Cameron's Book Round-Up, late November and Early December 2023

Man, the world sucks right now. The links go to bookshop, but maybe consider donating to something that might help deal with the human suffering and ongoing ethnic cleansing in Palestine before grabbing one of these.

This is somewhat shorter than my normal book round-ups. Normally, I would let this sit until it was a bit more full, but it’s finals week and I don’t have the brain power to really dive into something else.

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Red Pill by Hari Kunzru.

An alumnus of the University of Warwick’s philosophy department, Kunzru has a loose association with previously mentioned writers Mark Fisher (yay!) and Nick Land (boo!) though isn’t necessarily part of either camp. It’s somewhat unclear to me what Kunzru believes, though the main thrust of this novel is generally something that I found engaging.

An academic travels takes a fellowship in Wannsee, a suburb of Berlin, and finds himself crumpling under the pressure of the uncomfortable working conditions — the “transparency” that the foundation behind the fellowship lauds itself for being, essentially, surveillance and the reduction of all things to a series of performance metrics — and begins to wander around the neighborhood, becoming obsessed with Romantic dramatist and proto-Incel Heinrich von Kleist, watching episodes of a strange and brutal drama show called Blue Lives, and having brushes with a number of German and American fascists who view the narrator — a man of Indian descent, like Kunzru — as a curiosity.

The narrator slowly spirals into madness, becoming obsessed with a man he met at a party he was dragged to, Anton, who turns out to be the director of Blue Lives and a fascist intent on red pilling the narrator into accepting his worldview.

There’s a great deal going on in this book, and while I enjoyed it, I fear that its moment might have passed before it really got out: it was explicitly set in 2016, and came out in September 2020. Kunzru can’t be faulted for not seeing the future, but I can’t help but feel that a clock started ticking for him as soon as the Unite the Right rally ended. It’s an incredibly perceptive novel of that moment, but it feels a bit dated. The things discussed in it are still relevant, but it may not last.

Perdido Street Station by China Miéville.

A classic of secondary world weird fiction, Miéville’s New Crobuzon novels are examples of another of-their-moment genre of book, though a very different moment than the one Kunzru was writing about, and one that I am somewhat sad has passed. Perdido Street Station is a fantasy story about a dystopian, pseudo-victorian city in the world of Bas-Lag. It is an epic novel that never leaves its city, drawing more from M. John Harrison and Mervyn Peake than J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.

Isaac, a doctor, is hired by a mysterious but apparently wealthy traveler from outside the city to help correct a crippling injury. In the course of this, he manages to acquire contraband from the government. Unfortunately, his girlfriend, an artist, has recently been commissioned to produce a sculpture by a mob boss, whose business concerns that contraband and she is imprisoned and tortured. The theft of this contraband begins a long and convoluted adventure through the city to attempt to put the metaphorical genie back in the bottle.

Except the doctor is as much a magician as a scientist, the wealthy traveler is a bird-man whose wings were cut from his back in punishment for a horrible crime, the contraband is an extradimensional moth that eats dreams and not even the legions of hell wish to involve themselves with, the girlfriend has a scarab beetle for a head and sculpts by extruding resin, and the mob boss is a chimeric amalgamation of body parts and no one is quite sure how he got that way. There’s also a giant spider “with people hands” (Edgar’s words, not mine) who is actually quite charming.

In all honesty, I’m not sure a talent less than Miéville’s could have pulled off anything like it. He brings a groudnedness, a material consideration, to the whole proceeding that most authors don’t.

T. Kingfisher’s bluesky post on the worldbuilding. Found here.

System Collapse (Murderbot Diaries, #7) by Martha Wells.

A continuation of the Murderbot books that both of us have enjoyed a great deal. This fairly extended novella filters a discussion of PTSD, colonialism, and corporate greed through the lens of a security robot that watches soap operas.

It’s a pretty good book. The Murderbot Diaries is solid pulp, reasonably funny but centering that humor in the dry narration of a being forced to work with humans who is fundamentally neutral on the issue of humanity. Unlike other depictions of heroic but inhuman protagonists, there’s not suggestion that the titular Murderbot ever really wants to become more human than he already is. Which…fair. Withotu the same set of drives that human beings have, why would you want to?

I will say, though, that the Murderbot stories are better treated as an episodic series, rather than as something where each entry is going to be a full and complete narrative arc that satisfactorily ties everything up into a definitive conclusion — this, however, is perfectly fine: that’s not what they’re trying to do. They’re trying to be an episodic, science fiction/action series that satirized corporate culture and the security industry with a protagonist that serves as an excellent metaphor for the neurodivergent expeirence.

As such, if you’re looking for a whole, satisfying experience, I might recommend reading them all in a block, instead of discretely and spaced out.

Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James C. Scott.

A very different experience from the prior entry, Against the Grain is sort of a bridge between Seeing Like a State and The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow (who were both thanked in the acknowledgements of this volume). Longtime readers will know that I’m a fan of both of these books, and so it’s an easy proposition that I enjoyed this book.

Scott attempts to grapple with a fairly established problem in the history of the development of what we call civilization: who would choose to engage in agriculture when it is an easily established fact that not only long-term subsistence, but even what we might call a kind of urbanism, does not depend on it: he establishes that the earliest accumulations of human settlement could easily provide subsistence for their then-extant population without requiring the same degree of work that their farming ancestors would.

Scott suggests that this was primarily due to the influence of elites who could marshal violence to support them. He even goes so far as to note that the earliest city walls were not built for defense, but (apparently) to fence in a laboring population, subjecting them to diseases that were potentially completely novel to urban centers.

It’s an interesting read, though my own reading on this topic (including the previously mentioned Fabric of Civilization, which Edgar finished long ago and which I will probably be including in my next round-up) suggests that there may have been alternate raw materials that were desirable, besides just food (Scott mentions the early appearance of sheep in the “late-neolithic multispecies resettlement camp”, as he calls them, and the amount of flax needed to make a bolt of linen is staggering.) Of course, this sort of thing might appear somewhat invisible to a scholar mostly concerned with subsistence and resistance to state power like Scott.

Roarings from Further Out: Four Weird Novellas by Algernon Blackwood edited by Xavier Aldana Reyes.

Bought while in Rhode Island for two days, I have been picking away at this for several weeks now, and I have a new appreciation for Blackwood’s work. The volume contains four stories: “The Willows”, “Ancient Sorceries”, “The W*ndigo” (which I will be censoring in my review out of consideration for wishes expressed by Algonquin and other Native American people), and “The Man Whom Trees Loved”.

The odd-numbered stories are the strongest of the set, though that doesn’t mean any of the others are specifically bad. The first concerns a nameless pair of men canoing down the Danube, who encounter a strange maze of rivers and islets covered in willow trees and hosting an ancient, inhuman intelligence. It was a tight little story of wilderness horror, adapted by T. Kingfisher into The Hollow Places, which both Edgar and I loved.

“Ancience Sorceries” is part of a longer series, the Doctor John Silence stories, about a sort of occult detective. I’ve got a complex relationship with this story, but it mostly serves as a mechanism for the story to be related to a particular, knowledgeable individual. It concerns an Englishman who disembarks a train early and waits for the next one in a small French town — which is the proper response to both encountering a large number of your countrymen while travelling and to being surrounded by the English — and ends up becoming entranced by the strange, hypnagogic town, almost becoming stuck there, slowly dissolving into the fabric of the town’s dream.

“The W*ndigo” is disappointingly good, though it has very little to do with the figure from Algonquin legend or, honestly, with the indigenous peoples of the Americas altogether. It’s somewhat dismissive of its one Native American character, a cook whom the others call “Punk” and who has the good sense to leave as soon as he gets an inkling of what is going on, showing that he’s the only one who had any bit of sense. It’s much more insulting to the French Canadian wilderness guide, Défago, who is described as such:

He had, however, one objection to Défago, and one only—which was, that the French Canadian sometimes exhibited what Hank described as "the output of a cursed and dismal mind," meaning apparently that he sometimes was true to type, Latin type, and suffered fits of a kind of silent moroseness when nothing could induce him to utter speech. Défago, that is to say, was imaginative and melancholy. And, as a rule, it was too long a spell of "civilization" that induced the attacks, for a few days of the wilderness invariably cured them.

which is simply an insane degree of ethnic prejudice to level against the Québécois, though I suppose there is the suggestion that he could be Métis. Maybe Blackwood simply didn’t know what that was. In any case, this is the lesser of the two black marks against the story, the greater of which is the inclusion of the titular monster itself, which is a figure from still-existing religion, and which it is improper to use in horror fiction. Despite this, the story is extremely good, playing upon the eerieness of the wilderness for those not familiar with it.

My recommendation is simple: if you are going to read it, make sure to understand the context of the original figure, and understand why it should not be used in fiction, games, and the like. Frankly, the story has little enough to do with the original legendary figure that the use of the name somewhat detracts from it.

The final story, from which the collection’s name is taken, is “The Man Whom Trees Loved” and is a much more subtle story aboud a married couple who move to a country house in the middle of a large forest. Over their time there, the husband grows more and more obsessed with caring for the woods, and the wife becomes more and more convinced that he is being manipulated by some kind of spirit in the woods. It was fine, but it didn’t grab me as the other stories did.

Twin Peaks: Unwrapping the Plastic by Franck Boulegue.

A short, critical analysis of David Lynch and Mark Frost’s television series, which was a nice, light little read to move through between other things. This book concerns itself with laying out the roots of the series, examining the Freudian and Vedic influence that Lynch brings to the table and looking at the Hermetic and Theosophic influences that informed Mark Frost, whose influence is often overlooked. Boulegue makes the argument that it is the interaction between the two that gave the series its character — which is not necessarily a new position — but it does so without characterizing Mark Frost as the responsible, grounding influence on David Lynch’s coffee-and-sugar-sucking chaos goblin: instead, it suggests that there is a complex kind of dance taking place between the two, with both moderating the other and enabling the other to go further.

The sources cited, also, are quite impressive, and I made sure to copy down choice selections from the bibliography so that I can track down more of this information as I go forward.

There were only two drawbacks to this text. The first is a very formal sort of quibble: the book has still images from the show, but they are reproduced in black and white, which is a problem when they are small printed images taken from a standard-definition show: the images were often just sort of…blobs, which detracted somewhat from the whole experience. The other drawback is that it seemed to me that Boulegue has a perspective on the show — about it being about the interaction of four-dimensional entities with our three dimensional world — and, while he makes a solid case for it, I don’t believe that Twin Peaks, or similar artifacts, should be explained or solved, and he erred dangerously close to that.

So…a reasonably fine read, and one that I would recommend to someone interested in reading a critical analysis of the show. Possibly a small audience, but eh.

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