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tachyondecay
Last week’s Last Week Tonight (at the time when I wrote this review, though it will be last last week’s Last Week by the time you read this) had a segment on chicken farming, and specifically the impact that corporate-controlled factory farming has on farmers and their quality of life. I thought that was an interesting take on it. As I watched this segment, I already had Eating Animals sitting on my shelf, waiting to be read. I was very interested to see what Jonathan Safran Foer had to say on the subject.
Foer spends a great deal of time on the subject of factory farming. I’m sorry to say that his optimism in 2009 is misplaced when, six years later, John Oliver can deliver a rant that echoes many of Foer’s concerns and points the finger at the same corporations—Tyson’s, Perdue’s, Pilgrim’s Progress—that Foer does. It sounds like we have not made much headway in a struggle for a more ethical, sustainable method of eating animals.
Factory farming forms such an intense backbone to Foer’s analysis because he is keen on exploring whether there are viable alternatives. That is, he wants to know if there is a way to “ethically” eat meat. Is there a way to bring animals up from birth to farm to table such that they do not suffer, or at least don’t suffer any more than is necessary? In this respect, Eating Animals is not your typical pro-vegetarian polemic in which Foer argues vehemently that Eating Meat Is Bad. His ostensible motivation behind this inquiry is the birth of his first child—he wants to understand more about how we eat, why we eat meat, how we produce meat, to understand whether he can justify feeding his kid meat. I think that’s as good a reason as any to examine one’s attitudes towards eating meat.
Foer himself comes down firmly in the vegetarian camp (and self-identifies as a vegan, it seems). Towards the end, he lays out what he feels are the compelling reasons for this stance—but he acknowledges that other people might feel differently. Most importantly, he remarks that just because he feels he should raise his child in a certain way doesn’t mean that all parents must raise their child in the same way in order to be good parents. This is a laudably tolerant attitude in a time where it seems that we are ever less tolerant of people doing things a different way from us. I mean, we have to label our kids as “free range” now? What does that even mean? Foer certainly doesn’t know when it comes to animals!
When Foer does stray too far towards a moral and ethical discussion, the book weakens. He never really examines the moral and ethical claims critically or with much enthusiasm. There are plenty of books about vegetarianism that do this with varying degrees of philosophical complexity, and I am actually glad that Eating Animals largely steers clear of this. Rather, Foer delivers a more rounded, cultural examination of what it means to eat meat.
There is more to eating meat than our omnivorous appetites. We eat meat because it’s cultural. Different cultures have different menus, different rituals around food preparation, and different rituals around meals. Foer eloquently elucidates examples of the ways in which eating meat has shaped society. He points out that “ethical meat-eating” can be very difficult, for if one refuses to eat meat that was factory farmed, it can be confusing and/or rude—paradoxically, being vegetarian is actually more socially acceptable right now.
And so our cultural obsession for meat brings us back to factory farming. It’s not all of the book, but it’s most of it, and it is largely the most interesting part. Foer’s explanation of some of the methods used by the industry is not an attempt at an exposé (others have done that) or even an outright condemnation (not that he’s happy about it). Rather, he wants to make that connection between our demand for meat and what has changed in how we produce it. Ultimately, factory farming is kind of our fault.
But now how do we stop it? Foer chronicles some of the attempts to blunt the edge of factory farming, either by organizations or individuals or elected representatives. The corporations who make a profit from this business don’t meekly bow their heads: they buy politicians and votes, or just ignore the regulations—which aren’t really enforced—if it suits them. The result is damaging, to everyone, from the farmers who live below the poverty line to the children harmed by the toxic byproducts to the genetics of the animals we raise in these environs.
So if Foer’s conclusion, with its “well, I’m a vegetarian because reasons, but I guess I understand why you aren’t” seems ambiguous or wishy-washy in its declarations, it’s because he is every bit as confused and feeling powerless as we are. He does a great job communicating why he, and pretty much every other average person in the developed world, has a hard time understanding what is going on in the meat industry, as in so many other industries. Such is the pernicious nature of capitalism that puts the lie to the dream of a free market where regulation is unnecessary: capitalism disempowers and disenfranchises all of us.
I nearly didn’t read this. I put it on my to-read shelf in 2009, just after it came out, and only now got around to borrowing it from the library. Yet I was doubtful. “This won’t persuade me to stop eating meat,” I thought, “so why read it?” Then I slapped myself, saying, “Shut up, Ben! You never don’t read a book just because you think you’ll disagree with it—you have to keep an open mind!” So I girded my loins and waded in, somewhat skeptical about the entire process. I’m glad I told myself off and read this.
Eating Animals is not, I must say, your typical non-fiction book. There is a slightly Couplandesque feel to its design and execution. The chapters have bold, even brusque title pages that try to illustrate a point in a kind of creative explosion of typography. And Foer is doing more than writing non-fiction here; he is telling a story, sometimes in his own words, and sometimes in others’. This is a creative book, as much as it is a book of non-fiction, and that makes it refreshing.
Far from your typical pro-vegetarian fare, Eating Animals is what the title implies. (And, can we just pause for a moment to celebrate the fact this book has no lengthy subtitle? What a miracle!) Foer does more than talk about the morality of eating meat: he explores how and why we eat meat, and how we might possibly do it better. Along the way he takes any number of interesting tangents, always returning and spiralling in towards that central question: why eat meat? If his answers are circumstantial or circuitous, it’s only because this is such a complicated issue, one where the answers are difficult to reach, even after so much research and inquiry. But the book certainly made me think. I’m always up for that.
Foer spends a great deal of time on the subject of factory farming. I’m sorry to say that his optimism in 2009 is misplaced when, six years later, John Oliver can deliver a rant that echoes many of Foer’s concerns and points the finger at the same corporations—Tyson’s, Perdue’s, Pilgrim’s Progress—that Foer does. It sounds like we have not made much headway in a struggle for a more ethical, sustainable method of eating animals.
Factory farming forms such an intense backbone to Foer’s analysis because he is keen on exploring whether there are viable alternatives. That is, he wants to know if there is a way to “ethically” eat meat. Is there a way to bring animals up from birth to farm to table such that they do not suffer, or at least don’t suffer any more than is necessary? In this respect, Eating Animals is not your typical pro-vegetarian polemic in which Foer argues vehemently that Eating Meat Is Bad. His ostensible motivation behind this inquiry is the birth of his first child—he wants to understand more about how we eat, why we eat meat, how we produce meat, to understand whether he can justify feeding his kid meat. I think that’s as good a reason as any to examine one’s attitudes towards eating meat.
Foer himself comes down firmly in the vegetarian camp (and self-identifies as a vegan, it seems). Towards the end, he lays out what he feels are the compelling reasons for this stance—but he acknowledges that other people might feel differently. Most importantly, he remarks that just because he feels he should raise his child in a certain way doesn’t mean that all parents must raise their child in the same way in order to be good parents. This is a laudably tolerant attitude in a time where it seems that we are ever less tolerant of people doing things a different way from us. I mean, we have to label our kids as “free range” now? What does that even mean? Foer certainly doesn’t know when it comes to animals!
When Foer does stray too far towards a moral and ethical discussion, the book weakens. He never really examines the moral and ethical claims critically or with much enthusiasm. There are plenty of books about vegetarianism that do this with varying degrees of philosophical complexity, and I am actually glad that Eating Animals largely steers clear of this. Rather, Foer delivers a more rounded, cultural examination of what it means to eat meat.
There is more to eating meat than our omnivorous appetites. We eat meat because it’s cultural. Different cultures have different menus, different rituals around food preparation, and different rituals around meals. Foer eloquently elucidates examples of the ways in which eating meat has shaped society. He points out that “ethical meat-eating” can be very difficult, for if one refuses to eat meat that was factory farmed, it can be confusing and/or rude—paradoxically, being vegetarian is actually more socially acceptable right now.
And so our cultural obsession for meat brings us back to factory farming. It’s not all of the book, but it’s most of it, and it is largely the most interesting part. Foer’s explanation of some of the methods used by the industry is not an attempt at an exposé (others have done that) or even an outright condemnation (not that he’s happy about it). Rather, he wants to make that connection between our demand for meat and what has changed in how we produce it. Ultimately, factory farming is kind of our fault.
But now how do we stop it? Foer chronicles some of the attempts to blunt the edge of factory farming, either by organizations or individuals or elected representatives. The corporations who make a profit from this business don’t meekly bow their heads: they buy politicians and votes, or just ignore the regulations—which aren’t really enforced—if it suits them. The result is damaging, to everyone, from the farmers who live below the poverty line to the children harmed by the toxic byproducts to the genetics of the animals we raise in these environs.
So if Foer’s conclusion, with its “well, I’m a vegetarian because reasons, but I guess I understand why you aren’t” seems ambiguous or wishy-washy in its declarations, it’s because he is every bit as confused and feeling powerless as we are. He does a great job communicating why he, and pretty much every other average person in the developed world, has a hard time understanding what is going on in the meat industry, as in so many other industries. Such is the pernicious nature of capitalism that puts the lie to the dream of a free market where regulation is unnecessary: capitalism disempowers and disenfranchises all of us.
I nearly didn’t read this. I put it on my to-read shelf in 2009, just after it came out, and only now got around to borrowing it from the library. Yet I was doubtful. “This won’t persuade me to stop eating meat,” I thought, “so why read it?” Then I slapped myself, saying, “Shut up, Ben! You never don’t read a book just because you think you’ll disagree with it—you have to keep an open mind!” So I girded my loins and waded in, somewhat skeptical about the entire process. I’m glad I told myself off and read this.
Eating Animals is not, I must say, your typical non-fiction book. There is a slightly Couplandesque feel to its design and execution. The chapters have bold, even brusque title pages that try to illustrate a point in a kind of creative explosion of typography. And Foer is doing more than writing non-fiction here; he is telling a story, sometimes in his own words, and sometimes in others’. This is a creative book, as much as it is a book of non-fiction, and that makes it refreshing.
Far from your typical pro-vegetarian fare, Eating Animals is what the title implies. (And, can we just pause for a moment to celebrate the fact this book has no lengthy subtitle? What a miracle!) Foer does more than talk about the morality of eating meat: he explores how and why we eat meat, and how we might possibly do it better. Along the way he takes any number of interesting tangents, always returning and spiralling in towards that central question: why eat meat? If his answers are circumstantial or circuitous, it’s only because this is such a complicated issue, one where the answers are difficult to reach, even after so much research and inquiry. But the book certainly made me think. I’m always up for that.
So we begin the Second Age—dare I say, the Silver Age?—of Animorphs with The Secret. Applegate combines one of the ongoing themes of environmentalism with a personal look at the tolls this secret war takes on Cassie, the most empathetic of the Animorphs.
See what I did there? These titles, simplistic though they might seem, are always multi-faceted. The eponymous secret could be so many things. It could be the Yeerk invasion. It could be the existence of the Animorphs. It could be the fact that the Animorphs are not, as Visser Three believes, Andalite bandits (and it isn’t interesting he calls them bandits now, rather than warriors?), but just ordinary humans—human children, even. For Cassie, the secret might be that she is exhausted by the morally dubious nature of morphing and the war they are fighting. She just wants to peace out and take care of some animals.
That can’t happen, though, if the Yeerks clear-cut the forest behind her farm. So Cassie finds herself forced to once again fight, even if she isn’t sure she is doing the right thing in order to do the right thing. Does that make sense? No? Good. The whole point is that war doesn’t make sense, that sometimes you get so caught up in trying to survive and win the latest battle you lose sight of what you’re fighting for. Case in point, Cassie does not mince words when she explains what the Animorphs are:
Boom. Applegate is not playing around here. The Animorphs are totally child soldiers, full stop. Worse still, they are fully aware of the stakes of this war and the odds stacked against them.
Trappings of the Second Age are all around us. For the first time, the Animorphs come up with a plan that actually doesn’t suck. They realize a full frontal assault is a bad idea. They perform reconnaissance, and then they find a way to help deny the Yeerk front company the permission it needs to cut the forest. Smart! Everything still goes pear-shaped, of course, but this time it isn’t because the Animorphs charged in, morphs blazing, hoping for the best.
We also see some more signs of conflicting opinions and ideologies. In particular, Cassie conveys a harsher side to Marco than we have really seen before. Sure, he still jokes and tries to be the clown … but he’s also a little nasty towards Cassie. I appreciate how Applegate uses her different narrators not just to highlight different aspects of the war against the Yeerks but also different aspects of each other’s personalities.
This is a nearly pitch-perfect story, in my opinion, until we hit the end. The subplot in which Cassie has to mother some temporarily orphaned skunks is adorable, even as Applegate uses it to explore the psychology of the war-traumatized Animorphs. The stakes in this book are appropriate, and I love the way the Animorphs make a plan and execute it. Once again they try a morph that goes disastrously wrong. Really, they just need to swear off insects in general.
Unfortunately … that ending. The Secret takes an abrupt turn towards farce. If the whole book had been like that, then I wouldn’t have a problem—the Visser’s predicament, and the way the Animorphs handle it, is genuinely funny. Yet it runs contrary to the sombre tone the rest of the book adopts. It’s a huge flaw in an otherwise perfect gem.
This week’s technological callback to the 1990s? Cassie looks up termites in one of her mom’s books. The Web was, of course, quite new-fangled back when this was published, and while some of the Animorphs might have access (Marco’s computer seems Internet-enabled), Google and Wikipedia and online sites about termites were not much in evidence. So the Animorphs still have to do book research. Do kids these days ever do that? I suspect that a young reader of this era would wonder why Cassie didn’t just pull out her phone.
Siri, what will happen if I morph a termite?
Next up, the Animorphs violate Asimov’s Laws of Robotics. Siri, what could possibly go wrong? …Siri? Why are you looking at me like that?
My reviews of Animorphs:
← #8: The Alien | #10: The Android →
See what I did there? These titles, simplistic though they might seem, are always multi-faceted. The eponymous secret could be so many things. It could be the Yeerk invasion. It could be the existence of the Animorphs. It could be the fact that the Animorphs are not, as Visser Three believes, Andalite bandits (and it isn’t interesting he calls them bandits now, rather than warriors?), but just ordinary humans—human children, even. For Cassie, the secret might be that she is exhausted by the morally dubious nature of morphing and the war they are fighting. She just wants to peace out and take care of some animals.
That can’t happen, though, if the Yeerks clear-cut the forest behind her farm. So Cassie finds herself forced to once again fight, even if she isn’t sure she is doing the right thing in order to do the right thing. Does that make sense? No? Good. The whole point is that war doesn’t make sense, that sometimes you get so caught up in trying to survive and win the latest battle you lose sight of what you’re fighting for. Case in point, Cassie does not mince words when she explains what the Animorphs are:
We had been made into soldiers that night.
Soldiers in a terrible war we could not really hope to win.
Boom. Applegate is not playing around here. The Animorphs are totally child soldiers, full stop. Worse still, they are fully aware of the stakes of this war and the odds stacked against them.
Trappings of the Second Age are all around us. For the first time, the Animorphs come up with a plan that actually doesn’t suck. They realize a full frontal assault is a bad idea. They perform reconnaissance, and then they find a way to help deny the Yeerk front company the permission it needs to cut the forest. Smart! Everything still goes pear-shaped, of course, but this time it isn’t because the Animorphs charged in, morphs blazing, hoping for the best.
We also see some more signs of conflicting opinions and ideologies. In particular, Cassie conveys a harsher side to Marco than we have really seen before. Sure, he still jokes and tries to be the clown … but he’s also a little nasty towards Cassie. I appreciate how Applegate uses her different narrators not just to highlight different aspects of the war against the Yeerks but also different aspects of each other’s personalities.
This is a nearly pitch-perfect story, in my opinion, until we hit the end. The subplot in which Cassie has to mother some temporarily orphaned skunks is adorable, even as Applegate uses it to explore the psychology of the war-traumatized Animorphs. The stakes in this book are appropriate, and I love the way the Animorphs make a plan and execute it. Once again they try a morph that goes disastrously wrong. Really, they just need to swear off insects in general.
Unfortunately … that ending. The Secret takes an abrupt turn towards farce. If the whole book had been like that, then I wouldn’t have a problem—the Visser’s predicament, and the way the Animorphs handle it, is genuinely funny. Yet it runs contrary to the sombre tone the rest of the book adopts. It’s a huge flaw in an otherwise perfect gem.
This week’s technological callback to the 1990s? Cassie looks up termites in one of her mom’s books. The Web was, of course, quite new-fangled back when this was published, and while some of the Animorphs might have access (Marco’s computer seems Internet-enabled), Google and Wikipedia and online sites about termites were not much in evidence. So the Animorphs still have to do book research. Do kids these days ever do that? I suspect that a young reader of this era would wonder why Cassie didn’t just pull out her phone.
Siri, what will happen if I morph a termite?
Next up, the Animorphs violate Asimov’s Laws of Robotics. Siri, what could possibly go wrong? …Siri? Why are you looking at me like that?
My reviews of Animorphs:
← #8: The Alien | #10: The Android →
Growing up in Canada and watching American TV shows, one becomes familiar with Americanisms that nevertheless are not applicable in Canada. For instance, two initialisms that are a big deal to American students and have no bearing on Canadians (unless we want to go to an American university): SATs and GPAs. Don’t exist here, for the most part. (Some schools require SAT-like tests for admissions, and most universities calculate a GPA statistic—but it doesn’t have the same titanic quality it takes on below the border.)
Many good science fiction stories begin as “what if” questions. In the case of Scored, Lauren McLaughlin asks, “What if we could generalize the idea of a GPA to a student’s entire actions? What if we could monitor them 24/7, and use algorithmic approaches to rating and ranking them?” Score highly enough, and it doesn’t matter if your parents have no money: you get a scholarship to any number of prestigious institutions. But if your score drops too low … well, I hope you like getting pregnant. Or joining the military.
Scoring, then, is supposed to be the ultimate implementation of the meritocracy. In theory the score, as an adaptive set of algorithms, is impartial. Free from prejudice and taking in the entirety of your actions through the ubiquitous surveillance ScoreCorp has been allowed to set up, your score is not based on your parents’ economic status or on any innate qualities, like your genotype, phenotype, etc. In theory, your score is entirely a product of who you are, the actions you take, and the mark you leave on the world.
In theory.
I’ve been reading a lot about meritocracy and, more to the point, why meritocracy is a dangerous and misguided myth, akin to the American Dream (and McLaughlin actually brings that up later in Scored). Meritocracy is so attractive because it pretends to be a solution to all the bad things that have traditionally plagued human hierarchies—namely, discrimination based on some traits. But the problem is that a meritocracy would ignore the fact that we are human, that we have different circumstances and privilege and experience, and in ignoring our humanity it erases it. That doesn’t sound like utopia at all.
McLaughlin takes such criticisms of meritocracy and then distils them into a young adult form. She throws in some healthy skepticism of surveillance society. I like how she makes this book about corporate surveillance rather than government surveillance (Brave New World instead of 1984). We certainly have enough of both in our present society. However, corporate surveillance is a little more opaque and pernicious. It is easier to forget, because we tend to actively engage with a corporation and think we’re the ones using it. We need to remember that even if tech companies protest and lobby against government orders and laws that compel them to hand over user data, those same companies are all about weakening privacy regulations so they can collect and store more data about you for their purposes.
The score, then, is the ultimate fusion of the meritocratic myth with the surveillance society nightmare. We see class divisions opening up along the lines of the scored versus unscored. And as Imani’s precious 92 dips down into the 60s because of her “unsavoury” association with Cady, we see that the score is far from the perfect system its proponents make it out to be. It reinforces conformity in a vicious feedback loop and punishes people who decide to act out.
I wish we got more of Cady. Despite being Imani’s best friend, she only figures about twice in the whole book. I know the point of the plot is that Imani is “dropping” Cady, or pretending to, for the last month of school for the sake of her score. Yet Cady is herself such an interesting character, and she hardly features at all!
Fortunately, I liked Imani. As with Jill from Cycler, the first McLaughlin book I read, Imani is a fallible protagonist. She isn’t hyper-aware of her society’s flaws or very critical. In this way, McLaughlin creates a journey for Imani to go on as she develops into a more self-aware and critical person. Similarly, I liked how Diego’s skepticism sets him at odds with most of the others, Imani included. While I liked these two characters separately, I wasn’t as fond of them together. The banter isn’t as good as it could be, and their sometime-friendship sometime-romance sometime-rivalry progresses far too quickly.
Alas, that’s a criticism I could level at much of Scored: it’s just over far too quickly! There is so much going on here that it could easily have been another fifty pages (and don’t give me any guff about YA being “shorter” than fiction for older adults). I love what is here, but it could be so much more. It’s like baking that could have stayed in the oven just five more minutes: yes, it’s done, and it tastes fine, but it doesn’t have that golden brown coat yet, and if you leave it in a little longer, it will taste wonderful.
Now I’m hungry.
So, to summarize: Scored shows me that Cycler wasn’t a fluke, and I want more McLaughlin books! Also, it’s a neat take on surveillance societies and our obsession with ranking students and then claiming that those ranks are somehow objective or meaningful. It’s not; it never is. It’s always about power, and about helping those in power keep their power. But McLaughlin doesn’t ever get too preachy on this point: as much as the book obviously presents the score as a bad idea, she makes sure to present the case for the other side and outline why it seemed so desirable at the time. As Mr. Carol exhorts his students to do by having the scored oppose scoring and the un-scored support scoring in their end-of-year essays, we should always play the Devil’s Advocate once in a while. Dissent isn’t the most comfortable part of free speech, but it might be the most important.
Many good science fiction stories begin as “what if” questions. In the case of Scored, Lauren McLaughlin asks, “What if we could generalize the idea of a GPA to a student’s entire actions? What if we could monitor them 24/7, and use algorithmic approaches to rating and ranking them?” Score highly enough, and it doesn’t matter if your parents have no money: you get a scholarship to any number of prestigious institutions. But if your score drops too low … well, I hope you like getting pregnant. Or joining the military.
Scoring, then, is supposed to be the ultimate implementation of the meritocracy. In theory the score, as an adaptive set of algorithms, is impartial. Free from prejudice and taking in the entirety of your actions through the ubiquitous surveillance ScoreCorp has been allowed to set up, your score is not based on your parents’ economic status or on any innate qualities, like your genotype, phenotype, etc. In theory, your score is entirely a product of who you are, the actions you take, and the mark you leave on the world.
In theory.
I’ve been reading a lot about meritocracy and, more to the point, why meritocracy is a dangerous and misguided myth, akin to the American Dream (and McLaughlin actually brings that up later in Scored). Meritocracy is so attractive because it pretends to be a solution to all the bad things that have traditionally plagued human hierarchies—namely, discrimination based on some traits. But the problem is that a meritocracy would ignore the fact that we are human, that we have different circumstances and privilege and experience, and in ignoring our humanity it erases it. That doesn’t sound like utopia at all.
McLaughlin takes such criticisms of meritocracy and then distils them into a young adult form. She throws in some healthy skepticism of surveillance society. I like how she makes this book about corporate surveillance rather than government surveillance (Brave New World instead of 1984). We certainly have enough of both in our present society. However, corporate surveillance is a little more opaque and pernicious. It is easier to forget, because we tend to actively engage with a corporation and think we’re the ones using it. We need to remember that even if tech companies protest and lobby against government orders and laws that compel them to hand over user data, those same companies are all about weakening privacy regulations so they can collect and store more data about you for their purposes.
The score, then, is the ultimate fusion of the meritocratic myth with the surveillance society nightmare. We see class divisions opening up along the lines of the scored versus unscored. And as Imani’s precious 92 dips down into the 60s because of her “unsavoury” association with Cady, we see that the score is far from the perfect system its proponents make it out to be. It reinforces conformity in a vicious feedback loop and punishes people who decide to act out.
I wish we got more of Cady. Despite being Imani’s best friend, she only figures about twice in the whole book. I know the point of the plot is that Imani is “dropping” Cady, or pretending to, for the last month of school for the sake of her score. Yet Cady is herself such an interesting character, and she hardly features at all!
Fortunately, I liked Imani. As with Jill from Cycler, the first McLaughlin book I read, Imani is a fallible protagonist. She isn’t hyper-aware of her society’s flaws or very critical. In this way, McLaughlin creates a journey for Imani to go on as she develops into a more self-aware and critical person. Similarly, I liked how Diego’s skepticism sets him at odds with most of the others, Imani included. While I liked these two characters separately, I wasn’t as fond of them together. The banter isn’t as good as it could be, and their sometime-friendship sometime-romance sometime-rivalry progresses far too quickly.
Alas, that’s a criticism I could level at much of Scored: it’s just over far too quickly! There is so much going on here that it could easily have been another fifty pages (and don’t give me any guff about YA being “shorter” than fiction for older adults). I love what is here, but it could be so much more. It’s like baking that could have stayed in the oven just five more minutes: yes, it’s done, and it tastes fine, but it doesn’t have that golden brown coat yet, and if you leave it in a little longer, it will taste wonderful.
Now I’m hungry.
So, to summarize: Scored shows me that Cycler wasn’t a fluke, and I want more McLaughlin books! Also, it’s a neat take on surveillance societies and our obsession with ranking students and then claiming that those ranks are somehow objective or meaningful. It’s not; it never is. It’s always about power, and about helping those in power keep their power. But McLaughlin doesn’t ever get too preachy on this point: as much as the book obviously presents the score as a bad idea, she makes sure to present the case for the other side and outline why it seemed so desirable at the time. As Mr. Carol exhorts his students to do by having the scored oppose scoring and the un-scored support scoring in their end-of-year essays, we should always play the Devil’s Advocate once in a while. Dissent isn’t the most comfortable part of free speech, but it might be the most important.
I’m hesitant about proclaiming love for historical fiction. To me it’s just a genre that can be so hard to get right. Take too many liberties, and it’s not really historical any more, is it? But don’t take enough liberties, try to follow the actual course of history (as best we know it) too slavishly, and then it’s not really fiction…. The best historical fiction is the kind that follows the main narrative but tries to give the reader a glimpse at the people behind the dates and events, makes them come alive and gives us a sense of their emotions and motivations.
The Bookman concerns, obviously, the Bookman, that strange and mysterious terrorist who plagued Britain at the turn of the century. The story starts at the height of the Bookman’s reign of terror and continues through to the riots and uprising that eventually led to the devolution of royal powers to the reformed parliament. Throughout this backdrop of one of the Everlasting Empire’s most well-documented crises, Tidhar weaves the story of Orphan.
Unlike the majority of the cast of the book, Orphan himself is fictional—though he’s inspired by some of the rumours contemporary to the Bookman and the riots. Tidhar seizes on the “Return of the King” myth that one of the descendants of the last human monarch of Great Britain is somehow alive and has returned, at that moment, to retake the throne. He moulds this heir not into a prince trained in the art of statecraft and warfare but a street urchin, a poet fallen in with revolutionaries and in love.
In this respect, The Bookman is more a romantic adventure set against the backdrop of the Bookman crisis. Tidhar posits that if Orphan existed, than the Bookman would have known about him and tried to use him in the plot to take down Les Lézards. As the launch of the Martian probe draws closer, the Bookman traps Orphan and uses him as a pawn in a much longer game.
If you’re really into a naive young protagonist stumbling his way through an adventure mostly on luck and perseverance rather than any skill or intelligence, then you won’t have much to complain about here. Orphan isn’t exactly an outstanding or even memorable character, and that’s a shame. What’s worse, though, is that he’s practically the only interesting or well-realized character in the book. I don’t get it: Tidhar is writing in one of the most exciting time periods, with brilliant personalities like Irene Adler, Prime Minister Moriarty, and simulacrum Lord Byron … yet he uses them as little more than instruments of exposition.
Tidhar’s pale imitations of these historical juggernauts poke, prod, and otherwise shepherd Orphan through the required hoops of his adventure. This includes an all-too-brief side quest to become a pirate under the infamous Captain Wyvern. Yet again, though, Wyvern is a historical personality who graces the book for but a few pages, largely serving as a way for Orphan to finally make it to Caliban’s Island.
It must be a heady sensation, realizing as you’re reading up and researching a time period the number of famous people you might be able to include in your book. (I should note that Tidhar takes a few liberties here—by the time Adler is as prominent a detective as she is here, Mycroft has already retired from the civil service. And although Orphan’s meeting with the simulacrum Lord Byron is fun, I’m pretty sure he was on the Continent during most of the time this book takes place.) But if you include everyone in a tangential capacity, you won’t have time to develop any of them in much detail. And I don’t want to harp on this point too much; I’m just so disappointed, because Tidhar’s writing is beautiful. I love his dialogue, his description, and his action sequences. I just didn’t fall in love with the plot or the way it uses its characters.
Tidhar also does a great job portraying the political climate of that era from the perspective of an impoverished but somewhat educated person like Orphan. Whistle-stop tour of personalities aside, The Bookman captures a lot of the big issues of the day: the struggle for equal rights for automata and simulacra; the tension between advocates for free speech and loyalists to Les Lézards; the sense of unbounded scientific and technological progress, as seen in the Martian probe experiments. When you think back to the later reign of Queen Victoria and the Bookman, these are probably the sorts of things you think about.
Victoria was, of course, probably the Last of the Great Lizard Monarchs of our Everlasting Empire. Historians are still split on how they judge her decision to restore peace and promote stability by relinquishing some of her authority. Personally, I fall in with those who think she did the best thing, given the circumstances. In the long view of history, Les Lézards’ numbers were always the issue: it was either devolution or a truly bloody rebellion before her reign was out. And these days, old Lizard Lizzie isn’t that bad, eh? Long may she reign!
The Bookman is a serviceable, if not particularly amazing, adventure set at the turn of the century, in the last days of the absolute monarchy. Books themselves as booby traps. An heir to the throne on the loose in the streets of London. Pirates, submarines, hot-air balloons, and a mysterious island … it really is like something out of the science fiction of the time. I’ll give Tidhar his due: Verne would be proud. In the end, it’s not necessarily what I’m looking for when I read historical fiction, but it comes pretty close. Next time I might look for some alternate history, like one of those series set in a world where the Lizards never took the throne.
The Bookman concerns, obviously, the Bookman, that strange and mysterious terrorist who plagued Britain at the turn of the century. The story starts at the height of the Bookman’s reign of terror and continues through to the riots and uprising that eventually led to the devolution of royal powers to the reformed parliament. Throughout this backdrop of one of the Everlasting Empire’s most well-documented crises, Tidhar weaves the story of Orphan.
Unlike the majority of the cast of the book, Orphan himself is fictional—though he’s inspired by some of the rumours contemporary to the Bookman and the riots. Tidhar seizes on the “Return of the King” myth that one of the descendants of the last human monarch of Great Britain is somehow alive and has returned, at that moment, to retake the throne. He moulds this heir not into a prince trained in the art of statecraft and warfare but a street urchin, a poet fallen in with revolutionaries and in love.
In this respect, The Bookman is more a romantic adventure set against the backdrop of the Bookman crisis. Tidhar posits that if Orphan existed, than the Bookman would have known about him and tried to use him in the plot to take down Les Lézards. As the launch of the Martian probe draws closer, the Bookman traps Orphan and uses him as a pawn in a much longer game.
If you’re really into a naive young protagonist stumbling his way through an adventure mostly on luck and perseverance rather than any skill or intelligence, then you won’t have much to complain about here. Orphan isn’t exactly an outstanding or even memorable character, and that’s a shame. What’s worse, though, is that he’s practically the only interesting or well-realized character in the book. I don’t get it: Tidhar is writing in one of the most exciting time periods, with brilliant personalities like Irene Adler, Prime Minister Moriarty, and simulacrum Lord Byron … yet he uses them as little more than instruments of exposition.
Tidhar’s pale imitations of these historical juggernauts poke, prod, and otherwise shepherd Orphan through the required hoops of his adventure. This includes an all-too-brief side quest to become a pirate under the infamous Captain Wyvern. Yet again, though, Wyvern is a historical personality who graces the book for but a few pages, largely serving as a way for Orphan to finally make it to Caliban’s Island.
It must be a heady sensation, realizing as you’re reading up and researching a time period the number of famous people you might be able to include in your book. (I should note that Tidhar takes a few liberties here—by the time Adler is as prominent a detective as she is here, Mycroft has already retired from the civil service. And although Orphan’s meeting with the simulacrum Lord Byron is fun, I’m pretty sure he was on the Continent during most of the time this book takes place.) But if you include everyone in a tangential capacity, you won’t have time to develop any of them in much detail. And I don’t want to harp on this point too much; I’m just so disappointed, because Tidhar’s writing is beautiful. I love his dialogue, his description, and his action sequences. I just didn’t fall in love with the plot or the way it uses its characters.
Tidhar also does a great job portraying the political climate of that era from the perspective of an impoverished but somewhat educated person like Orphan. Whistle-stop tour of personalities aside, The Bookman captures a lot of the big issues of the day: the struggle for equal rights for automata and simulacra; the tension between advocates for free speech and loyalists to Les Lézards; the sense of unbounded scientific and technological progress, as seen in the Martian probe experiments. When you think back to the later reign of Queen Victoria and the Bookman, these are probably the sorts of things you think about.
Victoria was, of course, probably the Last of the Great Lizard Monarchs of our Everlasting Empire. Historians are still split on how they judge her decision to restore peace and promote stability by relinquishing some of her authority. Personally, I fall in with those who think she did the best thing, given the circumstances. In the long view of history, Les Lézards’ numbers were always the issue: it was either devolution or a truly bloody rebellion before her reign was out. And these days, old Lizard Lizzie isn’t that bad, eh? Long may she reign!
The Bookman is a serviceable, if not particularly amazing, adventure set at the turn of the century, in the last days of the absolute monarchy. Books themselves as booby traps. An heir to the throne on the loose in the streets of London. Pirates, submarines, hot-air balloons, and a mysterious island … it really is like something out of the science fiction of the time. I’ll give Tidhar his due: Verne would be proud. In the end, it’s not necessarily what I’m looking for when I read historical fiction, but it comes pretty close. Next time I might look for some alternate history, like one of those series set in a world where the Lizards never took the throne.
More Heinlein! Not planned. It just so happened that this paperback was on the New Books shelf at the library, so I snatched it up. (In fact, it’s a double feature, with Orphans of the Sky as the second book. This edition has an afterword, two introductions to The Man Who Sold the Moon, as well as a preface from Heinlein. It is saturated. If you like Heinlein, buy this edition.)
The more I read Heinlein, the more the experience becomes a reaction to how his writing is so old, but not quite old enough….
We could get into a rousing late-night discussion about the “first” science fiction stories. I’m all for crediting Mary Shelley with the first SF novel, though I‘m aware there are numerous earlier claimants to the looser “story” title. Few would dispute, however, that Jules Verne and H.G. Wells are two names who loom large when we discuss the earliest science fiction novelists—or is it science fantasy? Hard to say….
Still, no one reading Verne or Wells really expects the books to feel scientifically accurate. They were writing adventure novels with a fantastic science component, inspired by the cutting edge scientific discoveries of their time, but not necessarily bound by any need to be accurate.
Heinlein is closer to us in time, close enough, indeed, that he feels like he should be all properly scientific. So when his works deviate from science or historical fact because science and history have outpaced them … well, that feels weird. Because of his competency with technobabble, I had to keep reminding myself that Heinlein is writing this in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s … well before satellites, let alone the low Earth orbit or moon landings.
What Heinlein has in common with Wells and Verne, however, is definitely his role as a monumental inspiration for future scientists and explorers. This is the paradoxical ourobouros that is science fiction: writers describe these technologies and places that don’t yet or can’t exist … young people read their stories … and then they grow up, inspired to become scientists and explorers and create or find those things. Reading the stories in this anthology in that light, then, I can totally see why so many people cite Heinlein as their favourite science-fiction author. The fervour for technological process displayed by Douglas, or Martin, or Gaines, or Harriman, is infectious. Despite the note of careful cynicism running throughout these stories, Heinlein cannot avoid communicating an boundless enthusiasm for humanity’s apparently limitless ability to surmount obstacles and strive to reach the stars.
Reading Heinlein at this age and in this time also allows me to contrast it with more recent science fiction and see how the genre has changed. In both style and subject, science fiction in Heinlein’s day was markedly different from science fiction now.
In his introduction to The Man Who Sold the Moon, John W. Campbell, Jr. makes much the same point, only contrasting Heinlein’s writing with earlier works. His voice comes across as folksy while he says this, talking about how “Bob Heinlein … sent in a yarn,” and that just sounds cute to me. But he soon gets serious and literary and contrasts Heinlein with, yes, Wells:
He then goes on to use the word dilly, and I just want to bring him home and show him off to everyone like some kind of cantankerous grandfather figure.
Anyway, Campbell was, of course, right: Heinlein’s prose tends to be lean. It is at its most dense when he gets carried away describing technology—like I said earlier, I think Heinlein is an unapologetic technobabbler, but I’m fine with that. As far as people, though, in his descriptions of them and their actions Heinlein becomes positively stingy. Much of these stories consists of dialogue with very little description. This actually seems to be coming back into vogue … and I’m struck, also, by how much it resembles a lot of young adult novels. Maybe that’s one reason we never had a massive YA presence before World War II: much of “adult” literature was taking on the snappy YA-like pacing such that it could be read by children and adults alike. Certainly, I can see Heinlein’s stories at home in the hands of a fourteen- or a fifty-year-old….
But I digress. Heinlein is the Aaron Sorkin of science fiction here (in more ways than one—see depiction of women, below). He has mastered the literary walk’n’talk.
As far as subject goes, well: atomic power. It is a significant motif in most of the stories in this collection. “Blowups Happen” doubts that we could harness atomic power safely (and while Heinlein was not entirely right on this point, he also wasn’t entirely wrong), whereas “The Man Who Sold the Moon” and “Requiem” allow that maybe we could produce some usable fuel from these unstable monstrosities of reactors. In general, though, the book provides great insight into how an author who lived through World War II and saw humanity enter the Atomic Age (which he dubbed the Power Age) envisioned the rest of the century unfolding.
I had a much longer paragraph about the subject matter of science fiction today, but I realized it was getting untenable. I wanted to talk about it, however, so I spun it off into a separate blog post.
Anyway, unlike some people I can’t really tell a personal story about “my Heinlein.” I read him as something of historical interest: he informs my reading of the rest of science fiction, and provides insight into the zeitgeist of his time. I totally understand why a lot of people were inspired by him if they read his stories growing up, though. I suspect not a lot of those people were women, though.
What strikes me about The Man Who Sold the Moon is that, unlike The Moon is a Harsh Mistress of twenty years later, women aren’t merely objectified in these stories: they are practically erased. There are a few women characters in the stories, but they are secretaries or wives, minimized and put in their place. All the characters of action are men; it is inconceivable, indeed, that there could be a woman person of business—all that stuff is manly! The only notable exception is Dr. Mary Lou Martin from “Let There Be Light.” However, she is a biologist (life sciences being “acceptable” for a woman because it doesn’t require her to do math, since math is hard). And she is objectified to a nauseating degree.
Look, apologists will point out that Heinlein is “of his time,” and harsher critics will then trot out the fact that Heinlein had some ideas about sex and sexuality that were weird for his time … and that’s just not the point here. I’m reading this from a historical perspective, and so what I’m seeing is how important it is to have that diverse representation in a story. Because it’s true that Heinlein’s stories are of a calibre great enough to inspire people to become scientists and engineers … but how well could they motivate women to go into STEM if all these brilliant people are men?
I’m pleased to say we’ve come a long way since Heinlein wrote these stories in that regard—we regularly depict women as scientists, at least. Also, I saw a great discussion on Twitter the other day about how Gillian Anderson inspired a generation of women to enter STEM with her portrayal of Scully. (And I think Amanda Tapping deserves an honourable mention for her stellar portrayal of Captain/Major/Colonel Samantha Carter, the scientist/warrior of Stargate SG-1.)
Also, I am a dude talking about the portrayal of women in SF, so let me just say that I’m aware I’m not saying anything new here. I’m just trying to use my privilege to amplify what I’ve heard many women say. Because while things have improved, there is still a tendency to fridge women and to objectify or marginalize women, even when they are in scientific roles.
But I digress. As I tend to do, and as I’ve done in this review quite a bit, because I don’t actually have much to say about this book. This is a solid collection of stories. I don’t think it’s a matter of recommending or panning Heinlein: I would say that you should read at least one Heinlein story, just because he is unarguably a juggernaut in the field of science fiction. Whether you continue on the journey is entirely up to you. I’ll probably keep reading Heinlein, leisurely over the years, just to continue getting a good perspective on how science fiction has changed over the past century. After all, Campbell was right: these are some good yarns.
The more I read Heinlein, the more the experience becomes a reaction to how his writing is so old, but not quite old enough….
We could get into a rousing late-night discussion about the “first” science fiction stories. I’m all for crediting Mary Shelley with the first SF novel, though I‘m aware there are numerous earlier claimants to the looser “story” title. Few would dispute, however, that Jules Verne and H.G. Wells are two names who loom large when we discuss the earliest science fiction novelists—or is it science fantasy? Hard to say….
Still, no one reading Verne or Wells really expects the books to feel scientifically accurate. They were writing adventure novels with a fantastic science component, inspired by the cutting edge scientific discoveries of their time, but not necessarily bound by any need to be accurate.
Heinlein is closer to us in time, close enough, indeed, that he feels like he should be all properly scientific. So when his works deviate from science or historical fact because science and history have outpaced them … well, that feels weird. Because of his competency with technobabble, I had to keep reminding myself that Heinlein is writing this in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s … well before satellites, let alone the low Earth orbit or moon landings.
What Heinlein has in common with Wells and Verne, however, is definitely his role as a monumental inspiration for future scientists and explorers. This is the paradoxical ourobouros that is science fiction: writers describe these technologies and places that don’t yet or can’t exist … young people read their stories … and then they grow up, inspired to become scientists and explorers and create or find those things. Reading the stories in this anthology in that light, then, I can totally see why so many people cite Heinlein as their favourite science-fiction author. The fervour for technological process displayed by Douglas, or Martin, or Gaines, or Harriman, is infectious. Despite the note of careful cynicism running throughout these stories, Heinlein cannot avoid communicating an boundless enthusiasm for humanity’s apparently limitless ability to surmount obstacles and strive to reach the stars.
Reading Heinlein at this age and in this time also allows me to contrast it with more recent science fiction and see how the genre has changed. In both style and subject, science fiction in Heinlein’s day was markedly different from science fiction now.
In his introduction to The Man Who Sold the Moon, John W. Campbell, Jr. makes much the same point, only contrasting Heinlein’s writing with earlier works. His voice comes across as folksy while he says this, talking about how “Bob Heinlein … sent in a yarn,” and that just sounds cute to me. But he soon gets serious and literary and contrasts Heinlein with, yes, Wells:
But Wells’ method was to spend two chapters or so describing…. In the leisurely [18]’90s and early twentieth century, that was permissible. The reader accepted it. Long descriptive passages were common.… Today, the reader won’t stand for pages of description of what the author thinks the character is like; let the character act, and show his character.
He then goes on to use the word dilly, and I just want to bring him home and show him off to everyone like some kind of cantankerous grandfather figure.
Anyway, Campbell was, of course, right: Heinlein’s prose tends to be lean. It is at its most dense when he gets carried away describing technology—like I said earlier, I think Heinlein is an unapologetic technobabbler, but I’m fine with that. As far as people, though, in his descriptions of them and their actions Heinlein becomes positively stingy. Much of these stories consists of dialogue with very little description. This actually seems to be coming back into vogue … and I’m struck, also, by how much it resembles a lot of young adult novels. Maybe that’s one reason we never had a massive YA presence before World War II: much of “adult” literature was taking on the snappy YA-like pacing such that it could be read by children and adults alike. Certainly, I can see Heinlein’s stories at home in the hands of a fourteen- or a fifty-year-old….
But I digress. Heinlein is the Aaron Sorkin of science fiction here (in more ways than one—see depiction of women, below). He has mastered the literary walk’n’talk.
As far as subject goes, well: atomic power. It is a significant motif in most of the stories in this collection. “Blowups Happen” doubts that we could harness atomic power safely (and while Heinlein was not entirely right on this point, he also wasn’t entirely wrong), whereas “The Man Who Sold the Moon” and “Requiem” allow that maybe we could produce some usable fuel from these unstable monstrosities of reactors. In general, though, the book provides great insight into how an author who lived through World War II and saw humanity enter the Atomic Age (which he dubbed the Power Age) envisioned the rest of the century unfolding.
I had a much longer paragraph about the subject matter of science fiction today, but I realized it was getting untenable. I wanted to talk about it, however, so I spun it off into a separate blog post.
Anyway, unlike some people I can’t really tell a personal story about “my Heinlein.” I read him as something of historical interest: he informs my reading of the rest of science fiction, and provides insight into the zeitgeist of his time. I totally understand why a lot of people were inspired by him if they read his stories growing up, though. I suspect not a lot of those people were women, though.
What strikes me about The Man Who Sold the Moon is that, unlike The Moon is a Harsh Mistress of twenty years later, women aren’t merely objectified in these stories: they are practically erased. There are a few women characters in the stories, but they are secretaries or wives, minimized and put in their place. All the characters of action are men; it is inconceivable, indeed, that there could be a woman person of business—all that stuff is manly! The only notable exception is Dr. Mary Lou Martin from “Let There Be Light.” However, she is a biologist (life sciences being “acceptable” for a woman because it doesn’t require her to do math, since math is hard). And she is objectified to a nauseating degree.
Look, apologists will point out that Heinlein is “of his time,” and harsher critics will then trot out the fact that Heinlein had some ideas about sex and sexuality that were weird for his time … and that’s just not the point here. I’m reading this from a historical perspective, and so what I’m seeing is how important it is to have that diverse representation in a story. Because it’s true that Heinlein’s stories are of a calibre great enough to inspire people to become scientists and engineers … but how well could they motivate women to go into STEM if all these brilliant people are men?
I’m pleased to say we’ve come a long way since Heinlein wrote these stories in that regard—we regularly depict women as scientists, at least. Also, I saw a great discussion on Twitter the other day about how Gillian Anderson inspired a generation of women to enter STEM with her portrayal of Scully. (And I think Amanda Tapping deserves an honourable mention for her stellar portrayal of Captain/Major/Colonel Samantha Carter, the scientist/warrior of Stargate SG-1.)
Also, I am a dude talking about the portrayal of women in SF, so let me just say that I’m aware I’m not saying anything new here. I’m just trying to use my privilege to amplify what I’ve heard many women say. Because while things have improved, there is still a tendency to fridge women and to objectify or marginalize women, even when they are in scientific roles.
But I digress. As I tend to do, and as I’ve done in this review quite a bit, because I don’t actually have much to say about this book. This is a solid collection of stories. I don’t think it’s a matter of recommending or panning Heinlein: I would say that you should read at least one Heinlein story, just because he is unarguably a juggernaut in the field of science fiction. Whether you continue on the journey is entirely up to you. I’ll probably keep reading Heinlein, leisurely over the years, just to continue getting a good perspective on how science fiction has changed over the past century. After all, Campbell was right: these are some good yarns.
Second Heinlein collection in this book (the first being The Man Who Sold the Moon). Now we have two related 1940s novellae fixed-up into a single novel in the 1960s. Oh, science fiction publishing, you are so fun.
Orphans of the Sky is one of the ur–generation ship tales. Heinlein immediately seizes on the possibility that something could go so disastrously wrong during the voyage such that the entire crew forgets it is on a ship. For all intents and purposes, the Ship is now the universe. Anyone, like Hugh, who challenges this worldview is accused of heresy. (There’s a nice little shout-out to Galileo’s trials and tribulations with the Catholic Church.) This plot was executed most memorably for me in “For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky,” an episode in the third season of the original Star Trek.
There’s something about generation ships that doesn’t really apply to me as a motif. I really didn’t like Journey into Space, and I wasn’t crazy about this book either. As far as the writing goes, it is pretty much what I expect from Heinlein now—a lot of conversation, a lot of scientific speculation and libertarianism disguised as the desire for open scientific inquiry.
The plot is mediocre. Lots of repetitive actions culminating in an all-too-predictable betrayal and a mad dash towards near-certain death. It goes through the motions, follows certain forms, and so it is minimally fulfilling in that barest of ways. While it is true that this is among the first (if not the first) story of its kind, I suspect that others who have since picked up on these themes have used them better, or in more interesting ways, or with better characters.
I also can’t forgive the level of misogyny in this book. Heinlein’s sexism in The Man Who Sold the Moon is problematic, sure, but mostly for its erasure of women—he does at least feature a single woman scientist, even if she is objectified. But in Orphans of the Sky, women play a far smaller and worse role. Women of the Ship, it seems, exist to be wives and breeders. Hugh “selects” two women, graciously “allowing” the first to keep her own name because she behaves. The other, however, is “wild as a mutie” and bites Hugh, so “he had slapped her, naturally, and that should have been an end to the matter” and then “had not got around to naming her.” Later on Heinlein talks about how she is better behaved after Hugh knocks out a tooth! Because there’s nothing like trivializing domestic abuse, amirite?
If you’re a diehard Heinlein completist (I’m not) or you have a particular fascination with the subgenre of generation ships (I don’t), you should probably read this. Otherwise, give it a miss.
Orphans of the Sky is one of the ur–generation ship tales. Heinlein immediately seizes on the possibility that something could go so disastrously wrong during the voyage such that the entire crew forgets it is on a ship. For all intents and purposes, the Ship is now the universe. Anyone, like Hugh, who challenges this worldview is accused of heresy. (There’s a nice little shout-out to Galileo’s trials and tribulations with the Catholic Church.) This plot was executed most memorably for me in “For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky,” an episode in the third season of the original Star Trek.
There’s something about generation ships that doesn’t really apply to me as a motif. I really didn’t like Journey into Space, and I wasn’t crazy about this book either. As far as the writing goes, it is pretty much what I expect from Heinlein now—a lot of conversation, a lot of scientific speculation and libertarianism disguised as the desire for open scientific inquiry.
The plot is mediocre. Lots of repetitive actions culminating in an all-too-predictable betrayal and a mad dash towards near-certain death. It goes through the motions, follows certain forms, and so it is minimally fulfilling in that barest of ways. While it is true that this is among the first (if not the first) story of its kind, I suspect that others who have since picked up on these themes have used them better, or in more interesting ways, or with better characters.
I also can’t forgive the level of misogyny in this book. Heinlein’s sexism in The Man Who Sold the Moon is problematic, sure, but mostly for its erasure of women—he does at least feature a single woman scientist, even if she is objectified. But in Orphans of the Sky, women play a far smaller and worse role. Women of the Ship, it seems, exist to be wives and breeders. Hugh “selects” two women, graciously “allowing” the first to keep her own name because she behaves. The other, however, is “wild as a mutie” and bites Hugh, so “he had slapped her, naturally, and that should have been an end to the matter” and then “had not got around to naming her.” Later on Heinlein talks about how she is better behaved after Hugh knocks out a tooth! Because there’s nothing like trivializing domestic abuse, amirite?
If you’re a diehard Heinlein completist (I’m not) or you have a particular fascination with the subgenre of generation ships (I don’t), you should probably read this. Otherwise, give it a miss.
Jumped on this after seeing it in the new paperbacks section of the library. Having recently read, and greatly enjoyed, The Forever War, I was happy to see something much more recent from Joe Haldeman. That being said, the description made it seem more like a thriller than a science-fiction novel, so I didn’t go into it expecting too much. This proved fortuitous, because there isn’t much here. Thrillers are neither my area of interest nor expertise, so I can’t be certain, but I don’t think this is a particularly good one. As a “near future science fiction story of the dangers of living in a surveillance state,” as the blurb says, Work Done for Hire is just perplexingly dull.
There are a few rays of sunshine, so let’s start there.
The main character, Jack Daley, is actually pretty interesting. He sort of fell into sniping after being drafted in a near-future rerun of something that sounds suspiciously like the Iraq/Afghanistan wars. He got out with a medical discharge, became a hack writer, and found a girlfriend.
Did I mention the girlfriend, Kit, is a mathematician? Mmhmm. The duo protagonist vibe here is very similar to the one from The Forever War. And while sometimes it seems like all Haldeman had to say about their relationship involved their sex life, I did appreciate at least that both Jack and Kit were the type of people who were fairly open about such things. Haldeman depicts their relationship as one where they are both comfortable in their own skins and comfortable with each other—they are probably in love, but it isn’t the melodramatic, head-over-heels, passionate romances that are almost required in fiction. Theirs is a relationship grounded in mutual respect: Jack views Kit every bit as capable as him, though each recognizes that the other has certain domains in which they excel. I think this is a very positive and healthy portrayal of a long-term romantic relationship.
I also like that the two are, for the most part, interesting fugitives. They go on the run quickly, pulling up sticks and changing cities and identities without too much complaining. While Jack’s reticence to involve the police or other law enforcement might feel a little contrived, I admit it doesn’t feel too contrived. I suspect that we are all generally starting to become rather cynical about the state of law enforcement these days—and Haldeman is probably trying to say something about that here.
Unfortunately, the entire premise of their fugitive lifestyle is hampered by the story-within-a-story that Haldeman includes. This is Work Done for Hire’s unique point: Jack is also writing a novelization of a screenplay that will then serve as the basis for a horror movie about a serial killer. Haldeman intersperses chapters of his story with chapters of Jack’s story. Even after going on the run, Jack continues to write chapters and send them to his editor. Uh … you know, if I were running for my life, that probably wouldn’t be near the top of my priorities. But Jack has to keep doing it, so Haldeman can keep including those chapters, and in so doing, stretch that suspension of disbelief ever so slightly.
Similarly, the third act, in which Jack goes Liam Neeson on the bad guys, feels like it was bolted on to the rest of the book after Haldeman couldn’t find a better ending. (I’m not saying that’s the case; it might be the original ending—but it’s not a good ending.) The story very quickly degenerates into formulaic tropes in which Jack tries to turn the tables on the bad guys. Surprise, surprise—they turn out not to be as competent as they first appeared. The suspense that Haldeman is successful in building for the first half of the novel escapes with all the impressiveness of air escaping a balloon. And from there on, it’s just your textbook thriller.
So, I mean, if that’s your thing, then go for it. Haldeman demonstrates he’s a good writer. I like how he writes the story-within-a-story chapters in a different style to Jack’s more simplistic, formulaic approach to writing. I was having fun for the first part of the book, and I didn’t hate the last part—it just became rather boring. The two main characters are all right, even if no one else ever receives much development.
In short, Work Done for Hire is in the unfortunate position of being among the “meh” novels I’ve read this year. Little distinguishes it from the background—and perhaps if I hadn’t already read so many great books this year I might have been able to say nicer things about this one. As it is, all I can say is that it’s not bad.
There are a few rays of sunshine, so let’s start there.
The main character, Jack Daley, is actually pretty interesting. He sort of fell into sniping after being drafted in a near-future rerun of something that sounds suspiciously like the Iraq/Afghanistan wars. He got out with a medical discharge, became a hack writer, and found a girlfriend.
Did I mention the girlfriend, Kit, is a mathematician? Mmhmm. The duo protagonist vibe here is very similar to the one from The Forever War. And while sometimes it seems like all Haldeman had to say about their relationship involved their sex life, I did appreciate at least that both Jack and Kit were the type of people who were fairly open about such things. Haldeman depicts their relationship as one where they are both comfortable in their own skins and comfortable with each other—they are probably in love, but it isn’t the melodramatic, head-over-heels, passionate romances that are almost required in fiction. Theirs is a relationship grounded in mutual respect: Jack views Kit every bit as capable as him, though each recognizes that the other has certain domains in which they excel. I think this is a very positive and healthy portrayal of a long-term romantic relationship.
I also like that the two are, for the most part, interesting fugitives. They go on the run quickly, pulling up sticks and changing cities and identities without too much complaining. While Jack’s reticence to involve the police or other law enforcement might feel a little contrived, I admit it doesn’t feel too contrived. I suspect that we are all generally starting to become rather cynical about the state of law enforcement these days—and Haldeman is probably trying to say something about that here.
Unfortunately, the entire premise of their fugitive lifestyle is hampered by the story-within-a-story that Haldeman includes. This is Work Done for Hire’s unique point: Jack is also writing a novelization of a screenplay that will then serve as the basis for a horror movie about a serial killer. Haldeman intersperses chapters of his story with chapters of Jack’s story. Even after going on the run, Jack continues to write chapters and send them to his editor. Uh … you know, if I were running for my life, that probably wouldn’t be near the top of my priorities. But Jack has to keep doing it, so Haldeman can keep including those chapters, and in so doing, stretch that suspension of disbelief ever so slightly.
Similarly, the third act, in which Jack goes Liam Neeson on the bad guys, feels like it was bolted on to the rest of the book after Haldeman couldn’t find a better ending. (I’m not saying that’s the case; it might be the original ending—but it’s not a good ending.) The story very quickly degenerates into formulaic tropes in which Jack tries to turn the tables on the bad guys. Surprise, surprise—they turn out not to be as competent as they first appeared. The suspense that Haldeman is successful in building for the first half of the novel escapes with all the impressiveness of air escaping a balloon. And from there on, it’s just your textbook thriller.
So, I mean, if that’s your thing, then go for it. Haldeman demonstrates he’s a good writer. I like how he writes the story-within-a-story chapters in a different style to Jack’s more simplistic, formulaic approach to writing. I was having fun for the first part of the book, and I didn’t hate the last part—it just became rather boring. The two main characters are all right, even if no one else ever receives much development.
In short, Work Done for Hire is in the unfortunate position of being among the “meh” novels I’ve read this year. Little distinguishes it from the background—and perhaps if I hadn’t already read so many great books this year I might have been able to say nicer things about this one. As it is, all I can say is that it’s not bad.
The Android is an excellent example of the greatness of the Animorphs series. If you were going to jump in to this series rather than start from the first book, you could do worse than start here. In addition to the now-boilerplate introduction required to get such new readers up to speed, Applegate continues to expand the mythology of the series. We meet the Chee, programmed to be peaceful by the joy-loving but now extinct Pemalites. And Marco’s parent—this time his dad—is threatened again by the Yeerks.
The writing is stellar in this one. Unlike the disappointing plot in The Secret, which takes a turn towards bathos at the end, the plot The Android is tense and suspenseful up until the final page. First, Marco and Tobias stumble onto the fact that this kid, Erek King … isn’t exactly human. But he’s managed to infiltrate the Sharing. Why? The Animorphs have to get to the bottom of this mystery … and when they do, they find out they have to pull a heist to stop the Yeerks from gaining control over all the computers on the planet.
So the stakes are high.
Oh, and Marco’s dad is starting to work with the company that has the crystal the Yeerks are using. Which means he might be a target.
The stakes are really high.
Navigating the security during the heist is tense. I love heist stories! The Animorphs use bat morphs—an excellent choice. But I particularly love that, after they go to all that trouble to be sneaky, they decide they can’t lift the crystal as bats … so they’re just going to turbo their way out.
That is totally something I would do in a video game. (I save often….)
Emotionally, there’s a lot going on here too. For Marco, the prospect of losing his dad to the Yeerks is too much, especially considering what happened with his mom. Marco seems lately to be all about drawing lines: if this happens, I’ll do this. Applegate portrays here the emerging conscience of an adolescent: Marco is no longer saying things are right or wrong because an adult told him so; he’s actually internalizing, expressing, and acting on his own sense of ethics.
But where will those ethics lead in time of war?
The pacifism of the Chee is a stark contrast to the child soldier nature of the Animorphs. And Applegate does not pull any punches. Not a single one. Erek manages to rewrite his programming to let him slaughter the Controller guards, thereby saving the Animorphs from certain death … and it’s horrible. Everyone seems shocked and scarred beyond imagining. It feels like they kicked and killed a baby. The fact that Marco was unconscious and only learns about it secondhand makes this sentiment all the more potent. Sometimes, it’s about what you don’t say, and the way that the other Animorphs have trouble expressing how disturbing that scene was says it all.
Beyond that single moment, however, lies the enduring ethical question. Most of the Animorphs understand why Erek has now changed sides and agrees with Maria that the Chee cannot surrender their pacifism. This allows us to hold the Chee up as a foil to the Animorphs, who will become increasingly militant as this series progresses. As always, Applegate asks the question: how far are you willing to go to win?
The Android, even this early in the series, hints that there is an event horizon you should not cross.
It’s serious business. Despite being a Marco book, and therefore replete with the usual Marco humour, there’s a sombre tone to this story. This complementary sense of black humour to stave off the darkness is key to Marco’s role in the series, and it’s one reason this book is so successful.
Next time, the Animorphs get timey-wimey wibbly wobbly again. And Jake goes crazy. It’s basically The Real World meets I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here.
My reviews of the Animorphs series:
← #9: The Secret | #11: The Forgotten →
The writing is stellar in this one. Unlike the disappointing plot in The Secret, which takes a turn towards bathos at the end, the plot The Android is tense and suspenseful up until the final page. First, Marco and Tobias stumble onto the fact that this kid, Erek King … isn’t exactly human. But he’s managed to infiltrate the Sharing. Why? The Animorphs have to get to the bottom of this mystery … and when they do, they find out they have to pull a heist to stop the Yeerks from gaining control over all the computers on the planet.
So the stakes are high.
Oh, and Marco’s dad is starting to work with the company that has the crystal the Yeerks are using. Which means he might be a target.
The stakes are really high.
Navigating the security during the heist is tense. I love heist stories! The Animorphs use bat morphs—an excellent choice. But I particularly love that, after they go to all that trouble to be sneaky, they decide they can’t lift the crystal as bats … so they’re just going to turbo their way out.
That is totally something I would do in a video game. (I save often….)
Emotionally, there’s a lot going on here too. For Marco, the prospect of losing his dad to the Yeerks is too much, especially considering what happened with his mom. Marco seems lately to be all about drawing lines: if this happens, I’ll do this. Applegate portrays here the emerging conscience of an adolescent: Marco is no longer saying things are right or wrong because an adult told him so; he’s actually internalizing, expressing, and acting on his own sense of ethics.
But where will those ethics lead in time of war?
The pacifism of the Chee is a stark contrast to the child soldier nature of the Animorphs. And Applegate does not pull any punches. Not a single one. Erek manages to rewrite his programming to let him slaughter the Controller guards, thereby saving the Animorphs from certain death … and it’s horrible. Everyone seems shocked and scarred beyond imagining. It feels like they kicked and killed a baby. The fact that Marco was unconscious and only learns about it secondhand makes this sentiment all the more potent. Sometimes, it’s about what you don’t say, and the way that the other Animorphs have trouble expressing how disturbing that scene was says it all.
Beyond that single moment, however, lies the enduring ethical question. Most of the Animorphs understand why Erek has now changed sides and agrees with Maria that the Chee cannot surrender their pacifism. This allows us to hold the Chee up as a foil to the Animorphs, who will become increasingly militant as this series progresses. As always, Applegate asks the question: how far are you willing to go to win?
The Android, even this early in the series, hints that there is an event horizon you should not cross.
It’s serious business. Despite being a Marco book, and therefore replete with the usual Marco humour, there’s a sombre tone to this story. This complementary sense of black humour to stave off the darkness is key to Marco’s role in the series, and it’s one reason this book is so successful.
Next time, the Animorphs get timey-wimey wibbly wobbly again. And Jake goes crazy. It’s basically The Real World meets I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here.
My reviews of the Animorphs series:
← #9: The Secret | #11: The Forgotten →
I’m disappointed that so many people seem underwhelmed by the autobiographical parts of this book and feel that they are ancillary to Frenkel’s purpose. I disagree: they are, in fact, the heart and soul of Love & Math. Without them, this would be a fairly intense treatise on deep connections between abstract algebra, algebraic geometry, and quantum physics. With them, Frenkel demonstrates how the study of mathematics and a devotion to thought for thought’s sake, to fulfil human curiosity helped him personally through anti-Semitism and Soviet persecution. In some ways I was reminded of remarks Neil Turok makes in The Universe Within (if I am remembering correctly) about the state of education in many African countries depriving us of staggering potential intellects. How many people, poor or Jewish or otherwise unprivileged, were not as lucky as Frenkel happened to be?
Frenkel’s personal recollections are also interesting because they provide a glimpse into the lifestyle and community of professional mathematicians. This is not something most people think about, even people who are scientifically-minded. There are a few famously reclusive or otherwise lone-wolf mathematicians out there (though I think that most of them at least maintain some kind of correspondence with a few respected colleagues), but for the most part, twentieth and twenty-first century mathematics is very much a group endeavour. Frenkel describes how he helped to organize new research in the Langlands Program by gathering together mathematicians from various institutions to hear their input. Belying the stereotypes, mathematics is a very social world.
Ultimately, of course, the personal parts of the story are essential to Frenkel’s explanation of why he loves math. Again, I must disagree with those reviewers who pan this book because it doesn’t inspire them to love math … that was never the aim. Neither the book nor Frenkel are naive enough to believe that, I think. But I suspect one reason many people react the way they do when one reveals one’s mathematical inclinations is genuine bewilderment over the idea that a “normal” person could actually love math. As Frenkel points out, even when mathematical achievements are depicted in popular culture, the subject is always a social outsider.
(In a way, it’s similar to this whole idea of left brain/right brain people. “Oh, you’re a left brain person!” and, when people find out I teach both math and English, “You’ve got a weird left and right brain thing going on!” But the truth is, a lot of people in “left brain” positions that require logical reasoning are also very creative and passionate and linguistic—and a lot of “right brain” thinkers are also organized and calculating. Humans are diverse, and the stereotypes and categories we create are not that good at classifying us.)
The autobiographical elements also humanize what might otherwise be a fairly involved book. When Frenkel talks about loving math, he isn’t pulling a Cabinet of Curiosities here. Don’t get me wrong: I’m all for books explaining elementary math. But I’m pleased that Frenkel tackles much higher-concept, abstract mathematics in a nonetheless accessible and approachable way.
I’ve forgotten a lot of my undergraduate math, I am sorry to say. One day I’ll delve back into ring theory and group theory for some fun. I’m pleased by how much I do remember, however. I recognized a great deal of what Frenkel explained, even though some of it still managed to escape me. So when I say Love & Math is accessible, I’m not claiming Frenkel is going to help you comprehend abstract algebra. Rather, he demonstrates some of the concepts that power abstract algebra through some clever diagrams and explanations, and he connects abstract algebra to quantum physics.
I particularly enjoyed this latter endeavour. I knew that symmetry was one of the most significant aspects of group theory, but I didn’t understand the specific ways in which group theory actually underlies a good deal of the interactions between subatomic particles. So that was cool. There are many points where Frenkel basically explains the math behind the physics, then says, “Oh, and mathematicians figured this out long before physicists came along and discovered the math was useful.” That’s not to say math is more important than physics (that’s just, like, self-evident), but I love that we can build these models in math without any reference to the physical world … and then somehow, these models become useful in explaining the physical world. That is just mind-boggling.
As an educator, I also sympathized with another remark Frenkel makes, rather early in the book. He compares the teaching of math in high schools now to the prospect of teaching art by having students paint fences. That is, we barely get to scratch the surface of what mathematics is in high school. Frenkel speaks of quadratics with the disdain only a pure mathematician could muster. But it’s true: I don’t blame students for thinking that math is boring, because the topics we drill into them and the way we do it tends to communicate that fact. You really don’t need to know the quadratic formula—not in the days of Wolfram Alpha—but symmetry? That’s not only important but beautiful as well.
Honestly, Love & Math is not going to make you love math, and it was never supposed to. It’s not going to teach you group theory or representation theory, and you probably won’t have any clue what a Riemannian Surface or a Kac–Moody Algebra is after reading the book. (Maybe you’ll understand what a group is, in some way.) If you’re really interested in learning those things, there are books and videos and courses and wikis to help you out.
Instead, Love & Math is one mathematician’s story of how he fell in love with math, how it saved and defined his life, and how he feels honoured and awed that he has had the chance to give back to the mathematical community. Frenkel goes so far as to make a weird surrealist movie about loving math … and that is not my thing, but it’s clearly his thing, and I’m all for people doing their thing. So you go, Frenkel. And while you do that, hopefully some of the people who read this book come away with a better understanding of what it might mean to love math, even if they don’t quite share that feeling themselves.
Frenkel’s personal recollections are also interesting because they provide a glimpse into the lifestyle and community of professional mathematicians. This is not something most people think about, even people who are scientifically-minded. There are a few famously reclusive or otherwise lone-wolf mathematicians out there (though I think that most of them at least maintain some kind of correspondence with a few respected colleagues), but for the most part, twentieth and twenty-first century mathematics is very much a group endeavour. Frenkel describes how he helped to organize new research in the Langlands Program by gathering together mathematicians from various institutions to hear their input. Belying the stereotypes, mathematics is a very social world.
Ultimately, of course, the personal parts of the story are essential to Frenkel’s explanation of why he loves math. Again, I must disagree with those reviewers who pan this book because it doesn’t inspire them to love math … that was never the aim. Neither the book nor Frenkel are naive enough to believe that, I think. But I suspect one reason many people react the way they do when one reveals one’s mathematical inclinations is genuine bewilderment over the idea that a “normal” person could actually love math. As Frenkel points out, even when mathematical achievements are depicted in popular culture, the subject is always a social outsider.
(In a way, it’s similar to this whole idea of left brain/right brain people. “Oh, you’re a left brain person!” and, when people find out I teach both math and English, “You’ve got a weird left and right brain thing going on!” But the truth is, a lot of people in “left brain” positions that require logical reasoning are also very creative and passionate and linguistic—and a lot of “right brain” thinkers are also organized and calculating. Humans are diverse, and the stereotypes and categories we create are not that good at classifying us.)
The autobiographical elements also humanize what might otherwise be a fairly involved book. When Frenkel talks about loving math, he isn’t pulling a Cabinet of Curiosities here. Don’t get me wrong: I’m all for books explaining elementary math. But I’m pleased that Frenkel tackles much higher-concept, abstract mathematics in a nonetheless accessible and approachable way.
I’ve forgotten a lot of my undergraduate math, I am sorry to say. One day I’ll delve back into ring theory and group theory for some fun. I’m pleased by how much I do remember, however. I recognized a great deal of what Frenkel explained, even though some of it still managed to escape me. So when I say Love & Math is accessible, I’m not claiming Frenkel is going to help you comprehend abstract algebra. Rather, he demonstrates some of the concepts that power abstract algebra through some clever diagrams and explanations, and he connects abstract algebra to quantum physics.
I particularly enjoyed this latter endeavour. I knew that symmetry was one of the most significant aspects of group theory, but I didn’t understand the specific ways in which group theory actually underlies a good deal of the interactions between subatomic particles. So that was cool. There are many points where Frenkel basically explains the math behind the physics, then says, “Oh, and mathematicians figured this out long before physicists came along and discovered the math was useful.” That’s not to say math is more important than physics (that’s just, like, self-evident), but I love that we can build these models in math without any reference to the physical world … and then somehow, these models become useful in explaining the physical world. That is just mind-boggling.
As an educator, I also sympathized with another remark Frenkel makes, rather early in the book. He compares the teaching of math in high schools now to the prospect of teaching art by having students paint fences. That is, we barely get to scratch the surface of what mathematics is in high school. Frenkel speaks of quadratics with the disdain only a pure mathematician could muster. But it’s true: I don’t blame students for thinking that math is boring, because the topics we drill into them and the way we do it tends to communicate that fact. You really don’t need to know the quadratic formula—not in the days of Wolfram Alpha—but symmetry? That’s not only important but beautiful as well.
Honestly, Love & Math is not going to make you love math, and it was never supposed to. It’s not going to teach you group theory or representation theory, and you probably won’t have any clue what a Riemannian Surface or a Kac–Moody Algebra is after reading the book. (Maybe you’ll understand what a group is, in some way.) If you’re really interested in learning those things, there are books and videos and courses and wikis to help you out.
Instead, Love & Math is one mathematician’s story of how he fell in love with math, how it saved and defined his life, and how he feels honoured and awed that he has had the chance to give back to the mathematical community. Frenkel goes so far as to make a weird surrealist movie about loving math … and that is not my thing, but it’s clearly his thing, and I’m all for people doing their thing. So you go, Frenkel. And while you do that, hopefully some of the people who read this book come away with a better understanding of what it might mean to love math, even if they don’t quite share that feeling themselves.
So there’s this new show on TV called CSI: Cyber. It’s a spin-off of a little-known TV series you probably haven’t heard of—CSI or something like that—about people investigating cybercrime. Every episode involves bad guys trying to do bad things with computers (sometimes their computer, sometimes your computer!), and the good guys have to race against the clock to stop the bad things by doing things that are like the bad things but are good because the good guys do it. But because it’s CSI, the actors get to stand around for much of the show tossing around made-up terms that sound real but aren’t, and pretty much just scare the audience (who has no idea how computers and hacking actually work) of technology.
I am hacking you with this review right now!
I mock CSI: Cyber as I open this review of Broken Monsters because I feel like police procedurals and crime thrillers are slow on the uptake here. Yes, you have your Tom Clancys, who have made veritable fortunes in writing fictional cybercrime adventures. For the most part, though, it has been a struggle for these writers to capture with verisimilitude the staggering way in which cybercrime operates. Because we are still thinking about computers as things, when in reality we need to start thinking about things as computers … computers embedded in other things.
Lauren Beukes takes her speculative fiction skills and applies them to the mystery genre. The result: a spectacular blend of creepy surrealist SF and kickass crime thriller. The ensemble cast is layered, fascinating, with likeable and unlikeable characters, moments low and moments awesome aplenty. Though slow to get started, the novel is like a kettle coming to boil: soon it heats up, and by the time it starts to whistle, the steam escaping from the spout makes you worry the whole top is going to come off.
This is a powerful book.
I should mention that I read the last 300 pages of it in about two and a half hours. It was due at the library that day, and there was a hold on it, so I couldn’t renew it. I didn’t want to keep it an extra day if I could possibly avoid it—the fine isn’t that bad, but it’s bad karma. Someone else really wants to read the book, so why should I delay them?
Fortunately I wasn’t working that morning, so I had the time to sit with a cup of tea and finish the book. Reading so much of it in a short duration wasn’t ideal—as I said above, this is a slow boil of a story, and you need time to take it in and mull it over. Nevertheless, I’m still so satisfied, both by the story itself and Beukes’ evident talent.
This novel reaffirms characterization as one of Beukes’ core strengths. Broken Monsters just has character, full stop. I so seldom visualize while I’m reading; to me, it is just words on a page. But when I read this, I could almost picture the scenes in my mind’s eye. The characters were just that real, that believable, that I could nearly turn this book into a movie in my head. That’s exciting for me.
I could go on at length about each of the characters. I could talk about the linoleum-like texture of Gabbie’s life, how Beukes expertly portrays the worn-out, scrubbed-over palimpsest of her feelings about police work and love and marriage and motherhood. I could talk about the brutal earnestness of TK, and how he leads a life I’ll never really understand given my privileged upbringing. I could even, if I really pushed myself, find some things to say about Jono, the shiftless would-be writer who has come to Detroit to discover his own fame. (I didn’t like him that much, which is not to say he’s a poorly realized character.)
But the two characters who really caught me were Layla and Cas.
Layla and Cas are incidental, in many ways, to the ostensible main plot. Layla ends up playing a pivotal role in the climax and resolution. But for the most part, she exists simply as the daughter of Gabriella Versado. Her life is a window on what Gabbie has to deal with as a cop in Detroit. And it’s also so much more.
Beukes nails the depiction of two teenaged girls in the second decade of the twenty-first century. The portrayal of their effortless code-switching, social media savvy, and paradoxical mixture of maturity and naivety was what kept me hooked on the first part of Broken Monsters while the mystery was slow to start. Cas’ announcement that they are going catfishing brought a smile to my lips. It’s very easy to portray teenagers stereotypically; Beukes manages to avoid exaggerating the tropes but still use them when appropriate.
While Layla and Cas don’t initially play a big role in the mystery behind Broken Monsters, I would argue that they are essential to the novel’s main theme—or at least, the theme I took away.
I love the last line of this book: “This is the way the world is now. Everything is public. You have to find other people who understand. You have to find a way to live with it.”
The revelation in the middle of the book, Cas’ big secret, and the magical realism moments of the climax, are arrows through the heart of Broken Monsters and a bullseye on the above. In this age of spectacle, the medium is the message, and the message is “Share! Share! Share!”
Beukes turns a murder mystery set in the husk of Detroit into a beautiful exploration of our post-privacy age. How do we conduct ourselves in a world where everything about us is potentially out there, searchable, findable? How do we grow up? How do we explain the things we can’t explain, and live with the things we can’t unwatch?
The book has no answers for this. I just came away with the certainty that Beukes gets it. And she expresses it in a deep, moving, thoughtful way. Layla and Cas have a subjectivity and a vocabulary to experience this in a way the older characters can’t necessarily. And they aren’t even done growing—what will their world be like in ten more years?
That’s the real issue with shows like CSI: Cyber. We are right to be wary of the ways the Internet can be used for crime. But the people who make those shows either don’t understand, or don’t care, about how the nuances influence our perception of this medium. It’s not just a generational thing—there are plenty of people twice my age who get it. Rather, it’s an experiential one. You have to inhabit this liminal space between offline and online long enough, regularly enough, authentically enough, in order to develop a sense of what it means and what it bodes for our futures.
Broken Monsters is a story about the way passion is infectious. Passion, so wholly neutral in its intensity, so capable of inspiring good and bad and great and catastrophically awful. This is a novel about bad things happening because we are human, and the contradiction of our condition is that our beauty is often terrible.
And this is why we can’t have nice things.
I am hacking you with this review right now!
I mock CSI: Cyber as I open this review of Broken Monsters because I feel like police procedurals and crime thrillers are slow on the uptake here. Yes, you have your Tom Clancys, who have made veritable fortunes in writing fictional cybercrime adventures. For the most part, though, it has been a struggle for these writers to capture with verisimilitude the staggering way in which cybercrime operates. Because we are still thinking about computers as things, when in reality we need to start thinking about things as computers … computers embedded in other things.
Lauren Beukes takes her speculative fiction skills and applies them to the mystery genre. The result: a spectacular blend of creepy surrealist SF and kickass crime thriller. The ensemble cast is layered, fascinating, with likeable and unlikeable characters, moments low and moments awesome aplenty. Though slow to get started, the novel is like a kettle coming to boil: soon it heats up, and by the time it starts to whistle, the steam escaping from the spout makes you worry the whole top is going to come off.
This is a powerful book.
I should mention that I read the last 300 pages of it in about two and a half hours. It was due at the library that day, and there was a hold on it, so I couldn’t renew it. I didn’t want to keep it an extra day if I could possibly avoid it—the fine isn’t that bad, but it’s bad karma. Someone else really wants to read the book, so why should I delay them?
Fortunately I wasn’t working that morning, so I had the time to sit with a cup of tea and finish the book. Reading so much of it in a short duration wasn’t ideal—as I said above, this is a slow boil of a story, and you need time to take it in and mull it over. Nevertheless, I’m still so satisfied, both by the story itself and Beukes’ evident talent.
This novel reaffirms characterization as one of Beukes’ core strengths. Broken Monsters just has character, full stop. I so seldom visualize while I’m reading; to me, it is just words on a page. But when I read this, I could almost picture the scenes in my mind’s eye. The characters were just that real, that believable, that I could nearly turn this book into a movie in my head. That’s exciting for me.
I could go on at length about each of the characters. I could talk about the linoleum-like texture of Gabbie’s life, how Beukes expertly portrays the worn-out, scrubbed-over palimpsest of her feelings about police work and love and marriage and motherhood. I could talk about the brutal earnestness of TK, and how he leads a life I’ll never really understand given my privileged upbringing. I could even, if I really pushed myself, find some things to say about Jono, the shiftless would-be writer who has come to Detroit to discover his own fame. (I didn’t like him that much, which is not to say he’s a poorly realized character.)
But the two characters who really caught me were Layla and Cas.
Layla and Cas are incidental, in many ways, to the ostensible main plot. Layla ends up playing a pivotal role in the climax and resolution. But for the most part, she exists simply as the daughter of Gabriella Versado. Her life is a window on what Gabbie has to deal with as a cop in Detroit. And it’s also so much more.
Beukes nails the depiction of two teenaged girls in the second decade of the twenty-first century. The portrayal of their effortless code-switching, social media savvy, and paradoxical mixture of maturity and naivety was what kept me hooked on the first part of Broken Monsters while the mystery was slow to start. Cas’ announcement that they are going catfishing brought a smile to my lips. It’s very easy to portray teenagers stereotypically; Beukes manages to avoid exaggerating the tropes but still use them when appropriate.
While Layla and Cas don’t initially play a big role in the mystery behind Broken Monsters, I would argue that they are essential to the novel’s main theme—or at least, the theme I took away.
I love the last line of this book: “This is the way the world is now. Everything is public. You have to find other people who understand. You have to find a way to live with it.”
The revelation in the middle of the book, Cas’ big secret, and the magical realism moments of the climax, are arrows through the heart of Broken Monsters and a bullseye on the above. In this age of spectacle, the medium is the message, and the message is “Share! Share! Share!”
Beukes turns a murder mystery set in the husk of Detroit into a beautiful exploration of our post-privacy age. How do we conduct ourselves in a world where everything about us is potentially out there, searchable, findable? How do we grow up? How do we explain the things we can’t explain, and live with the things we can’t unwatch?
The book has no answers for this. I just came away with the certainty that Beukes gets it. And she expresses it in a deep, moving, thoughtful way. Layla and Cas have a subjectivity and a vocabulary to experience this in a way the older characters can’t necessarily. And they aren’t even done growing—what will their world be like in ten more years?
That’s the real issue with shows like CSI: Cyber. We are right to be wary of the ways the Internet can be used for crime. But the people who make those shows either don’t understand, or don’t care, about how the nuances influence our perception of this medium. It’s not just a generational thing—there are plenty of people twice my age who get it. Rather, it’s an experiential one. You have to inhabit this liminal space between offline and online long enough, regularly enough, authentically enough, in order to develop a sense of what it means and what it bodes for our futures.
Broken Monsters is a story about the way passion is infectious. Passion, so wholly neutral in its intensity, so capable of inspiring good and bad and great and catastrophically awful. This is a novel about bad things happening because we are human, and the contradiction of our condition is that our beauty is often terrible.
And this is why we can’t have nice things.