So, I blew past the goal I set on Goodreads. I tend to set it very low, because I want to take my time with things, and a lot of my day job involves reading things so I can explain them to people who were supposed to have read them and didn’t. However, due to the ongoing everything, I’ve been mainlining audiobooks when Edgar’s out of the house and I’ve made it extremely far. I don’t know if there’s a single print book in this whole set of reviews, and honestly that makes me a bit sad.

But not much, because I’m up to thirty-four books this June, when I said I’d hit twenty-five by December.

So...I’m reading perhaps more than I anticipated. Let’s get started, shall we?

Rage of Dragons by Evan Winter (Orbit, 2019)

(referenced by Edgar here.)

An interesting high fantasy that deals with colonialism and inter-class violence. The Chosen – a warlike race from across the sea, who have learned a number of magical techniques to supplement their strength of arms – have arrived on a new continent and begun to drive away the natives, going to war with them and scraping out a meager living in a harsh new land. The author layered in elements of Xhosa culture, which gives it texture it wouldn’t otherwise have.

The story follows a lot of the normal beats of high fantasy, but subverts them at many points. The central character is a “high common” (middle class, I believe?) young man with the younger son of a nobleman as his best friend. In early chapters they help repel an enemy attack and witness the use of dragons as a weapon of war, the protagonist’s father is killed, the young man swears revenge, is forced to flee his hometown and becomes a soldier, subsequently training very hard and achieving high status. However, at every turn, Winter manages to inject something new and interesting into the equation, either through the use of class consciousness or through an examination of colonialism.

At more than one point I mentioned to Edgar that the book reminded me of the anime Attack on Titan, but without the fascist elements. It is, to put it bluntly, far better than that comparison makes it sound.

The Hollow Places by T. Kingfisher (Gallery/Saga Press, 2020)

I felt like reading horror, so I looked through what Libby had available, and found this little gem – it’s about a recently divorced woman going to live with her weird uncle in his “museum” of the strange. She falls into a routine, but when he goes and gets surgery, she and her friend – the gay barista who works next door to the museum – find a portal in the upstairs of the museum that leads into a strange bunker.

Very quickly, they discover that this bunker is located in another world, where a malevolent intelligence lurks, brought in by the strange willow trees there – the willows, notably, are used in reference to the Algernon Blackwood story of the same name; T. Kingfisher, a pseudonym used by YA author Ursula Vernon, has written at least one other story based on Blackwood’s works, and she does excellent work.

Her handling of the subject matter is influenced by her experience writing young adult fiction. The style is very similar, but she manages to bring in a more mature sensibility – the description of the lead character, Kara, suffering from a long-term injury from a minor incident felt all too real, for example.

The Broken Girls by Simone St. James (Berkley, 2018)

Picked up at a similar time as The Hollow Places, and still perfectly serviceable, The Broken Girls is a story about a journalist investigating the attempts to revive an abandoned boarding school in Vermont. The school itself, Idlewild, had a terrible reputation, and was the site of the murder of the lead character’s sister some twenty years before the plot kicked off.

On the whole, it wasn’t a bad book, but it paled in comparison to The Hollow Places, and it felt as if St. James didn’t want to commit wholly to the premise she set up. There’s a certain tendency at the more literary end of things to debunk any supernatural element, or to de-center it so that the story can be considered solely as a prosaic account of events.

That being said, the stance of the story after the de-centering was a reasonably good choice, and if it did have to do that, St. James picked a good direction. I won’t say that I believe it to be a perfect choice, but I do think that there were worse ways that it could have been handled.

Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCullough (Riverhead books, 2019)

(Used in this piece.)

I picked this up on the off-chance that it might help me teach composition. It very well might, but I think that McCullough’s book has other values to it as well – at the very least, it helped me understand why my mother texts the way she does. (It’s because she approaches text messages as a postcard, a trait of older people who only began using informal writing extensively after the advent of Facebook. That’s where the ellipses come from, and while that’s one of the bigger revelations in the book, it’s worth the price of admission.)

The linguistic habits that we develop in informal writing are fascinating to be, primarily because they’re considered to be bad habits, but I think this is something that a lot of people don’t really think through – the use of systematic abbreviations isn’t bad, necessarily. Or emoji. What we have to understand, really, is that these habits are a sign that we are writing more, and the fact that we develop these shortcuts is a direct proof of James Baldwin’s point that “language arises out of brutal necessity.”

Young people wouldn’t be writing book reports or argumentative essays if they weren’t writing text messages – the fact that they’re writing at all is good, because there are certain skills that all writing uses, and they’re learning those skills. As a teacher I just have to name the thing they already know and teach them to push it further. McCullough’s work, I feel, supports that approach.

All Systems Red (Murderbot Diaries, #1) by Martha Wells (Tor.com, 2017)

Look below for the review of Exit Strategy.

A Burglar’s Guide to the City by Geoff Manaugh (FSG Originals, 2016)

(used in some pieces.)

I started reading Geoff Manaugh’s website, BLDGBLOG, about thirteen years ago, though I haven’t been a religious reader. This is his second book, and it’s largely about the intersection of architecture and criminology. He makes the point that the built environment predisposes its inhabitants to one type of crime or another – bank robbers in L.A. drive, those in New York are on foot, for example, because of how the transportation infrastructures in those cities work.

While it is somewhat long, and digresses somewhat, I found it to be an interesting read, between the references to science fiction and pop culture (his term “Nakatomi Space”, to refer to the topology depicted and exploited in the movie Die Hard, has stuck with me since I heard the term,) as well as his deep historic reading (I had not heard about the life of George Leonidas Leslie until this book, and he’s an absolutely fascinating figure – an architect-turned-criminal-mastermind that is either Luciferian or Promethean depending on how you look at him.)

I greatly value books like this, because despite what they say, they are fundamentally books about epistemology: this book is about a way of seeing the city – not as a given, but as a puzzle to be solved, or as a game board with rules that can be rewritten as the game is played. I think that these epistemological toolkits are interesting and enlightening to collect, because the bog standard epistemology is – frankly – boring and limiting. Much better to adopt one of these mutant ones to get as much as you can out of your experience.

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman (Viking Penguin, 1985)

(Referenced, long ago, in this piece.)

Okay, so, this book is out of date. It covers much the same ground as Within the Context of No Context, but Postman isn’t anywhere near as interesting as Trow was. Moreover, it seems to me that – post-1991 – books that discuss the shortcomings and pitfalls of television have aged like the Julian Glover character from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade after he chose poorly. In the internet era every word of these Jeremiads is somehow both trite and alarmist – to the point where it feels ironically disengaged to even mention them alongside something called “the internet era.” They talk about the caustic effects of television on public discourse, and then we log on to facebook and twitter, and we have to deal with all of that.

Postman’s thesis – that Aldous Huxley was right and George Orwell was wrong about their predicted dystopia – is, fundamentally, a stupid one. Neither man predicted anything: both observed. Huxley observed the dangerous tendencies of hedonism, and Orwell the slippery slope of authoritarianism, and neither one of them is more correct than the other. If you average them out and use a different world map, you’re just describing the 1990s.

In short, I don’t think this book is necessarily worth reading as anything other than a historical artifact.

Artificial Condition (The Murderbot Diaries, #2) by Martha Wells (Tor.com, 2018)

Look below for the review of Exit Strategy.

The Red Tree by Caitlin R. Kiernan (Ace Books, 2009)

I’m not sure about this cover design. It’s somewhat unclear who the young woman here is supposed to be.

This book was one I heard about positively in comparison to House of Leaves and The Hollow Places, and while I loved both of those books, I believe that The Red Tree is more in line with the quality of the former than the latter. The book follows Sarah Crowe, an author from Atlanta who moved to New England after the messy end of her last relationship – her partner left her and shortly thereafter committed suicide.

In New England, Crowe spends all of her time avoiding the task of writing a new book (a whole mood, honestly), but discovers a manuscript in the basement of the house she rented about the folkloric significance of the Red Tree, a massive oak on the property she has rented. The author of this manuscript, a professor, committed suicide by hanging himself from the tree – and it’s no secret, because it’s in the introduction to the book (supposedly written by Crowe’s publisher) that she did the same thing.

What follows is a delightful and horrifying bit of weird fiction, set in the sweltering heat of the New England Summer – made worse by climate change and the fact that none of the buildings are built for it – that ends about where you expect it to.

However – my review of Rage of Dragons above aside – we don’t necessarily read a book because it’s surprising or because we can’t see where it’s going. We read books for the journey and to watch the author unfold them. It is here that Kiernan does an excellent job: she writes Crowe not as a self-insert (though I know very little about Kiernan; it’s possible) or as wish-fulfillment, but as a relatable person. She hates her own books, and thinks that they’re not worth the paper they’re printed on, but still she writes them because what else is she going to do with her time? And, of course, as soon as she finds something else to do, that’s what she does.

The Burnout Generation by Anne Helen Petersen (Audible, 2019)

A short Audible original. Reasonably good, examining the condition of burnout, which is described as a millennial thing, but seems more generalized: we just hit it earlier. I think the Zoomers were born with it.

Honestly, if you have the premium level of Audible, it’s not a bad thing to listen to, but it doesn’t seem to offer any new insights that aren’t available elsewhere.

Rogue Protocol (The Murderbot Diaries, #3) by Martha Wells (Tor.com, 2018)

See the next entry, for Exit Strategy.

Exit Strategy (The Murderbot Diaries, #4) by Martha Wells (Tor.com, 2018)

(Series reviewed by Edgar here.)

I was told to read the Murderbot books back in… 2018, I think? by a friend who was running an Eclipse Phase game (which I mentioned, I believe, in my review of the second edition of that game). I’ve greatly enjoyed the series, finding the titular Murderbot to be relatable, and feeling that the world being portrayed in the books is a well-thought-out and well-considered one.

These books are recommended, and while All Systems Red isn’t bad, they get progressively better as you go deeper into the series, largely because it seems to me that Wells is writing these books as a way of redeeming the “bad” machines from earlier science fiction – one could easily see Murderbot himself as a revision of the titular machine from Terminator, and there’s a ship later on that is controlled by a “good” version of HAL 9000 (though as an aside, I can’t help but feel that HAL was a victim in that movie. More on that some other time).

The world depicted in the Murderbot Diaries is not an original or innovative one, but Wells does excellent work in drawing the characters that she uses and explaining why they do the things that they do. It is for this reason that I’ve read four of her novellas and am in line for the novel on Libby: they’re excellent books, and well-written.

A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster by Rebecca Solnit

This book is something of the opposite of the Shock Doctrine, though I feel like the two books are complementary in other ways. Solnit describes the tendency of normal people to productively respond to the disasters that they experience, and the false perception that the average person, in a disaster situation, is a dumb, panicky animal in need of a show of force to bring them in line. Far from it: Solnit describes how human beings will spontaneously order themselves to bring their communities through dangerous periods.

On the other hand, the elite have a tendency to panic, largely because they have the most to lose and the tendency to look at the average person as the aforementioned dumb, panicky animal. Through a series of case studies, Solnit describes how the events that dissolve the social order in which we live tend to set us free, and how they can dissolve the barriers that keep us in our “place.”

I’m most likely going to try to bridge Shock Doctrine and A Paradise Built in Hell in a later piece, but if I don’t I want you to know that it’s an extremely fascinating and worthwhile read.

The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner (Harper & Row, 1972)

“No one except possibly the late John Brunner, in his brilliant novel The Sheep Look Up, has ever described anything in science fiction that is remotely like the reality of 2007 as we know it.” — William Gibson, Salon.com interview. — “No one except possibly the late John Brunner, in his brilliant novel *The Sheep Look Up,* has ever described anything in science fiction that is remotely like the reality of 2007 as we know it.” — William Gibson, Salon.com interview.

(referenced, long ago, in this piece.)

Consider these two passages:

But I could say: let me show you lakes that are not foul with the leavings of man. Let me reap you crops grown on animal dung and pure clean rain. Let me feed you apples from trees that were never sprayed with arsenic. Let me cut you bread from a cob loaf, that greets your hands with the affectionate warmth of the oven. Let me give you children that need fear nothing worse than a bottle dropped by a drunk, straight-limbed, smiling, clear of speech. And would you care if that speech were full of the echoes of a tongue that spoke civilization a thousand years ago? (p. 250)

and

"Can't I, baby? Are you ever wrong!" Fritz, his voice cold, dead serious, dead. "Listen, Mike, because you don't understand and you ought to. Who's going to be sane in this country when you know every breath you draw, every glass you fill with water, every swim you take in the river, every meal you eat, is killing you? And you know why, and you know who's doing it to you, and you can't get back at the mothers."

Some people say that J.G. Ballard predicted the future because it’s boring. I say that John Brunner predicted the future because it sucks. Of course, despite this, you keep reading because John Brunner can write a world that sucks better than anyone else.

In an alternate 1980s, the world has been poisoned to such a degree that people regularly wear gas masks, and buy a hit of oxygen from kiosks in drug stores. The seas are dying, and people fear to have children because of the state of the world. The wealthy enjoy organic produce bought at great cost, while the poor poison themselves on artificial food.

The only people who seem to be taking any kind of action on it are a loose confederation of radical environmentalists, the Trainites, named for their ideological leader, Austin Train. Their symbol is a skull and crossbones, with the slogan “STOP, YOU’RE KILLING ME” written underneath it.

Did I mention that this book was written in 1971?

The purpose of science fiction is not to predict but to observe (as I note in the review of Postman up above), but Brunner had something like the gift of prophecy, though he often suffered from the New Wave Science Fiction inability to end a book in a satisfying way (not so here; this has a more satisfying, though more depressing, ending than most). His style, also, is notable: he very clearly has taken stylistic cues from John Dos Passos, with its sprawling, nonlinear focus.

An excellent read, and well worth picking up if you can find it.

Ringworld by Larry Niven (Balantine books, 1970)

As you may have guessed from the previous entry, I have a strong affinity for the New Wave of science fiction – which arguably includes Larry Niven. Ringworld is a classic entry in the “big dumb object” subgenre, and features some fairly regressive gender relations, but has some interesting elements. The story follows a man named Louis Wu in an expedition masterminded by an insane member of an alien race, joining them are a diplomat from the warlike Kzinti species and Louis’s twenty-year-old sexual partner (Louis, himself, is about ten times that age but kept young through drugs. It is, frankly, offputting to read).

I read this primarily because I’ve felt the itch to read space opera and future history, but the contemporary iteration of the genre generally doesn’t work as well for me – apologies to Murderbot, but it all feels a bit too wrapped up in the question of artificial intelligence. There isn’t as much examination of the universe as a vast and confusing place – a big part of that is the increased popularity of hard science fiction, where the draw is largely the scientific accuracy of the story being told.

Larry Niven’s Known Space stories are not particularly hard science fiction – perhaps the hardest of the old space opera, but there are problems with it. It’s mostly there as an excuse to discuss the titular artifact, a vast ring, millions of miles in circumference, around a sunlike star. Niven does a great job depicting this, describing the vastness and great age of the artifact. However, I feel like the book is full of wasted potential. The visitors to the ringworld spend most of their time riding hover-bikes over the surface of the planet or discussing events that would have implications for the other known space books, but it loses something – I presume – if you’re not going to read the others. Given how Ringworld is one of the most popular of his works, this is a bit of a problem. There are crumbs hidden to attract the reader’s attention to these other works, but none of them feel like a solid argument for reading them.

Providence by Matt Barry (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2021)

A book about space war in the social media age. Kind of. It’s about four people stuck, for years, on a warship that could very well drive itself and fight the war itself, with minimal – if any – input from the human crew. They are there more as a PR gimmick, to sell the war to the public.

Honestly, I feel like the premise was somewhat wasted, in a way that was similar to the waste of The Broken Girls. It’s not the Barry demystified the book unnecessarily, but that he was incorrect about what the interesting part of the book even was. The space war portion, honestly, could be traded out for any number of other, analogous situations (or, admittedly, for a more interesting space war). But what he had was honestly something like Peter Watts’s Blindsight (which I need to finish rereading at some point), a world where there is the suggestion that the human has become superfluous to the project that humanity is engaged in, and could easily be sloughed away and make the machine work better – but we won’t, because the human part is supposed to be the interesting one. Or that’s what we’re told.

Instead, Barry focuses on the aliens – which he calls “Salamanders” – who fly through space and spit microscopic black holes and may or may not be sentient at all. He answers this question, and comes to a conclusion about almost everything, but I feel that this is a weakness in the book.

Much as there’s a tendency among more literary authors to de-center the strange and usual, there’s a tendency among more genre writers – outside of certain branches of horror and mystery – to tie everything up and answer every question.

Which is, honestly, a bad approach.

Welcome to Night Vale by Joseph Fink (Harper Perennial, 2015)

As someone who put out a narrative podcast, I’ve listened to the podcast Welcome to Night Vale – it was actually one of the first that I listened to – and I have a complicated relationship with it, which is probably a very personal and particular thing. Night Vale mixes deep and profound reflections on human life with bizarre and unsettling events (such as a giant glowing cloud drifting over the titular small town and dropping roadkill while telepathically commanding the population to praise and worship it).

I don’t have a problem with either of these things. My complaint about Night Vale is that I feel that it gets the ratio of them off and, as a result, it’s like eating a perfectly baked cake that has about three times too much icing. If you’re looking for something that replicates the experience of the podcast, then the audiobook of the novel will do it for you perfectly – it’s even read by Cecil Palmer, the host of the podcast.

It shifts back and forth between two protagonists: one is Jackie Fierro, the nineteen-year-old operator of the local pawn shop, who has been nineteen for several decades, and Diane Crayton, a single mother whose son is a shapeshifter and whose ex-husband has begun to appear all over town. These two people begin to search for information on the mysterious “Man in a Tan Jacket” who has begun handing out pieces of paper that simply read “KING CITY” that people cannot get rid of.

The book itself is reasonably fine, though it’s certainly made for fans of the podcast and may be somewhat opaque to a new audience. If you enjoy Welcome to Night Vale the podcast, you’ll like the book. If you don’t, you’re not going to.

Reading Now:

Revenger by Alistair Reynolds.

Space Opera with a pirate theme, and hard science fiction, too? With an eye to character? Sign me up. I’ll give that a shot.

A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari

I need to read this faster. It’s easier when I do it faster.

※

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Cameron's Book Reviews, Summer 2021