Jul 27 2016

Authoritarian Russia by Vladimir Gel’man

Authoritarian Russia

In Authoritarian Russia Vladimir Gel’man answers a question that is extremely important for contemporary international relations: Why is post-Soviet Russia the way that it is? Or, framed slightly differently, how did post-Soviet Russia get to be the way that it is? Gel’man, who is a friend of a friend, presents his answers in 150 carefully argued and thoroughly sourced pages, with another 50 pages of endnotes for anyone who wants to double-check his work. He makes the heart of his case right up front, and from personal experience with people who would be crucial to Russia’s path after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. It’s worth quoting extensively.

It was a very lovely and sunny day in the summer of 1990 when I sat at the reception hall in the Mariinsky Palace in (then) Leningrad. I was a twenty-four-year-old activist for the anti-Communist prodemocratic movement, which had gained a majority of seats during the recent city council elections. After this victory, I had received two rather different job offers from two groups of my acquaintances. […] I had to choose between a junior research fellowship at the Institute of Sociology of the Academy of Sciences, and a somewhat mid-range position in the newly formed apparatus of the city council. The latter option initially sounded tempting, and I came for a job interview with the chair of the city council, Anatoly Sobchak. A professor of law who had been elected to the Soviet parliament during the first semicompetitive elections in 1989, he had gained great popularity as a vocal and outspoken critic of the Soviet system; the following year, Leningrad deputies invited Sobchak to serve as chair of the city council upon winning a seat in the by-elections. As usual, he took a long time to arrive, and while waiting for him, I chatted with a receptionist named Dima, a smiling, talkative guy the same age as myself.
Finally, Sobchak arrived, and we went to his extraordinarily large office, with its excellent view of St. Isaac’s Cathedral. Without asking me anything or even taking my presence into account, my potential boss began a long and passionate speech, as if he were giving a talk before hundreds of people, even though nobody else was in the room (I think he used this opportunity as a testing ground for one of his public appearances, which were bringing him countrywide fame at that time). Sobchak’s speech was full of bright rhetoric but rather vague in substance […] After a seemingly endless speech, he paused, and I was able to ask a question I considered essential for my future job. “Anatoly Aleksandrovich, how do you perceive the system of city government that you plan to build?”
Sobchak turned toward me at last, shifted his attention down to earth, and changed his tone to a more sincere and frank register. “Well … there are the city council deputies, who are numerous, noisy, and disorganized; they have to respond to the complaints of ordinary citizens and mostly work in their local constituencies instead of having long discussions. Then there is the city executive committee; it should deal with matters of everyday routine, such as bumpy roads and leaking pipes, but not go beyond such duties. And I myself […] with the aid of my apparatus […] will conduct politics in the city.” I was shocked to hear these rather cynical words from a person who had a public image as a democratic icon. “But this sounds almost the same as what we had before, under the Communists … and what about democracy?” Sobchak was probably surprised that someone who was supposed to become a member of his emerging team had posed such a naive question. He responded firmly, as certain university professors often do when they pretend to tell the truth to freshmen: “You know, we are in power now—that is democracy.” […] I was unable to turn myself into a minor cog in the newly emerging political machine. I turned my back on Sobchak and left his office, not even saying goodbye. Then I walked directly to the Institute of Sociology, and joined the world of scholarship, not the world of politics.
[…] And the lessons I learned from Sobchak in his office many years ago were worth dozens of textbooks on normative political theory to me. I realized that the ultimate goal of politicians is the maximization of power […].
In fact, Sobchak also failed to achieve this goal and did not maximize his power in Leningrad and (after 1991) St. Petersburg. Six years later, in 1996, as a city mayor, he faced tough electoral competition from his deputy, Vladimir Yakovlev, and lost by a tiny margin. His other deputy, namely Vladimir Putin, learned certain lessons from Sobchak in his career as a politician—but these lessons were very different from those I’d learned, because of the difference between politics and political science. Putin, at least for the time being, was able to maximize his power as president and prime minister of Russia, although more recently [Authoritarian Russia was published in 2015] he has been facing increasing challenges. And Dima, whom I had met on that memorable day, also learned some lessons: Dmitry Medvedev, too, has served as president and prime minster of Russia. He is still a very nice, frequently smiling, and talkative guy—but in a sense, he is still a receptionist. (pp. XI-XIII)

In post-Soviet Russia, Gel’man argues, political conflicts were resolved as zero-sum games, and the consequences of losing were high. In the 1990s, state and economic weakness contributed to a certain degree of political pluralism if one looked at the country as a whole, although there was often little competition within a given region. In the 2000s, “thanks to economic growth and the revival of state capcity, [Putin] was able to successfully pursue the reshuffling of winning coalitions, and to impose conscious and consistent institutional changes. The Russian political system seemingly achieved a stage of authoritarian consolidation on the basis of an inefficient low-level equilibrium, which could not be easily broken without significant losses for the country’s elite and some segments of society.” (p. XIV)

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/07/27/authoritarian-russia-by-vladimir-gelman/

Jul 26 2016

The Boy Who Lost Fairyland by Catherynne M. Valente

Boy Who Lost Fairyland

By the penultimate book in the Fairyland series, my reading of them has fallen into a certain pattern: I struggle a bit in the first parts, while the author rattles off so many new characters, items and places so quickly that I get sort of a literary sensory overload. Not only that, they arrive so randomly that I begin to wonder whether the writer has missed the key trick of the fantastical and whimsical, making it seem that there is a hidden logic, a connection that the reader will see in due course. At the beginning of each book, Fairyland feels like it is going out of its way to skip that connection, to announce with its sheer randomness that things are Very Different there. That almost kept me from finishing the first, the wonderfully titled The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. Who could resist a book with “Circumnavigated” in the title? Not me.

I’m glad that I persevered. Once the world settles down a bit, there’s a wonderful story with a solid emotional core to it. I had similar experiences reading the second, The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There, and the third, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two. And so I was not surprised that the beginning of The Boy Who Lost Fairyland started out in much the same register, despite the change in protagonist and partial shortening of the title. The Red Wind arrives with the Panther of Rough Storms and carries off Hawthorn, a troll. The moment of his departure gives a sense of the furious pace of the first few chapters:

The Panther of Rough Storms picked up Hawthorn in his soft mouth just as any cat might do to a naughty kitten. The great black cat lifted the troll out of his whale-skull cradle, out of his lovely familiar nursery with its wallpaper of garnets and big, blue, long-lashed eyes, out of his underground house, leaving a parlorful of untidy green and violet queens’ crowns with enchantments still clining to their prongs by the skin of their teeth.
One enchantment had been cast by Hawthorn’s father, who, at that moment, lay sleeping in a long mulled-wine-colored magician’s cloak, snoring smoke-rings in his bed of green butterflies with a want clutched in his arms like a teddy bear and gleaming things on his sleeping cap. It was meant to keep his son from marauding pirates, of whom he had an irrational fear.
One had been cast by Hawthorn’s mother, who, at that moment, was bending over an overturned church bell full of leprechaun teeth in a distant midnight meadow, her arm muscles bulging. It was meant to keep her son safe from marauding disappointments, of which she had too much experience for any one troll.
One had been cast by a cabbage-gnome a hundred years ago. It was meant to wilt the leaves of anyone who forgot the gnome’s birthday. Of these enchantments, one missed its mark, one bided its time, and one had no effect whatsoever, as trolls have very few leaves. (p. 3)

This is Chekhov’s cabinet of curiosities.

Eventually — quickly, in fact, the book is less than 250 generously spaced pages — the tale settles down enough to focus on what happens to Hawthorn after the Red Wind whisks him out of Fairyland and delivers him, a Changeling, into our world. It’s a tale of someone trying to fit in, and then discovering that he can do much better than merely fit in once he decides to be himself. “Much better” in this case meaning to the dismay of his teachers and the delight of his fellow schoolchildren, whom he convinces of many improbable things.

But Hawthorn doesn’t just feel out of place, he really is out of place and so, as he eventually discovers during a memorable baseball game, is his friend, a girl named Tamburlaine. The Fairyland books are growing up, and boys and girls discovering each other, sharing secrets, making magic together and exploring new worlds is part of that. Except of course it’s also very literally the stuff of the story. Tamburlaine helps Hawthorn remember he’s a changeling, at the same time as she shows him her true nature. The magic they make together includes animating many of the objects in Tamburlaine’s house. And the world they explore is of course Fairyland. Crossing that border is the high point of the book, although it occurs about two-thirds of the way through, as it resolves the main conflict of the story. The rest of the book is just as delightful, but it also sets up the final volume in the series, The Girl Who Raced Fairyland All the Way Home. Hawthorn and Tamburlaine find that they are not the only Changelings, not the only people to have crossed into Fairyland. They meet September, protagonist of the first three books; there are intimations that all is not well in the balance between our world and Fairyland; and Something Must Be Done.

The Boy Who Lost Fairyland is splendid fun with a big heart, but as the fourth in the series and clear lead-in to the fifth and final book, it’s definitely not the place to start. The old advice of the King of Wonderland applies to Valente’s set.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/07/26/the-boy-who-lost-fairyland-by-catherynne-m-valente/

Jul 25 2016

The Nightmare Stacks by Charles Stross

Charles Stross’ Laundry series began as pastiches of spy novels, with Lovecraftian beings of endless horror substituting for cat-stroking megalomaniacs as the bad guys. Running a close second in the bad guy scheme of things are the higher reaches of the spy organization, partly because the third well of inspiration for the series is The Office, but partly also because some of the higher-ups are not actually human.

The series posits that magic is essentially a very specific form of advanced mathematics, with certain theorems acting as gateways to otherwise inaccessible but very real dimensions. A corollary of that approach is that devices that can perform vast amounts of calculations are effectively magical as well. A further premise of the series is that the performance of magic to bridge dimensions weakens the borders between them. With computing power increasing dramatically over the course of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the barriers between good old earth and gibbering horrors from beyond the walls of space are becoming very permeable indeed.

Nightmare Stacks

One of the key themes of the early books in the series is keeping secrets secret. This is part of the espionage genre, made more important by the cosmic scale of the threats faced by the protagonists. If Downing Street doesn’t want people to know what the KGB gets up to on British territory, Number 10 really doesn’t want to explain that there is a whole section of the intelligence apparatus devoted to keeping brain-eating horrors away from the populace. Mad cow disease was bad enough. And for the first several books that works well: main protagonist Bob Howard learns more about the inhuman threats in the multiverse, fights off baddies of various stripes (and tentacles), develops his abilities as a mathematical sorcerer, and rises a bit through the ranks, which makes him subject to the dark arts of HR and occasionally draws the terrifying scrutiny of an auditor. The cloak and dagger and theorem escapades stay under the cloak of secrecy.

By the end of the previous volume in the series, The Annihilation Score, the threads of that cloak are starting to unravel. There is a major incident in the Albert Hall, and despite practice at deception, magical enhancement, and a good story about superheroes, HM Government is hard pressed to keep the truth under wraps. The Nightmare Stacks tears that cloak to shreds. The series has also been slowly building toward several possibly apocalyptic scenarios; a key question the Laundry personnel face in The Nightmare Stacks is which one seems to be playing out already, and whether it is only one apocalypse at a time, or perhaps several. There’s a reference early on to the Ghostbusters Twinkie, and it’s entirely fitting. The book is action-packed almost from the very beginning, and the Things that have gone bump in the night have come out to play by the light of day.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/07/25/the-nightmare-stacks-by-charles-stross/

Jul 24 2016

Soul Music by Terry Pratchett

Death not only had a daughter, it turns out he had a granddaughter as well. In between, he had an apprentice and, as these things often happen, the daughter married the apprentice and in due course the daughter arrived. One unfortunate night, a carriage went too fast around Dead Man’s Curve, which earned its name on that night as on so many others, and then Death only had a granddaughter. She grew up a bit, and was sixteen at the opening of Soul Music, the sixteenth Discworld book. That Terry Pratchett’s own daughter was sixteen around the time he wrote Soul Music is, surely, a coincidence.

Soul Music

Because the ordinary run of Death’s work is not only grim but of limited interest to those not immediately involved, it’s not surprising that the Discworld novels in which Death plays a prominent role concern breaks in the continuity: Mort, when Death first takes on an apprentice; Reaper Man, when he takes off for a bit; and now Soul Music, when he takes a more philosophical break, and granddaughter Susan gets called into the family business.

The other half of the story starts with a musician who has gone from simple rural lands to seek his fortune in the great city of Ankh-Morpork. He is a bard, winner of renowned prizes among his people, possessed of a harp of age and unparalleled beauty. He lasts about half a day. The Guild of Musicians discovers an unlicensed practitioner and instructs him on the consequences. Worse, the troll he had just met at the Guild sat on his harp, with predictable results. The bard, the troll and a dwarf try to rescue the situation by purchasing a new instrument, so the three of them can play music and earn enough to pay their Guild dues. In an olde music shoppe, they discover an instrument:

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/07/24/soul-music-by-terry-pratchett/

Jul 23 2016

All Clear by Connie Willis

All Clear, which picks up right where Blackout left off and comprises the second part of an 1100-page story, would have been a brilliant book at about half or two-thirds of its 640-page length. The ending has emotional power; it resolves the main question running through the books and ties up the characters’ individual tales satisfyingly, but it’s a long way to get there. I like big books and I cannot lie, but even though I have just finished All Clear this afternoon I would be hard pressed to say what the characters were getting up to in the first 300 or so pages.

All Clear

The three historians from the future who were separated through most of Blackout have found each other by the time All Clear begins. They are still cut off from 2060s Oxford, and they cannot understand why. Worse, a historian cannot visit the same day in the past twice, and so at least one of them who had a previous research assignment later in the war is facing a deadline in a very literal sense. Time is no longer on their side. They also convince themselves that the reason the drops are not opening and allowing them to return to the future is that they have somehow altered the course of history, and the Oxford that they knew in the future has ceased to exist. In the first parts of the novel, the historians react to their reunion and their joint predicament largely by retreating into their circle of three and cutting off most contact with the contemporaries with whom they had forged bonds in the previous book. That struck me as both bad behavior on their part and inconsistent with the way they had been portrayed up to that point. It also seemed an odd authorial choice, as interesting characters were mostly set aside for a series of wild goose chases. Another odd choice was to have the historians at least partly come to the conclusion that the continuum of history itself is trying to kill them and many of the people around them, in an attempt to prevent the historians from altering events. But when characters in a novel started talking about history taking specific actions, it was impossible for me not to see the hand of the author, and my suspension of disbelief started to fall apart.

It’s possible that Willis wanted readers to experience the length of wartime Britain in some way as the people of the period did, and that’s why the first half of the book felt like an uncertain slog, full of bombs and raids and destruction. It’s possible that her material just got away from her, as happens to the best of authors from time to time.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/07/23/all-clear-by-connie-willis/

Jul 18 2016

Blackout by Connie Willis

Reading Connie Willis is always, sentence by sentence, a delight. Her characters are sympathetic and interesting to spend time with; conflicts usually arise from misunderstandings, or from the nature of a situation. Some few people are jerks, some are hurt and acting out, but that’s just like life, isn’t it? Willis also appears to have a deep and abiding love for Hollywood screwball comedies, and even her most serious stories have their madcap moments.

Blackout

In Blackout, she returns to her loose series of tales (Doomsday Book, “Fire Watch,” To Say Nothing of the Dog) of time-traveling historians. In the middle of the twenty-first century, the practical aspects of time travel were mastered, even if not all of the theory was properly worked out, and history changed from an archival discipline to a practical one. Oxford University, as an ancient seat of learning, offers the backdrop for the segments of Blackout that take place in the future. As Blackout opens, the history department is particularly busy, with historians and technicians running hither and thither, juggling schedules, props, costumes and implants that give detailed local knowledge. The comedy of missed connections in these parts of the book is enjoyable, especially if you don’t stop to ask why characters in the Oxford of 2060 can’t simply call each other on a mobile phone.

The main action of the book follows three historians – two women and one man – who have gone back to research parts of the Second World War. Generally speaking, their work is about the heroism of everyday people. That’s a perfectly valid research agenda, and it allows Willis to do what she clearly wants to do with the novel, which is to show regular people getting on with their lives under circumstances that are increasingly trying. The historians stand in for readers, although with even more precise knowledge of upcoming events. One encounters a betting pool about the date of the end of the war; all of the “contemps” (contemporaries) expect the fighting in Europe to end within just a few months of the opening of the second front in Normandy. Another encounters a pair of very young honeymooners in the Tower of London in 1940, during the Blitz.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/07/18/blackout-by-connie-willis/

Jul 13 2016

Yotsuba&! Vol 03 by Kiyohiko Azuma

Found this on my kitchen table this morning, likely unearthed by someone else in my family. Quick, delightful read centering on a six year-old in Japan and her daily life with her father, neighbors and friends. I thought the kids’ extortion of Jumbo at the Bon festival especially hilarious. Was also impressed by the clean lines of the narrative: a lot of manga have the habit of cramming things together so quickly that panel-to-panel transitions get unnecessarily confusing, but Yotsuba&! Vol 3 does not inflict that upon the reader: excellent pacing on the part of Kiyohiko Azuma. I’ll definitely be looking out for more volumes, tho might not necessarily make it a point to seek out more (as I still haven’t even completed my beloved Gakuen Alice collection.)

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/07/13/yotsuba-vol-03-by-kiyohiko-azuma/

Jul 10 2016

The Hunt For Red October by Tom Clancy

Jesus, Mary and Joseph, that took forever to read. Which isn’t the reason I’ve been away from here for so long, for which I tender my apologies: work has been extra busy recently, and I only read this to keep up with Ingress Book Club. But to the book!

I expected much better, tbh. I remember reading Patriot Games back when I was a teenager and quite enjoying it (tho my recollection might be colored by time, as I apparently gave it a reviewless 3 stars on Goodreads some years ago.) Granted, PG was written two books after this debut, and wow, is The Hunt For Red October very obviously and painfully a debut. Stiff as a board and crammed with painstaking detail, it’s got a lot of twists but the writing suffocates under the weight of all the accuracy. It’s almost as if Tom Clancy wanted to establish his credentials as a researcher first, storyteller far distant second. I appreciate that rigorous attention to the truth, but the lack of storytelling flair makes it all incredibly dull. A worthy read, tho I did have certain moments where I grimaced at the “aw, shucks, God and America!” attitude throughout (or, annoyingly “Gawd” and America. Having sailors talk like Valley Girls was incredibly jarring.) Recommended for submarine/Cold War buffs, but everyone else should probably just watch the movie, which I haven’t yet seen but am planning to now.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/07/10/the-hunt-for-red-october-by-tom-clancy/

Jun 20 2016

Hamilton: The Revolution by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jeremy McCarter

Hamilton: The Revolution by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jeremy McCarter is three hundred pages of wonderful, unadulterated squee. It’s a companion to the musical that I’ve been listening to nearly non-stop since last September, a documentation of the development of a show that’s clearly going into the canon of American theater and has already burst the boundaries of Broadway success. Because nothing says “massive Broadway hit and cultural phenomenon” like “based on an 800-page biography of a Treasury Secretary who’s been dead for more than 200 years,” right?

Hamilton Revolution

And yet, that is precisely what it has become. Over the last nine months, since its Broadway debut, Hamilton has exploded into popular culture. Its original cast recording had the highest debut on Billboard’s album chart since 1963. For good measure, it also debuted at number three on the rap album chart. The musical was nominated for a record 16 Tony awards, and won 11, one win shy of an all-time record. After the Tony awards, the album became one of only three cast albums to reach the Top Ten in the last 50 years. An entire subculture is growing up around Hamilton, with tumblrs, pastiches, and related items just a small part of what fans are producing. A Chicago run opens later this year; national touring companies will begin on the West Coast; the show is set to run in London next year, and I am already on the mailing list for information about that one. Some months ago, a friend who saw it a couple of times while it was in development at the Public Theater asked whether a singalong at a Brooklyn bar was an indicator of peak Hamilton. Not a chance, I replied; just you wait.

To give a far too truncated summary, the show tells the tumultuous story of Alexander Hamilton, a leader of the American Revolution who died in a duel in 1804 and was largely overshadowed by other founders who outlived him. The musical draws directly on the 2004 biography by Ron Chernow, who became an advisor to the show. Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote the music and lyrics, and he played the title role.

Hamilton: The Revolution is both serious and playful, a documentation of the process of creating the show and bringing it to Broadway, a printing of the libretto, and an object the creators had fun making and sharing with their still-growing fan base. The thick pages, mock leather spine, and ragged page trim are all meant to suggest a book from Hamilton’s period. The suggestion continues on the title page, which reads, “Hamilton The Revolution, Being the Complete Libretto of the Broadway Musical, with a True Account of its Creation, and Concise Remarks on Hip-Hop, The Power of Stories, and The New America, by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jeremy McCarter.” The table of contents follows the same form, with chapter titles that include “Of Oskar Eustis, His Politics, His Eventful Career, His Thoughts on Verse Drama, and His Stewardship of The Public Theater, with a Word About The Pharcyde,” or “On Killing Your Darlings, with Reference to ‘The Adams Administration,’ the Seductions of Ben Franklin, and Songs on the Cutting-Room Floor.”

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/06/20/hamilton-the-revolution-by-lin-manuel-miranda-and-jeremy-mccarter/

Jun 06 2016

Mirabile by Janet Kagan

The trouble with writing about a book some considerable time after reading it is that the details and fresh impressions have inevitably started to fade, and so this essay is more about what has stayed with me about Mirabile by Janet Kagan, rather than what struck me while reading it, or what my impressions were immediately after finishing.

mirabile-janet-kagan

Mirabile is one of the first books I finished in 2016, but I am only just now, five months later, sitting down to write about it. (Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton is also waiting to be written about, but that will probably also entail writing about the musical, which has moved me and stayed with me as few other artistic works have, so I will likely have a lot to say but have not yet ordered my thoughts. Ancillary Mercy and Radiant State are great books that I read last year, which have so far defied my efforts to set down what I think makes them so great. I may re-read and try again, or I may just cry “Uncle.”)

Janet Kagan only published three books in her lifetime: Uhura’s Song, a Star Trek novel that is something of a landmark in that field; Hellspark, a novel of first contact within an interstellar civilization; and Mirabile, a collection of related stories set during the early years of colonizing the eponymous planet.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/06/06/mirabile-by-janet-kagan/