Sep 22 2021

Gnomon by Nick Harkaway, Pt. 1

Some time past the middle of the twenty-first century, Britain offers its citizens the safest, most democratic, best-adjusted society in human history.

Every person under the System is encouraged — though not compelled — to spend a certain amount of time each week voting, and is semi-randomly assigned to decision-making bodies for the duration of their session. Each body will most likely be around two hundred individuals strong, and will deal either collectively or in subcommittee jury group with anything from asylum requests or the allocation of medical resources to commercial disputes. It is the most nuanced and democratic system of direct governance ever devised, and it requires genuine participation from the polity. For the body of the state to perform its function properly, each person must make his or her own decision in the light of their personal experience and opinion without being influenced by others at the formative stage, so sessions are initially private and remain anonymous throughout. Each problem is proposed to each person in a way that is fractionally different, tailored precisely to pique their interest and understanding, their self-interest and their altruism, so that every choice is made with the greatest awareness of consequence and meaning. (p. 25)

Gnomon by Nick Harkaway

But the workings of a utopian participatory democracy are not what Gnomon is about. They are the necessary foundation of a story — or more properly a nested set of stories — that is both wider and deeper. It begins with Inspector Mielikki Neith making a televised statement about the death of a suspect in the custody of the Witness, while people use the System to examine her microexpressions to gauge whether her pained honesty about how everyone at the Witness feels this failure is faked, and Neith herself follows the polling numbers that trail across her screen. Or maybe it begins with the death of Diana Hunter, the death that distresses Inspector Neith because of the failure it implies, though Hunter’s case will do much more than distress her as Gnomon proceeds. Or maybe it begins with Hunter being called in for interrogation. The first words that she gives to the System are the title of the first section of Gnomon, “my mind on the screen.” In fuller form:

“I can see my mind on the screen.”
Hunter’s first thought during the examination is like the barb on a fishhook, and Neith instinctively loathes it. These eight unremarkable words cause her to tighten her jaw as if expecting a blow. The phrase is, to be sure, unusually clear and strong, quite ready to be vocalised. One must assume that Hunter was deliberately recording a message, in which case: to whom? To Neith, as the investigating officer? Or to an imagined historian? Why does the tone, the clean, discursive flavour of Hunter’s mind, trouble that part of the Inspector that is devoted to a professional mistrust of appearances? (p. 10)

A gnomon is the bar sticking out from a slab that turns a flat surface into a sundial. Its intrusion changes a physical phenomenon into a source of meaning and measurement. “In geometry, a gnomon is a plane figure formed by removing a similar parallelogram from a corner of a larger parallelogram; or, more generally, a figure that, added to a given figure, makes a larger figure of the same shape.” Gnomon is filled with such irruptions, things that intrude among planes, cast shadows, and change meanings.

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Sep 21 2021

Iyanu: Child Of Wonder Volume 1 by Roye Okupe & Godwin Akpan

The second title in the YouNeek YouNiverse is just as gorgeous as its predecessor, the first volume of Malika: Warrior Queen, if not more so. The digital art is rendered with a colorful airiness reminiscent of manga but with decidedly African influences. And the use of color throughout is simply mind-blowing: Godwin Akpan is so majorly talented!

If only the storyline kept up quite as well with the illustrations. I have the general idea of where the plot is going, but the layers of story are too frustratingly opaque. Essentially, young Iyanu has been raised just outside the city walls of Elu by the wise woman Olori, who is skilled in eliminating a mysterious force known only as Corruption. But the death of Elu’s king sets in motion a power play by the new king’s chancellor Noru, that would eliminate Olori and Iyanu while doing nothing to alleviate the suffering of Elu’s citizens, whose welfare is championed only by much maligned foreign minister Uwa.

By the end of the book, I’d gotten an inkling of why Noru was pushing as hard as he was, but I’m genuinely surprised that Uwa is the only person not taken in by what’s an obvious con. Noru is so entirely shifty, making portentous declarations with only the vaguest of claims to back them up, that it makes everyone who goes along with him look hopelessly gullible. It’s one thing if he were speechifying to a desperate populace, but he’s mainly talking to the entrenched ruling class, who have the luxury — but clearly not the brains — to ponder his pronouncements and push back, especially when said pronouncements are clearly against their own interests. It is absolutely mind-boggling how cow-like the new king is in just going along with what Noru tells him to do. Maybe this is a plot-point later, but there are no indications that the ruling class’ submission is due to anything but sheer plot devicery.

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Sep 20 2021

From Page to Screen: Dune

Confession time: Though I have read Dune several times after encountering it at an early and impressionable age, I don’t think that I have read it this century. My recollection is more impressionistic than detailed, and my impression is that the movie got all of the most important parts of the story up on the screen and made the famously sprawling story comprehensible. One important caveat is that the 2021 Dune only tells part of the novel’s tale. (Discussion of the plot for a book that’s been out for more than 50 years may reveal some of its details.)

Dune by Frank Herbert

It goes as far as Paul and Jessica’s escape into the desert after the Harkonnen attack on the Atreides. I was discussing it with a friend this morning and said that’s at most a third or a fourth of the way through the book — the friend said more like an eighth — but on reflection it also makes considerable sense. Everything leading up to Paul going into the desert is Before; everything that follows is After. The Harkonnen attack and devastation of House Atreides, though it comes relatively early in the novel, is the hinge of the external action, and that’s what the movie is made to show.

Paul’s journey to becoming Muad’Dib is an internal journey; his eventual leadership of the Fremen is the external one that the second half of Dune — assuming it gets made in the nearish future — will presumably show. It will be a great, epic visual story when the second half is done, if it is done on the scale of the first.

Dune movie poster

As a story to watch, Dune is brilliant. It’s a fully developed interstellar civilization, complete in itself, and alien. (While there are, inevitably, recognizable bits of earthly cultures, it’s not like Game of Thrones where I called the first season “War of the Roses plus Mongols,” and was able to add, “Yep, there’s the Vikings, there’s Henry VIII” and so forth.) This is a far future with a deep past, and both aspects are visible on the screen. I could happily watch for many hours. Listen, too. The movie’s score, by Hans Zimmer, melds the times and cultures up on the big screen, conveying emotions and also providing sounds that are simultaneously familiar and strange.

Though the film clocks in at just over two and a half hours, Dune is epic enough that some key characters and concepts are given relatively short shrift. Mentats were something that appealed to precocious me when I first read the book; they’re shown but not really explained for anyone not already familiar with how Herbert’s worlds work. Viewers don’t know why the Atreides trust Dr Yue; they’ll be less surprised at what happens than the characters are. Gurney Halleck gets off one of the movie’s few funny lines; who he is and why he stands next to the Duke are hardly explored at all. Cuts had to be made, even for a long movie. In general, Dune has made them judiciously.

Some of the flaws in the story come straight from the novel. House Atreides has supposedly been around for thousands of years without fully internalizing the concept of “an heir and a spare.” Yes, yes, Jessica and the Bene Gesserit breeding project and all that. Still. Failure to have an adult heir is the key failure mode of noble lines. It’s best not to think too hard about how sandworms could work. It’s also best not to think too hard about the Fremen industrial base, where all that technology comes from, or how it got developed. (Or if you do want to think entirely too hard about the Fremen, here is a good place to start.)

The flaw, such as they are, were easy for me to ignore in exchange for an enormous, gorgeous compelling story. I hope to catch it again, on the biggest screen that I can find.

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Sep 19 2021

Descending Figure by Louise Glück

Glück divides Descending Figure into three sections, “The Garden,” “The Mirror,” and “Lamentations,” though I cannot say that I found the division particularly helpful or enlightening. Certainly there is a lot of lamenting in the final section, but there is a lot of it in the rest of the collection as well. This is a book whose first poem is titled “The Drowned Children,” and it begins horrifyingly matter-of-factly: “You see, they have no judgment. So it is natural that they should drown…” Part of me wants to read this poem as a supernatural tale, with a non-human narrator puzzled that its listeners should feel anything strongly about the children’s deaths, explaining to its audience that something of the children remains, “And yet they hear the names they used/like lures slipping over the pond…” Part of me wants to read it in the voice of a grieving parent, going to pieces over the course of its three stanzas. Part of me wants to just reject it entirely, especially the second stanza’s start: “But death must come to them differently/so close to the beginning.”

Descending Figure byLouise Glück

I suspect my first reaction is a large part of the reason I find myself sliding off of Glück’s poems so often. I’m reminded of what Jo Walton wrote about the ending of Middlemarch: “…Dorothea’s story at least ends happily, if unconventionally. That is, unconventionally for a Victorian novel. She doesn’t get to be the ambassador to Jupiter, more’s the pity.” My sensibility would find it perfectly natural for a character to be ambassador to Jupiter. I suspect that Glück has firm ideas (or at least had them when she was writing these poems more than 40 years ago) about who her narrators are and who their audiences are, and I’m willing to bet there’s not a member of the Jovian diplomatic corps among them. More’s the pity.

There could be. In various poems in this collection gods are invoked; statues’ immobility is remarked upon unfavorably, perhaps they could be persuaded to move about a bit and bring some liveliness. In the poem that gives its title to the first section of Descending Figure — and indeed in a sub-part of that poem with the same name, the garden is personified, but how much more would I have related to the poem if it turned out the garden could speak? Instead it just admires the poem’s undefined “you,” and “smears itself with green pigment/ … so that you will come to it with your lovers.” Glück remains resolutely mundane, while I try to read her poems into a much wilder work, and so we connect rather poorly.

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Sep 18 2021

Fletcher and Zenobia by Victoria Chess and Edward Gorey

I don’t have all that much to say about Fletcher and Zenobia except that reading it makes me very happy, every time. It hits just the right note of whimsy without being twee. It’s mildly melancholy at the beginning, then enlivened, then worrisome again, and then everything is pleasantly resolved at the end. What more could I ask for?

Fletcher and Zenobia

Fletcher is a cat who lives in the biggest tree “for miles around. He had run up it in a moment of thoughtless abandon and ever since had been unable to get down again.” As cats do. He is well provided for by the contents of a “vast, brass-bound leather trunk.” Provisions include “a collection of hats for all occasions. Alas, not one single one had arisen as long as Fletcher had been in the tree.”

Zenobia is an old-fashioned doll. “She was dressed in mauve velvet, and though her face was plain, the ribbons on her gown and the flowers on her hat were stylish indeed—not to mention her buttons.” Fletcher discovers her inside a papier-mâché egg in the trunk.

She looked around her with puzzled interest
“We are in a tree,” said Fletcher.
“A perfect place for a sunny summer afternoon,” said Zenobia. “Where do you live otherwise?”
Fletcher explained that there wasn’t any otherwise.

Thus summarizing the dilemma perfectly.

They come up with something to do, which turns out to provide an occasion for the wearing of hats. One thing leads to another, and by the end of the book things are very different, and I am happy for having read it.

Some sample illustrations are below the fold.
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Sep 17 2021

From The Neck Up by Aliya Whiteley

Bluntly, I don’t know anyone working in speculative fiction today who consistently writes such disturbingly weird shit. But not like in a gratuitous way. Aliya Whiteley doesn’t want to shock you, necessarily, but she is unafraid to plumb into the deeper, uglier parts of the human psyche to examine the monstrous and strange, to ponder how humanity might react to the far futures that seem like science fiction now but might very well turn out to be reality, if humanity keeps on going in the direction we’re headed.

This volume of 16 stories written between 2014 and 2020 covers a wide range of Ms Whiteley’s interests, tho tend to circle back round to a world ravaged and, perhaps, recovering from a disaster all too often of humanity’s own making. Other strongly recurring themes are the complexity of two people’s interpersonal relationship, often via marriage or parenthood, and the convergence of minds. Fans of her terrific Skyward Inn will find exquisite variations on the main themes of that novella reflected in the stories here.

But this isn’t just a book for fans such as myself, tho it’s definitely a book that will bring her more admirers! I enjoyed these stories so much that I’m actually hard pressed to pick a favorite! So many of these stories land so well that it’s hard to rate any of them better or worse than their fellows in this overall extremely strong, consistently entertaining collection. If I had to choose, I’d say that the opening novelette, Brushwork, stood out in large part because it gave Ms Whiteley more room to explore the macro of the world she’d created and the micro of the protagonist’s feelings, especially towards Lucas. The bit where she admires the subtlety of his brushwork was like a shot through the heart for me.

Granted, there were moments where I felt less hit in the feels than missed by a reference flying far overhead. I didn’t really understand the identity of the aliens in Compel, for example, which is pretty hilarious given my often grumpy insistence that words have meanings and people should say what they mean. I also felt that the title story was carrying a possibly British subtext that I just wasn’t seeing somehow.

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Sep 16 2021

Rooms Of The Mind by Makenzie Campbell

There’s a huge caveat to my review of this book today: I got an e-galley for Kindle, which was so strangely formatted as to make me constantly second guess whether I was reading a new poem or a continuation of the last one every few stanzas. This pervading doubt is not terribly conducive to enjoyment of a poem’s flow, much less its message, so my apologies for any obtuseness on my end caused by this.

That said, I did find my brain mulling over the writing more than once, as Makenzie Campbell describes several different compartments in her mind. Mulling is a good thing, to be clear. She writes about very universal, relatable feelings, whether they be love or hope or fear or nostalgia, in ways that reminded me of chapters of my own life. The emotions felt very raw and true — even if I did sigh a little at the portentous declarations of turning a heartbroken 21, like, chiiiiild, just you wait! — and more than once, I felt snagged on a particular snapshot of feeling, and had to sit with it to ponder for a while before I could move on. Once I finished the book, I also went back and started to read again from the beginning, to see if things looked differently the second go-round. I was rewarded with greater insight on the second pass-through, as matters that had seemed opaque as I was reading the first time slid into greater clarity: this speaks to the richness of the collection.

For all that the book hangs together seamlessly enough to warrant circling back round to an immediate re-read, however, I don’t necessarily think that the thematic divisions worked as well as intended. There was a lot of overlap, particularly in the last half, and just a wee bit too much repetition. Overall, it’s a laudable attempt at structure that I think could have used greater stringency in (self-)editing.

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Sep 15 2021

Poe For Your Problems: Uncommon Advice From History’s Least Likely Self-Help Guru by Catherine Baab-Muguira

I honestly wasn’t sure when I started reading this book where Catherine Baab-Muguira was going with it, and to be completely honest, I’m still not sure how to categorize this work now that I’m done reading it either. I do know that I finished reading this with stars in my eyes and hope in my heart, and if that isn’t the point of any good self-help manual then I don’t know what is.

Here’s the thing: while the book allegedly seeks to have readers learn from the absolute dumpster fire that was Edgar Allan Poe’s life, his life serves as about 50% model and 50% cautionary tale, as wittily depicted in this volume. Poe For Your Problems doesn’t claim to be a biography of the famed author and poet but frankly is one of the best popular biographies I’ve ever read, humorous and honest and not above leaning in to 21st century mores and manners in examining the good, bad and absolutely cringe aspects of Poe’s life. Ms Baab-Muguira shows how weirdly relatable his life is to the modern American reader’s, whether it be in matters of education, career or romance. There are plenty of flaws and transgressions that she’s quick to admonish — like Poe marrying his 13 year-old cousin, ewwwwww — but even more that she highlights as being full of lessons for today’s reader. For a far more relatable anecdote in the field of romance, for example, Poe may not have been the first celebrity to do the equivalent of sliding into his fans’ DMs to disastrous effect, but he certainly was not the last. So if you’re gonna be messy on social media about your love life, don’t feel too bad about it: people who should probably know better have been doing it since time immemorial, and everything still worked out okay eventually!

The thing is, PFYP feels a lot like a humorous biography with plenty of (gosh, it feels weird to say but here goes) morals for readers to learn from. The cautionary tales are easiest to nod along to, ofc: don’t marry a thirteen year-old, don’t drink to excess, don’t gleefully burn every professional bridge while struggling to live off of bread and molasses. But it’s the sideways lessons that are the most poignant, and which provide the chewiest food for thought. We don’t need necessarily to be less neurotic, more together people in order to find happiness and success, Ms Baab-Muguira tells us. Sometimes, it’s okay to lean into our less sociable, less decorous, less polite instincts in order to remain true to ourselves and leave behind something worthwhile.

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Sep 14 2021

Beautiful Country: A Memoir by Qian Julie Wang

For the first three-quarters or so of this book, I was absolutely enthralled. Qian Julie Wang tells the story of her relatively prosperous, if politically oppressed life in Northern China before her Ba Ba emigrates to America, followed by herself and her Ma Ma five years later. They overstay their visas, becoming undocumented while Ba Ba and Ma Ma work a series of awful jobs to scrape together a life in Brooklyn, constantly dodging anyone who might seem to want to deport them. Qian struggles in school even after teaching herself how to read English, less due to her innate abilities than to the less than nurturing attitudes of certain teachers.

As the years pass, the corrosive effect of living in the shadows takes its toll on the small family, coming to a head when Ma Ma is hospitalized. Even after her recovery, Ma Ma is further disillusioned by her inability to become documented and thus get a job worthy of the qualifications she’s worked so hard to achieve both pre- and post-immigration. So Ma Ma takes a drastic step, and Qian is finally set on a certain path to freedom from the fear of losing everything she loves because of arbitrary employment and status regulations.

So, as an open borders absolutist, books that expose the completely ridiculous ways in which people contort themselves to justify denying human rights to migrants are totally my jam. Towards this end, Beautiful Country knocks it out of the park. It’s a stain on the moral character of any peoples who allow migrants to work for pennies under inhumane conditions, as the entire Wang family is forced to do. Some of our citizens even have the nerve to decry a shortage of skilled labor while refusing to extend protections to the qualified, further making up arbitrary reasons to harm the vulnerable while still profiting from their exploitation. Jackasses like these don’t see immigrants as people, only tools.

Fortunately, we have books like Ms Wang’s that highlight the humanity of the undocumented by depicting with complete frankness all the trauma that a life of poverty, enforced only by a lack of documentation (which, let’s be honest, is fundamentally due to racism,) inflicts upon her and her parents. She has the self-awareness to show how kindness and understanding require effort that the impoverished and hungry often simply can’t afford, freely admitting to having been kind of a shit herself, while still calling out the people who don’t have this excuse, whose experiences are so limited to their lives of relative privilege that they don’t even ask why a child would behave in seemingly self-sabotaging ways, instead assuming it’s because she’s lazy or indifferent. She catalogs both the people who were kind to her as well as all the ways people were gratuitously unkind, including in this last list her parents and the bizarre pronouncements they would lay on her. It’s fascinating and heartbreaking to follow along with a maturing Qian as she sees her father become exactly the opposite of who he’d wanted to be, why he’d left China in the first place.

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Sep 13 2021

Among Thieves by M.J. Kuhn

This debut fantasy novel has all the things that pique my interest, starting with a motley team of rogues coming together for a daunting heist, each with their own ulterior motives and back stories that unfold as the novel progresses. There’s adventure, romance, multiracial representation and plot twists galore! So I should totally love this book, right?

Alas, reading Among Thieves felt like a chore for me for one reason alone: the pacing was godawful. All the information came in a fevered rush, there was no suspense, no build up, and all the plot twists were dropped in like anvils from heaven. When something genuinely surprised me (which it only did at the end,) I was moved so far as to raise an eyebrow and murmur, “Clever.” And that’s it! The entire reading experience was like lying down in rapidly rushing water, with a big wave at the end: pleasant but rather mindless, and extremely one note.

But, you know, some readers will dig that, and if that’s you then I’m happy for you, because here’s a book you’ll love! The premise, briefly: the port city of Carrowwick is run by its street gangs in the same way that the five kingdoms of Thamorr are run by their monarchies. The Saints, led by the ruthless and potentially mad Callum Clem, have just suffered a rather large reversal, but Callum has a plan for getting his gang back on top of the power structure. This will involve bringing together Ryia (and I really want somebody to tell me how that’s pronounced,) the assassin known as the Butcher of Carrowwick; Tristan, a light-fingered street urchin indebted to Callum; Ivan, the foreign master of disguise; Nash, the smuggler captain who styles herself the Empress of the Three Seas, and Evelyn, the disgraced former captain of the Needle Guard, the security force that patrols Carrowwick for its ruler.

And as the ruler guides the country, so does the Guildmaster rule Thamorr, due to his being the only source for the gifted warriors known as Adepts. Ofc, our team is sent on a heist to steal something extremely valuable from said Guildmaster. But since each of our rogues has their own interests at play here, will they be able to score their prize without betraying and possibly dooming each other to death or worse?

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