Sunday, the beginning of my week off at the end of the summer. What better way to start it off than with a golden oldie? As with many authors, I’ve been gradually collecting any Samuel R. Delany books that show up at the used bookstore in town, and I haven’t read any for a while. So I picked up The Fall of the Towers, an omnibus of a trilogy that Delany wrote in his early twenties. This is far from “peak Delany” and nowhere near as good as Triton or, my personal fave, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand. Yet precursors of the themes and motifs he explores more confidently and deeply in those books show up in this trilogy … and it’s a lot of fun. This is about as “beach read” as SF can get while still being thinky, and that is a tough balance to achieve.

The Fall of the Towers takes place in the empire of Toromon. Five hundred years after the Great Fire, Toromon is the only known human habitation left on Earth. It’s isolated from the rest of the planet by impassable radiation belts. There is an uneven distribution of technology, with an aristocracy in control but a merchant class starting to rival the aristocrats. Interestingly, as Toromon reclaims the technological innovations of its ancestors, its constrained economy can’t keep up. In the face of these pressures, some people in power think it’s best for Toromon to go to war—so they conjure up an enemy “beyond the barrier” and get very creative when it comes to fighting this false war.

Delany’s cast is as interesting as it is diverse. Jon Koshar, our initial protagonist, is a somewhat stereotypical masculine hero, but this characterization is buoyed by the way he changes and relies on his allies. These include two prominent women: Petra, a Duchess far more capable than the King of Toron and mastermind of a scheme to kidnap the heir apparent so he’ll grow up in a more formative environment; and Clea, an up-and-coming brilliant young mathematician, who is also Jon’s sister. There’s also Arkor, a member of the forest giants, a race of humanity mutated by exposure to radiation in such a way that they are taller, stronger, and occasionally telepathic. Together, these people must fight off the “Lord of the Flames”, a non-corporeal being from another universe essentially causing trouble and destabilizing Toromonian society. Although they get a little assistance from the “Triple Being” (another non-corporeal but apparently more benevolent entity, and no, I didn’t miss the Christian symbolism to all this) to root out the Lord of the Flames, they are largely on their own when it comes to addressing the social problems its visit has amplified.

I want to say that reading this reminds me of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon and all the other zany, improbable, “high fantasy in space” productions of the 1940s and 1950s. Certainly this is a book heavily influenced by the zeitgeist of late 1950s science fiction: the spectre of atomic apocalypse, near-magical appliances and labour-saving devices, but with computers still envisioned as bulky, specialized equipment. There is an element of adventure and romance to this book, but by and large it’s social commentary.

Out of the Dead City depicts a corrupt aristocracy high on itself in the days before a war. The rulers on Toron have little concern for the lower classes or the people who live on the mainland. To the masterminds behind the war, these people are simply statistics: too many here, not enough there, production up or down in different places. There is a sense of calculation to this, emphasized more in The Towers of Toron, where Jon et al finally reveal the war as a sham. Yet even once they find themselves in a position of effecting meaningful change in Toromon, they are somewhat hesitant.

Thus, Delany defies the traditional hero narrative in which an exiled prince shows up, takes the throne, and it’s suddenly the good old days. It is much harder than that. Stopping the war pretty much has the opposite effect from what was intended, as the method that our protagonists use also gives everyone a brief glimpse of the horrible disconnection we suffer from each other. City of a Thousand Suns, probably the weakest of the three novels in terms of plot and writing both, features an entire empire basically attempting to recover from one hell of a collective hangover. As we revisit characters seen (or even just mentioned) in the first two novels, the protagonists have to stop the Lord of the Flames one last time, even as an evil computer threatens the safety of Toron.

If it sounds a bit hokey, that’s because it is. Lots of this book is pure, grade A cheese. The Lord of the Flames/Triple Being plot forms a convenient narrative thread throughout the novels, but it’s really just an excuse to bring these disparate characters together. Entirely too-contrived coincidences show how minor characters’ lives keep intersecting the main narrative. Some of this might be Delany trying to be clever, but I think mostly it’s a way to frame The Fall of the Towers as a kind of science-fiction fairytale or quest story. There’s just the tiniest resemblance to The Dying Earth here—I have no idea if that’s intentional or not, but that’s probably the closest comparison I can come to. This is a type of science fiction that doesn’t so much eschew magic as relabel it into “science” without actually making it scientific; this is a book that comes from a time before marketing decided to cleave SF&F into “science fiction” and “fantasy”. Although there have always been authors who straddled, moved between, or reunited these genres on their own, it is nice to see a book that is a product of a time when this was more common and conceivable.

The Fall of the Towers, then, is fun because of its age and its context. It has a lot of interesting but perhaps not groundbreaking thoughts on war and social order and life—the kind of grandiose stuff you’d write about if you’re a smart(ass) twenty-something like Samuel R. Delany was when he wrote this. I wouldn’t recommend you rush out to find a copy any time soon, but if you happen to see one lying around one day and need something to read, I think you might just like it.

Oh, I liked Graceling, but I want to like it a whole lot more. I want to like … perform surgery on this book to remove a bunch of stuff and graft new limbs to it in a kind of Frankensteiny horror show way and then it would be so much better. Kristin Cashore has an interesting idea here and provides all the requisite basics, but she never quite takes the story or the characters far enough. Unlike The Crown’s Game, where I struggled to identify what it was that made me enjoy the book so much, I know exactly why I liked Graceling. Yet there’s also just so many flaws screaming out to be fixed. Instead of a “love it or hate it” book, there’s plenty of room on either end, or in my case, right in the middle in a puddle of ambivalence.

Katsa is an eponymous “graceling”, so called because she has a Grace. You can have a Grace for really mundane things, like tree-climbing, or cooking. In Katsa’s case the Grace is supposedly for killing/fighting, but we eventually learn it’s actually survival. More on that later. So Graces are basically like having an uber-talent. While you think that would make you popular, six of the seven kingdoms (hmm, seven kingdoms … where have I heard that one before?) treat gracelings like royal chattel. If you have a “useful” Grace, like Katsa’s, you’re little better than an indentured servant to the king. If you have a boring Grace, you’re shunned because your two eyes are different colours (and I guess that’s … bad?).

Much of your opinion of the story is going to depend on Katsa, and she is a difficult protagonist to like. She acts like a wild thing at times, impulsive and rude and violent at the slightest of troubles. There’s good reason for this, mind you—as soon as her uncle, King Randa, learned of her Grace at the tender age of eight, he locked her up and started treating her like a prized hound instead of, you know, an actual person or anything. Randa is not a very nice character, and the beginning of Katsa’s awakening is the realization that he derives a lot of his power from her. When she refuses to carry out his orders, she turns the tables and reclaims her power for herself.

There’s something so compelling about this act of seizing one’s autonomy, particularly for a female character. Cashore charts Katsa’s growth from obedient, if reluctant, assassin and thug into someone more independent, someone who allows herself to have romantic feelings and sexual desires, someone who avoids killing or hurting people unless it’s strictly necessary. This transformation is powerful, and I like the way Cashore pulls it off.

Much to my surprise, I also enjoyed the romance element! The back of the book features a blurb from the LA Times promising “a knee-weakening romance that easily rivals that of Twilight” and I almost wanted to vomit, because Twilight does not feature a romance I want any part of. Fortunately, instead of the incredible power imbalance of “oh hey I’m a couple hundred years older than you and I watch you when you sleep and, oops, I knocked you up with a vampire baby so now I’m going to make you a vampire, you down for that?” it’s more like “oh wow, both these characters have skills the other one doesn’t have and they can hold their own with each other in fights physical and verbal”. This romance is not a rival to Twilight’s: it is downright better and healthier than Twilight’s.

Furthermore, I really have to hand it to Cashore for portraying a romantic relationship that doesn’t end in marriage. If marriage is what you and your partner want, then go for it; I’m not trying to say that all marriage is bad. But it’s unfortunate that a great deal of romance, particularly romance in these high fantasy kind of stories, sees marriage as the ultimate destination for pairings. I was worried that Katsa’s insistence on not marrying would mean either that Po has to die or she will have to change. Instead, we get Po’s smug little reminder to Katsa that, hey, they could totally be lovers. Katsa’s steadfast rejection of marriage and children sends a strong signal to the reader that it is OK for a woman to be interested in other things—not just to like things in addition to wanting babies, but to not want babies at all, ever.

As much as I enjoyed Katsa’s growth, however, other aspects of her characterization are not so good. For instance, she is quite overpowered. The revelation that her Grace is survival rather than killing is powerful, for it totally reverses Katsa’s perspective on who she is: her power is life, not death. I love that part of it. And while I can appreciate the tenacity it takes to single-handedly get a child through an inhospitable mountain pass in the dead of winter, I’m not sure Cashore has Katsa face any real challenges in this book. Even Leck, who in his first encounter bests Katsa so much that she basically forgets the whole thing and we have to learn about it from Po, proves pretty easy to dispatch. (This book is basically a high fantasy version of Jessica Jones, which I love in some respects, but David Tennant plays a much more interesting villain than whoever is playing Leck here.) Pretty much everyone likes Katsa, too, despite the fact we keep being told that no one likes her. She has a ton of friends, and everyone she meets falls for her! Katsa verges upon being, if she is not outright, a Mary Sue, and that undermines a lot of the significance her character has.

In much the same way, I wish Cashore had spent more time examining Katsa’s twisted adolescence and her abuse at the hands of Randa. He doesn’t feature in too many scenes here, though, and he is fairly flat and one-note in each of his appearances. We get the sense that Randa does not appreciate Katsa as a person or think her very intelligent; he just wants her to follow orders and hurt people who owe him fealty and money. One of the problems with abuse, however, is that even once one leaves their abuser, the effects of that abuse don’t just go away. Katsa’s transformation and recovery are rather shallow.

This lack of depth proves to be Graceling’s chief deficit, and it crops up elsewhere. Consider the setting: five of the kingdoms are called Nander, Estill, Sunder, Wester, and Middluns. I’ll let you guess where they are in relation to each other, once you finish rolling your eyes at the lack of originality. Oh wait, I forgot about a sixth kingdom called Monsea. You’ll never guess which terrains define its borders! Cashore doesn’t waste much of the budget on establishing a unique setting; it’s pretty much your cookiecutter fantasy setting (TVTropes), complete with helpful inns popping up everywhere. The kings tend to be corrupt and bickering, except when they are outright evil (like Leck) or uncharacteristically wise and beneficent (like Ror). Subtlety and shades of grey there are not. The thing is, Graceling is a long book! There should have been plenty of room to explore these things, flesh out the setting, properly deal with Katsa’s past. Instead most of these pages are taken up by detailed descriptions of going from one place to another.

I guess if I wanted to resolve my ambivalence I might try to sum up Graceling this way: it’s a dull fantasy novel but a good story. I don’t think it has universal appeal or is a “must read”, but I like what Cashore attempts to do here, with varying degrees of success. I don’t know if I’ll seek out the other two books in the series (the second is a prequel, the third a sequel), but we’ll see.

The same friend who lent me Decoded asked me if I wanted to borrow Men Explain Things to Me, which is great, because it has been on my list for a while now. When I went over to her house, she handed me the book. A mutual friend who was there and only in town until early the next week then said, “Can you read it really quickly so I can have it?” So I read it all the next day—I know I didn’t have to read it quite that fast, but we were meeting up again the day after that, so it seemed convenient. Nevertheless, I don’t recommend downing this book in one go: at under 200 pages it is a slim volume indeed, but Rebecca Solnit packs a lot of heavy stuff in here. Plus, although there is a common theme throughout the essays, they are by and large unrelated. It’s worthwhile taking some time to digesting each one before you move on.

But I’ve never been great at taking my advice, so let’s do this thing.

The first essay, titled the same as this book, is clever and funny in a facepalming sort of way, and it’s easy to understand why it went viral when Solnit first published it. Obviously, as a man, I don’t experience mansplaining (to use the term Solnit herself did not coin and actually rather dislikes, sorry not sorry) the way women do—indeed, I am probably more often than I’d care to admit on the other side of that exchange. But at least I can admit that, whereas there are so many men out there who, like the chateau-owning New York Times Book Review–reading mansplainer of Solnit’s essay, don’t understand what they’re doing or why it’s so pernicious.

And then you have people, men and women both, who like to criticize conversation about this issue by pointing out that there are “more important problems” we should be dealing with, like rape and domestic violence and oppression of women the world over. Why are we wasting our words on mansplainers, they say, when we should be going after murderers? So I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Solnit follows the first chapter with an essay on the frequency of rape in the United States. It is a harrowing chapter, quite a bit darker and more statistics driven than Solnit’s opening, levity-fuelled number. It’s almost like how in that first episode of Game of Thrones, you get so distracted enjoying Mark Addy that you are almost lulled into a false sense of security before holy shit the brother and sister are having sex and then he pushes a kid out the window. But as the story unfolds further, we quickly see that one of these things is related to the other—the problems afflicting the Iron Throne are too knotty to separate neatly into “important” and “not important”, and so too it is with the problems affecting women.

As Solnit’s subsequent essays demonstrate, one of the factors in women’s ongoing oppression is how little men listen to them. Men often don’t listen to women when they speak up about rape; the courts, largely dominated and presided over by men, don’t support victims, largely female, and even when they do, those victims have to run a gauntlet of vitriolic public opinion even before the case makes it to trial. So we can’t discuss an “important” issue, like rape, without talking about mansplaining, because the latter is why the former can continue unchecked.

Solnit walks a careful tightrope between optimism and frustration. As a historian she likely takes a broader view than others might; she has a great awareness of the cultural shifts that have occurred over the past few centuries. It’s interesting to see her so excited about, for example, the Strauss-Kahn case—and then to see that excitement tempered by a postscript added in this addition where she talks about the criminal charges being dismissed. The final essay of the book attempts to reminds us that feminism and its related struggles for equity and liberation is a long, gradual journey. According to Solnit, it is possible for us to be disappointed by the current state of affairs even if we’re happy with the gains we have made.

I don’t know if I share quite the same mixture of optimism she does. I don’t know if that’s because I’m not as familiar with history as her, or if it’s an age thing, or what the reasons might be. I have some measure of optimism: like Solnit, I am heartened and encouraged by the feminist voices (both male, female, or otherwise) who speak up and speak out against specific injustices, online or offline. Last week when a terrible pick-up artist website published an article about “how to talk to a woman wearing headphones”, multiple unrelated people I follow on Twitter were posting about it and tearing into it within minutes of each other. There is a heady sense of “you are not alone” in the conversation now.

Yet while reading Solnit’s essays, I couldn’t help but be struck by how easy it is to take her 2012, 2013 specifics and replace them with events from the past year. Strike “Dominique Strauss-Khan” and put in “Roger Ailes”. Replace the Steubenville case with Stanford’s Brock Turner, who has been released from prison 3 months into his 6 month sentence (he’s just such a nice boy, dontchaknow). Whatever gains we might or might not be making long term, it seems that, short term, the cycle continues.

Of all the essays here, “In Praise of the Threat: What Marriage Equality Really Means” is the one I liked most. That might be because my friend and I talked about our views on marriage, so the topic is still fresh in my mind. But I also like how Solnit essentially cuts through the smokescreen and straw people surrounding the conservative position on the subject and says, “Y’all want men to be men and women to be women (i.e., less than men) and you should just say so.” I’m a little terrified that some people (Michelle Bachmann, back in 2008, and now Donald Trump and his followers in 2016) appear to have taken her up on this: recently, the trend has been towards thinner- and thinner-veiled misogynistic rhetoric. The drainpipe, sewer type posts that you only used to find on 4chan or, you know, any woman’s Twitter mentions are now par for the course in the news, and it’s very unfortunate. Nevertheless, the essay itself is a thoughtful examination that asks us to question the fundamental premises of a social institution like marriage, and I love being asked to do stuff like that.

I was far less enamoured with “Woolf’s Darkness: Embracing the Inexplicable”. While I fully admit I need to read more Virginia Woolf, I had trouble following this particular essay’s point. I found it much less focused or coherent than the other chapters in this book—or at least, I should say, one’s comprehension and enjoyment of this chapter probably needs a little more knowledge of Woolf and Susan Sontag than I have.

Your mileage with these essays will vary. Men Explain Things to Me is interesting and certainly has its high points. Solnit writes persuasively and passionately. Yet it treads a lot of ground that others have covered, often better, and I find that I don’t appreciate the form—as a collection of nine disconnected essays—as much as I would a longer, more thorough book that perhaps restricts itself to fewer topics. Like I said at the beginning of the review, this isn’t a book I’d recommend reading in one sitting—yet if you’re going to read something in multiple sittings, why not find something a little meatier? At the end of the day, Men Explain Things to Me is brilliant in a literary kind of way but the essays themselves are of uneven quality when it comes to the ideas and arguments within.

This is one of those rare instances where I feel a book’s cover copy gives away too much about the plot. Other than that, Mogworld is a lot of fun if you’re a fan of MMOs, or D&D-style fantasy adventure games, or spoofs of the fantasy genre in general. Yahtzee Croshaw brings his renowned wit to the world of novels, and while I miss the crudely-drawn stick-like figures against a yellow background, there’s plenty of entertainment to be had here. As with many stories like it, Mogworld’s humour is in the details.

Jim is a reluctant hero, an antihero, who was a nobody when he was alive and who has been dead for sixty or so years. After dying unheroically at the second- (third-?) rate magic school he attended, Jim gets resurrected by a discount dark lord who goes by the name of Dreadgrave. And this is where the fun really begins. Dreadgrave works some impressive magic to reanimate all these corpses, but then they turn around and have free will. So, in a sketch that reminds me a little of Monty Python, he actually has to offer them, you know, payment and benefits and reasonable working conditions! So Jim ends up working in Dreadgrave’s dungeons, going after the surprisingly numerous adventurers who attempt to infiltrate Dreadgrave’s fortress. But matters take an even more sinister turn, and as Croshaw draws back the curtain on Jim’s reality, we find out more about the hint of an “AI” as promised on the back cover.

This is probably one of the more refreshing takes on NPCs’ perspectives on their existence in a game world. Attempts to personify or imagine these types of worlds tend have variable success. It’s so tempting to play fast-and-loose with the tropes, to poke fun at everything, until you’ve broken down the fourth wall so much that the floor starts giving away too. Croshaw neatly dances around this problem by disassembling that fourth wall brick-by-brick. Spoilers on the back cover aside, even if you figure out the nature of Jim’s universe early on, Croshaw teases out Jim’s personal realization for as long as possible. Heck, Barry finds out first—and I love how he interprets it as a “Truth” that he must spread to others.

Indeed, the multiple layers of conflicts in Mogworld help to make it a much more entertaining novel than its premise or writing first suggest. First there’s Jim’s personal quest to be “deleted”, because he just wants to die, for good. That might sound macabre and nihilistic, and it kind of is, but Jim’s habit of acting heroically despite claiming not to be a hero balances it out. Then we have the various antagonists Jim runs up against, for better or for worse, including Barry and his minions. These characters almost always out-match Jim in the power department; their weakness lies in an inability to adapt to constantly changing circumstances. Jim, by contrast, pretty much just rolls with everything. Finally, the overarching meta-conflict among the game developers, personified in game by the appearances of Simon and Dub and their chosen messiahs of Barry and Jim, respectively, is a lot of fun. Simon is the kind of personality we’ve all worked with at some point in our lives, and it’s interesting in a trainwreck kind of way to watch him totally sink Mogworld because of his ego.

I read this book towards the end of a week off from work, and it was a good choice. It is light, fast-paced, and very, very funny. But there are opportunities to dig deeper if that’s your thing; Jim’s whole story arc is very existentialist. Nevertheless, I do think Croshaw misses some opportunities to do even more here. The romance, or lack thereof, between Jim and Meryl is very unsatisfying—not because of Jim’s ambivalence but rather because I’m not entirely sure why Meryl is there, except to react to what Jim does. Indeed, pretty much every other character in the book exists purely as a plot device, literally showing up exactly when Jim needs them and then being written out, temporarily, until they get needed again. Although these kinds of cosmic coincidences make for very fun reading, they also have the effect of transforming Mogworld into a Swiss cheese block of plot holes and contrivances.

In other words, Mogworld is good, and if you think you’re going to like it, you will probably like it. Like many self-aware and meta-fictional jaunts, however, it is very much a patchwork with visible seams, and while Croshaw is a fun and talented writer, sometimes he tries to pack in one too many jokes. I had a great time, not sure if I’ll pick up his other novels though.

There is a school of thought rising in popularity which wants coding to become a mandatory subject in schools. I have some thoughts on this, but that is neither here nor there for this review. Rather, it’s just interesting that for all the talk of teaching kids to code because it will lead to “better jobs”, there isn’t much emphasis on teaching about the way Big Data is redefining our lives. From data mining to algorithms to the much-vaunted buzzword of 2015, the “blockchain” (blech), the explosion of computational capacity in the last two decades is literally changing the world, and we don’t talk enough about it. Oh, you see the headlines, the surface tech news. But unless a Snowden shows up and drops a payload of documents, it doesn’t make much of a ripple. And even these ripples subside.

Data Love: The Seduction and Betrayal of Digital Technologies is a very academic examination of the consequences of our society’s increasing dependence upon and fascination with data collection and analysis. Roberto Simanowski points out the tension inherent in this fascination: more data can help us be more efficient, make societies better—but it comes at the cost of privacy and security, and it is not always a neutral force.

I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley and the publisher, Columbia University Press. The book appears to have been previously published in German two years ago but came out last week in this English edition. This would explain why I had a hard time getting through it, I think: the writing definitely sounds like it has been translated into English. Academic texts can be dry enough in one’s native tongue; translated texts can be even harder to grok sometimes.

And to be fair, I think I was anticipating something less academic and more pop culture-y, and that’s on me for not reading the description more carefully to pick out choice words like “philosophical”. So I went into Data Love expecting something on the order of The Numerati and instead got something closer to Reason, Faith, and Revolution (and we all know how that turned out).

Whatever the reasons, however, I’m still not fond of Data Love as an academic text. The organization is a mess. Simanowski jumps from topic to topic seemingly at random; I cannot for the life of me discern any governing thread or theme running through the book or any semblance of purpose to the chapters. This goes beyond being lost in translation (which only explains issues on a sentence/paragraph level) into being lost, period (at a chapter level). I’d finish a chapter, sit back, and go, “Wait, what did I learn from this?” Heaven forfend I ever had to read this as part of a philosophy course! Simanowski knows his stuff, cites people I’ve heard of (like Evgeny Morozov, that delightful Internet curmudgeon). Having gone to set it down on the page, however, he does not successfully organize his thoughts into coherent, easily summarized points.

So I gave up. I’m trying to do that more often these days.

Look, this is not a fatally flawed book. The subject matter is of interest to me, obviously, and I think if one is in the appropriate mood and one’s mind properly girded for an intense, introspective look down the mined rabbit hole of translated philosophy texts, then Data Love could be good. Don’t take my DNF as damning critique, but do take it as a warning that you can’t just jump into this one on a whim and expect to love it.

I had to dive into the children’s section of my library to get this one. I haven’t been in there for ages. There were short people around! And all the shelves are much shorter! Still, it was worth it. The Story of Cirrus Flux is an interesting attempt to set a children’s adventure novel in Georgian Britain. Matthew Skelton’s breadth of imagination makes for some entertaining characters and rambunctious action scenes. Nevertheless, the plotting is underwhelming and frayed at the edges, and I was left unsatisfied. While I think some people will get a lot from this book, you have to be more willing than I am to overlook its flaws.

Cirrus Flux is an orphan, and everyone seems to be after him. He doesn’t know why—indeed, he’s only clued in when another orphan, Pandora, lets him know that her new mistress is up to no good. So Cirrus has to go one the run, somewhat clumsily, with a sphere left as a keepsake at the orphanage by his father. This would theoretically lead someone to the Breath of God, a mystical force with unimaginable power.

If that seems a little vague to you, it is.

The novel takes a bit of time to get going. I like how different people keep showing up at the orphanage asking for Cirrus. Yet Skelton spends more time initially developing Pandora. That’s not a bad thing—I liked Pandora—except that the book is very explicitly called The Story of Cirrus Flux. Indeed, a cynical person might think the title is a disingenuous attempt to get boys interested in a book that has a girl as arguably a main protagonist. Because while Cirrus certainly sees some action at the end of the book, some of the most interesting and difficult experiences are Pandora’s.

In between these present-day moments, Skelton gives us flashbacks to when James Flux first discovers, and then later in life, retrieves, some of the Breath of God. Again, these are a great idea and could have been super interesting, but they don’t seem all that particularly well done. Skelton only gives us a vague understanding of what’s happening in these scenes: it’s not entirely clear who is running these expeditions or what the stakes are. I know that children’s novels aren’t going to have the same type or amount of depth and background exposition that an adult story might have, but it’s all just very vague. Who are the good guys and bad guys in all of this?

Fortunately, the book picks up in its final act. Cirrus finds an old friend of his, there is plenty of betrayal and danger, and Pandora has to help save the day. There is a chase sequence, some electrifying, and a phoenix-like bird. Skelton has a talent for evoking a sense of wonder, and I couldn’t help but imagine this book as a miniseries. I think it could be really successful, and the miniseries format would allow a little more time to explore things that Skelton elides here.

The Story of Cirrus Flux will probably delight its younger audience. I don’t regret reading it, but I do think my mindset is a little too critical for it. I might have thoroughly enjoyed this adventure novel as a kid, but I didn’t read it then, so I don’t have the fond memories of it now. Next time I hit up the children’s section probably won’t be until I finally get around to re-reading Anne of Green Gables.

A moving, sometimes surprising story that examines the fallibility present in all of us as individuals, Before We Visit the Goddess is one of the briefest multi-generational tales I’ve ever tackled. Indeed, initially I was sceptical that Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni could tell three women’s stories in just over 200 pages. Fall On Your Knees, probably my gold standard for multi-generational storytelling, clocks in at twice that length. Yet I had faith in CBD’s writing—I cannot believe it has been six years since I read The Palace of Illusions. I recognized her name and her style as soon as I saw this book on the library’s New Books shelf, and I knew I had to get it.

CBD accomplishes the multi-generational feat through narrative and stylistic choices that won’t work for everyone. This is a novel that jumps around in time a lot. Now, I’m a fan of straightforward, linear storytelling for the most part, with perhaps the occasional flashback for good expository and dramatic effect. So consider that when I compliment this novel on its disjointed narrative. You might almost say that CBD structures the story around the development of theme rather than plot—to say that it has an overall plot at all might be inaccurate—and while this can go horrendously wrong, I think it works very well here. The result is an intense study of three characters and the balancing act between the choices they make and the circumstances their lives thrust them into.

It’s intriguing to see CBD tease out the similarities among the three women. Sabitri, Bela, and Tara are all stubborn and driven to achieve their own goals. Each is intelligent and passionate about what interests her. Each chafes at the restrictions that constrain her, owing to her gender and class and race, within her time period. Although these women do not get along with each other, do not often see eye-to-eye regarding each other’s beliefs and decisions, they do so from a position of their own making. By showing us each woman’s experiences and crises, CBD helps us to understand why each one feels the way she does and judges the others accordingly.

So in this way, Before We Visit the Goddess reminds us that each person has their own story. That might seem obvious, especially when it comes to fictional characters, but I think it’s an easy fact for us to forget in daily life. How many of us hastily judge our parents, or coworkers, especially those who are older than us or who come from very different backgrounds? We smirk at their quaint ideas, frown at their socially-awkward or politically incorrect statements. We occasionally lack empathy, not because we are broken or defective, but simply because we are worn out by the challenges of our own lives. So it behoves us to stop, to think before we act or speak, to consider why someone else is acting the way they are. Conduct, rational or irrational, is typically the consequence of cumulative experiences. And while that doesn’t excuse bad conduct, it does shed light onto why we don’t always get along.

And so CBD shows us why empathy is so important. With each section, I felt sympathy for each of the women’s struggles. I saw how hard it was for Sabitri to build her business from the ground up following her husband’s death, the way she had to wrap herself in armour and refuse to let herself love or be too vulnerable. I saw how Bela, resentful of Sabitri’s inattentiveness, allowed herself to become infatuated with a man who promised more than he was able to give. Watching Bela’s friendship with Kenneth, and the way the two of them judge and misjudge each other, was easily one of my favourite parts of the book. I also enjoyed seeing Tara confront Bela on the eve of the latter’s move to an assisted living facility, that climactic discovery of the letter from Sabitri, and the tears and talk that resulted.

The ending of Before the Goddess is not much of an ending, as one might expect given the narrative’s non-linear structure. Nevertheless, the final scenes are at least fulfilling. We get a confrontation, and we get explanations as well as recriminations. It’s a little bit soapy, I suppose, but only in a good way. Like I said earlier, I don’t always—maybe seldom—like novels with this kind of structure, but CBD pulls it off. It’s a grand demonstration that you don’t need hundreds of pages of expositions and scenes in order to deliver character development; if you choose just the right moments, you can let the reader fill in the blanks.

At this point in the Animorphs series, the team has been fighting the Yeerks long enough that each of them must come to terms with how this war is changing them. The Prophecy is Cassie’s turn, as she suddenly finds herself riding shotgun with the personality of Aldrea (remember her from The Hork-Bajir Chronicles?). The Animorphs need Aldrea’s personality to help them retrieve a cache of weapons on the Hork-Bajir homeworld. With it, the last Arn can arm a new generation of cloned Hork-Bajir who can rise up and retake their planet. There is something so strategic in the way the Animorphs agree to help in this mission, not just because helping the Hork-Bajir is the right thing to do, but because it would be a distraction for the Yeerks and might divert resources away from Earth. Very calculating.

Aldrea’.s presence in Cassie’s mind reminds me of #19: The Departure, where Cassie is temporarily host to a Yeerk. There is, of course, an intentional parallel between Aldrea’s presence and the Yeerks: Aldrea can seize control of Cassie’s body, although Cassie has at least some capacity to wrest back that control, which is not the case when a Yeerk infests you. There is something very ironic to having an Andalite mind in control of one’s body in this way, however. Applegate and Metz capitalize on the tension of whether Aldrea will go willingly once the mission is over. I like the subterfuge that Aldrea and the Animorphs commit, exploiting this tension, to ensure that Toby returns to Earth instead of staying to lead the new Hork-Bajir.

On one level, it might seems surprising that such a big adventure takes place here, instead of in a Megamorphs instalment. The Animorphs visit the Hork-Bajir homeworld! This should be a big deal! There are explosions and chase sequences and stuff! Most of that gets sidelined, though—and it’s better that way. This book works because it’s not about the fight or the struggle. Instead, it’s about how to conduct yourself when you don’t want to fight. Aldrea chooses Cassie not because she is weaker and therefore easier to control, as Cassie first surmises, but because Cassie is most similar to her: cool and collected, intelligent and compassionate, but with an inner wellspring of strength. For all her fighting, Aldrea is not the gung-ho warrior that Rachel is. She and Cassie share the trait of not really wanting to be in this fight but having no choice in the matter.

Aldrea has to struggle with losing her beloved Dak, and that grief runs through this entire book. It’s mirrored and amplified by the way Cassie casually addresses her feelings for Jake at the beginning, prior to the start of the adventure. I love how the Animorphs’ various relationships are intensifying at this point in the series. While the ongoing fight makes it difficult for them to explore these feelings and associations in ways they might like, it’s nice we’re seeing some acknowledgement of the situation. Aldrea and Dak’s ending, if you will, is a portent (dare I say, a prophecy?) of how Jake and Cassie could end up: torn asunder in the fighting, one or both wounded or killed and thereby snatched away from the other. It’s a reminder that life is unfair, that the universe is uncaring, that good people do not always get happy endings.

This is another very strong book in the series in a sequence of strong books. The Animorphs (both group and series) have come so far. Whereas the earliest books necessarily deal with more localized problems—aliens in your high school, kidnapping your family, etc.—these books are addressing far larger issues. The Animorphs are literally helping an entire species to rebuild! That’s huge! It lends credence to the meddling of the Ellimist and Crayak earlier (and later) in the series: despite being five human beings from a backwater of the galaxy, the Animorphs do get around and have remarkable influence on events. As The Prophecy explores, however, these events take a toll on the Animorphs themselves. How much longer can Cassie continue her cognitive dissonance of compassionate warrior before something has to go?

Find out … well, not next time. Next time Marco has a much more important mission: his Dad must not get laid!

My reviews of Animorphs:
← #33: The Illusion | #35: The Proposal →

The feedback cycle that exists between technology and society is an interesting one. I took a Philosophy of Science course in university, and one of our two textbooks discussed the “evolution” of technology and whether it is accurate to say that certain technological innovations are inevitable consequences of previous ones. While I agreed with the book’s author when he dismisses technological development as deterministic, it is so interesting to see how a society’s response to technology drives further development of related technologies. This is a key idea in Technocreep, where Thomas P. Keenan looks at how the fact that digital technology is getting exponentially faster, smaller, and cheaper influences the ways in which we use it.

First off, I love that Keenan is Canadian and that he references a lot of Canadian examples in this book. Although I am accustomed to wading through examples of how something affects the United States, it is refreshing to see the names of Canadian politicians or public servants show up in a book like this. (Don’t worry, Americans, he also mentions the US a couple of times, so you won’t feel too left out!) Keenan himself seems like a good figure to write a book like this: he has extensive computer science experience since back in the 1970s when smaller computers were making the rounds on university campuses. This makes for more “savvy” approach than someone who is more of a journalist and less of a programmer or computer expert might take.

Despite these expert credentials, however, Keenan keeps the book quite accessible. This is the kind of technology book that anyone can read. He doesn’t use many buzzwords, and those he does use, he defines. There are some beefy endnotes too (though no index, sadly), so readers who like further reading will be able to track down all the contemporary references and happenings that he mentions.

To summarize the topics Keenan covers here: he’s basically outlining how advances in hardware and software allow organizations to observe, track, and store data about people more efficiently and cost-effectively. This has many consequences for individuals and for businesses. For us, it means that we have less control over what corporations and governments know about us (this is a dimension of, though not the entirety of, privacy). For businesses, it means there is an economic incentive to collect and act on this data, because if they don’t, they might fall behind. Personalized everything is the logical endpoint of an individualist technocratic capitalism.

Keenan is not serving us up pipe dreams or science fiction, however. He does cite futurists like Kurzweil on occasion (but with an adequate degree of skepticism, I would submit). For the most part, though, each chapter focuses on what organizations can do right now with technology, and what that means they might be able to do in the near future. He delves into the consequences, and points us in the direction of the right questions to ask. For example, if companies like Facebook and Google are developing better and better facial recognition, what does this mean for our privacy? Keenan reminds us that even if these companies promise not to misuse the data (hah), governments could still compel them to turn it over. In the chapter “Physible Creep”, Keenan asks us to consider how 3D printing of illicit objects, such as guns, might alter our society. People have already 3D printed guns—the plans can be found online—and while such items aren’t yet commonplace, 3D printers themselves are more common. Since this book was published, my local library has one! (I suspect they won’t let me print a firearm, thankfully.)

Perhaps my key takeaway from Technocreep is this: the rise of digital makes technology increasingly inscrutable to newcomers and laypeople. In his preface, Keenan mentions the IBM 1620 computer that set him on this journey into computer science. Back in those days, programming and hacking on such devices could be excruciating and unforgivable (or so I understand, never having done it), but the barrier to entry was also fairly low. These days, the “stack” just seems so darn intimidating. Personally, my desire to program and code for the web has never been lower. I’m really disheartened by all the hoops we’re supposed to jump through these days. And now I look at children and teens who might be interested in taking up coding, and I wonder what they will see.

Digital makes our technology opaque to us. If your machine wasn’t working, you used to be able to take it apart. You might be able to fix it yourself, or maybe you knew someone who could fix it on the cheap. These days, DRM means that your car or your tractor can often only be fixed by the manufacturer. If they go out of business? Too bad, guess you need to buy a new vehicle…. The same goes for many of the technologies we use. The nature of software-based innovation means that obsolescence and obscurity are now far more prominent in the devices we use. I’m all for digital technology, of course. But I want to use it while acknowledging the problems and pitfalls it brings.

One word of warning: Technocreep is short, yet it took me way too long to read it. Partly this was the result of a busy week, but it’s also because these short chapters are remarkably involved. And you don’t want to read a lot of them in one sitting. If you do, it feels repetitive, perhaps even soporific. This isn’t so much a problem on Keenan’s end as it is the nature of the book format and the short chapter length. So don’t be deceived by its slim form factor, and set aside the appropriate amount of time to digest this.

Despite being two years old already, Technocreep holds up remarkably well. There are a few contentions or predictions that I find dubious (he describes personalized medicine at a Woodstock of 2019 that I doubt we’ll have by then), but by and large, Keenan discusses issues that remain relevant in 2016, if not more so. It’s hard to believe that Snowden’s leak was already three years ago. Sadly, I don’t think we’ve had the conversation that people like Keenan were hoping we would have in the wake of the revelations from those documents. Maybe reading this book will provoke a few more people to think more deeply about the ways in which digital technology provokes and accelerates change in our society. That change can be good or bad, but it’s up to us to drive that direction.

What’s that? Sorry, I got distracted by how I’m leaving horrific fingerprints every time I touch the cover of this book because of that slick finish some fancy paperbacks have.

I’ve been listening to Of Monsters and Men’s latest album, Beneath the Skin, obsessively lately (even though it came out last year, I only just discovered it recently, because that’s how plugged into the music scene I am!). It is pretty much the perfect soundtrack to Station Eleven. The same sweeping, wide-open sounds I loved from their first album are back and accompanied by haunting suggestions of wilderness, perfect for the post-apocalyptic setting of this story. (“Black Water” is my jam.)

Emily St. John Mandel’s lovely, literary apocalypse novel reminds me a lot of Player One: What is to Become of Us. With its non-linear narrative of interconnected yet dispersed stories and characters, its meditative qualities and an almost pathological resistance to plot development, Station Eleven is everything the literature snob who doesn’t want to be caught reading “actual” science fiction desires. Even the cause of the apocalypse—a virulent, deadly flu—is highbrow, and there is nary a zombie or vampire in sight. Although speculative in its depiction of a future that has not happened (yet), Station Eleven carefully confines itself to a realistic vision of a post-apocalyptic world.

Mandel, much like Coupland, takes a snapshot approach to the end of civilization in which we see a small group of people gradually realizing that their lives, as they know them, have changed forever. Both authors focus not so much on the practical difficulties of survival as they do the ramifications of civilization’s end. Whereas much of the current glut of post-apocalyptic entertainment emphasizes the insanity of us urbane, 21st-century humans having to subsistence hunt and survive without antibiotics and how we’ll all be terrible people to one another—I’m looking at you, The Walking Dead—Mandel is much more interested in how culture and education adapt to the new normal.

Station Eleven is far more optimistic a vision of the future than some of its cousins in this field. True, the first twenty years, largely elided, are rough and even violent. And there are cults, with polygamist Prophets who will take your guns, but those are just part of the landscape now. What matters, Mandel insists, is that there remains some continuity of human history and civilization. The human species, like most species on this planet, is resilient and adaptable. Our species would survive even if our society takes the hit.

Station Eleven also reminds me of Saga. Indeed, I think this book would itself make a fine graphic novel. Mandel has quite visual writing (a strange observation from a reader who himself doesn’t visualize much as he reads), and I can well imagine the interesting ways a skilled artist would contrast the world pre-apocalypse with the world post-apocalypse, in terms of inking and colours and lighting. There is a fertility to the imaginative nature of Station Eleven’s world. It is a captivating novel not because of terrible events or the nihilism of the end of the world but because you just want to know what else is out there. What is over the next ridge for the Symphony? Do they find more civilization? What happens next?

The dual nature of Station Eleven’s narrative also allows for a contrast between the perceptions of time pre- and post-apocalypse. In particular, Clark looks back with amusement at how obsessed he used to be with improving the efficiency of companies and their executives. He recounts a time he realized how he was just as “absent” from the real world as any number of surrounding pedestrians who were all glued to their phones. Our society has in this past century both quantified and quantized our lives with heretofore unanticipated precision. While this has resulted in many improvements in technology and infrastructure, culturally it has a lot of problems. Mandel doesn’t go to the extreme of suggesting that the end of civilization allows us to attain some kind of idyllic pastoral existence. But she does demonstrate that our construction of an artificial sense of time is incredibly fragile and dependent, much like our economy, on the consensual hallucination we all share.

It’s no coincidence that Kirsten, as close as this book gets to any one protagonist, is old enough to remember, just barely, the world before its end, but young enough to have adapted to the new one. I mentioned before how I wouldn’t survive, wouldn’t like to survive—and that’s because I’m just now becoming old enough to get set in my ways. Mandel observes that the young flourish and adapt; if our digital technology stopped working today, the children born tomorrow would shrug, because it’s hard to miss what you didn’t have.

If this review is rather disjointed and not all that related to the actual book, it’s mainly because I read Station Eleven over a long period (six days) during which I was sick and working an inordinate amount, so my reading happened in short and sporadic bursts. This is a novel that does not so much demand your attention as it does politely come up to you, tap you on the shoulder, and request the honour of you giving it a modicum of attention, if that isn’t too much of an inconvenience. Indeed, this might be a very Canadian post-apocalyptic novel, and I don’t say that simply because Toronto is featured. Mandel’s writing reminds me a lot of Charles de Lint’s, even if her setting is not quite as fantastic. Her characters, even the American and British ones, have a kind of crispness I associate with Canadian writers—it’s hard to describe, nor am I suggesting it’s necessarily superior to foreign authors, merely different.

Mandel’s writing amplifies this. I keep thinking about one passage in particular, where Mandel describes the whirlwind of Miranda’s divorce from Arthur from the former’s point of view:

In four months Miranda will be back in Toronto, divorced at twenty-seven, working on a commerce degree, spending her alimony on expensive clothing and consultations with stylists because she’s come to understand that clothes are armour … she comes to a point after four or five years when she travels almost constantly between a dozen countries and lives mostly out of a carry-on suitcase, a time when she lives a life that feels like freedom and sleeps with her downstairs neighbour occasionally but refuses to date anyone, whispers “I repent nothing” into the mirrors of a hundred hotel rooms from London to Singapore and in the morning puts on the clothes that make her invincible, a life where the moments of emptiness and disappointment are minimal….

I think I could have stopped reading at “puts on the clothes that make her invincible” and loved this book. It’s one thing to tell a good story; it’s quite another to write beautifully while doing so. Plus, Mandel would have won me over with her allusions to Star Trek: Voyager (because any casual can reference something Kirk or Spock said, but if you reference a specific episode of Voyager you’re hardcore).

I might get ornery on occasion about the way some books arbitrarily escape the ghetto of science fiction to live the literary life. Nevertheless, some books deserve the hype. Station Eleven is one of them. It’s thoughtful without being ponderous, meditative without being slow, interesting without trying too hard.