wants to stay out there until the job is done. Whatever that is.

And so begins the problem: how do you conduct a mutiny when you’re only awake one day in a million, it doesn’t synch up with everyone else, and your opponent – while not necessarily that intelligent – is unsleeping and ever-vigilant?

It goes about as well for them as anything in a Peter Watts book does.

It’s an interesting read, and quite intriguing. Now that I know there are other entries in the series, I’m going to have to track them down.

After the Revolution by Robert Evans.

Fittingly, I read this next. Edgar reviewed it here.

I’m a big fan of Evans’s journalistic work, and this is his attempt to turn that a bit more towards fiction. It’s largely based on his experiences in Syrian Kurdistan (Rojava) – essentially, it’s that mixed with Eclipse Phase and Fallout. The United States has dissolved into a dozen or more squabbling nations, and the post-human soldiers who fought in that final paroxysm of violence are hidden among the population and occasionally rear their heads.

It’s a fun read. Evans’s prose is very workmanlike – no high poetry here, but goddamn is it a fun read. There’s a certain glee that Evans has in discussing the subject matters of this book, which I can only really attribute to his time working at Cracked, back when that outlet actually put out quality work. There’s a tremendous glee present in the audiobook (which he reads), but it’s matched by an equally tremendous sadness — which might be the calm on the other side of despair, or perhaps a sign that he needs a vacation. Hard to say, I’m trying not to get parasocial with it.

You can listen to it here.

How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell

Okay, that’s enough fiction for a little bit. Edgar read this, reviewed it here and evangelized about it for quite a while before I tracked down the audio-book. I don’t really have much to add to their review, but I will agree that it’s an amazing read. Odell does an excellent job of synthesizing a number of different writers and thinkers and bringing them together to form a new line of thought. It’s not just about the detrimental effects of social media, it also fits in anti-capitalism, artistic practice, and ecological reasoning.

I highly recommend it as a read, because it really provides a coherent lens through which to view the world and it’s largely in line with what we’ve been saying around here about capitalism and ecology.

An African American and Latinx History of the United States by Paul Ortiz

A counterpart to An Indigenous Person’s History of the United States, and it fills in the gaps between Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous Person’s History of the United States.

It covers the same general periods, obviously, but it also covers more of the western hemisphere in general – it’s impossible to talk about Latin and Black history without talking about Mexico and Cuba. That being said, it did seem to be the weakest of the three. Still, for the complete story, it’s a necessary read.

Disappearance at Devils Rock by Paul Tremblay

I felt a need to read some horror, because I had such a good time reading The Red Tree and The Hollow Places. I generally have a problem with contemporary fantasy, because so much of it is seems to be focused on the rules of things: the rules governing magic, vampires, fairies, and werewolves, for example. However, I find this sort of thing boring.

I’m much more interested in novel takes on the strange and unusual. As such, I thought I would check out the works of Paul Tremblay, because I heard them referred to in the context of the excellent horror podcast The Magnus Archives. The first of the two that I picked up was Disappearance at Devil’s Rock. It was quite good, though it didn’t scratch the itch I felt.

Tremblay seems to be trying to occupy the space between more thriller-oriented horror and supernatural horror: he resists easy answers and focuses on providing a more Rashomon-like rehashing of events over and over again. So, while it didn’t satisfy the hunger that I had at the time, it was still a very enjoyable read.

Fugitive Telemetry by Martha Wells

The most recent Murderbot book, and technically occurring earlier in the chronology of the series than Network Effect, I feel that it benefits somewhat from the lessons that Wells learned in the process of writing that novel – namely, the exploration of the “gender” of the artificial constructs in the story. As one tumblr user, “whetstonefires”, put it: “So first how it is emphatically devoted to eschewing human gender categories. Like, it’s not a default thing; there are shown to be multiple nonbinary pronouns in routine use, and life would be simpler for picking one or even making a new one up, just as it would be for picking a name that it is willing to use in public.”

In addition, the note that, for constructs, gender boils down to whether they are an artificial “cop” or “prostitute” also shows up later on, and how the role that one plays in society is defined by which of these roles they wish to be cast in. This book, I feel (only slightly less that Artificial Condition, where it is made most explicit,) explores this idea a bit more than others, and uses the tools of queerness to explore the performance of a particular role.

It was my favorite of the lot, but I’m still, to an extent, digesting what all of this means. These books have a lot to say about neurodiversity and gender presentation, and it’s all plugged into a fairly rollicking adventure plot.

Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials by Malcolm Harris

This book, which I acquired through Audible, is an examination of the forces that produced the “Millennial” subject, and made the point that generation is often a proxy for social changes, which is part of why I’m back on the generation train.

It’s a good read, looking at the material conditions that produced the people that I spend most of my time with. The way that Harris talks about the people born since 1980 (and he doesn’t seem to differentiate between Millennials and Post-Millennials too much, but I imagine it might simply be too early for such an analysis to make much sense.)

One thing that I really appreciated about Harris’s work is that the final chapter breaks the mold of this sort of book – oftentimes, this is described as “nine chapters of Marx and one of Keynes” – in short, the diagnosis is radical and the prescription is decidedly not. Harris, instead, engages in a negative critique of the options available to us, dismissing all of the most common political prescriptions and refusing to put forward a formula to solve the problem.

Which is damned frustrating, but also incredibly honest. If you pick up the book for nothing else, read it for that last chapter.

The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul Tremblay

The other Paul Tremblay book I read. I didn’t enjoy this one quite as much, because it did much the same thing as Disappearance at Devils Rock, trying to leave the supernatural-versus-mundane explanations ambiguous. While it was quite horrific, I think that it both succeeded more in being frightening that Devils Rock and failed in being the exact kind of story it was aiming at being.

The fundamental story is very tightly contained: a gay couple and their adopted daughter are trapped in a cabin, far from civilization, by a group of four intruders that insist that two of them must decide to murder the third, or else the world would end.

The earnest nature of the four intruders makes everything much more horrific, but the apocalyptic scope didn’t quite work for me. I felt it came down too hard on the mundane end of the explanations for things. Edgar also read it, and has a somewhat different take, I imagine it will be available in their next book roundup.

The Unidentified: Mythical Monsters, Alien Encounters, and Our Obsession with the Unexplained by Collin Dickey

I have a confession: I’ve got a weakness for Forteana. I love weird shit. This may be a surprise or it may not, but I love hearing about UFOs and cryptids and whatnot. So, when this showed up as a book recommendation from a blog I follow (it was on Tumblr, so I forget which,) I decided to look it up and found it on Libby. It’s on a subject I hadn’t looked at it in a long time, it was free to get, and I had space on my dance card.

It was actually really enjoyable. Dickey writes less about the weird and more about the psychology and sociology of conspiracy theories and conspiracism. While he leaves open the question of whether anything actually strange is happening, his orientation is more towards the idea that the strange event is less in the world itself and more in the eye of the beholder: so what’s really going on there?

The book largely begins with a discussion of the figure of the crank, which is different from the grifter in that the crank is a true believer in the idea that they’re putting forward. The grifter attempts to make money off of rubes by putting forward an incredible story and insisting on its truth; the crank believes what they’re saying in a monomaniacal fashion and gets trapped in a labyrinth of their own mutilated epistemology.

A good example of a grifter is someone like Keith Raniere, the man behind NXIVM, who used manipulation to get himself access to sex and money. A good example of a crank might be someone like Francis E. Dec, Esq., the racist schizophreniac who claimed to be persecuted by the forces of the “gangster computer god” who lived beyond the false sky. Or perhaps Trofim Lysenko, the soviet agronomist. Other figures, such as Milton William Cooper, might fall somewhere in the middle – it’s impossible to say.

Still, it was a fascinating read, and weirdly formed a good complement to How to Do Nothing, mentioned above.