Lost Fleet, Outlands, books 1 & 2 
4.0 Stars
2-10-2023
Kind of good? These are books number ~16 and ~17 in a long running series. Years ago I had read the first book in the series and bounced off of it, but I found myself liking these later books to a surprising degree. The world and the characters are way more developed, there's some light humor, and for the most part the focus has shifted from space-fighting to space-administrating, as the protagonist deals with political, diplomatic, personal, and espionagal hurdles while trying to manage an expedition sent to solidify diplomatic relations with an alien race. It's not brilliant work, but it is solid beer and pretzels stuff and I was disappointed that there's not another dozens audio books lined up for me in this series. I'll probably go back to the start of the series and see if I like them better on the second try, and now that I know that they improve over time. Oh right another note, for whatever reason I have basically an infinite appetite for space opera and mil-space opera stuff, for some reason my brain categorizes as important information that will be useful some day. The struggle though is that so much of this stuff is written by people with hard-right views, to the point where I can't even choke down their beer and pretzels any more. This series though is pleasantly liberal-centrist, which is a relief.
Fairy Tale, by Stephen King
4.0 Stars
2-1-2023
All American high school football star goes on an Isekai adventure where he beats up various smaller and less handsome people that he meets. Actually wait, he also beats up a lot of people bigger than him. Not a work of genius, and leans hard on some simple emotional beats, but also very easy to read and quietly & soundly clever at times. Another way of putting that is that it's the work of a seasoned and skilled craftsman who wants to entertain a large swathe of people. Really impressive work for a 75 year old; we can all only hope to be so skilled and open to the world at that age.
Through Struggle, the Stars
3.0 Stars
1-25-2023
Space opera that is very heavy on the Space and very light on the Opera. The author is one of the prime movers behind the video game Terra Invicta, and the book shares ~85% of its concerns with the video game. Both of them have a heavy focus on nearish-future space ship design and combat, where everything the ships are doing is potentially viable with our current day understanding of physics (wormholes excepted of course). It's also a sort of "fragile" setting, where humans have industrialized space and colonized other planets, but we have in no way settled the national and ethnic conflicts that separate the globe. So you still have nations on Earth that abhor each other and could mutually destroy each other with nuclear weapons, but added to that you also have vulnerable stations in low Earth orbit that are vital to making the Earth-space economy work, asteroids or bombardments that could easily be dropped from space onto Earth, and then a whole logistics chain from the colonies to Sol and back again that can be disrupted or blockaded. So there's a lot of potentially catastrophic points of failure that are all shoved up next to each other, and with no good way to guard them, except by trying to navigate this line between competition and atrocity.
Anyway! There's some space battles, some Jack Ryan type forays into covert ops, and only the lightest of characterizations connecting the various bits. It's less of a story, and more of a chance for the author to talk about space things and the course of a made up future conflict. In terms of politics, the story is somewhat agnostic. There are no real heroes or villains (ok, maybe one or two), just soldiers and astronauts and spies on both sides involved in a gradually escalating WWI type conflict over expansion and national primacy. The author isn't a great writer, but he's not bad or lazy or dumb either. E.g. he has a reasonable understanding of people, but he's not really interested in spending words talking about them. The prose is serviceable, and well above what you find from most amateurs or fan-fic writers, without every really being beautiful.
Ok! Now for fun facts about the cross over in strategy between the game and the books. Is the video game realistic? Take the quiz yourself and find out.
Fact or fiction: the best fleet strategy is to bunch up all your ships up into a tight & slow moving grid, so that they can mutually cover each other with PD while concentrating fire on whatever is in front of them.
Fact! This is born out in the first battle of Yuan-ti, where the American fleet tries some fancy maneuvers with flanking and bullshit and gets absolutely pasted by the Chinese wall of battle.
Fact or fiction: Fleet engagements happen at relatively low intercept speeds and short distances.
Fact! Both simulations and live combat show that high speed passing engagements are basically a death sentence for everyone involved, since it A) increases the deadliness of projectiles while B) decreases the time for PD to fire. So only truly kamikaze fleets go for high speed engagements, others either fight a battle they think they can win or they just run.
Fact or fiction: At one point in the book, two potentially hostile ships ended up floating within 30 km of each other, as one ship tried to occlude the other's firing arc on a disputed ground target. Did this really happen?
Fiction! No, there is absolutely no way that a captain would bring their ship that close to a threat. 30 km? Jesus H Christ, the youth these days. No of course this could never happen in real life.
Fact or fiction: As technology advanced, missile weapons were phased out of warship builds as they were no longer able to pierce ever more effective laser-PD screens.
Fiction! In the real world, missiles do not angle for a direct hit on their target. Rather the missile explodes into a cloud of projectiles while still dozens of kilometers out from its target, forcing the PD systems to try and intercept thousands of incoming threats. While missiles aren't a primary weapon of most fleets, they still play a role in engagements, especially when trying to force chokepoints around wormholes. However the developers of the Terra Invicta game found these shrapnel clouds too computationaly expensive to model, which is why the in-game missiles must score a direct hit and are less effective than their real world counter-parts.
Fact or fiction: Future wars will be fought by essentially random combinations of nations.
Fact! The war in the book is fought with China and Korea on one side, with Japan, American, Australia, and Iran on the other. The game Terra Invicta accurately models this and gets this aspect of sci-fi combat completely right.
The Spare Man
1.0 Stars
1-20-2023
A murder mystery aboard a space-cruise-liner, which uses The Thin Man as its loose inspiration. I found it to be unreadable. The story is set in a future neo-liberal dystopia, where hordes of wage slaves spend their existence bowing and scraping and serving the trillionaire main character. For her part, she spends her time worrying about her tiny dog, her PTSD, her chronic pain, her medications, her triggers, her pronouns, and how best to ruin peoples lives with SLAPP lawsuits. One airlock could solve all of the problems for both the crew and her. This problem of class is particularly glaring when you compare this book to the original Thin Man books. In the Thin Man, the main characters are well off, in the sense that they have a nice penthouse in Manhattan, some shares in a lumber conglomerate, and no immediate material concerns. But at the same time, they are not in a completely different realm of existence from the rest of humanity. They do not completely own one segment of the infrastructure of a star-faring species. They do not need to be constantly shielded by a team of bodyguards, or else hidden by a cloak of anonymity. Instead, one of the neat features of the original protagonist is that he is comfortable with and has connections at all levels of society, from bankers, lawyers, dancers, musicians, criminals, cops, reporters, veterans, doctors, etc. etc. He and his wife go to clubs with normal people, they are packed into trains along with everyone else. So, yeah, that is the problem with the book in a nutshell. It completely eliminates class or any complaints about oligarchy, while elevating a gaggle of (boring) botique concerns to the point that they slow and obscure any actual story or plot.
Incidentally suffers from something common to most sci-fi mysteries, which is that the reader is not able to effectively reason about these worlds and so the mystery ends up feeling disconnected, unfair, and cheap. E.g. why is this a mystery at all, and why is every inch of this spaceship not covered with microscopic scale cameras? Any ship capable of intra-stellar travel is also potentially a gigantic WMD, like a fully loaded 747 but with orders of magnitude more potential energy. The idea that you would just let randos crawl all over this fusion powered rocket in an unsupervised manner is insanity, but that is of course what is going on in the story.
Edit: Another annoyance with the book that has stuck with me and that I feel compelled to expel from my mind is the vagueness with which the author describes her characters. For some reason the author is against physical descriptions of people, so we get character introductions like this: (chosen at random)
"An elegant passenger with beach blond hair and a soft, curving jawline"
Uh, what was their hair like? Long, short, close cropped, bangs, comb-over, wavy, other? Were they tall? Fit? How were their clothes and style elegant? Tell me about their face! Tell me about their fucking face. The author does this with like 50% of her character descriptions; she can only bring herself to describe the most trivial and unimportant parts of the person, like the color of their hair and maybe one other feature.
Compare this to a randomly chosen Iris Murdoch description of a tertiary character:
"Noel was a very big man with a pale and unwrinkled face and pale colourless hair. With his look of gentle bland amiability he was like a large teddy bear. He smiled down at Dora, wanting to be sympathetic without humouring her mood."
or on the same page for a more prominent character:
"
Before she sat down she inspected herself quickly in the mirror. In spite of all her awful experiences she looked good. She had a round well formed face and a large mouth that liked to smile.Her eyes were a dark slaty blue and rather long and large. Art had darkened but not thinned her vigorous triangular eyebrows. Her hair was golden brown and grew in long flat strips down the side of her head, like ferns growing down a rock. This was attractive. Her figure was by no means what it had been."
"
But the author of The Spare Man cannot use this language, since it would imply lookism? ableism? fatphobia? ageism? And so she is left only being able to describe the most circumstantial features of her characters, like the color of their hair.
Edit 2: The fact I read this as an ebook might also have contributed to my problems with it, as for whatever reason my brain evaluates ebooks as being a notch lower in quality than physical books.
Legends and Lattes, by Travis Baldtree
3.0 Stars
1-05-2023
What does it mean to be a murder hobo, once you have stopped traveling and stopped murdering people? Who are you even at that point? What does your life mean? An aging orc explores these questions as she settles down and starts a coffee shop, and tries to forget all the monsters she has fought, all the villagers she has killed and robbed, and all the weak, squishy, human men she has taken by force. A slow, meandering, introspective novel, as the protagonist tries to make sense of a lifetime of brutality.
Mariposa, by Greg Bear
1.0 Stars
12-15-2022
A real piece of anti-art. The general vibe is of slightly conservative, aging-and-declining-autist. There is no interesting characterization, and everything from the tech to the plot is only briefly sketched out, and not an actual story told by one human being to entertain and enlighten another human being. This is all combined with the dregs of the war on terror and early 2000's right-wing fear-phantoms. Not a kind book, an interesting book, or an intelligent book, or even a book with consistent themes or ideas. The one line from it that I would keep is an exclamation from the President, "I refuse to be the first President to nuke Texas!". Which raises all sorts of questions, and kind of implies she would be fine with it if another President had done it first. DNF.
Cradle, books 1-11
2.0 Stars
12-14-2022
Naruto + LitRPG. Serviceable. It takes ~10 books or so but eventually it starts to get fairly good.
Footfall
2.0 Stars
10-25-2022
A semi-acceptable book so long as you skip over every attempt at characterization and conversation, and just read the parts about sci-fi world building & orbital conflict. Has decent answers as to why aliens are advanced enough to travel to our solar system, but can still be fought by contemporary human technology.
Excession, by Banks
5.0 Stars
10-5-2022
Still a banger. Not even one of my favorite Culture books (I thought the text conversations between Minds dragged, as did a lot of the scenes on the Sleeper Service), and yet still enjoyable, entrancing. Banks is such an articulate young man, and I forget that when I haven't read his stuff for a while. There's just this quality of skill and intelligence that shines through in all of his writing.
Pariah, Penitent, by Dan Abnett
3.0 Stars
10-1-2022
Two perfectly acceptable WH40K books. The author occasionally goes into "tell, not show" mode where he elaborates at length on the themes of the book that we're already very well aware of, but otherwise this is a fine, slow, gothic, spy-story unfurling on a backwater Imperium planet.
Name of the Wind, Wise Man's Fear, by Patrick Rothfuss
5.0 Stars
9-15-2022
Re-reading these with the benefit of 10 more years of wisdom, I have to say that they are both still bangers. Two notes:
One early interpretation of the books that I had was "wizard school harem", which is indeed a very strong foundation upon which to build a novel. But really the author goes further than that, and makes just about every character in the books friendly and "neat", with their own unique and interesting thing going on. You want the main character to spend lots of time with basically all of these characters, and it is sad that we and the characters exist in linear time and can only go down a single path. E.g. the appeal of the book is not just Auri the MPDG, or Fela the well put together, or shadowed Denna, or ruthless but loveable Devi, it's also austere & intellectual Lorren, wild Eolin, musical Stanchion, and the manufactory bear-genius Kilvin. These are all great characters, and you'd like to see the MC spend a lifetime working alongside each of them. It's a good way to orient a novel; rather than going down the Game-Of-Thrones or Joe-Abercombie route of having none of the characters be likeable, instead have nearly every character be likeable in their own way.
Which ties into the second point, which has been oft repeated/thought by me, that a lot of people miss out on a lot of what this book is trying to do. The world in these books is nice! It's a world that, barring a few long running problems, is humming along smoothly. It's not a series where there is a Dark Lord, or a dire prophecy, or an encroaching shadow, or whatever ticking down that the heroes have to stop. It's just a world that is doing its thing and maybe slowly developing and getting better. So instead of this big external threat, basically all of the problems & drama in these books come from ... the main character. Specifically, the main character of this fantasy novel acts like the hero of a fantasy novel, thus causing basically every issue in his own life (ok, barring the parents, but otherwise this is true). In some ways it's an anti-fantasy novel? But like anti-war creators have found out, it is difficult to make an anti-war story if you in anyway focus the lens on the actual war. In a similar way, the anti-fantasy novel aspects of this book are undercut by the author making a really enjoyable fantasy novel.
Anyway! Great stuff, would like to see more of it, but unfortunately the Chandrian killed the author for telling the wrong kind of tales.
Personal interest note: Early on in book #1, Kvothe meets a charity worker who has difficulty getting around and walks gingerly, and Kvothe diagnosis' the worker as having circulation issues which in turn caused issues with the extremities. Thank you! Early in my 30's I went to *multiple* modern doctors with this same issue, and they were completely useless/baffled by these symptoms. I eventually figured it out via internet articles and lived experience with different exercise & diet choices, but it was neat to see Kvothe/the author being aware of the same issues.
Heathern, Ambient, by Jack Womack
3.0 Stars
8-20-2022
Two more Womack books, both set deep in his dystopian DryCo universe. This turns out to be a problem, since it's not a very enjoyable universe. Previous to this I'd read *Random Acts of Senseless Violence*, which leads into the DryCo setting, and *Terraplane*, which uses that setting as a bookend for adventures in other spaces. One of the reasons these previous books worked is that they just touch upon the DryCo setting, rather than wallowing in it. It's difficult to make a hellish setting interesting/readable for any length of time, but that is the task that Womack sets up for himself in Heathern and Ambient.
So, more about the setting. It's a sort of post-Jackpot, where the surviving 2 billion live in a strange combination of Idiocracy, 1984, and libertarian heaven. Human life is nearly worthless, and the demographics have reverted to medieval levels where a large fraction of the population is less than 20 years old. It is a society that is deeply death-seeking and that is constantly tearing at itself in myriad ways. For the reader, at times this comes off as cartoonish, at other times affecting, at other times as just very unpleasant. Both of the books are set at the top echelons of DryCo, the company that runs the Western world. In Hearthern, the executives try to tame a Gnostic messiah that has come to the world. A lot of people die. In Ambient, there is a power struggle between the founder of DryCo and his son. A lot of people die. In between, there are roller-derby death matches to determine & finalize corporate mergers, an Elvis cult, the founder of DryCo and his Friedman-esque continual chaining of sayings and metaphors, malformed and super-intelligent mutants that follow the teachings of the new Gnostic Messiah, and the lyrical and oblique speech of the mutants. Of the two books I prefer Ambient, though it does have the downside of introducing like 4 new major ideas and themes in its last 20 pages. Too much, too much. Shot through both books is both the author's brilliant writing and a continual, intelligent, and extreme cruelty towards its characters. You could argue that the cruelty is a midnight-black satire of trends in America, but at a certain point you have to ask if the author is satirizing the stupidity and cruelty or just getting off on them. I'd have difficulty recommending the books to anyone even if parts of both books are beautiful. It *does* make me understand why Womack never achieved any mainstream success with this books, despite their quality and the great recommendations that he gets from famous sci-fi authors.
Neat random bits: learning that the occasionally referenced "mollies" are Molotov cocktails, learning the reason Jake wears white suits, the religious testifying of the mutants, and the fate of 2 of the characters from Senseless Violence. Oh right and Ambient, written in 1997, has as a plot point the "Q Papers", a series of ancient and long hidden documents that completely upend Christianity. Coincidence?
The Maze of the Enchanter, by Clark Ashton Smith
4.0 Stars
8-15-2022
A collection of inventive and beautifully written Weird Tales from the early 1900's. The stories are short & don't overstay their welcome, and tend to be more inventive in the details than in the overall plotting. Also markedly less racist than much of the contemporary writing.
Collision with the Infinite, by Segal
3.0 Stars
8-5-2022
This was one the books mentioned by Ligotti in his survey of anti-self literature. It is the personal account of Suzanne Segal, noted void monk, as she talks about both her early life and her life after losing her sense of personhood. In brief: as a youngster Segal practiced transcendental meditation under different guru's and had plentiful ventures into otherspace. She abandoned this meditation in her late 20's. Several years later, after settling down and getting married and getting pregnant, she was stepping onto a city bus when her sense of "self" disappeared from one moment to the next. She went through a months long phase of being an "observer", watching "herself" from over her shoulder as she carried out her actions. Later on even that sense of observerhood would disappear and for many years she was in a paradoxical state of having no self, of observing herself without an observer, a sort of experiential view from nowhere as she viewed and recorded the actions and emotions of someone that she was not. To give you an idea of the weirdness of this state, where a person might normally write "I opened my eyes after waking up" she would instead write "the eyes opened". Finally, at age 42, she became badly ill and on testing an aggressive brain tumor was discovered. Within months she was dead.
So, a couple of notes. Note #1 is that Segal was ill-served by many of the people in her life. The spiritual gurus she interacted with were all scumbags. The Western psychologists she went to for help also failed her, and were unable to identify what seems to be a fairly clear and literal case of depersonalization, i.e. the patient came up and told them "I can no longer recognize myself as a person". This was 40 years ago and psychiatry was not as advanced, but still, they should not have all been so completely useless to her. If at some point one of them would have told her "hey, your brain is having hiccups, lets pop you in a X-ray or MRI machine and maybe we will find a tumor that is tripping you up", then it is entirely possible that Segal would still be alive today. Instead the brain tumor was just allowed to progress for ~12 years. Oh, and then her husband, being French, completely failed to try and understand her or help her when the depersonalization came on. She was no longer filling the wife role she was scripted for, and so she was fired.
Note #2 is that I feel cheated, as the narrative failed to really dig into the particular aspect of her experience that I was interested in, the experience of moment to moment decision making within this condition. E.g. how does an action come about, say eating ice cream? Is it just something that she observes happening? Does she feel/observe hunger or anticipation or something pleasant to look forward too? I really would have loved just an in depth, 30 page long examination of how basic actions and decision occur. At several points in the book, both before and after depersonalization, she describes making life decisions because it seemed "obvious". Is life like that for her, a continual series of obvious choices? Unclear. So the one bit of info I was reading the book for, I did not find.
Note #3 is a moderately positive one. Ligotti and to a certain extent Segal say (this is very much paraphrasing), that the self is an illusion. Yet her experience seems to indicate that the self is at least a load-bearing illusion, and that its lack results in very noticeable effects. For Segal this experience of lack-of-self caused continual terror, trembling, anxiety, and exhaustion. True, later on she becomes calmer as she understands her situation better, but even then there were definite effects. You could easily posit a different situation, where her sense of self disappeared in the same way, but she just continued on in precisely the same life-track as before. She could have become a p-zombie with no one being the wiser, with no terrors, no divorces, no books being written. The fact that the disappearance of self was a life changing event argues that it fills at least some role in the ecosystem of the mind.
Oh right! and Note #4, she refers in the end to her altered and unmediated? remediated? perception of reality/the universe as "the Vastness". What a great phrase!
The Jakarta Method, by Bevins
5.0 Stars
8-1-2022
Kansas, the root of all evil. Alt-text: "are we the baddies?"
A study of the cultivation and spread of anti-leftist mass murder in the third world in the 50's - 70's. In many ways this is a companion piece to Legacy of Ashes, where Legacy is US-centric and views events through the lens of the CIA, while Jakarta is Third World centric and views events through the lens of people who were affected by this violence. They are both excellent books, but this one has the advantage of being simpler? more innocent? and manages to at least partially separate itself from cultural preconceptions and achieve a "this is an alien describing earth society" viewpoint. It's also briefer than Legacy, and I think it is a great history book for understanding what exactly is meant by terms like imperialism and neo-colonialism, and how large chunks of the world transitioned from the post-WWII world to our current world. The short summary of the book is that America's initial anti-Communist efforts were spearheaded by the CIA, and were often unsuccessful or had enormous blow back. Later on, we transitioned from acting more or less directly, to instead nurturing & funding hard-right elements in the target nations, and letting them do the desired work in a more organic and home-grown fashion.
Other deets:
-Leavenworth, Kansas, where the US gathered and nurtured Alex Jones types from all over the world before sending them back out to organize and commit mass murder. It was the School of the Americas before the School of the Americas.
-It turns out the Secret Service is usually the agency responsible for supplying foreign dignitaries with prostitutes. Which makes some of the Secret Services more recent scandals less surprising (I mean the sex scandals, not the coup scandals).
- It's jarring to see so many names starting with "Bal-", since 99.9% of the time when I see that prefix it is as part of my Metafilter handle. :D But it turns out to be a common way to begin a name in Indonesia.
- Some insightful letters between Mao and the peaceful democratic-socialist party of Indonesia. He's trying to break it to them as gently as possible that they need to arm up or else the right wingers will kill you. Other people make the point more directly later, that the
Barn 8, by Unferth
4.0 Stars
7-28-2022
Iowa, the death of hope
Delightful. The book completely charmed me within the first 20 pages. Since there's great stuff even at the very beginning of the book, I don't want to spoil anything by going into too much detail of the plot. Instead I'll just say that it's about a cast of yearning, misfit, animal rights activists who decided to do something. The book does a great job of creating a group of characters who are all unique and lovely in their own way and own light. I would give the book 5 stars, except that it kept adding new characters (who are fine!), rather than focusing on the initial characters that I'd already fallen in love with. Anyway. It's short, it's fast, and it's one of the most cheerful and enjoyable books about factory farming and environmental collapse that you will read this year.
The Good Shepherd, by CS Forester
3.0 Stars
7-24-2022
Nobody is impressed. We've all spent 48 hours playing a video game before.
A weird little book. This is an account of a fictional naval battle, as the straight-laced commander of a destroyer group & convoy are under prolonged attack by German submarines. The 2 elements that immediately stand out are A) the war story, which is good, and makes for a propulsive middle half of the book and B) the commander's immersion in Christianity, to the point where he's constantly bible-quoting to himself about the most minor of things. I haven't read any other books by CS Forester, so I don't really have him calibrated and wasn't entirely sure in what light this was intended, but it seems like this meant in a positive light? In any case, the real and hidden draw of this book & half the reason I looked it up is the time-management/shift change logistics. The US Navy apparently subscribed (subscribes?) to the same philosophy as US doctors, that it is right and proper for the head captain/doctor to stay on shift for absurd lengths of time with only the smallest sleep breaks in between. And as a programmer you can only look on this with horrified fascination. There's been countless studies in various CS departments about how mental function inexorably declines with lack of sleep & overwork, and how past around ~45 hours per week the gains from increased work are overtaken by the losses from increased error rates, with the conclusion that it is simply counterproductive to work past that many hours for any extended length of time. And then you go to these absolutely vital fields like medical science, where any mistake could cripple someone their life, and the common practice is to work doctors/nurses for ~18 hour shifts for 100 hours per week. As I said, it seems horrifyingly maladjusted. And for their part doctors seem to be fine with this, partly from tradition & their own hazing, partly from the fact that being mentally impaired dulls the very senses that you would need to detect impairment (e.g. people who think they drive better while drunk), and I think partly because their job is at least somewhat physical, which might further mask to them the degradation of their mental faculties. Anyway! The navy follows this same philosophy, and has the same captain in charge of the battle for the full 48 hours without any meaningful breaks. So a larger and larger aspect of the story is the Captain becoming both utterly exhausted and utterly absorbed in this task. Sometimes this drives out bodily realities, other times these physical needs come crashing back with vividness. Again, we've all been there after a gaming bender. So this was the 3rd element of the book for me, thinking about ways this could have been avoided, and what sort of duplicate/triplicate commander system you would need and with what sort of shadowing and hand offs, so that the commander of the fleet/ship could take sleep breaks and not just be completely blasted out of his mind by hour #28 of the battle. It seems doable; you have plenty of other officers & men there, there's no reason they can't be trained up in this decision making while on the job. And the task of convoy-defense is relatively "local", i.e. you are not executing on a long-term plan, rather most of the decision making consists of reasonable responses/procedures to incoming reports. So in that sense it could be handed off with less overhead. Anyway! The US Navy apparently still has a massive problem with sleep deficits, to the point where their officers regularly ram ~$20 billion dollar warships into the sides of cargo vessels. Save a cargo container, take a nap!
Oh right and the book is meant as a metaphor of some sort. I am 90% sure of that.
Shards of Earth
4.0 Stars
7-21-2022
A fast paced & inventive space opera adventure. It reads a bit like a like a one of the more modern and wild sci-fi RPGs, where you have various ships, aliens, human-alien hybrids, hive-minds, cyborgs, alien-cyborgs, psychics, trans-humans, trans-aliens, gangsters, lawyers, boyars, and tyrannical hierophantical whelks scrabbling with and against each other at the edges of known space. Or here's another angle: it's a bit like Stephen Donaldson's *The Gap* series, except with only 10% as many content warnings and more variety & color & friendliness. Not exactly Iain M. Banks, but also very easy to read in 1 or 2 days.
City of Saints and Madmen, Vandermeer
2.0 Stars
7-15-2022
A much, much, much ... much, much lesser Vandermeer. This is one of his earlier works, where he decided he wanted to create his own version of Perdido Street Station/Etched City/Viriconium and fully realize the life and history of the fantastic city of Ambergris. It doesn't work. This is mostly due a combination of slowness and triteness.
The book is broken up into a number of novella length stories, where each story changes the genre/time period/perspective on the city. So you have the story of a shattered priest returning to the city after failed missionary work, you have a highly parenthetical popular history of the city's founding, you have a key moment in the lives of several famous artists in the city's modern period, you have a meta-text with the author in a psych ward because the city became too real for him, etc. etc. And there are numerous links between the stories, e.g. the popular history has a brief mention of the lasting psychoactive effects of the jungle-poison on the dart that the priest was pierced with, e.g. the famous artists (Voss, Lake) are mentioned in almost all other stories, etc. etc
The problem is that the quality of the work is not sufficient to keep the reader's interest. The world building is often ... bleh. It's not fan-fic level, but it is also not creative enough or original enough or beautiful enough to justify itself. Instead it's just this long slog through mediocre world building & nice but also quite slow storytelling. And there are easter eggs and cross references and sub-texts and subversions there for you to find, except that if you do not care about the work to begin with these rewards are not very rewarding. As an example, let's dig into the story of the artists (which is one of the better ones). The main thread of the story is about an artist who makes mediocre art and is perhaps wasting his talent, he has a big dramatic traumatic experience, and then after that experience he makes good art. As plot goes, this is trite & unrealistic. The second thread of the story is about an art historian writing about the artist's paintings during this time, and getting things wrong in a confidently bullshitty way. This has also been done before, many times, since artists love to turn their art on the critics who criticize them. It's a super common sub-genre, and often quite cutting and hilarious. And this story-thread is just a mediocre example of that sub-genre. At most it gets some gentle chuckles. The novella isn't worthless, some of the physical descriptions and scenes are excellent, but that quality alone isn't enough to support the novella. If the art-history thread had been dropped, then the pace of the story doubles, and that might have worked fine. As is though the book is too slow, and the shifts in perspective regularly kill any momentum that the reader has managed to build up.
Anyway! I quit around the 300 page mark, as I couldn't deal with another psychiatric hospital scene where it seems like the hospitalized person is insane, or are they?! Perhaps my favorite thing of the whole book was the (apparently) real life talk about Vandermeer's own personal experience with a hummingbird as a symbol of piercing and awakening beauty, which he would later expand into his Hummingbird Salamander. Neat.
I'm not sure how to rate this book, as it's not offensive or incompetent, but I also can't think of any situation in which I would recommend it to someone. I'm going to call that "2 stars" in recognition of Vandermeer's past services.
The Conspiracy against the Human Race, by Thomas Ligotti
3.0 Stars
7-4-2022
I am a meat popsicle
Reading this book reminded me of the old joke about two mid-westerners who meet and start chatting. They happily realize that they are both Protestants, they chat more and realize they are both Baptists, they chat more & more and follow down the pathways of schism and reform, realizing they both belong to the exact same minuscule branch of their religion... up until the very last branch where it turns out one belongs to the Reformation of 1879 while the other belongs to the Reformation of 1915. They then turn on each other as bitter enemies.
Which is to say that I agree with a lot of what Ligotti writes, and it is only at the last steps that I have strong disagreements with him. Being is consciousness? Check. Our material substrate is inevitably decaying towards pain and death? Check. Our conception of a unitary and self-directing personhood is largely illusory? Check. Our reasoning is strongly psychologically motivated? Check. Life endlessly feasts on itself, a continuous brutal process played out in a thin scum across the surface of a tiny rock in an infinite and meaningless void? Obviously. So we agree on all of these factual points, only to diverge on how to contextualize them, and the proper reaction to them.
So, in more detail, Ligotti's central metaphor for his complaint and for describing humanity's existence is that of the horror-movie puppet, a creature that should not be alive but is alive, a chunk of base matter given an uncanny consciousness. To Ligotti the proper reaction to human consciousness is an unsettled horror, both that there is consciousness housed in matter, and that this consciousness allows us to apprehend the fundamentally negative nature of the world we exist in. So to Ligotti consciousness, a random evolutionary by-product, is a tragic event in the course of our world as it opens up doors of terror and suffering that were previously closed. In his view the proper action would be to re-seal these doors by letting the human race go extinct. To a certain extent he is not wrong in his negative reaction, in the same way that if someone says that cilantro tastes bad to them they are not wrong. It is a subjective statement of taste that you can't really gainsay from the outside. So I fully believe that this is Ligotti's aesthetic reaction to the world, and that there are probably dozens of other people in the world who feel the same way.
And now begins the part where I criticize the book.
First, the metaphor of the horror-movie puppet. Ligotti says that the puppet is horrifying because it is uncanny; I would say that the puppet is horrifying because it will hide under your furniture and then rush out and stab you with a knife. Without the stabbing aspect, the puppet is not half so scary. There are plenty of puppet-figures that we view with affection, e.g. the Nadja-puppet from What we do in the Shadows, Johnny-5 from Short Circuit, and most of the robots from Star Wars and other sci-fi. We are perfectly fine with base matter given life, we just need to know that it is not going to suddenly stab us. Ditto with the other examples Ligotti lists, of actual humans with physical/mental issues that make them behave in weird ways. The scary thing about these conditions is not that they are uncanny, it is that they are uncertain & potentially dangerous, and we are no longer able to read or predict the other person's actions. (Edit: Science backs me up on this! They did an extensive survey, and one of the things that makes clowns so scary is the inability to read their emotional cues,due to their misleading makeup) This make the situation fraught and carries a constant risk of violence, which is half of what makes people scared or anxious when dealing with health issues that cause people to behave abnormally.
Second, the suffering. Ligotti lists suffering as one of the reasons for human extinction, but either I don't understand his moral calculus, or he is personally not doing a good job of achieving a decent suffering-to-pleasure ratio. I think for most people, we consider a certain amount of suffering a reasonable trade for a certain amount of life and pleasure. E.g. say that you were to live as long as you wanted in a beautiful alpine resort, however once every 500 years you would fall while skiing and painfully break your arm. This is a good trade? It seems like a good trade, and that the pain of breaking your arm is outweighed by all the other positive experiences you have. And if you were to look back at a life of 3000 years of alpine vacation, you wouldn't really describe is as a bad or painful life full of arm breaking, but rather an overall pleasant one. You can envision other deals with less favorable exchange ratios, where eventually the ratio would be bad enough that most people would be like "yeah, euthanize me please". But in general, especially in the modern day, especially in the rich West, it seems like we have a pretty good ratio, with at least moderate hopes of it getting better. So this part didn't really land for me, and I did not understand the argument that because some suffering is unavoidable, that therefor life as a whole was not worth it.
Third, depression. Ligotti writes a brief but I think quite astute description of depression, and how the very nature of thought and consciousness and the world is different there than it is in "normal" consciousness. And he uses this as an example of how life is fundamentally negative, if only we could see it. I think the experience of depression is instead a hopeful sign? In that if you can conceive of a second fundamental type of consciousness, where the very ground of existence is altered, why not a third or a fourth or a trillionth type of consciousness? Especially for someone like Ligotti, who dis-enjoys both baseline consciousness and depression consciousness, this understanding that there exists entirely different ground seems like a sign that he should do further exploring and possibly psychonaut his way to greener pastures. In a later section Ligotti dumps on transhumanism as another false hope, but to me that has always been the real appeal of that -ism, that through relatively minor alterations to brain organization we could enable new or more sustained states of consciousness rather than sticking with what evolution seems to have landed us on. (e.g. as one small example, the sustained states of transcendental bliss talked about by Segal in her book)
Fourth, the nature of the world. Ligotti argues for a Schopenhauerian view, that there is "black life" behind all things and animating the world. Ligotti brings this up numerous times, of an unsettling presence behind the curtain, or a hidden nature in the world, of which we receive glimpses but shy away from. To that I would say: bro, it's fine. Yes we feast on ourselves, yes there is an endless web of negative meaning, but the proper response to this understanding is a joy and a peace of knowing yourself to be a part of this vast system, that you are connected to all things through it, that it will consume you just like has consumed countless trillions of others. I've read Christians talking about the comfort of knowing that the liturgy they experience in church is the same one experienced by their parents and their parents before them, going back in an unbroken tradition for hundreds of years. How much more comforting to know that you are part of a tradition going back hundreds of millions of years!
Or for another take, we could go to Nietzsche and one of his criticisms of Christianity (I'm not a Nietzsche scholar, if I have got this completely wrong don't @ me), that Christianity looks at this entire vast creation and human life and human desire, and then stamps its foot and says "no, you are wrong". Charitably, this could be viewed as a delightful degree of chutzpah, less charitably, as a sort of pettish insanity and absurdity and smallness. In the same vein, we could look at Ligotti looking at the world, where he recognizes the vastness behind everything, and he says "ugh, I don't like it." Maybe the problem is with you dude, maybe *you* should work on changing your own mindset. Black life matters.
Oh, while we're on Nietzsche, Ligotti does have a very funny if not entirely accurate chapter on him. Ligotti does seem to misunderstand eternal re-occurrence, it's supposed to be a thought experiment or mental exercise, not a statement of actual fact. I've seen this confusion in a lot of other places, hopefully that doesn't just mean that I am misundestanding it.
And finally, to conclude the complaining, let me just toss out a grab-bag of other issues, e.g. the book is in many ways a complete mess, as it is this weird combination of philosophical screed + survey of related philosophical writing + survey of weird fiction. It doesn't so much make a continued and developed philosophical argument as it does collect a variety of related and highly opinionated thoughts that the author has had and then sort of list these thoughts out one by one. The language and reasoning is often extremely sloppy, and it often wobbles quite close to the line of "too edgy and cringy to read".
Still! Despite everything above, and despite disagreeing with huge chunks of the book, I do have a fundamental affection for it. While I disagree with the final take, the book still gets right things that 99% of books simply don't. And some of its references (e.g. Segal, Zapffe, parts of Schopenhauer) seem interesting and worth looking into more. This book could have been better, but it also could have been much, much worse.
(Edit: oh right, not sure where to put it, but a nice Zapffe bit: "Communism and psychoanalysis, however incommensurable otherwise, both attempt by novel means to vary the old escape anew; applying, respectively violence and guile to make humans biologically fit by ensnaring their critical surplus of cognition. The idea, in either case, is uncannily logical. But again, it cannot yield a final solution. Though a deliberate degeneration to a move viable nadir may certainly save the species in the short run, it will be its nature be unable to find peace in such resignation, or indeed any peace at all..." Interesting stuff, basically arguing that you just need to let these things simmer for a while before you will come around to Ligotti's viewpoint.