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tachyondecay
Whoa, so Guy Haley has a new novel out, and my library inexplicably has it in stock not two months after its release. Kudos to my library for whatever motivated that purchase. Thanks to my Angry Robot Books subscription, I discovered Haley through Reality 36 and its sequel, Omega Point, two mysteries set in a future where strong AI has become a fact of life. In Crash, Haley takes a slightly different approach to the future, but the results are still delightfully entertaining and thought-provoking.
Set in the twenty-second century, Crash depicts an Earth on which the cries of Occupy Wall Street have fallen on deaf ears. The 0.1% have become the 0.01%—the “Pointers”—a select few families who control 80% of the world’s wealth while everyone else toils in the proverbial muck to eke out an existence. The automation of the economy that we started in the late twentieth century has continued full-force, with the stock market now existing predominantly as the Market, a sub-sentient network of trading algorithms supervised (but seldom scrutinized) by human traders.
It’s a future that is drearily realistic considering our present. If corporations finally shove geriatric governments to one side and take a more active role in daily affairs, if people become even more complacent and unwilling to take a stand and try for change, then the future could very well be like Crash. Haley channels much of the cyberpunk vibe of Neuromancer’s Sprawl, but with less of a focus on the deleterious effects of unchecked technological augmentation. This is a world where augmentation is affordable only to the mega-rich, and all the proles are just trying to get by.
Instead, Haley develops a discourse around the nature of power and its abuses. First, on Earth, he shows how the asymptotic gap between rich and poor has warped the power relations in society. The Pointers’ word is essentially law. Everyone else toils, eking out a miserable existence and hoping not to get noticed for the wrong reason. Most of the Pointers have a belief in their right to power in a divine rule sense—their ancestors were wise enough to become wealthy, and now they have an obligation to rule everyone wisely so that they can stay wealthy. Hmm.
The question is whether this vicious cycle of exploitation and destitution can be broken. With the situation on Earth, which is now home to twenty billion humans, looking increasingly poor, the Pointers have decided to launch a fleet of colonization ships. Two Pointers accompany the colony sleeper ship ESS Adam Mickiewicz on its voyage. Sabotage causes it to leave the fleet and crash on a different, tidally-locked world. Its unintended detour took 500 years, and now 900 years have passed on Earth.
Haley never revisits Earth; the rest of the story focuses exclusively on how the 4000 survivors pick up the pieces of their colonization effort. For all they know, they could be the last surviving humans in the universe. This enforces a strong feeling of isolation, and factions begin to form as priorities shift. Insectoid-like aliens attack the settlement frequently, attracted by its radio emissions—but if they are as sentient as they appear, is killing them wrong?
One faction doesn’t care. The two Pointer brothers, Leonid and Yuri, aren’t as power-hungry as their father. He feared this and sent a servant genetically-engineered to have unquestionable loyalty to him. This man, Anderson, strong-arms Leonid into wresting control from the democratic council he set up and instituting martial law. What follows is a chilling flirtation with the type of oppressive totalitarian government that manifested in the middle of the twentieth century. Haley doesn’t spend too much time in this mode—he keeps the pace moving pretty swiftly—just long enough to establish that tone before moving on to the next stage of the colony’s development.
Some of those humans have to live with their guilt. Dariusz is the saboteur, sympathetic because he is motivated out of love for his son and ignorant of the true motives of his employer. When he discovers that his actions have caused the deaths of so many people, he is nearly incapacitated by grief. He only stays around long enough to receive the retrovirus that will allow him to digest the planet’s indigenous vegetation. Then, he strikes off on self-imposed exile, determined to find the ship’s Systems Core and return it before turning himself in for sentencing and probable execution.
Meanwhile, the sophisticated technology rebels. Somewhere along the way, we realized that electronic computers just don’t cut it, and we started building robots with organic brains in jars. Unfortunately, this causes no end of problems. So the colonists have to start falling back on older technology and means of production, as symbolized by Sand’s enthusiastic rediscovery of how to do heavier-than-air flight from scratch. Part of this is a commentary on how dependent we’ve become on technology. Part of this is a demonstration of the stupidity of making all our technology too complex (complexity breeds failure modes). But mostly, I think, Haley demonstrates the versatility of humankind.
For Crash might be dark at times, but it is ultimately an optimistic vision of the future. It might have shadowy artificial intelligence presences, but it is ultimately about the ability for humanity to survive. It might present us with a dismal vision of Earth’s future and a dark opinion of how much power corrupts, but it is ultimately a story of hope and resilience and essential decency winning out over fear. It’s about how much we repeat the same mistakes, over and over, despite what we have learned—but how we swear, every time, we will do better.
So next time, let’s do better already.
With Crash, Haley showed me he can do more than write mystery novels. This is a multi-layered story with several key protagonists. His vision of the future is, if not well fleshed-out, then defined well enough for me to fill in the gaps myself. I was hooked while I was reading, and I was sad when it was over. But I also like that it is a standalone story without a sequel hanging over its head. I can breathe when I get to the ending.
Set in the twenty-second century, Crash depicts an Earth on which the cries of Occupy Wall Street have fallen on deaf ears. The 0.1% have become the 0.01%—the “Pointers”—a select few families who control 80% of the world’s wealth while everyone else toils in the proverbial muck to eke out an existence. The automation of the economy that we started in the late twentieth century has continued full-force, with the stock market now existing predominantly as the Market, a sub-sentient network of trading algorithms supervised (but seldom scrutinized) by human traders.
It’s a future that is drearily realistic considering our present. If corporations finally shove geriatric governments to one side and take a more active role in daily affairs, if people become even more complacent and unwilling to take a stand and try for change, then the future could very well be like Crash. Haley channels much of the cyberpunk vibe of Neuromancer’s Sprawl, but with less of a focus on the deleterious effects of unchecked technological augmentation. This is a world where augmentation is affordable only to the mega-rich, and all the proles are just trying to get by.
Instead, Haley develops a discourse around the nature of power and its abuses. First, on Earth, he shows how the asymptotic gap between rich and poor has warped the power relations in society. The Pointers’ word is essentially law. Everyone else toils, eking out a miserable existence and hoping not to get noticed for the wrong reason. Most of the Pointers have a belief in their right to power in a divine rule sense—their ancestors were wise enough to become wealthy, and now they have an obligation to rule everyone wisely so that they can stay wealthy. Hmm.
The question is whether this vicious cycle of exploitation and destitution can be broken. With the situation on Earth, which is now home to twenty billion humans, looking increasingly poor, the Pointers have decided to launch a fleet of colonization ships. Two Pointers accompany the colony sleeper ship ESS Adam Mickiewicz on its voyage. Sabotage causes it to leave the fleet and crash on a different, tidally-locked world. Its unintended detour took 500 years, and now 900 years have passed on Earth.
Haley never revisits Earth; the rest of the story focuses exclusively on how the 4000 survivors pick up the pieces of their colonization effort. For all they know, they could be the last surviving humans in the universe. This enforces a strong feeling of isolation, and factions begin to form as priorities shift. Insectoid-like aliens attack the settlement frequently, attracted by its radio emissions—but if they are as sentient as they appear, is killing them wrong?
One faction doesn’t care. The two Pointer brothers, Leonid and Yuri, aren’t as power-hungry as their father. He feared this and sent a servant genetically-engineered to have unquestionable loyalty to him. This man, Anderson, strong-arms Leonid into wresting control from the democratic council he set up and instituting martial law. What follows is a chilling flirtation with the type of oppressive totalitarian government that manifested in the middle of the twentieth century. Haley doesn’t spend too much time in this mode—he keeps the pace moving pretty swiftly—just long enough to establish that tone before moving on to the next stage of the colony’s development.
Some of those humans have to live with their guilt. Dariusz is the saboteur, sympathetic because he is motivated out of love for his son and ignorant of the true motives of his employer. When he discovers that his actions have caused the deaths of so many people, he is nearly incapacitated by grief. He only stays around long enough to receive the retrovirus that will allow him to digest the planet’s indigenous vegetation. Then, he strikes off on self-imposed exile, determined to find the ship’s Systems Core and return it before turning himself in for sentencing and probable execution.
Meanwhile, the sophisticated technology rebels. Somewhere along the way, we realized that electronic computers just don’t cut it, and we started building robots with organic brains in jars. Unfortunately, this causes no end of problems. So the colonists have to start falling back on older technology and means of production, as symbolized by Sand’s enthusiastic rediscovery of how to do heavier-than-air flight from scratch. Part of this is a commentary on how dependent we’ve become on technology. Part of this is a demonstration of the stupidity of making all our technology too complex (complexity breeds failure modes). But mostly, I think, Haley demonstrates the versatility of humankind.
For Crash might be dark at times, but it is ultimately an optimistic vision of the future. It might have shadowy artificial intelligence presences, but it is ultimately about the ability for humanity to survive. It might present us with a dismal vision of Earth’s future and a dark opinion of how much power corrupts, but it is ultimately a story of hope and resilience and essential decency winning out over fear. It’s about how much we repeat the same mistakes, over and over, despite what we have learned—but how we swear, every time, we will do better.
So next time, let’s do better already.
With Crash, Haley showed me he can do more than write mystery novels. This is a multi-layered story with several key protagonists. His vision of the future is, if not well fleshed-out, then defined well enough for me to fill in the gaps myself. I was hooked while I was reading, and I was sad when it was over. But I also like that it is a standalone story without a sequel hanging over its head. I can breathe when I get to the ending.
Reality 36 is a mystery novel wrapped inside a science-fiction story wrapped inside a fun, technologically-oriented thriller. Richards & Klein are PIs in 2129. Richards is a Class Five AI, while Otto Klein is an ex-military German cyborg. And their day gets complicated when they have to solve the murder of Zhang Qifang—he was murdered twice, you see.
The stakes are high. Qifang’s disappearance and murder have sent ripples throughout the Grid, and the people (and machines) who pay attention to such things are noticing—and moving. The EuPol Five, whom Richards calls Hughie, is particularly interested in figuring out who stood to benefit from Qifang’s death. Eventually, Richards and Klein zero in on a plot involving the Reality Realms. The RRs were immersive virtual environments; the next evolution from World of Warcraft, if you will. But they were too good, and eventually they were banned. With the characters within developed enough to be declared sentient, the Reality Realms became a kind of wildlife preserve—strictly off-limits to all but the most trusted of researchers. Now someone has been tinkering with the fabric of Reality 36, to no good ends.
The pace is intense. You know those mystery novels where the detective gets the call from a smarmy police inspector, maybe goes off and investigates the scene of the crime, then meanders back to his flat and sits to ponder out a solution? I love those books. They’re awesome and cerebral. Reality 36 is nothing like this. From the first chapter to the end, Richards and Klein are out there, chasing leads or being chased by them. When Richards discovers a suspect might be hiding something in an abandoned warehouse with tough security, he creates a backdoor in that security—by blasting a hole in the warehouse wall using a combat mech. Meanwhile, Otto finds himself on the run, looking for Qifang’s fugitive postdoc student. He manages to find her annoying phone instead, just before a sniper team catches up with him. Richards & Klein are hunters and hunted here.
Reality 36 is not perfect, but it comes close. There are times when the number of characters whom Haley follows becomes slightly unwieldy. I can see why Veronica Valdaire is essential to the plot as Qifang’s protege. I was not similarly convinced by Santiago Chures. At its heart, this story is about Richards and Klein: any time the perspective did not revolve around them, it was not as interesting. Fortunately, those times more than made up for the moments we spent away. By the same token, I both loved and hated the dialogue in Reality 36. Sometimes it was so good; other times it was trite. Here’s an example of the former, from the beginning of Chapter 27:
For all its levity, however, Reality 36 is more than just a detective novel with a cool science-fiction setting. Haley shows how that setting can be put to good use, and he raises some of the most fascinating issues with artificial intelligence and posthumanism. He manages to do this without turning the book into a 900-page tome.
I’ve read several reviews that refer to the Singularity’s appearance in Reality 36. Well, obviously AIs play a big role in this book, but the Singularity itself is absent. Haley himself says this in the timeline he includes at the end of the novel: “2069. First true AI created…. The Singularity fails to happen”. Now, much like most scenarios for the Singularity predict, there are several extremely powerful AIs in existence who have slowly been taking over more and more of the operational aspects of human society: Hughie runs the European Police; there are three Class Five AIs, known as the Uncle Sams, who run the United States of North America in all but name. But the crucial detail of the Singularity is missing: these AIs are not bootstrapping themselves to more and more advanced levels of intelligence. They are stable.
Richards is the most stable of the bunch, at least from our limited, human perspective. His interest in human culture, grounded in his role as a private investigator who fancies fedoras and natty suits, keeps him closely aligned with his human brethren. It’s not surprising, then, that the ultimate antagonist in Reality 36 is an AI who is far removed from the world of humanity and much more at home as a disembodied consciousness. This theme that embodiment is essential is strongly reflected in other parts of Reality 36 too, from the way that the avatars of the guardians of Reality 36 are expressed to Otto’s own meditations on the symbiosis between his cybernetic and biological systems. Indeed, with the spectre of the “meat puppet” appearing a few times, Haley also emphasizes that having a body isn’t enough—one needs a body over which one has control. One needs embodiment and volition. The odd election of Zhang Qifang, which I won’t spoil, underscores this point in a bittersweet way.
So for those like me who are familiar with the posthuman dialogue, I think Reality 36 will be a rewarding change of pace: something light but deep, reminding me a lot of the likes of Charles Stross or maybe Cory Doctorow. For those who are here for the mystery, I hope you will stay for the discussions of cydroids and AIs too. While they might not be taking over any time soon, one day we will have to confront issues like this in some way—and besides, I think they are interesting ideas in their own right.
Oh, and that cliffhanger ending? Yeah, that annoyed me. But I won’t whine too much. After all, it’s foreshadowed well enough that I wasn’t too surprised. And the book earns it—the ending isn’t cheap. Haley concludes with Richards in real peril and Otto unsure how to help, with the stakes higher than ever. The antagonist is after nothing less than world domination, and it’s doing it for the most dangerous reason of all: because it wants to make the world a better place.
My Reviews of Richards & Klein:
← The Nemesis Worm | Omega Point →
The stakes are high. Qifang’s disappearance and murder have sent ripples throughout the Grid, and the people (and machines) who pay attention to such things are noticing—and moving. The EuPol Five, whom Richards calls Hughie, is particularly interested in figuring out who stood to benefit from Qifang’s death. Eventually, Richards and Klein zero in on a plot involving the Reality Realms. The RRs were immersive virtual environments; the next evolution from World of Warcraft, if you will. But they were too good, and eventually they were banned. With the characters within developed enough to be declared sentient, the Reality Realms became a kind of wildlife preserve—strictly off-limits to all but the most trusted of researchers. Now someone has been tinkering with the fabric of Reality 36, to no good ends.
The pace is intense. You know those mystery novels where the detective gets the call from a smarmy police inspector, maybe goes off and investigates the scene of the crime, then meanders back to his flat and sits to ponder out a solution? I love those books. They’re awesome and cerebral. Reality 36 is nothing like this. From the first chapter to the end, Richards and Klein are out there, chasing leads or being chased by them. When Richards discovers a suspect might be hiding something in an abandoned warehouse with tough security, he creates a backdoor in that security—by blasting a hole in the warehouse wall using a combat mech. Meanwhile, Otto finds himself on the run, looking for Qifang’s fugitive postdoc student. He manages to find her annoying phone instead, just before a sniper team catches up with him. Richards & Klein are hunters and hunted here.
Reality 36 is not perfect, but it comes close. There are times when the number of characters whom Haley follows becomes slightly unwieldy. I can see why Veronica Valdaire is essential to the plot as Qifang’s protege. I was not similarly convinced by Santiago Chures. At its heart, this story is about Richards and Klein: any time the perspective did not revolve around them, it was not as interesting. Fortunately, those times more than made up for the moments we spent away. By the same token, I both loved and hated the dialogue in Reality 36. Sometimes it was so good; other times it was trite. Here’s an example of the former, from the beginning of Chapter 27:
"Did you miss me?" said Richards, out over the Grid.
"Did I what?" said Otto. He was in the heavy lifter's sickbay, wired up into three walls of medical machines. They didn't seem to be helping. He was as weak as a baby and his head ached worse than every Saturday hangover he'd ever had rolled into one.
"Didn't you hear? I got blown up, big man, by an atomic bomb!"
"I was nearly murdered by a robot pretending to be a VIA agent. Our weeks have been equally lousy," said Otto, and wished Richards would leave him be.
"But I nearly died," protested Richards. "Properly. That's traumatic, we're not supposed to die."
"Get used to the idea," said Otto. Richards fell silent. "I did not worry," Otto said less harshly. "I thought you would find a way."
"Well, yeah, naturally," said Richards sulkily. He paused. "But I still reckon nuclear bomb trumps deadly robot in the peril stakes."
For all its levity, however, Reality 36 is more than just a detective novel with a cool science-fiction setting. Haley shows how that setting can be put to good use, and he raises some of the most fascinating issues with artificial intelligence and posthumanism. He manages to do this without turning the book into a 900-page tome.
I’ve read several reviews that refer to the Singularity’s appearance in Reality 36. Well, obviously AIs play a big role in this book, but the Singularity itself is absent. Haley himself says this in the timeline he includes at the end of the novel: “2069. First true AI created…. The Singularity fails to happen”. Now, much like most scenarios for the Singularity predict, there are several extremely powerful AIs in existence who have slowly been taking over more and more of the operational aspects of human society: Hughie runs the European Police; there are three Class Five AIs, known as the Uncle Sams, who run the United States of North America in all but name. But the crucial detail of the Singularity is missing: these AIs are not bootstrapping themselves to more and more advanced levels of intelligence. They are stable.
Richards is the most stable of the bunch, at least from our limited, human perspective. His interest in human culture, grounded in his role as a private investigator who fancies fedoras and natty suits, keeps him closely aligned with his human brethren. It’s not surprising, then, that the ultimate antagonist in Reality 36 is an AI who is far removed from the world of humanity and much more at home as a disembodied consciousness. This theme that embodiment is essential is strongly reflected in other parts of Reality 36 too, from the way that the avatars of the guardians of Reality 36 are expressed to Otto’s own meditations on the symbiosis between his cybernetic and biological systems. Indeed, with the spectre of the “meat puppet” appearing a few times, Haley also emphasizes that having a body isn’t enough—one needs a body over which one has control. One needs embodiment and volition. The odd election of Zhang Qifang, which I won’t spoil, underscores this point in a bittersweet way.
So for those like me who are familiar with the posthuman dialogue, I think Reality 36 will be a rewarding change of pace: something light but deep, reminding me a lot of the likes of Charles Stross or maybe Cory Doctorow. For those who are here for the mystery, I hope you will stay for the discussions of cydroids and AIs too. While they might not be taking over any time soon, one day we will have to confront issues like this in some way—and besides, I think they are interesting ideas in their own right.
Oh, and that cliffhanger ending? Yeah, that annoyed me. But I won’t whine too much. After all, it’s foreshadowed well enough that I wasn’t too surprised. And the book earns it—the ending isn’t cheap. Haley concludes with Richards in real peril and Otto unsure how to help, with the stakes higher than ever. The antagonist is after nothing less than world domination, and it’s doing it for the most dangerous reason of all: because it wants to make the world a better place.
My Reviews of Richards & Klein:
← The Nemesis Worm | Omega Point →
I have an itch when it comes to artificial intelligence. Guy Haley scratches that itch, and then some. My hang-up on AI probably has to do with my interest in the philosophy of mind, the nature of consciousness itself. Will we ever be able to model human consciousness? Will we ever be able to create sentient AI? (These questions are related but not necessarily equivalent.) AI brings with it difficult issues that we will have to confront, including our role in the universe, the possibility of a copy of our minds surviving after our death (or living concurrently with us!), and of course, the nature of “human rights”. In The Nemesis Worm, Haley touches on these even as he spins a compelling thriller about a mad group of terrorists bent on constructing the perfect AI.
Caveat: As I write this I have already finished Reality 36, the first proper Richards & Klein novel. (According to Haley, he wrote this as part of his pitch for the novel.) And I loved it. So my opinion of that has coloured my impression of this novella, but I will do my best to recount my thoughts just after I finished The Nemesis Worm.
It’s 2129. Richards and Klein are private investigators based in London, but they aren’t just any PIs. Richards is a Class Five artificial intelligence with a bit of an obsession with 1920s/1930s America. Otto Klein is an ex-military German cyborg. Together they fight crime.
Sound awesome yet? Good, because it is.
The Nemesis Worm is very in media res, and Haley does not provide a great deal of exposition about his imagined future. We pick up along the way some details about the different classes of AI, but suffice it to say for now that Richards is one of only 76 Class Fives left around—the majority of them went insane and had to be deactivated before they precipitated a global catastrophe. So he is under constant scrutiny from the Powers That Be, and when a string of murders points to a Gridsig that matches Richards’, some of those Powers come knocking. Although quickly exonerated, it’s in Richards’ best interest to help solve the crimes—whoever is doing this has copied him, which is not only illegal but a violation of his own self.
This is very much Richards’ story and not so much Otto’s (that’s the me who has read Reality 36 talking). Richards is an excellent characterization of an AI who is pretending to be human. Haley describes Richards’ digital, shapeless form with enough imagination but without delving into the somewhat clichéd cyberspace tropes that have become a staple of the genre. He mentions, in a somewhat offhand way, Richards moving himself to a new location, transferring his senses to an android sheathe, or cracking some system’s security somewhere. Through his use of language and some snappy dialogue, Haley builds his world economically and effectively.
The dialogue is one of my favourite things about The Nemesis Worm. It walks the line between cheesy and fantastic, but for the most part it falls into the latter camp. The story opens with a sometime antagonist, an ogre of a cop named Smille, coming to the office of Richards & Klein to take Richards in for questioning. They exchange words in a heated manner, Richards full of quips while Smille is the indignant buffoon of a cop. It’s fun and somewhat frivolous—but later, when Smille takes a bullet to the shoulder and fights side-by-side with Otto, it’s clear that Haley does not deal in stereotypes. His characters can sometimes get a little goofy, but they are all fully fleshed out—even those who are not flesh and blood.
The resolution to The Nemesis Worm, which relies on the unique nature of the principal antagonist—a twisted version of Richards—was very well done. The action sequences in this story were exciting and well-written … but make no mistake. Despite having the guise of a mystery and techno-thriller, The Nemesis Worm is really interesting because of the futuristic world it depicts, and the posthuman and transhuman entities who inhabit it. Haley demonstrates that science fiction works best when regarded properly as a setting, in which any type of adventure is possible. He’s taken this to heart, and it pays off.
You can read The Nemesis Worm for free by downloading it from Haley’s site (link above) or downloading the Kindle edition for free.
My Reviews of Richards & Klein:
Reality 36 →
Caveat: As I write this I have already finished Reality 36, the first proper Richards & Klein novel. (According to Haley, he wrote this as part of his pitch for the novel.) And I loved it. So my opinion of that has coloured my impression of this novella, but I will do my best to recount my thoughts just after I finished The Nemesis Worm.
It’s 2129. Richards and Klein are private investigators based in London, but they aren’t just any PIs. Richards is a Class Five artificial intelligence with a bit of an obsession with 1920s/1930s America. Otto Klein is an ex-military German cyborg. Together they fight crime.
Sound awesome yet? Good, because it is.
The Nemesis Worm is very in media res, and Haley does not provide a great deal of exposition about his imagined future. We pick up along the way some details about the different classes of AI, but suffice it to say for now that Richards is one of only 76 Class Fives left around—the majority of them went insane and had to be deactivated before they precipitated a global catastrophe. So he is under constant scrutiny from the Powers That Be, and when a string of murders points to a Gridsig that matches Richards’, some of those Powers come knocking. Although quickly exonerated, it’s in Richards’ best interest to help solve the crimes—whoever is doing this has copied him, which is not only illegal but a violation of his own self.
This is very much Richards’ story and not so much Otto’s (that’s the me who has read Reality 36 talking). Richards is an excellent characterization of an AI who is pretending to be human. Haley describes Richards’ digital, shapeless form with enough imagination but without delving into the somewhat clichéd cyberspace tropes that have become a staple of the genre. He mentions, in a somewhat offhand way, Richards moving himself to a new location, transferring his senses to an android sheathe, or cracking some system’s security somewhere. Through his use of language and some snappy dialogue, Haley builds his world economically and effectively.
The dialogue is one of my favourite things about The Nemesis Worm. It walks the line between cheesy and fantastic, but for the most part it falls into the latter camp. The story opens with a sometime antagonist, an ogre of a cop named Smille, coming to the office of Richards & Klein to take Richards in for questioning. They exchange words in a heated manner, Richards full of quips while Smille is the indignant buffoon of a cop. It’s fun and somewhat frivolous—but later, when Smille takes a bullet to the shoulder and fights side-by-side with Otto, it’s clear that Haley does not deal in stereotypes. His characters can sometimes get a little goofy, but they are all fully fleshed out—even those who are not flesh and blood.
The resolution to The Nemesis Worm, which relies on the unique nature of the principal antagonist—a twisted version of Richards—was very well done. The action sequences in this story were exciting and well-written … but make no mistake. Despite having the guise of a mystery and techno-thriller, The Nemesis Worm is really interesting because of the futuristic world it depicts, and the posthuman and transhuman entities who inhabit it. Haley demonstrates that science fiction works best when regarded properly as a setting, in which any type of adventure is possible. He’s taken this to heart, and it pays off.
You can read The Nemesis Worm for free by downloading it from Haley’s site (link above) or downloading the Kindle edition for free.
My Reviews of Richards & Klein:
Reality 36 →
I ended last year, and started this one, by discovering a great new writer of science fiction. In Reality 36, Guy Haley combines smartass private investigators with artificial intelligence, creating a truly entertaining posthuman thriller. There was just one problem.
It ended on a cliffhanger.
Fortunately, by the time I got around to reading the book, its sequel’s release date was fast approaching. So I was eagerly awaiting this month’s subscription email from Angry Robot Books telling me I could download the titles for May. Omega Point picks up where Reality 36 leaves off (so spoilers for that one, ’kay?).
Richards, a Class Five AI, and his cyborg partner Otto Klein, are running for their lives. Richards finds himself trapped in the Reality Realms, derelict remnants of advanced immersive virtual environments that their foe has co-opted for a more nefarious purpose. Meanwhile, in the Real, Otto is forced into an uneasy alliance with the VIA, the agency in charge of watching (and policing) artificial intelligences. They have to act fast to curtail the plans of k52, another Class Five. If they fail, there’s no telling how many innocent people will lose their lives. But as Haley shows, even success can come at a grim price.
I was originally going to compare Omega Point to the previous novel by saying that this book is less of a mystery and more of a thriller. That’s not true, though. The mystery of Reality 36 was who was behind the death of Zhang Qifang—not to mention the nuclear attack on the office of Richards & Klein. These were very much existential threats, which kept the stakes high and the pace quick. In Omega Point, we know who the villain is, but k52’s plans are still unclear (though they are pretty easy to figure out if you’re familiar with this genre). Richards original enters the Reality Realms to do some recon, but he gets stuck there when k52’s defences go up.
As much as I like Richards as a character, I did not enjoy most of the chapters that feature him. Haley’s descriptions of Reality 37, as Richards dubs it, are detailed and fantastical, but the milieu doesn’t do much for me. It was a somewhat wonky, Alice in Wonderland atmosphere that was jarring in juxtaposition with the suspenseful or thrilling chapters featuring Klein and Valdaire. The inherently mutable nature of the Reality Realm makes it difficult to get a sense of the rules, which in turn makes picking up on foreshadowing and trying to untangle the complicated knots of mystery much harder. That is to say, it’s like reading a mystery novel where the killer turns out to have been disguised as an armchair the entire time. The only truly fascinating aspect of these chapters was watching Richards deal with being trapped in a realistic simulation of a human body. Richards, like a lot of non-human entities in fiction, emulates the humanoid form and often wonders what it is like to be human. Now that he has a chance to experience meat, he’s finding it a rude awakening.
I much preferred the chapters in the Real, where Klein and Valdaire go after the one man they think can shed some light on what might be happening in the Reality Realms. (This subplot is quite literally a game of “Where’s Waldo?”, which was a fun callback the first three times Haley used it and then became somewhat stale.) Alas, their efficacy is hindered by the pursuit of a cyborg agent, Kaplinsky, who has some serious Terminator-like invulnerability happening. Kaplinsky is a foil to Klein, who unlike his garrulous partner is much more withdrawn and taciturn. Kaplinsky is the machine-like being Klein might have come had he not had the emotional stability provided by his wife. Now, he’s wrapped up in memories of his wife’s death owing to complications from her cybernetic implants. These painful memories are inextricably linked to what Klein himself has become.
Haley masterfully weaves these intimate effects of technology on people (artificial or not) into the larger story. Although the Singularity is absent from the world of Richards & Klein, the trend of our growing dependence on automation and algorithms has continued relentlessly. The question now is not so much “will the machines replace us” as it is “will the machines rule us [because they’re better at it]?” Computers are just really good at some tasks, particularly when it comes to sorting through information. Even now we’re handing over so much autonomy and authority to computer systems, so the idea that this has become the default in the 22nd century is not so far-fetched.
I can’t say the same for Haley’s use of the eponymous Omega Point as k52’s ultimate goal. This is a topic that comes up often in far-future considerations of posthumanism, and I find the various interpretations given by different authors both fascinating and thought-provoking. Although Haley’s revelation is perfectly consistent with what we already know about k52’s personality, I’m still having trouble understanding why k52’s attainment of the Omega Point in the Reality Realms would be such a threat to the Real. I understand that during its moment of infinite simulated processing power k52 will be able to simulate all possible realities and therefore become omniscient. Yet what good does this do k52 if it only has that one moment to act before the reality of an electromagnetic pulse fries all the Reality Realm servers? It’s all well and good to achieve apotheosis in a simulation, but if you can’t reach out from the simulation because all your servers have just been destroyed … well, let’s just say that this aspect of k52’s plan still confuses me. (Plus, I’m sceptical that we’d have servers capable of even simulating towards an Omega Point that aren’t unwieldy, planet-sized carbon computers….)
Whereas Reality 36 had a feeling that anything could happen, Omega Point has a much more linear plot, with Richards & Klein racing against time towards a final boss fight. For me, this makes it less enjoyable. Reality 36 certainly has a more profound exploration of how Richards relates to and interacts with the real world. The glimpses of “ordinary” activities for Richards, whether it’s travelling the Grid to meet with another AI or donning a sheathe to do some recon, were really cool. In contrast, Richards stuck in a simulated meat suit in the Reality Realms was less interesting. Similarly, with Richards & Klein separated for the majority of the book, we get very little banter between the AI and the cyborg. That was one of my favourite parts of Reality 36! Hence, Omega Point provides the much-needed conclusion to the story started in Reality 36 but doesn’t quite cause that same satisfied feeling I had upon finishing its predecessor.
In an afterword, Haley writes that he has tried not to focus on a single Big Idea but rather create a future that is cogent, self-consistent, and “plausible”—plus, he wanted to write a story that was entertaining. I think he’s succeeded in these respects, although we could spend a long time quibbling about what qualifies as plausible! He’s not so much predicting the future as sketching a future based on current trends, and then using that future to examine the consequences of some of our major contemporary concerns, from global warming to the increasing complexity of machines. Whatever the method, the results are definitely worth reading. I look forward to the next Richards & Klein investigation, whenever that may be….
My Reviews of Richards & Klein:
← Reality 36
It ended on a cliffhanger.
Fortunately, by the time I got around to reading the book, its sequel’s release date was fast approaching. So I was eagerly awaiting this month’s subscription email from Angry Robot Books telling me I could download the titles for May. Omega Point picks up where Reality 36 leaves off (so spoilers for that one, ’kay?).
Richards, a Class Five AI, and his cyborg partner Otto Klein, are running for their lives. Richards finds himself trapped in the Reality Realms, derelict remnants of advanced immersive virtual environments that their foe has co-opted for a more nefarious purpose. Meanwhile, in the Real, Otto is forced into an uneasy alliance with the VIA, the agency in charge of watching (and policing) artificial intelligences. They have to act fast to curtail the plans of k52, another Class Five. If they fail, there’s no telling how many innocent people will lose their lives. But as Haley shows, even success can come at a grim price.
I was originally going to compare Omega Point to the previous novel by saying that this book is less of a mystery and more of a thriller. That’s not true, though. The mystery of Reality 36 was who was behind the death of Zhang Qifang—not to mention the nuclear attack on the office of Richards & Klein. These were very much existential threats, which kept the stakes high and the pace quick. In Omega Point, we know who the villain is, but k52’s plans are still unclear (though they are pretty easy to figure out if you’re familiar with this genre). Richards original enters the Reality Realms to do some recon, but he gets stuck there when k52’s defences go up.
As much as I like Richards as a character, I did not enjoy most of the chapters that feature him. Haley’s descriptions of Reality 37, as Richards dubs it, are detailed and fantastical, but the milieu doesn’t do much for me. It was a somewhat wonky, Alice in Wonderland atmosphere that was jarring in juxtaposition with the suspenseful or thrilling chapters featuring Klein and Valdaire. The inherently mutable nature of the Reality Realm makes it difficult to get a sense of the rules, which in turn makes picking up on foreshadowing and trying to untangle the complicated knots of mystery much harder. That is to say, it’s like reading a mystery novel where the killer turns out to have been disguised as an armchair the entire time. The only truly fascinating aspect of these chapters was watching Richards deal with being trapped in a realistic simulation of a human body. Richards, like a lot of non-human entities in fiction, emulates the humanoid form and often wonders what it is like to be human. Now that he has a chance to experience meat, he’s finding it a rude awakening.
I much preferred the chapters in the Real, where Klein and Valdaire go after the one man they think can shed some light on what might be happening in the Reality Realms. (This subplot is quite literally a game of “Where’s Waldo?”, which was a fun callback the first three times Haley used it and then became somewhat stale.) Alas, their efficacy is hindered by the pursuit of a cyborg agent, Kaplinsky, who has some serious Terminator-like invulnerability happening. Kaplinsky is a foil to Klein, who unlike his garrulous partner is much more withdrawn and taciturn. Kaplinsky is the machine-like being Klein might have come had he not had the emotional stability provided by his wife. Now, he’s wrapped up in memories of his wife’s death owing to complications from her cybernetic implants. These painful memories are inextricably linked to what Klein himself has become.
Haley masterfully weaves these intimate effects of technology on people (artificial or not) into the larger story. Although the Singularity is absent from the world of Richards & Klein, the trend of our growing dependence on automation and algorithms has continued relentlessly. The question now is not so much “will the machines replace us” as it is “will the machines rule us [because they’re better at it]?” Computers are just really good at some tasks, particularly when it comes to sorting through information. Even now we’re handing over so much autonomy and authority to computer systems, so the idea that this has become the default in the 22nd century is not so far-fetched.
I can’t say the same for Haley’s use of the eponymous Omega Point as k52’s ultimate goal. This is a topic that comes up often in far-future considerations of posthumanism, and I find the various interpretations given by different authors both fascinating and thought-provoking. Although Haley’s revelation is perfectly consistent with what we already know about k52’s personality, I’m still having trouble understanding why k52’s attainment of the Omega Point in the Reality Realms would be such a threat to the Real. I understand that during its moment of infinite simulated processing power k52 will be able to simulate all possible realities and therefore become omniscient. Yet what good does this do k52 if it only has that one moment to act before the reality of an electromagnetic pulse fries all the Reality Realm servers? It’s all well and good to achieve apotheosis in a simulation, but if you can’t reach out from the simulation because all your servers have just been destroyed … well, let’s just say that this aspect of k52’s plan still confuses me. (Plus, I’m sceptical that we’d have servers capable of even simulating towards an Omega Point that aren’t unwieldy, planet-sized carbon computers….)
Whereas Reality 36 had a feeling that anything could happen, Omega Point has a much more linear plot, with Richards & Klein racing against time towards a final boss fight. For me, this makes it less enjoyable. Reality 36 certainly has a more profound exploration of how Richards relates to and interacts with the real world. The glimpses of “ordinary” activities for Richards, whether it’s travelling the Grid to meet with another AI or donning a sheathe to do some recon, were really cool. In contrast, Richards stuck in a simulated meat suit in the Reality Realms was less interesting. Similarly, with Richards & Klein separated for the majority of the book, we get very little banter between the AI and the cyborg. That was one of my favourite parts of Reality 36! Hence, Omega Point provides the much-needed conclusion to the story started in Reality 36 but doesn’t quite cause that same satisfied feeling I had upon finishing its predecessor.
In an afterword, Haley writes that he has tried not to focus on a single Big Idea but rather create a future that is cogent, self-consistent, and “plausible”—plus, he wanted to write a story that was entertaining. I think he’s succeeded in these respects, although we could spend a long time quibbling about what qualifies as plausible! He’s not so much predicting the future as sketching a future based on current trends, and then using that future to examine the consequences of some of our major contemporary concerns, from global warming to the increasing complexity of machines. Whatever the method, the results are definitely worth reading. I look forward to the next Richards & Klein investigation, whenever that may be….
My Reviews of Richards & Klein:
← Reality 36
My Carnegie-nominated reads continue with Code Name Verity. This book cut me up. I thought it unlikely that any of the nominees could best Wonder’s worthiness for the award; I was wrong. I’m going to festoon this review with spoilers like they are going out of style, because I want to talk about what happens in this book and why that makes it so good.
Code Name Verity excels on multiple levels. It’s a great story: entertaining, thrilling even, packed with emotional moments that can occasionally feel like a punch to the gut. It has two capable but distinctive heroines whose exploits highlight both the danger inherent in the war, even for civilians. Most importantly, this book is an amazing example of kickass storytelling: characters and plot aside, the intricate way in which this tale is crafted has blown me away.
I kind of want to discuss the storytelling hand-in-hand with the story, so let’s talk about the characters first. Wein seizes upon the presence of women civilian pilots in the latter days of the war (though, for dramatic purposes, she sets the story a bit earlier). Julie Beaufort-Stuart is Scottish and of noble birth. Thanks to her schooling in Switzerland and a brief semester at Oxford, Julie’s German and her impeccable acting skills land her a job interrogating German prisoners. Her best friend is Maddie Brodatt, a middle-class girl whose mechanical skills and insatiable love for flying help her get a job in the Air Transport Auxiliary, and later, flying people like Julie on secret missions within England.
I love the distinctive characterization of these two heroines. Julie is just so Scottish—her indignation whenever someone refers to her as English is a running gag throughout the book. She also has a very strong sense of honour and duty, even if the perspective she provides us attempts to make it seem otherwise. It’s not until very close to the end of the book, after Maddie fills in the blanks in our knowledge, that we understand just how collected and careful Julie was throughout her weeks of imprisonment.
In contrast, Maddie is a less confident, more humble person who realizes quickly just how out of her depth she is. Like Julie, she excels in her chosen field, and her loyalty to her friends (and country) is second to none. Maddie bites off much more than she can chew in order to save Julie, and in the end I think Maddie has to pay a much higher price than Julie. In this way, Wein manages to create two protagonists who are both capable people with strengths and weaknesses uniquely their own.
By providing us with both characters’ perspectives, Wein creates a story greater than the sum of its parts. Indeed, Wein works creatively with the idea of unreliable narrators. Wein has Julie narrate the first half of Code Name Verity through a confession, of sorts, in which Julie is supposed to divulge as much as she knows about British airplanes, airfields, etc., to the German Gestapo officer holding her prisoner. Julie, a student of literature, elects to spin out this confession into a story. Along the way, we get a great sense of her character and temperament from the asides and outbursts she records on the page.
This narrative structure allows Wein and Julie to get away with a lot of neat tricks. Julie starts her story by introducing Maddie, not herself. Later, Julie introduces a character named “Queenie”, a wireless operator who meets Maddie by chance and becomes good friends with her. The woman translating Julie’s story into German expresses exasperation and impatience at the way Julie is divulging information. The Gestapo officer, von Linden, is more forgiving, congratulating Julie on her use of suspense and foreshadowing. In this way, Julie’s narrative is a very self-aware story with its seams bare for all to see, and it becomes a nice little game for the reader to look more deeply at how is she telling the story.
Much of the significance is necessarily lost to even the keenest-eyed reader until Maddie’s portion of the story begins. Just as Julie’s time runs out, Wein switches to Maddie’s perspective, written as a kind of report/journal that Maddie keeps while she is hiding out in the French countryside. Whereas Wein begins the story with Julie already incarcerated and, ostensibly, broken, she forces us to live vicariously through Maddie as the latter learns all about Julie’s capture and imprisonment. Maddie is struck by a feeling of ironic powerlessness: here she is, actually in France, practically operational as one might say in the lingo of the day … yet she might as well be sitting back in England, for all the good it does Julie.
Maddie’s perspective is most valuable for allowing us to step outside the confines of Julie’s unreliable narration and realize what a liar she has been. Again, Julie and Wein foreshadow this throughout Julie’s story, particularly in the scene between Julie and the French girl. But the depth to which Julie’s story is a subversion instead of a confession—the seemingly-random underlining that obviously had a meaning, the conversation with Georgia Penn—is impressive. It provides the reader with an entirely new side of Julie’s personality.
Additionally, it raised my appreciation for Wein’s writing even higher. I was already having fun (not to mention completely torn up by Julie’s plight). And now, these revelations made me go back and re-read certain sections of the book, hindsight allowing me to understand nuances to conversations or descriptions that I wasn’t previously aware of. The amount of planning and calculation that went into creating this story must have been considerable; this is what I mean when I say that Code Name Verity is well-crafted.
And then there is the ending. I avoided crying for most of the book. I even avoided crying when Maddie shot Julie. But the letter from Julie’s mother was the last straw. Julie sacrificed everything for king and country … but Maddie sacrificed her best friend, at her own hands. And now she has to live with that for the rest of her life. Thanks to the way Wein has developed their friendship, through both pairs of eyes, Julie’s death is meaningful and moving. Maddie’s involvement pushes the pathos to its maximum, and the letter from Julie’s mother ties everything up—and pushed me over the edge.
This edition has a blurb on the front cover from The Daily Mail: “A remarkable book, which had me horrified and totally gripped at the same time.” Normally, I like to make fun of cover blurbs, especially those that have been boiled down to three or more seemingly-unconnected adjectives. I can’t do that here, because this blurb is entirely accurate: it summarizes exactly how I felt as I read Code Name Verity. At the back of this edition, there are fourteen more blurbs in praise of this book. Every single one of them is accurate and deserved.
My effusive appreciation for Code Name Verity raises just one question: would young adults really find this book as fulfilling? The Carnegie award showcases books for children/young adults, and this book definitely pushes towards the far end of that spectrum. It works best when one can appreciate the depth of Julie and Maddie’s friendship, not to mention the hardships they each experience during their time in France. Nevertheless, while its appeal would be more restricted to older children, I do think it would appeal. It’s an interesting way to get older children to begin thinking about World War II on a personal level, as well as highlight the role of women in World War II.
I’m not a huge fan of fiction set in World War II. But I try not to let that prejudice me when I do elect to read a book in that era, and I’m glad, because Code Name Verity is an exception. It’s just so good.
Code Name Verity excels on multiple levels. It’s a great story: entertaining, thrilling even, packed with emotional moments that can occasionally feel like a punch to the gut. It has two capable but distinctive heroines whose exploits highlight both the danger inherent in the war, even for civilians. Most importantly, this book is an amazing example of kickass storytelling: characters and plot aside, the intricate way in which this tale is crafted has blown me away.
I kind of want to discuss the storytelling hand-in-hand with the story, so let’s talk about the characters first. Wein seizes upon the presence of women civilian pilots in the latter days of the war (though, for dramatic purposes, she sets the story a bit earlier). Julie Beaufort-Stuart is Scottish and of noble birth. Thanks to her schooling in Switzerland and a brief semester at Oxford, Julie’s German and her impeccable acting skills land her a job interrogating German prisoners. Her best friend is Maddie Brodatt, a middle-class girl whose mechanical skills and insatiable love for flying help her get a job in the Air Transport Auxiliary, and later, flying people like Julie on secret missions within England.
I love the distinctive characterization of these two heroines. Julie is just so Scottish—her indignation whenever someone refers to her as English is a running gag throughout the book. She also has a very strong sense of honour and duty, even if the perspective she provides us attempts to make it seem otherwise. It’s not until very close to the end of the book, after Maddie fills in the blanks in our knowledge, that we understand just how collected and careful Julie was throughout her weeks of imprisonment.
In contrast, Maddie is a less confident, more humble person who realizes quickly just how out of her depth she is. Like Julie, she excels in her chosen field, and her loyalty to her friends (and country) is second to none. Maddie bites off much more than she can chew in order to save Julie, and in the end I think Maddie has to pay a much higher price than Julie. In this way, Wein manages to create two protagonists who are both capable people with strengths and weaknesses uniquely their own.
By providing us with both characters’ perspectives, Wein creates a story greater than the sum of its parts. Indeed, Wein works creatively with the idea of unreliable narrators. Wein has Julie narrate the first half of Code Name Verity through a confession, of sorts, in which Julie is supposed to divulge as much as she knows about British airplanes, airfields, etc., to the German Gestapo officer holding her prisoner. Julie, a student of literature, elects to spin out this confession into a story. Along the way, we get a great sense of her character and temperament from the asides and outbursts she records on the page.
This narrative structure allows Wein and Julie to get away with a lot of neat tricks. Julie starts her story by introducing Maddie, not herself. Later, Julie introduces a character named “Queenie”, a wireless operator who meets Maddie by chance and becomes good friends with her. The woman translating Julie’s story into German expresses exasperation and impatience at the way Julie is divulging information. The Gestapo officer, von Linden, is more forgiving, congratulating Julie on her use of suspense and foreshadowing. In this way, Julie’s narrative is a very self-aware story with its seams bare for all to see, and it becomes a nice little game for the reader to look more deeply at how is she telling the story.
Much of the significance is necessarily lost to even the keenest-eyed reader until Maddie’s portion of the story begins. Just as Julie’s time runs out, Wein switches to Maddie’s perspective, written as a kind of report/journal that Maddie keeps while she is hiding out in the French countryside. Whereas Wein begins the story with Julie already incarcerated and, ostensibly, broken, she forces us to live vicariously through Maddie as the latter learns all about Julie’s capture and imprisonment. Maddie is struck by a feeling of ironic powerlessness: here she is, actually in France, practically operational as one might say in the lingo of the day … yet she might as well be sitting back in England, for all the good it does Julie.
Maddie’s perspective is most valuable for allowing us to step outside the confines of Julie’s unreliable narration and realize what a liar she has been. Again, Julie and Wein foreshadow this throughout Julie’s story, particularly in the scene between Julie and the French girl. But the depth to which Julie’s story is a subversion instead of a confession—the seemingly-random underlining that obviously had a meaning, the conversation with Georgia Penn—is impressive. It provides the reader with an entirely new side of Julie’s personality.
Additionally, it raised my appreciation for Wein’s writing even higher. I was already having fun (not to mention completely torn up by Julie’s plight). And now, these revelations made me go back and re-read certain sections of the book, hindsight allowing me to understand nuances to conversations or descriptions that I wasn’t previously aware of. The amount of planning and calculation that went into creating this story must have been considerable; this is what I mean when I say that Code Name Verity is well-crafted.
And then there is the ending. I avoided crying for most of the book. I even avoided crying when Maddie shot Julie. But the letter from Julie’s mother was the last straw. Julie sacrificed everything for king and country … but Maddie sacrificed her best friend, at her own hands. And now she has to live with that for the rest of her life. Thanks to the way Wein has developed their friendship, through both pairs of eyes, Julie’s death is meaningful and moving. Maddie’s involvement pushes the pathos to its maximum, and the letter from Julie’s mother ties everything up—and pushed me over the edge.
This edition has a blurb on the front cover from The Daily Mail: “A remarkable book, which had me horrified and totally gripped at the same time.” Normally, I like to make fun of cover blurbs, especially those that have been boiled down to three or more seemingly-unconnected adjectives. I can’t do that here, because this blurb is entirely accurate: it summarizes exactly how I felt as I read Code Name Verity. At the back of this edition, there are fourteen more blurbs in praise of this book. Every single one of them is accurate and deserved.
My effusive appreciation for Code Name Verity raises just one question: would young adults really find this book as fulfilling? The Carnegie award showcases books for children/young adults, and this book definitely pushes towards the far end of that spectrum. It works best when one can appreciate the depth of Julie and Maddie’s friendship, not to mention the hardships they each experience during their time in France. Nevertheless, while its appeal would be more restricted to older children, I do think it would appeal. It’s an interesting way to get older children to begin thinking about World War II on a personal level, as well as highlight the role of women in World War II.
I’m not a huge fan of fiction set in World War II. But I try not to let that prejudice me when I do elect to read a book in that era, and I’m glad, because Code Name Verity is an exception. It’s just so good.
Using the word versatile to describe Neil Gaiman is a bit like using the word crooked to describe a politician or talented to describe the holder of a world record for most pies eaten in an hour. It just seems obvious.
But think about it. Gaiman has written short stories and novels and all the lengths of fiction in between. He’s written comics/graphic novels. He writes for children and for adults, and picture books for both to boot. There is just nothing this man does not write. It’s a good thing he’s so good at it, because otherwise he would be annoying. Like Snooki. He would be the Snooki of the literary world.
Fortunately for all of us, Gaiman’s versatility is plain as day, and Odd and the Frost Giants showcases his dab hand at writing novels for children. This has many of Gaiman hallmarks: genuine danger for the protagonists, a mixture of light and darkness, and whimsical advice from more powerful beings. Ultimately Gaiman seems to be hinting at the idea that there is something intrinsic to human beings that makes us special and fascinating creatures when it comes to our ability to do great things, right and wrong.
This is, obviously, inspired by Norse myths. That means it has a special connection to my own childhood, because the Norse mythology was always the one I loved the most as a kid. I tore through the many, many books on Greek mythology in the school library, and the sizable collection of books on Egyptian mythology. I even read the knockoff reboot of Greek mythology called Roman mythology. And one time my mom’s friend gave me a university textbook full of Greek myths, and I was a very happy 10-year-old indeed. (I don’t know if I was 10. I was young. Probably shouldn’t have been reading a university textbook. My parents didn’t believe in academic training wheels. It’s why I compulsively write book reviews and teach math and English today. Damn them.)
And when I had exhausted all that, I discovered the two or three books on Norse mythology in my school library. Then I fell in love. In particular I love the Norse eschatology, and the idea that even the gods themselves must one day die. It is so fitting, and so interesting, the way this is all laid out as an epic story.
Gaiman, of course, can’t really get into all the details in a short book like this. Indeed, Odd and the Frost Giants does not lean heavily on its Norse roots. Obviously there are Frost Giants. Odin, Thor, and Loki make appearances, as does Freya. But for the most part, this is Norse Lite—and that’s fine. What matters instead is the type of adventure that Odd has, and what he learns along the way.
When we first meet Odd, he is at a loss what to do with himself. Dad is dead, mom remarried, his leg crushed from an accident of his own making. Odd really feels out of place. So he wanders away from the village, hoping never to come back, until he stumbles on to a problem the gods themselves can’t seem to figure out. He can solve the problem (duh, he’s the protagonist!)—but not because he is the Chosen One. No, it’s because he simply doesn’t have the functional fixedness that the gods do. He approaches the problem from a new angle.
On a related note, I really like the resolution. It seems a little pat and easy, the way Odd talks the giant down. Then again, think about what that says to a child. It says you don’t have to be the strongest person to prevail. You don’t have to use violence or force to get your way. You just have to be clever, to think and consider all the angles. Odd isn’t a big, strong Viking warrior, or a badass wizard, or even a particularly educated person.
This is a pretty powerful, positive message for children. You can help out gods—the beings who, you know, shaped the face of Midgard during these epic wars with the giants—just by being who you are!
The book doesn’t shy away from loss. As I said above, the book opens with the loss of Odd’s father. This, too, is typical Gaiman: a reminder that the goodness in our world, the things we hold dear and celebrate, are made all the sweeter by the bad. The two go hand in hand, one made all the more precious because of the other.
But think about it. Gaiman has written short stories and novels and all the lengths of fiction in between. He’s written comics/graphic novels. He writes for children and for adults, and picture books for both to boot. There is just nothing this man does not write. It’s a good thing he’s so good at it, because otherwise he would be annoying. Like Snooki. He would be the Snooki of the literary world.
Fortunately for all of us, Gaiman’s versatility is plain as day, and Odd and the Frost Giants showcases his dab hand at writing novels for children. This has many of Gaiman hallmarks: genuine danger for the protagonists, a mixture of light and darkness, and whimsical advice from more powerful beings. Ultimately Gaiman seems to be hinting at the idea that there is something intrinsic to human beings that makes us special and fascinating creatures when it comes to our ability to do great things, right and wrong.
This is, obviously, inspired by Norse myths. That means it has a special connection to my own childhood, because the Norse mythology was always the one I loved the most as a kid. I tore through the many, many books on Greek mythology in the school library, and the sizable collection of books on Egyptian mythology. I even read the knockoff reboot of Greek mythology called Roman mythology. And one time my mom’s friend gave me a university textbook full of Greek myths, and I was a very happy 10-year-old indeed. (I don’t know if I was 10. I was young. Probably shouldn’t have been reading a university textbook. My parents didn’t believe in academic training wheels. It’s why I compulsively write book reviews and teach math and English today. Damn them.)
And when I had exhausted all that, I discovered the two or three books on Norse mythology in my school library. Then I fell in love. In particular I love the Norse eschatology, and the idea that even the gods themselves must one day die. It is so fitting, and so interesting, the way this is all laid out as an epic story.
Gaiman, of course, can’t really get into all the details in a short book like this. Indeed, Odd and the Frost Giants does not lean heavily on its Norse roots. Obviously there are Frost Giants. Odin, Thor, and Loki make appearances, as does Freya. But for the most part, this is Norse Lite—and that’s fine. What matters instead is the type of adventure that Odd has, and what he learns along the way.
When we first meet Odd, he is at a loss what to do with himself. Dad is dead, mom remarried, his leg crushed from an accident of his own making. Odd really feels out of place. So he wanders away from the village, hoping never to come back, until he stumbles on to a problem the gods themselves can’t seem to figure out. He can solve the problem (duh, he’s the protagonist!)—but not because he is the Chosen One. No, it’s because he simply doesn’t have the functional fixedness that the gods do. He approaches the problem from a new angle.
On a related note, I really like the resolution. It seems a little pat and easy, the way Odd talks the giant down. Then again, think about what that says to a child. It says you don’t have to be the strongest person to prevail. You don’t have to use violence or force to get your way. You just have to be clever, to think and consider all the angles. Odd isn’t a big, strong Viking warrior, or a badass wizard, or even a particularly educated person.
This is a pretty powerful, positive message for children. You can help out gods—the beings who, you know, shaped the face of Midgard during these epic wars with the giants—just by being who you are!
The book doesn’t shy away from loss. As I said above, the book opens with the loss of Odd’s father. This, too, is typical Gaiman: a reminder that the goodness in our world, the things we hold dear and celebrate, are made all the sweeter by the bad. The two go hand in hand, one made all the more precious because of the other.
I won this book as a door prize at a conference. Aside from being the only door prize I’ve won to date, it’s also the best door prize I’ve ever won, because, hey, free book. You could not have picked a better person to give a free book to. Loves me the books, especially the free ones.
The conference, incidentally, was SELNO, the “Symposium for e-Learning in Northern Ontario,” and it was my favourite of the few conferences I’ve been to lately, mostly because I didn’t have to travel. And then I won a door prize. So basically, the best conference ever.
The idea behind The 20time Project is simple: give students 20% time, much like Google does (or did—there is some debate as to whether it still exists, but that’s beside the point here), to devote to a project of their own making. In essence, Kevin Brookhouser wants us to take project-based learning and hulk it out into audience-centred, student-led, project-based learning. And he makes it sound like a really cool idea.
Brookhouser starts off saying all the right things, and more importantly, he gets right to the point. “What happens when there’s no formula to learn?” he asks, highlighting that we need to encourage creativity in students if we expect them to solve what he calls the world’s “wicked problems.” I’m inclined to agree—here’s Ken Robinson outlining the reasons our industrialized education model is not good for creativity (and why creativity is a desirable trait). I have to admit I’m not sure how persuasive Brookhouser would be for someone who doesn’t already share this crucial perspective. If you’re still stuck in the “students go in, students learn formula, students go out into workforce” mentality, then … well, the book isn’t for you.
The 20time Project emphasizes that the fundamental constant in education in this century must be change. I can relate to that.
In my professional year, a teacher came to speak to one of my classes. He told us that if, after teaching for two years, we don’t look back in horror at what we were like when we started out, then we’re doing it wrong. Well, I went to England right after graduating, and I taught for two years … and he was absolutely right. Oh, I was competent. But competent really isn’t enough. There’s nothing wrong with being competent starting out, because there’s no way to know any better—professional year certainly can’t teach you the best ways to teach, only show you some ropes.
Those two years completely altered my perspectives on teaching, as I’m sure the next two years will. And the next two, and hopefully the two more after that—you see the pattern here? If you’re doing it right, then you’ll never stop learning, never stop changing your praxis. How do we expect our students to see the value in learning if we don’t?
Related to the necessity of creativity, Brookhouser also makes a point I firmly believe is important: “Our classrooms can be refuges of creativity, giving students a safe place to experiment…” He goes on in a similar fashion about setting students up to fail. I can’t agree more. It breaks my heart to see a student refuse to tackle a math problem because they fear getting it wrong. My response when they get it wrong? “Brilliant! Let’s take a look at what you tried.”
Failure happens. It happens a lot in real life. We can’t always succeed. So we need our students to be resilient. And we need them to know that failure can be OK, because you can learn from your mistakes as well as your successes.
Hence Brookhouser’s concept of the 20time project: it gives students a chance to be independent (something we claim we want our children to be) and to make mistakes, as well as to succeed. He emphasizes how it’s all about connecting students (safely) to the outside world and to other people; the projects have to be some kind of service to others, not just something for the students themselves. Ultimately, are these not all commendable goals, and ostensibly why we do what we do?
So that’s the first part of The 20time Project. Then Brookhouser actually outlines what a 20time project setup looks like for students and teachers. He lays out everything, from how to get parents on board to how he manages to assess students, as well as what to do when (not if, when) things start going wrong.
I won’t go into much more detail here. Read the book, or at the very least, check out the companion website. The major takeaway: despite the book’s subtitle, there is no successful formula to follow here. (No formula, eh? Where does that sound familiar…?) Brookhouser shares a general plan, and gives a lot of pertinent advice based on his experience running 20time over the years, but ultimately you’ll need to tailor it to your situation. I find that inspiring more than daunting. Much of the book is devoted to the 20time projects Brookhouser launched in his English classes. He mentions how 20time can apply in other disciplines, and I’m definitely not disputing that. But the challenges teachers of other subjects might face will always be slightly different.
Fortunately, The 20time Project is the tip of the iceberg in that record. This is the 21st century. Books are still relevant, but they aren’t the end of the line; Brookhouser includes an appendix with links to other websites relevant to aspirational 20time teachers.
At the moment, of course, I’m not actually in a classroom. And I’m not going to claim I’ll implement 20time the moment I set foot in the classroom again—that’d be unrealistic. But the type of learning promoted by 20time is exactly what I want to encourage in my classroom of the future, and The 20time Project lays out a path to get there so clearly that I’m much more confident it can be done. So I hope one day I’ll be launching some 20time projects in my classroom; until I do, I’ll look for the opportunity to apply many of the components behind 20time as I seek to make wicked learning spaces that help students tackle wicked problems.
The conference, incidentally, was SELNO, the “Symposium for e-Learning in Northern Ontario,” and it was my favourite of the few conferences I’ve been to lately, mostly because I didn’t have to travel. And then I won a door prize. So basically, the best conference ever.
The idea behind The 20time Project is simple: give students 20% time, much like Google does (or did—there is some debate as to whether it still exists, but that’s beside the point here), to devote to a project of their own making. In essence, Kevin Brookhouser wants us to take project-based learning and hulk it out into audience-centred, student-led, project-based learning. And he makes it sound like a really cool idea.
Brookhouser starts off saying all the right things, and more importantly, he gets right to the point. “What happens when there’s no formula to learn?” he asks, highlighting that we need to encourage creativity in students if we expect them to solve what he calls the world’s “wicked problems.” I’m inclined to agree—here’s Ken Robinson outlining the reasons our industrialized education model is not good for creativity (and why creativity is a desirable trait). I have to admit I’m not sure how persuasive Brookhouser would be for someone who doesn’t already share this crucial perspective. If you’re still stuck in the “students go in, students learn formula, students go out into workforce” mentality, then … well, the book isn’t for you.
The 20time Project emphasizes that the fundamental constant in education in this century must be change. I can relate to that.
In my professional year, a teacher came to speak to one of my classes. He told us that if, after teaching for two years, we don’t look back in horror at what we were like when we started out, then we’re doing it wrong. Well, I went to England right after graduating, and I taught for two years … and he was absolutely right. Oh, I was competent. But competent really isn’t enough. There’s nothing wrong with being competent starting out, because there’s no way to know any better—professional year certainly can’t teach you the best ways to teach, only show you some ropes.
Those two years completely altered my perspectives on teaching, as I’m sure the next two years will. And the next two, and hopefully the two more after that—you see the pattern here? If you’re doing it right, then you’ll never stop learning, never stop changing your praxis. How do we expect our students to see the value in learning if we don’t?
Related to the necessity of creativity, Brookhouser also makes a point I firmly believe is important: “Our classrooms can be refuges of creativity, giving students a safe place to experiment…” He goes on in a similar fashion about setting students up to fail. I can’t agree more. It breaks my heart to see a student refuse to tackle a math problem because they fear getting it wrong. My response when they get it wrong? “Brilliant! Let’s take a look at what you tried.”
Failure happens. It happens a lot in real life. We can’t always succeed. So we need our students to be resilient. And we need them to know that failure can be OK, because you can learn from your mistakes as well as your successes.
Hence Brookhouser’s concept of the 20time project: it gives students a chance to be independent (something we claim we want our children to be) and to make mistakes, as well as to succeed. He emphasizes how it’s all about connecting students (safely) to the outside world and to other people; the projects have to be some kind of service to others, not just something for the students themselves. Ultimately, are these not all commendable goals, and ostensibly why we do what we do?
So that’s the first part of The 20time Project. Then Brookhouser actually outlines what a 20time project setup looks like for students and teachers. He lays out everything, from how to get parents on board to how he manages to assess students, as well as what to do when (not if, when) things start going wrong.
I won’t go into much more detail here. Read the book, or at the very least, check out the companion website. The major takeaway: despite the book’s subtitle, there is no successful formula to follow here. (No formula, eh? Where does that sound familiar…?) Brookhouser shares a general plan, and gives a lot of pertinent advice based on his experience running 20time over the years, but ultimately you’ll need to tailor it to your situation. I find that inspiring more than daunting. Much of the book is devoted to the 20time projects Brookhouser launched in his English classes. He mentions how 20time can apply in other disciplines, and I’m definitely not disputing that. But the challenges teachers of other subjects might face will always be slightly different.
Fortunately, The 20time Project is the tip of the iceberg in that record. This is the 21st century. Books are still relevant, but they aren’t the end of the line; Brookhouser includes an appendix with links to other websites relevant to aspirational 20time teachers.
At the moment, of course, I’m not actually in a classroom. And I’m not going to claim I’ll implement 20time the moment I set foot in the classroom again—that’d be unrealistic. But the type of learning promoted by 20time is exactly what I want to encourage in my classroom of the future, and The 20time Project lays out a path to get there so clearly that I’m much more confident it can be done. So I hope one day I’ll be launching some 20time projects in my classroom; until I do, I’ll look for the opportunity to apply many of the components behind 20time as I seek to make wicked learning spaces that help students tackle wicked problems.
Feed is not a comfortable novel, nor is it comforting. I seem to be on a string of these sorts of YA novels lately—not mention my Animorphs re-read. I feel strongly that these types of books are valuable for young people. There is something to be said for escapism and the reassuring, but somewhat inaccurate, message that some of the most popular dystopian YA is giving that “youth can fight the power.” But I am pleased when a novel reminds us that, sometimes, there are not easy answers to the elements that lead to dissatisfaction or dystopia.
Take this book (because it’s the one I’m reviewing now). Titus, the narrator, is an idiot. He knows only what his feed tells him, and only if he cares to query it. For example, he doesn’t even know or care which battles of the Civil War George Washington fought in! (Heh heh—I see what you did there, M.T. Anderson.) Then he falls for this meg pretty girl, Violet, who seems a little different from his friends. Turns out she was homeschooled by her eccentric father, only got her feed when she was seven, and generally doesn’t know how to “fit in.”
So Titus gives her an opportunity to experience what life is like as “normal” teen, and Violet tries to open up his eyes to the wider world. She wants him to question why their corner of the United States is so insular, why nothing is growing any more unless humans planted it, why the Global Alliance is so belligerent towards the U.S. these days. Titus, for the most part, wants none of it. He doesn’t care why lesions are appearing on everyone’s skin, but no one is doing anything about it.
But then Violet starts dying, and suddenly it’s like A Walk to Remember if everyone in the movie were a jerk addicted to the computer in their brain.
The most amazing thing about Feed is that it really should be a terrible novel. It has one of the most basic premises—the idea that humans get wetware interfaces to the Internet. The language and diction are in a contrived dialect—more on that in a moment. And it winds and meanders towards what one can only describe as a downer ending. Somehow, though, it works. Feed isn’t mediocre; it isn’t good—it’s actually excellent.
Let’s talk narration. Anderson goes all in, not just on the dialogue but Titus’ own internal thoughts and stream of consciousness. He and his peers use their own types of slang—meg as in “mega;” mal as in “malfunction” (getting high off sensory feedback loops induced by the feed). This is one way to do worldbuilding, of course, albeit a risky one if the dialect feels too forced or is so alien that it becomes a chore to read. Fortunately Anderson manages to find a good balance. These characters really do feel like they are living in a futuristic world with flying cars and routine visits to the Moon—and it’s mostly thanks to the language, because there isn’t much description.
What really gets me about the language, though, is how the parents talk. Titus’ father talks like a cross between someone my age and a hippie: “‘She’s like, whoa, she’s like so stressed out. This is … Dud,’ he said. ‘Dude, this is some way bad shit.’” Now, I can imagine an adult speaking like that. But can you imagine an adult who is actually a banker speaking like that? And it’s not just a matter of being informal with one’s son—the doctor in charge of restoring Titus’ feed connection requests “a thingie, a reading on his limbic activity.” In these ways, Anderson subtly cues us as to how society has changed. Standards are different now; what it means to speak and act professionally is different. Anderson emphasizes the infantilization of child and adult alike at the hands of the corporations.
Because when you get down to it, corporations are the bad guys in this book. Feed is unabashedly anti-capitalist, which makes me love it even more. The feed might make your life easier, but it is there to streamline the process of consumption. Anderson takes the current trends of consumer culture to its (disturbing) extremes: your interactions with the feed allow companies to build a profile of you, which they use to send you personalized ads and promotions, to encourage you to buy things, which then contribute to your profile. This conspicuous consumption, along with the feed itself, seems localized to the United States (and maybe a few other very rich countries), while the rest of the world collapses into squalor and war.
Sound familiar? No? Corporations are already doing this. Spark had a very interesting segment on a recent episode in which they talk about product companies becoming Big Data companies, using Uber and Amazon as examples of companies that supposedly offer services or products but seem to be making more money off our data. As it becomes easier to collect and aggregate data about our habits, corporations will do it faster and faster, and try to sell us things as a result. The feed just makes this process more instantaneous and surreptitious—but other than not having ads beamed directly into your brain, it is already happening right now.
Anderson has Violet lead Titus towards an awakening on this idea, just as he must hope the book leads the reader to question aspects of American consumer culture. Unfortunately, it’s not an easy road for Titus, and their relationship suffers for it. As a reader it’s heartbreaking to watch Titus treat Violet poorly because her challenging of the system has overwhelmed him: she is dying, and he ignores her messages because he doesn’t want to deal with her idiosyncrasies. But this is why I like the book: it’s realistic, and it’s tough. Titus is not some kind of hero. He doesn’t start the revolution. He’s just a kid, a confused, hormonal adolescent, who wants a girlfriend. But she turns out to have weird ideas, and now she’s dying, and he’s scared. So he acts out.
While Anderson presents Violet at first as a Manic Pixie Dream Girl (TVTropes) who will liberate Titus from the drug of the feed, show him the light, and lead him on an adventure.
It doesn’t work out that way.
Instead, Anderson deconstructs this trope. Titus rejects most of Violet’s influence, at least for the majority of the book. Indeed, she virtually has to beg with him to go off on a literal adventure into the woods; he turns down sex with her because he’s grossed out by her terminal illness—and so their weekend falls apart. It’s not good times. Although Violet does leave a lasting impact on Titus and make him question the status quo, it is nowhere near as fast or as dramatic as one might expect.
And so we get to the ending.
I hated the ending. At first.
The ending disappointed me, because I was expecting this big conclusion. When Titus goes to Violet’s house and confronts her father, I expected them to commiserate over their mutual loss and become closer for it. But instead there is a lot of swearing and recrimination and even the threat of physical violence … and it makes total sense. I don’t know why I was expecting what I did, because that is actually a much better reaction to what has happened.
Feed can’t provide a happy ending, because there isn’t one. Violet is dead. The world is going to shit. The lesions are getting worse (and gross—thanks a lot for those nightmares, Anderson). Titus has a inkling of the outside world now—there is a tiny sliver of hope, there, but it’s not much. As the garbled messages of the advertisements that close out the novel seem to imply, maybe it’s just our time. Our final bow, our curtain call. Humanity’s era coming to a close in a last, drawn out swan song.
I don’t know. I don’t think it’s meant to be depressing so much as sobering. This is a novel that invites us to rethink what I’ll call the Church of Denialism that is prevalent in many countries, including Canada, but almost to the point of fervent worship in the United States. It combines the creed of exceptionalism (always popular, in the States) with the poison of apathy (ever easier, with mass media giving way to personalized media) to create the cognitive dissonance that makes it possible to ignore the pervasive police state springing up in a country that purports to value freedom and liberty, or the criminalization of poverty at a time where it is possible to feed, clothe, and care for every human on the planet. While we laugh and shop and watch our MTV (and write our Goodreads book reviews), people elsewhere die of diseases we’ve eradicated here, not because we are wilfully malicious, but because we just can’t bring ourselves to care….
If I sound angry, it’s because I’m angry. I hope you get angry after reading Feed. Get angry at these characters—go ahead; they’re just fictional creations; you can’t hurt them. Get angry at these characters for being so stupid that they can just let the world burn. Get angry at government corruption, at corporate greed, at consumer culture. Get angry. And then, maybe we can channel that anger, and do something about it.
Because maybe what young adults need is not to be cast as the hero in a power fantasy about overthrowing the adult-run dystopia. Maybe what they need is a sobering look at the problems with our world today, one where the ending reminds them that there are no easy answers. Maybe what they need is a little anger directed at the people, institutions, and ideologies that got us into this mess.
So that’s what I thought about Feed, and that’s why I enjoyed it. Anderson takes what could have been a simple novel with some fairly stock tropes and turns it into a powerful message novel about questioning the status quo, with bonus social commentary on capitalism and consumer culture. This is all totally my cup of tea already, so I confess to meg bias on that front. But all the more reason I’ll recommend this to people, adults and teens alike. These issues are important, and literature is capable of making us think and feel—both key prior to taking action. Feed makes you do that. So, bravo.
Take this book (because it’s the one I’m reviewing now). Titus, the narrator, is an idiot. He knows only what his feed tells him, and only if he cares to query it. For example, he doesn’t even know or care which battles of the Civil War George Washington fought in! (Heh heh—I see what you did there, M.T. Anderson.) Then he falls for this meg pretty girl, Violet, who seems a little different from his friends. Turns out she was homeschooled by her eccentric father, only got her feed when she was seven, and generally doesn’t know how to “fit in.”
So Titus gives her an opportunity to experience what life is like as “normal” teen, and Violet tries to open up his eyes to the wider world. She wants him to question why their corner of the United States is so insular, why nothing is growing any more unless humans planted it, why the Global Alliance is so belligerent towards the U.S. these days. Titus, for the most part, wants none of it. He doesn’t care why lesions are appearing on everyone’s skin, but no one is doing anything about it.
But then Violet starts dying, and suddenly it’s like A Walk to Remember if everyone in the movie were a jerk addicted to the computer in their brain.
The most amazing thing about Feed is that it really should be a terrible novel. It has one of the most basic premises—the idea that humans get wetware interfaces to the Internet. The language and diction are in a contrived dialect—more on that in a moment. And it winds and meanders towards what one can only describe as a downer ending. Somehow, though, it works. Feed isn’t mediocre; it isn’t good—it’s actually excellent.
Let’s talk narration. Anderson goes all in, not just on the dialogue but Titus’ own internal thoughts and stream of consciousness. He and his peers use their own types of slang—meg as in “mega;” mal as in “malfunction” (getting high off sensory feedback loops induced by the feed). This is one way to do worldbuilding, of course, albeit a risky one if the dialect feels too forced or is so alien that it becomes a chore to read. Fortunately Anderson manages to find a good balance. These characters really do feel like they are living in a futuristic world with flying cars and routine visits to the Moon—and it’s mostly thanks to the language, because there isn’t much description.
What really gets me about the language, though, is how the parents talk. Titus’ father talks like a cross between someone my age and a hippie: “‘She’s like, whoa, she’s like so stressed out. This is … Dud,’ he said. ‘Dude, this is some way bad shit.’” Now, I can imagine an adult speaking like that. But can you imagine an adult who is actually a banker speaking like that? And it’s not just a matter of being informal with one’s son—the doctor in charge of restoring Titus’ feed connection requests “a thingie, a reading on his limbic activity.” In these ways, Anderson subtly cues us as to how society has changed. Standards are different now; what it means to speak and act professionally is different. Anderson emphasizes the infantilization of child and adult alike at the hands of the corporations.
Because when you get down to it, corporations are the bad guys in this book. Feed is unabashedly anti-capitalist, which makes me love it even more. The feed might make your life easier, but it is there to streamline the process of consumption. Anderson takes the current trends of consumer culture to its (disturbing) extremes: your interactions with the feed allow companies to build a profile of you, which they use to send you personalized ads and promotions, to encourage you to buy things, which then contribute to your profile. This conspicuous consumption, along with the feed itself, seems localized to the United States (and maybe a few other very rich countries), while the rest of the world collapses into squalor and war.
Sound familiar? No? Corporations are already doing this. Spark had a very interesting segment on a recent episode in which they talk about product companies becoming Big Data companies, using Uber and Amazon as examples of companies that supposedly offer services or products but seem to be making more money off our data. As it becomes easier to collect and aggregate data about our habits, corporations will do it faster and faster, and try to sell us things as a result. The feed just makes this process more instantaneous and surreptitious—but other than not having ads beamed directly into your brain, it is already happening right now.
Anderson has Violet lead Titus towards an awakening on this idea, just as he must hope the book leads the reader to question aspects of American consumer culture. Unfortunately, it’s not an easy road for Titus, and their relationship suffers for it. As a reader it’s heartbreaking to watch Titus treat Violet poorly because her challenging of the system has overwhelmed him: she is dying, and he ignores her messages because he doesn’t want to deal with her idiosyncrasies. But this is why I like the book: it’s realistic, and it’s tough. Titus is not some kind of hero. He doesn’t start the revolution. He’s just a kid, a confused, hormonal adolescent, who wants a girlfriend. But she turns out to have weird ideas, and now she’s dying, and he’s scared. So he acts out.
While Anderson presents Violet at first as a Manic Pixie Dream Girl (TVTropes) who will liberate Titus from the drug of the feed, show him the light, and lead him on an adventure.
It doesn’t work out that way.
Instead, Anderson deconstructs this trope. Titus rejects most of Violet’s influence, at least for the majority of the book. Indeed, she virtually has to beg with him to go off on a literal adventure into the woods; he turns down sex with her because he’s grossed out by her terminal illness—and so their weekend falls apart. It’s not good times. Although Violet does leave a lasting impact on Titus and make him question the status quo, it is nowhere near as fast or as dramatic as one might expect.
And so we get to the ending.
I hated the ending. At first.
The ending disappointed me, because I was expecting this big conclusion. When Titus goes to Violet’s house and confronts her father, I expected them to commiserate over their mutual loss and become closer for it. But instead there is a lot of swearing and recrimination and even the threat of physical violence … and it makes total sense. I don’t know why I was expecting what I did, because that is actually a much better reaction to what has happened.
Feed can’t provide a happy ending, because there isn’t one. Violet is dead. The world is going to shit. The lesions are getting worse (and gross—thanks a lot for those nightmares, Anderson). Titus has a inkling of the outside world now—there is a tiny sliver of hope, there, but it’s not much. As the garbled messages of the advertisements that close out the novel seem to imply, maybe it’s just our time. Our final bow, our curtain call. Humanity’s era coming to a close in a last, drawn out swan song.
I don’t know. I don’t think it’s meant to be depressing so much as sobering. This is a novel that invites us to rethink what I’ll call the Church of Denialism that is prevalent in many countries, including Canada, but almost to the point of fervent worship in the United States. It combines the creed of exceptionalism (always popular, in the States) with the poison of apathy (ever easier, with mass media giving way to personalized media) to create the cognitive dissonance that makes it possible to ignore the pervasive police state springing up in a country that purports to value freedom and liberty, or the criminalization of poverty at a time where it is possible to feed, clothe, and care for every human on the planet. While we laugh and shop and watch our MTV (and write our Goodreads book reviews), people elsewhere die of diseases we’ve eradicated here, not because we are wilfully malicious, but because we just can’t bring ourselves to care….
If I sound angry, it’s because I’m angry. I hope you get angry after reading Feed. Get angry at these characters—go ahead; they’re just fictional creations; you can’t hurt them. Get angry at these characters for being so stupid that they can just let the world burn. Get angry at government corruption, at corporate greed, at consumer culture. Get angry. And then, maybe we can channel that anger, and do something about it.
Because maybe what young adults need is not to be cast as the hero in a power fantasy about overthrowing the adult-run dystopia. Maybe what they need is a sobering look at the problems with our world today, one where the ending reminds them that there are no easy answers. Maybe what they need is a little anger directed at the people, institutions, and ideologies that got us into this mess.
So that’s what I thought about Feed, and that’s why I enjoyed it. Anderson takes what could have been a simple novel with some fairly stock tropes and turns it into a powerful message novel about questioning the status quo, with bonus social commentary on capitalism and consumer culture. This is all totally my cup of tea already, so I confess to meg bias on that front. But all the more reason I’ll recommend this to people, adults and teens alike. These issues are important, and literature is capable of making us think and feel—both key prior to taking action. Feed makes you do that. So, bravo.
The Alien represents the end of the First Age of Animorphs. It is Ax’s first time as narrator, and so with this book, all of the six Animorphs have had a chance to tell their story. As with the introductions to each of the human Animorphs, this book lets us hear in Ax’s own words why he is fighting the Yeerks. Thanks to his knowledge as an Andalite, he also allows Applegate to share more background about the Andalite–Yeerk war. The human Animorphs begin to break down the last of Ax’s barriers, so he can finally become one of them. We and they now have more context, and going forward, this is going to be a whole new war.
Because, thanks to Ax’s brief contact with the homeworld, we know that the humans are on their own for now. The Andalites don’t consider Earth a priority. So it will be up to the Animorphs to do their best to hold the fort until the Andalites get around to sending a fleet. Once again Ax manages to come so close to killing Visser Three, only to be foiled at the last moment by something resembling morality. Pah! If Ayn Rand were writing this, it would be all:
OK, maybe I was channelling Terry Goodkind towards the end there….
Still, my point stands. Ax shows Alloran mercy. Acts of mercy are important moments in Animorphs, because this is a series about war and the effects of war on what, we must remember, are essentially conscript child soldiers. An Andalite warrior, rather than an aristh, might indeed have cut Alloran down to rid the world of the threat of a Visser Three with morphing powers. Ax’s time among humanity must have corrupted him.
And he takes responsibility for Elfangor’s indiscretion. I vaguely remembered this, but it was so chilling to see it happen again. This is the first time Applegate really shows us the level of Grade A Quality Douchebag that the Andalites, like any fictional advanced alien species, tends to be.
Of course, the main attraction of Ax as the narrator is his status as the outsider—not to mention being an alien. In addition to dropping tidbits—or outright sharing information with the reader—he is just hilarious. For example, take this from one of the diary epigrams at the beginning of a chapter:
Oh, those silly humans. Always doing stuff backwards! I have no doubt Applegate includes this as a bit of a shout-out to her devoted fanbase of loyal young readers. Books are amazing. More than that, however, this quote is just one in a long line of examples where Ax expresses his appreciation for human things we consider mundane. Chocolate. Cinnamon buns. Chili. OK, most of it is food. Our technology—excepting books, I guess—is primitive. Yet throughout The Alien, Ax remarks how humans are … well, remarkable. How in a century we’ll be out among the stars, hanging out with Andalites.
Prepare yourselves, hoofies. We’re coming for you.
If this is the end of an era, then it is a great ending. We’ve met all of the team now, gotten to know them, their thoughts, their desires. Up until this point there have already been hints at the deeper, more mature game Applegate wants to play. But with the next book, the series begins its inexorable transformation into a darker, much more adult story. The Animorphs now fully understand the existential ramifications of what it is they are doing. But just how far are they willing to go to protect their planet? Who and what will they sacrifice if it means winning?
And is Ax ever going to learn to control his taste buds?
Tune into the next review to find out!
My reviews of Animorphs:
← Megamorphs #1: The Andalite’s Gift | #9: The Secret →
Because, thanks to Ax’s brief contact with the homeworld, we know that the humans are on their own for now. The Andalites don’t consider Earth a priority. So it will be up to the Animorphs to do their best to hold the fort until the Andalites get around to sending a fleet. Once again Ax manages to come so close to killing Visser Three, only to be foiled at the last moment by something resembling morality. Pah! If Ayn Rand were writing this, it would be all:
<My name is Alloran-semitur-Corrass, and you must kill me, young aristh.> The Randalite and former host of Visser Three, body weakened by the venom as his mind was obviously weakened by a lack of will that allowed the Yeerk to take it over, could not stand on his own. He was weak, and therefore he was useless.
<Yes.> I had nothing but contempt for the older Randalite before me. <For you stand in the way of my obtaining what I truly desire. You cannot help me, and so I have no reason to help you.>
My tail twitched and severed Alloran’s head from his pathetic body. I had briefly wondered what I would feel when I killed one of my own people. Then I realized that was irrelevant. Sentiment had little place when considering how one could best achieve one’s goals. Alloran was weak. I am strong.
Later, Cassie would approach me to discuss these ideas. Of all the humans, she is the one least suitable to living in the perfect society these humans will achieve if they prove strong enough to throw off the shackles of the Yeerk oppressors. Prince Jake has it within him to be a great leader of men, if he can only actualize his self-worth. Rachel understands the need to take what is not offered. Even Marco, beneath his callous veneer of humour, is aware that the objective nature of reality around us means that one must always accept what happens and act accordingly, rather than rejecting events and living in a fantasy of the past.
Cassie said, “You must be sad you had to kill Alloran. He was once a proud warrior of your people, was he not?”
<He was a war-prince. But he lacked the strength and core moral character to succeed.>
“Did no one try to help him when he was taken by the Yeerks?” Cassie and her father run a primitive medical facility where they treat injured members of lesser species on Earth. Her father does not even charge the fair market value for this service! Sometimes, I wonder if Randalites and humans will ever truly be able to co-exist. Despite the greatness of a few individual thinkers in this species, many of them are weak and clamour for hand-outs and “support systems.” It boggles the mind, that an entire species could be so lazy.
<To help another person is to make them weak!> My tail quivered in anger, and a thing rose in me. How could Cassie not see that? Had she already been corrupted by the vile collectivist Yeerk philosophy? I steadied myself, then launched into a six-hour lecture on the nature of individualism and its triumph over collectivism—the benefit of thought-speak, obviously, being that I would not have to pause for breath, and Cassie would be unable to ignore my words of wisdom.
OK, maybe I was channelling Terry Goodkind towards the end there….
Still, my point stands. Ax shows Alloran mercy. Acts of mercy are important moments in Animorphs, because this is a series about war and the effects of war on what, we must remember, are essentially conscript child soldiers. An Andalite warrior, rather than an aristh, might indeed have cut Alloran down to rid the world of the threat of a Visser Three with morphing powers. Ax’s time among humanity must have corrupted him.
And he takes responsibility for Elfangor’s indiscretion. I vaguely remembered this, but it was so chilling to see it happen again. This is the first time Applegate really shows us the level of Grade A Quality Douchebag that the Andalites, like any fictional advanced alien species, tends to be.
Of course, the main attraction of Ax as the narrator is his status as the outsider—not to mention being an alien. In addition to dropping tidbits—or outright sharing information with the reader—he is just hilarious. For example, take this from one of the diary epigrams at the beginning of a chapter:
Books are an amazing human invention. They allow instant access to information simply by turning pieces of paper. They are much faster to use than computers. Surprisingly, humans invented books before computers. They do many things backward.
Oh, those silly humans. Always doing stuff backwards! I have no doubt Applegate includes this as a bit of a shout-out to her devoted fanbase of loyal young readers. Books are amazing. More than that, however, this quote is just one in a long line of examples where Ax expresses his appreciation for human things we consider mundane. Chocolate. Cinnamon buns. Chili. OK, most of it is food. Our technology—excepting books, I guess—is primitive. Yet throughout The Alien, Ax remarks how humans are … well, remarkable. How in a century we’ll be out among the stars, hanging out with Andalites.
Prepare yourselves, hoofies. We’re coming for you.
If this is the end of an era, then it is a great ending. We’ve met all of the team now, gotten to know them, their thoughts, their desires. Up until this point there have already been hints at the deeper, more mature game Applegate wants to play. But with the next book, the series begins its inexorable transformation into a darker, much more adult story. The Animorphs now fully understand the existential ramifications of what it is they are doing. But just how far are they willing to go to protect their planet? Who and what will they sacrifice if it means winning?
And is Ax ever going to learn to control his taste buds?
Tune into the next review to find out!
My reviews of Animorphs:
← Megamorphs #1: The Andalite’s Gift | #9: The Secret →
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I seem to remember reading some or all of Stephen Baxter’s Manifold books when I was much younger. Those also involved a future sentience/intelligence at the end of the universe reaching back in the history of the universe to alter events through weird, inexplicable phenomena. So I guess this is a thing for him. Proxima starts its life as a straightforward tale of enforced penal colonization of another planet before gradually sprawling into a parallel tale of solar system politics before eventually becoming something about exploring weird phenomena. Basically, it’s typical Baxter. I would have loved this more when I was younger.
The story gets much better after all the potential settlers, save two, die at the settlement site of interest. The survivors are left with the knowledge that they are no longer trying to establish a self-sustaining colony but are basically just eking out an existence day to day for the rest of their lives. Baxter leaves us thinking that this is the most cockamamie planetary colonization scheme ever dreamed up, until the very end—although the UN is majorly saved by the discovery of The Hatch, because otherwise I still think their colonization plan was a terrible one.
Meanwhile, in the solar system, China has taken over Australia and Mars and the asteroids, but the UN-affiliated countries (read: America) have Mercury and its mysterious kernels that can power interplanetary/interstellar ships. Oh, and there are strong AIs hunkering in subterranean facilities, relics from the Heroic Generation when men were real men, women were real women, and strong AIs created from brain scans and deep learning networks were real strong AIs created from brain scans and deep learning networks. No one trusts these AIs, but hey, they make for great deus ex machinae, hmm?
Weird and wacky hijinks ensue, with babies and twins and sentient robots and exo-geological and exo-biological observations. In one of the more blatant set ups I’ve seen in a while, nothing gets resolved before the end of the book—either this book was originally twice as long and had to get split in two, or else this is a cynical attempt to make people buy Book 2, because literally there is no ending. It’s cliffhanger, epilogue, done. Who are those guys, the lost Ninth Legion? I don’t know. Buy the next book to find out!
I know my sarcasm above makes it sound like I hated this book, and that’s not the case at all. In fact, for the majority of Proxima, I was enamoured to the point of really wanting to keep reading. That’s probably some of the highest praise a book can receive, right? It is a fun story. It’s just that its substance is stretched so thinly across these 400-some pages.
By far the best thing about Proxima is the way Baxter describes life on Proxima c, or Per Ardua. This is a beautiful look at what it might be like to colonize an exoplanet—not just another planet in our solar system, like Mars, but a planet around an entirely different star, one with life like but unlike the life on Earth. Baxter covers the challenges—having to manufacture soil in which to grow crops, adjusting to the different day/year lengths and the increased radiation, the need to carefully select one’s settler groups to avoid what happens here. In his slightly more fanciful but no less impressive depiction of alien, possibly sentient life in the builders, Baxter reminds us how difficult it would be to communicate with a species not of our planet. Basically, Proxima is a potent reminder of the practical challenges awaiting us if we ever attempt to colonize an exoplanet.
For all of the above, however, there were paragraphs of expository description and dialogue. There were extraneous characters and paper-thin politics. And all the characters, major or minor or extraneous, fit into a small number of moulds, from the cartoonishly macho and aggressive people like Gustave Klein to the suave but untrustworthy Michael Kings and Earthshines of the world. There is neither depth nor breadth to these people.
I can’t help but keep comparing Proxima to Red Mars, the other colonization SF novel I recently read. They share many strengths and flaws. Both are very technical, almost pragmatic looks at the difficulties of settling other worlds. Both have somewhat pessimistic ideas about how much humanity can cooperate in these endeavours (but Baxter’s political scenes are a little harder to believe than Kim Stanley Robinson’s). Is it weird that I found Proxima more engaging, but Red Mars overall the better book? Perhaps that’s just my lingering, Singularity-related obsession with weird alien artifacts manipulating space and time.
I’m not going out of my way to recommend this book. If you like this sort of thing, you will probably like Proxima, and there are way worse books you could spend your time on. I can’t even say it’s more ho-hum, nothing-to-see-here, because it definitely has one of the best depictions of exoplanetary settlement we’ll get for a while. Baxter loves to do the research and show off everything he has learned about exoplanets; I can’t fault that love. I just wish it had led, overall, to a more involved story with more interesting people.
The story gets much better after all the potential settlers, save two, die at the settlement site of interest. The survivors are left with the knowledge that they are no longer trying to establish a self-sustaining colony but are basically just eking out an existence day to day for the rest of their lives. Baxter leaves us thinking that this is the most cockamamie planetary colonization scheme ever dreamed up, until the very end—although the UN is majorly saved by the discovery of The Hatch, because otherwise I still think their colonization plan was a terrible one.
Meanwhile, in the solar system, China has taken over Australia and Mars and the asteroids, but the UN-affiliated countries (read: America) have Mercury and its mysterious kernels that can power interplanetary/interstellar ships. Oh, and there are strong AIs hunkering in subterranean facilities, relics from the Heroic Generation when men were real men, women were real women, and strong AIs created from brain scans and deep learning networks were real strong AIs created from brain scans and deep learning networks. No one trusts these AIs, but hey, they make for great deus ex machinae, hmm?
Weird and wacky hijinks ensue, with babies and twins and sentient robots and exo-geological and exo-biological observations. In one of the more blatant set ups I’ve seen in a while, nothing gets resolved before the end of the book—either this book was originally twice as long and had to get split in two, or else this is a cynical attempt to make people buy Book 2, because literally there is no ending. It’s cliffhanger, epilogue, done. Who are those guys, the lost Ninth Legion? I don’t know. Buy the next book to find out!
I know my sarcasm above makes it sound like I hated this book, and that’s not the case at all. In fact, for the majority of Proxima, I was enamoured to the point of really wanting to keep reading. That’s probably some of the highest praise a book can receive, right? It is a fun story. It’s just that its substance is stretched so thinly across these 400-some pages.
By far the best thing about Proxima is the way Baxter describes life on Proxima c, or Per Ardua. This is a beautiful look at what it might be like to colonize an exoplanet—not just another planet in our solar system, like Mars, but a planet around an entirely different star, one with life like but unlike the life on Earth. Baxter covers the challenges—having to manufacture soil in which to grow crops, adjusting to the different day/year lengths and the increased radiation, the need to carefully select one’s settler groups to avoid what happens here. In his slightly more fanciful but no less impressive depiction of alien, possibly sentient life in the builders, Baxter reminds us how difficult it would be to communicate with a species not of our planet. Basically, Proxima is a potent reminder of the practical challenges awaiting us if we ever attempt to colonize an exoplanet.
For all of the above, however, there were paragraphs of expository description and dialogue. There were extraneous characters and paper-thin politics. And all the characters, major or minor or extraneous, fit into a small number of moulds, from the cartoonishly macho and aggressive people like Gustave Klein to the suave but untrustworthy Michael Kings and Earthshines of the world. There is neither depth nor breadth to these people.
I can’t help but keep comparing Proxima to Red Mars, the other colonization SF novel I recently read. They share many strengths and flaws. Both are very technical, almost pragmatic looks at the difficulties of settling other worlds. Both have somewhat pessimistic ideas about how much humanity can cooperate in these endeavours (but Baxter’s political scenes are a little harder to believe than Kim Stanley Robinson’s). Is it weird that I found Proxima more engaging, but Red Mars overall the better book? Perhaps that’s just my lingering, Singularity-related obsession with weird alien artifacts manipulating space and time.
I’m not going out of my way to recommend this book. If you like this sort of thing, you will probably like Proxima, and there are way worse books you could spend your time on. I can’t even say it’s more ho-hum, nothing-to-see-here, because it definitely has one of the best depictions of exoplanetary settlement we’ll get for a while. Baxter loves to do the research and show off everything he has learned about exoplanets; I can’t fault that love. I just wish it had led, overall, to a more involved story with more interesting people.