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tachyondecay
Mmm, it’s good to dip back into the Laundry Files universe for a little while. Charles Stross is in fine form with Equoid, a delightfully creepy take on unicorn mythology guest starring a young H.P. Lovecraft. Bob Howard is itching to get out of the office, and in a classic case of careful-what-you-wish-for, he gets sent to a country farm with a unicorn infestation. Zombies and tactical teams and chaos and destruction ensues.
The Laundry Files is a great series because Stross attempts to tell a monster story where the government knows about the supernatural and has an agency tasked to deal with supernatural threats. But unlike so many other fictional government organizations devoted to fighting the supernatural, the Laundry is not magically exempt from bureaucracy and incompetence. Not only does Bob have to deal with unicorn infestations, but he also has layers of management breathing down his neck as well. This side of the Laundry doesn’t take the foreground here, but Stross still manages some bureaucratic humour in the form of excerpts of requisition orders for unicorn-like shock troops. With each requisition, the refusal and cancellation by the Cabinet Office becomes terser and more irate.
No, Bob spends most of his time in the field here. His only intel comes from an outdated file with bits of H.P. Lovecraft’s private correspondence, in which he relates his encounter with an equoid brood queen during his adolescence. This is enough to give Bob an idea of the magnitude of the equoid threat. In typical Stross fashion, the situation is described in clinical, scientific terms. The Laundry might be fantasy, but it is hard fantasy, if such a thing exists.
Bob’s brief trip into rural England allows Stross to poke fun at some of the stereotypes of the country as well. Bob’s partner for this mission is Greg, a local Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs inspector with a Land Rover and an over-animated beard. He’s chummy with the people who own the farm under investigation, and from there Stross extrapolates all sorts of interesting country and village dynamics involving the owners of the farm and the local police. In some ways the village seems a little underpopulated—this being a novella, most of the action focuses on Bob at the cost of failing to flesh out many of the minor characters. But you get the sense that this is a close-knit community, which makes the horror in its midst all the more devastating.
The best and worst part of Equoid, however, is its pace. “Nonstop” does not accurately describe how fast this story goes. This makes for an exciting read. However, there is also a lot here, and while Stross is a dab hand at the exposition, sometimes it goes over my head simply from how fast it goes. This could have been a novel in another life—it works great as a novella, especially because the story stands alone and requires no knowledge of the Laundry Files. But even for a novella it is quite densely packed. It’s exactly what one might want from a novella on occasion: an immersive, powerful story with a sympathetic protagonist and a quirky supporting cast. Stross fans will recognize his usual, analytical style, and newcomers will find the setting accessible. Equoid is an equitable novella of Lovecraftian horror and unicorn nightmare.
The Laundry Files is a great series because Stross attempts to tell a monster story where the government knows about the supernatural and has an agency tasked to deal with supernatural threats. But unlike so many other fictional government organizations devoted to fighting the supernatural, the Laundry is not magically exempt from bureaucracy and incompetence. Not only does Bob have to deal with unicorn infestations, but he also has layers of management breathing down his neck as well. This side of the Laundry doesn’t take the foreground here, but Stross still manages some bureaucratic humour in the form of excerpts of requisition orders for unicorn-like shock troops. With each requisition, the refusal and cancellation by the Cabinet Office becomes terser and more irate.
No, Bob spends most of his time in the field here. His only intel comes from an outdated file with bits of H.P. Lovecraft’s private correspondence, in which he relates his encounter with an equoid brood queen during his adolescence. This is enough to give Bob an idea of the magnitude of the equoid threat. In typical Stross fashion, the situation is described in clinical, scientific terms. The Laundry might be fantasy, but it is hard fantasy, if such a thing exists.
Bob’s brief trip into rural England allows Stross to poke fun at some of the stereotypes of the country as well. Bob’s partner for this mission is Greg, a local Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs inspector with a Land Rover and an over-animated beard. He’s chummy with the people who own the farm under investigation, and from there Stross extrapolates all sorts of interesting country and village dynamics involving the owners of the farm and the local police. In some ways the village seems a little underpopulated—this being a novella, most of the action focuses on Bob at the cost of failing to flesh out many of the minor characters. But you get the sense that this is a close-knit community, which makes the horror in its midst all the more devastating.
The best and worst part of Equoid, however, is its pace. “Nonstop” does not accurately describe how fast this story goes. This makes for an exciting read. However, there is also a lot here, and while Stross is a dab hand at the exposition, sometimes it goes over my head simply from how fast it goes. This could have been a novel in another life—it works great as a novella, especially because the story stands alone and requires no knowledge of the Laundry Files. But even for a novella it is quite densely packed. It’s exactly what one might want from a novella on occasion: an immersive, powerful story with a sympathetic protagonist and a quirky supporting cast. Stross fans will recognize his usual, analytical style, and newcomers will find the setting accessible. Equoid is an equitable novella of Lovecraftian horror and unicorn nightmare.
I bought this as a birthday gift for someone I know who has quite the collection of shoes/heels, although it was on my to-read list before I considered it as a gift. High Heel is an unconventional treatise on this type of footwear. In short, easily-digestible chunks, Summer Brennan ponders the evolution of high heels in our history and culture. She wrestles with the conflicting attitudes towards high heels evinced by feminists, as well as the role of high heels in shaping ideas of femininity and women’s sexuality. It’s an interesting book that makes some good points, although I’m not sure it left me feeling like I’ve learned a lot in the way of new stuff.
Summarizing this book is difficult. I didn’t know what to expect going into it. First, it arrived and revealed itself to be an A5-sized book. Huh. Then I discovered that within each of the 5 parts, rather than more conventional chapters like you’d see in a book, Brennan has written a series of numbered passages, most only a paragraph long, some a couple of pages. Each, then, represents a unified thought, which together form a kind of stream-of-consciousness lecture from the author to the reader, as if the two of us were together in a lecture hall—or perhaps lying along a river in the sun, musing about high heels. This is a very philosophical book, and makes no secret of that fact. Brennan name-checks thinkers both classical and modern, playwrights and authors and celebrities and politicians. She demonstrates, indeed, that high heels have touched pretty much every aspect of our society.
Some positionality, I guess? As you might surmise, I don’t wear high heels. My gender performance is fairly typically masculine, although I do experiment here or there—I’ve been painting my nails a bit this year. But at 6'4, I’m not really looking to get any taller, nor do I have much junk in my trunk to emphasize. So there’s two of the voluntary reasons one might wear heels ruled out. As far as the “involuntary” reasons might go … well, I’m privileged enough that I’ve yet to run into any situation in which I am required or strongly expected/encouraged to wear heels. I don’t understand my friends’ fascination with heels, or shoes in general, although I try my best not to disparage it either—I’m sure there’s many hang-ups I have that they don’t get, and they are graceful enough not to bother me about it.
So I don’t have a horse in this race, as it were. Like many feminist discussions of grooming and fashion habits, this is not something I can speak about from firsthand experience. Nevertheless, I still find these discussion fascinating. I enjoy reading people’s thoughts, and the high heel is such an immediately recognizable and polarizing object; its inclusion in this Object Lessons series is clever and apt.
Probably the part of this book I most liked (not the best word) is where Brennan discusses high heels as objects that sexualize women and as synecdoche for women-as-sex-objects. Trigger warning here for discussions on her part of rape, sexual assault, murder, etc. Brennan makes one very interesting point: stiletto heels have a peculiar dualistic role in our society. If you wear stilettos, you’re either very high-class or very low-class: either a powerful executive, or a sex worker (to be clear, neither Brennan nor I are positioning sex workers as lower class—rather, we’re talking about how sex workers are perceived in wider society). The so-called middle-class, average woman typically doesn’t wear stilettos often, if at all, and probably not expensive ones. This was a point I hadn’t previously considered, this double-standard of heel-wearing whereby your choice of footwear can signal that you’re either extremely available or extremely unavailable….
I also like that Brennan clearly articulates how choice is not always a choice. As previously mentioned, heels might not be a requirement of some jobs, yet they are still expected, just as women might not be required to wear makeup or perform other expensive rituals of femininity, yet they might be subtly penalized if they don’t conform to such expectations. Similarly, Brennan points out that even when heels are entirely optional, it still might not be considered a choice if women have internalized this desire for heels. If they grow up, are raised to want heels, or raised to want the things they think wearing heels will give them, then are they really choosing heels? Or are heels actually just a symptom of a different, larger social issue?
I admire how Brennan carefully balances her clear aesthetic and personal appreciation for the art and fashion of the heel with the obvious critiques and problematic aspects of this shoe. She makes no secret of her own conflicting attitude, nor does she waste our time attempting to apologize for or justify heels in any kind of torturous way. Mostly she just … talks. She talks about the fun things, the interesting history, the fascinating types of heels and their effects on those who wear them and those who look at those who wear them. She talks about the problematic stuff, the negative stuff.
In the end, she has justified the existence of this book: the high heel is an important enough object in our society to be worth such careful consideration. I enjoyed this book. It made me think. Yet I stop short of actually being able to tell you how it has altered my perception of heels all that much. Honestly, I wish Brennan had gone deeper, or at least had maybe taken more of a stance on some of these issues instead of tried to represent so many various perspectives. By avoiding too much of her own opinion and thought, she has certainly made this book an objective lesson—but it’s also a drier one for all that.
Summarizing this book is difficult. I didn’t know what to expect going into it. First, it arrived and revealed itself to be an A5-sized book. Huh. Then I discovered that within each of the 5 parts, rather than more conventional chapters like you’d see in a book, Brennan has written a series of numbered passages, most only a paragraph long, some a couple of pages. Each, then, represents a unified thought, which together form a kind of stream-of-consciousness lecture from the author to the reader, as if the two of us were together in a lecture hall—or perhaps lying along a river in the sun, musing about high heels. This is a very philosophical book, and makes no secret of that fact. Brennan name-checks thinkers both classical and modern, playwrights and authors and celebrities and politicians. She demonstrates, indeed, that high heels have touched pretty much every aspect of our society.
Some positionality, I guess? As you might surmise, I don’t wear high heels. My gender performance is fairly typically masculine, although I do experiment here or there—I’ve been painting my nails a bit this year. But at 6'4, I’m not really looking to get any taller, nor do I have much junk in my trunk to emphasize. So there’s two of the voluntary reasons one might wear heels ruled out. As far as the “involuntary” reasons might go … well, I’m privileged enough that I’ve yet to run into any situation in which I am required or strongly expected/encouraged to wear heels. I don’t understand my friends’ fascination with heels, or shoes in general, although I try my best not to disparage it either—I’m sure there’s many hang-ups I have that they don’t get, and they are graceful enough not to bother me about it.
So I don’t have a horse in this race, as it were. Like many feminist discussions of grooming and fashion habits, this is not something I can speak about from firsthand experience. Nevertheless, I still find these discussion fascinating. I enjoy reading people’s thoughts, and the high heel is such an immediately recognizable and polarizing object; its inclusion in this Object Lessons series is clever and apt.
Probably the part of this book I most liked (not the best word) is where Brennan discusses high heels as objects that sexualize women and as synecdoche for women-as-sex-objects. Trigger warning here for discussions on her part of rape, sexual assault, murder, etc. Brennan makes one very interesting point: stiletto heels have a peculiar dualistic role in our society. If you wear stilettos, you’re either very high-class or very low-class: either a powerful executive, or a sex worker (to be clear, neither Brennan nor I are positioning sex workers as lower class—rather, we’re talking about how sex workers are perceived in wider society). The so-called middle-class, average woman typically doesn’t wear stilettos often, if at all, and probably not expensive ones. This was a point I hadn’t previously considered, this double-standard of heel-wearing whereby your choice of footwear can signal that you’re either extremely available or extremely unavailable….
I also like that Brennan clearly articulates how choice is not always a choice. As previously mentioned, heels might not be a requirement of some jobs, yet they are still expected, just as women might not be required to wear makeup or perform other expensive rituals of femininity, yet they might be subtly penalized if they don’t conform to such expectations. Similarly, Brennan points out that even when heels are entirely optional, it still might not be considered a choice if women have internalized this desire for heels. If they grow up, are raised to want heels, or raised to want the things they think wearing heels will give them, then are they really choosing heels? Or are heels actually just a symptom of a different, larger social issue?
I admire how Brennan carefully balances her clear aesthetic and personal appreciation for the art and fashion of the heel with the obvious critiques and problematic aspects of this shoe. She makes no secret of her own conflicting attitude, nor does she waste our time attempting to apologize for or justify heels in any kind of torturous way. Mostly she just … talks. She talks about the fun things, the interesting history, the fascinating types of heels and their effects on those who wear them and those who look at those who wear them. She talks about the problematic stuff, the negative stuff.
In the end, she has justified the existence of this book: the high heel is an important enough object in our society to be worth such careful consideration. I enjoyed this book. It made me think. Yet I stop short of actually being able to tell you how it has altered my perception of heels all that much. Honestly, I wish Brennan had gone deeper, or at least had maybe taken more of a stance on some of these issues instead of tried to represent so many various perspectives. By avoiding too much of her own opinion and thought, she has certainly made this book an objective lesson—but it’s also a drier one for all that.
Longtime Twitter follower of Hannah Moskowitz, first time reader. Why did I pick Not Otherwise Specified? No idea! This was the one that came up and got added to my to-read list. No regrets.
Trigger warning, obviously, for discussions of eating disorder and weight loss. Also for use of potential queer slurs, bullying, and depictions of controlling/manipulative behaviour from friends.
Etta Sinclair is a Black, bisexual girl at an all-girls school. Her decision to date (and then subsequently break up with) a (gasp) boy has alienated her from friend group, lesbians who collectively call themselves "the Dykes." Etta has also struggled with an undiagnosed eating disorder (hence the title) and attends group therapy sessions, where she meets a new friend—Bianca. Along with Bianca’s gay brother, as well as another friend who offers Etta a lust interest, Etta and Bianca tackle auditions for Brentwood. All of these events put a lot of stress on Etta, who’s really just trying to figure out what any teenager is figuring out: who am I? What do I want from life? Which relationships should I value and prioritize?
From the start, Moskowitz establishes Etta’s voice in a way that makes me nod my head and go, “Yes, I want to keep reading this.” I love that first line: “Time for the Etta-gets-her-groove-back party.” Etta is the right balance between charming and self-deprecating, yet Moskowitz manages to avoid making her sound like every other sarcastic teenage narrator we might be exposed to in this day and age. Etta is thoughtful, but you can also tell that she still has a lot of thinking to do—her understanding of her own identities, and the way she relates to other people like the Dykes, demonstrates she still has a lot to unpack and consider, a lot of maturing to do, which is expected for someone at her stage in life. Almost from page-one, Etta feels like a realistic and fleshed-out character.
Then we get into all the drama! And for a book that involves some intense bullying (to the point of assault), the drama actually feels very … low key? In a way, this feels like the obverse of Holly Bourne’s approach to YA, in that both are valid and equivalent yet the presentation is different. Bourne’s books build and build towards what you just know is going to be a single, emotionally-devastating climax. In contrast, Not Otherwise Specified has a series of dramatic encounters—the plot graph is more spiky than it is a single pyramid. The result is a rich experience with a lot to unpack, some of which isn’t really in my lane.
For example, I’m reading a lot of angry reviews from lesbians saying the use of Dyke and the portrayal of “all lesbians” as biphobic is harmful … and I can see where that’s coming from, sure. But I’m not sure how else the book would explore this issue of Etta being bullied by her former friends for the way in which she’s exploring her sexuality? Etta herself isn’t saying that all lesbians are bad or biphobic—she’s just having a rough time with this particular group of lesbians, no doubt compounded by the fact they’re at an all-girls school that doesn’t seem to have a very good anti-bullying policy. The bullying happens because Etta’s friends are behaving badly, not because they are lesbians. Nevertheless, I recognize that this whole issue is outside my own lived experiences, and so I could be missing a crucial dimension to this discussion. So just be aware that this might not be the book for you if this is something more critical to you.
I could have gone for a little more nuance in the way that Moskowitz portrays the Dykes’ activities and actions against Etta. It seems like Tasha is the most active, most forthright bully—but in my experience, when friend groups have a falling out like this, there’s always a moment here or there when at least one of the former friends is softer, or a bit wistful, regarding the good, ol’ days. Or perhaps that’s the role Rachel is supposed to serve. I do like the portrayal of Rachel and Etta’s relationship. It’s so rich and complex.
First, Moskowitz acknowledges how blurry the lines can get between platonic and romantic/sexual relationships among friends, especially when they're friends of the same gender exploring how to express their queer identities. Rachel is a best friend and also a lover. They are “experimenting” but also being incredibly vulnerable and intimate with one another. Their membership in this high school clique is a political statement as much as it is a relational one. So much of this happens before the book even begins; when Rachel re-enters Etta’s life during Act 2 and we learn more about her as a person, the pieces start falling into place. Rachel is a great example of how someone in your life can be a great and a terrible presence all at the same time. She made Etta feel so good, so high … yet she also gave Etta terrible advice, tried to control Etta’s behaviour based on what Rachel thought was good for Etta:
Ugggggh this is so good! Coming as it does near the very end of the book, it’s such a great example of how Etta has grown throughout this whole experience. And it rings so true. Some people are shining beacons in our lives; some people are monsters. Many of the people we meet and befriend will not be one or the other but somewhere in between. Recognizing this complexity, and then being able to recognize when it’s happening in your relationships and react in the way that’s healthiest for you, is so important.
Similarly, Moskowitz ensures Etta is herself flawed and has lots of maturing to do. This is most obvious in her relationship with Bianca, of course. In many ways the two are very good for each other: Bianca is the one who unwittingly nudges Etta back into dancing ballet, while Etta bolsters Bianca’s self-confidence. Yet there is still a great deal of friendship turbulence here, compounded by what’s happening with Bianca’s brother and their parents. Etta’s behaviour towards the climax of the novel, the way she just acquiesces to Bianca’s demands to go out clubbing, but then realizes before it’s too late that she needs to be more responsible—not to mention that point where Etta confesses to us that she didn’t realize how sick Bianca actually was—that’s so powerful.
Not Otherwise Specified is a well-structured, deeply rich book, particularly when it comes to characterization. I didn’t even touch on Bianca’s brother, James, much, or Etta’s sister, or Etta’s relationship with her mom, or with Mason … there’s a lot more depth here than I can get into in this review. This book is under 300 pages!! I’m glad it lives in my local library, and hopefully some teens going through issues similar to Etta’s, who need to see themselves in a book, will find this one.
Trigger warning, obviously, for discussions of eating disorder and weight loss. Also for use of potential queer slurs, bullying, and depictions of controlling/manipulative behaviour from friends.
Etta Sinclair is a Black, bisexual girl at an all-girls school. Her decision to date (and then subsequently break up with) a (gasp) boy has alienated her from friend group, lesbians who collectively call themselves "the Dykes." Etta has also struggled with an undiagnosed eating disorder (hence the title) and attends group therapy sessions, where she meets a new friend—Bianca. Along with Bianca’s gay brother, as well as another friend who offers Etta a lust interest, Etta and Bianca tackle auditions for Brentwood. All of these events put a lot of stress on Etta, who’s really just trying to figure out what any teenager is figuring out: who am I? What do I want from life? Which relationships should I value and prioritize?
From the start, Moskowitz establishes Etta’s voice in a way that makes me nod my head and go, “Yes, I want to keep reading this.” I love that first line: “Time for the Etta-gets-her-groove-back party.” Etta is the right balance between charming and self-deprecating, yet Moskowitz manages to avoid making her sound like every other sarcastic teenage narrator we might be exposed to in this day and age. Etta is thoughtful, but you can also tell that she still has a lot of thinking to do—her understanding of her own identities, and the way she relates to other people like the Dykes, demonstrates she still has a lot to unpack and consider, a lot of maturing to do, which is expected for someone at her stage in life. Almost from page-one, Etta feels like a realistic and fleshed-out character.
Then we get into all the drama! And for a book that involves some intense bullying (to the point of assault), the drama actually feels very … low key? In a way, this feels like the obverse of Holly Bourne’s approach to YA, in that both are valid and equivalent yet the presentation is different. Bourne’s books build and build towards what you just know is going to be a single, emotionally-devastating climax. In contrast, Not Otherwise Specified has a series of dramatic encounters—the plot graph is more spiky than it is a single pyramid. The result is a rich experience with a lot to unpack, some of which isn’t really in my lane.
For example, I’m reading a lot of angry reviews from lesbians saying the use of Dyke and the portrayal of “all lesbians” as biphobic is harmful … and I can see where that’s coming from, sure. But I’m not sure how else the book would explore this issue of Etta being bullied by her former friends for the way in which she’s exploring her sexuality? Etta herself isn’t saying that all lesbians are bad or biphobic—she’s just having a rough time with this particular group of lesbians, no doubt compounded by the fact they’re at an all-girls school that doesn’t seem to have a very good anti-bullying policy. The bullying happens because Etta’s friends are behaving badly, not because they are lesbians. Nevertheless, I recognize that this whole issue is outside my own lived experiences, and so I could be missing a crucial dimension to this discussion. So just be aware that this might not be the book for you if this is something more critical to you.
I could have gone for a little more nuance in the way that Moskowitz portrays the Dykes’ activities and actions against Etta. It seems like Tasha is the most active, most forthright bully—but in my experience, when friend groups have a falling out like this, there’s always a moment here or there when at least one of the former friends is softer, or a bit wistful, regarding the good, ol’ days. Or perhaps that’s the role Rachel is supposed to serve. I do like the portrayal of Rachel and Etta’s relationship. It’s so rich and complex.
First, Moskowitz acknowledges how blurry the lines can get between platonic and romantic/sexual relationships among friends, especially when they're friends of the same gender exploring how to express their queer identities. Rachel is a best friend and also a lover. They are “experimenting” but also being incredibly vulnerable and intimate with one another. Their membership in this high school clique is a political statement as much as it is a relational one. So much of this happens before the book even begins; when Rachel re-enters Etta’s life during Act 2 and we learn more about her as a person, the pieces start falling into place. Rachel is a great example of how someone in your life can be a great and a terrible presence all at the same time. She made Etta feel so good, so high … yet she also gave Etta terrible advice, tried to control Etta’s behaviour based on what Rachel thought was good for Etta:
“I’m going to go,” I say. I don’t say, you’re a good person, Rachel, but you don’t want to be friends with me unless you can control me. There’s no point in saying it. I know it. And once I’m gone, she will too.
Still, I hope she comes and visits me sometimes. I’d like to get coffee with her.
Ugggggh this is so good! Coming as it does near the very end of the book, it’s such a great example of how Etta has grown throughout this whole experience. And it rings so true. Some people are shining beacons in our lives; some people are monsters. Many of the people we meet and befriend will not be one or the other but somewhere in between. Recognizing this complexity, and then being able to recognize when it’s happening in your relationships and react in the way that’s healthiest for you, is so important.
Similarly, Moskowitz ensures Etta is herself flawed and has lots of maturing to do. This is most obvious in her relationship with Bianca, of course. In many ways the two are very good for each other: Bianca is the one who unwittingly nudges Etta back into dancing ballet, while Etta bolsters Bianca’s self-confidence. Yet there is still a great deal of friendship turbulence here, compounded by what’s happening with Bianca’s brother and their parents. Etta’s behaviour towards the climax of the novel, the way she just acquiesces to Bianca’s demands to go out clubbing, but then realizes before it’s too late that she needs to be more responsible—not to mention that point where Etta confesses to us that she didn’t realize how sick Bianca actually was—that’s so powerful.
Not Otherwise Specified is a well-structured, deeply rich book, particularly when it comes to characterization. I didn’t even touch on Bianca’s brother, James, much, or Etta’s sister, or Etta’s relationship with her mom, or with Mason … there’s a lot more depth here than I can get into in this review. This book is under 300 pages!! I’m glad it lives in my local library, and hopefully some teens going through issues similar to Etta’s, who need to see themselves in a book, will find this one.
As some of you may be aware, one of my many hats at my day job involves being a math teacher. I try to cover as much financial literacy as I can manage, regardless of the course I’m teaching, because this is a fundamentally important topic in our society. So I’m always looking to learn more about how finances actually work in our society. We hear a lot about the “stock market,” but what does that actually mean? Flash Boys, by Michael Lewis, presents the story of a small group of Wall Street people who are attempting to create more “fairness” in the markets and preclude predation by a now-dominant paradigm known as high-frequency trading. This isn’t exactly what I would call a riveting read, but it still has lots of interesting things to learn. Let me start with why this book let me down, and then I’ll conclude with all the stuff I learned.
If there’s any protagonist to Lewis’ story, it’s Brad Katsuyama, a Canadian trader for RBC who leaves the bank to found the Investors Exchange (IEX). Lewis discusses a few other stories, like that of Sergey Aleynikov, a computer programmer arrested for taking alleged proprietary software from Goldman Sachs. He also opens the book, and then tries to bookend it, with a discussion of Spread Networks’ bid to build the fastest, most direct fibre connection between the Chicago and New York Stock Exchanges.
This is probably where I found Flash Boys. Somewhere along the way I learned the really fascinating fact that the stock market had been directly responsible for laying more direct cable between Chicago and New York, and that blew my mind. I wanted to know more, so I added this to my to-read list. To my chagrin, Flash Boys is less a Bill Bryson-esque “gee whiz” exposition on the technological reinvention of financial trading and more of an exposé-style encomium of Katsuyama and friends’ crusade. Don’t get me wrong—I am extremely anti-capitalist and am all for taking down the big guys and fighting the Man and whatnot. This is just not what I expected from the book.
Lewis also assumes a much greater familiarity with stock trading than I have. I could only barely follow his helpful attempts to explain everything with example scenarios. On the one hand, this helped me understand just how complex and unwieldy the stock market has become (more on that in a bit). On the other hand, I just didn’t enjoy Lewis’ writing as much as I have other non-fiction authors who seem to be better at explaining stuff to me.
Lewis makes a big deal out of how high-frequency trading (HFT) enables an activity called “front running,” where you can learn about someone wanting to buy or sell shares in a company and then manipulate the price before they actually do so, netting you significant profits. HFT isn’t necessarily bad, but it encourages bad behaviour when unchecked by regulations (either from the big banks or from the government). However, Lewis doesn’t really discuss the larger regulatory issues for the market. He just kind of tap dances through the whole 2008 recession—not eliding it, exactly, but only mentioning it as it relates to the characters of his story. Again, maybe this is just my unrealistic hopes for the book, expecting a larger overview of the issues with the present-day American stock market system. I still feel let down.
As I mentioned above, my biggest takeaway from Flash Boys is learning how much I don’t know. Plus, perhaps more frightening, is how much the people on Wall Street don’t know. Automation and algorithms have brought us to a point of staggering ignorance; the incentive to behave as badly as possible (without crossing any legal lines) to make money for oneself has motivated players of this game to make its rules as complicated and abstruse as possible. Any desire I ever had to play the stock market myself has been extinguished. Your “average” citizen has zero hope of ever understanding how the stock market works.
I also enjoyed learning about how these financial players interact. We hear names like Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, etc., but we don’t really understand what that means. Lewis actually goes into more details about how these institutions talk to each other (or don’t), how they compete (or collude), and what the consequences are for us in general.
One last thought: one date seems to loom large over this book, and that’s September 11, 2001. Lewis invariably relates where each character was on 9/11, no doubt because so many of them were near ground zero as a result of their employment. This is not a criticism of the book. Rather, it was really helpful, in my opinion, in understanding the mindset and motivation of some of these people. We think of finance as a global phenomenon, and it’s true that trading can and does happen everywhere. Yet the concentration of trading in New York means that the whole market was immensely affected by the psychic toll of 9/11 in a way that someone like me, slightly younger and Canadian and not involved in finances, couldn’t quite appreciate until now. Lewis manages to portray the shock, hurt, and re-evaluation of one’s world-view that must have accompanied that tragedy.
Flash Boys is a bit of a disappointment for me, overall. I can see why others would love this book and everything Lewis shares in it. But I was hoping for a much more comprehensive and comprehensible takedown of the markets. Lewis’ narrower scope and limited explanations leave me wanting much more. Maybe I’ll find it elsewhere.
If there’s any protagonist to Lewis’ story, it’s Brad Katsuyama, a Canadian trader for RBC who leaves the bank to found the Investors Exchange (IEX). Lewis discusses a few other stories, like that of Sergey Aleynikov, a computer programmer arrested for taking alleged proprietary software from Goldman Sachs. He also opens the book, and then tries to bookend it, with a discussion of Spread Networks’ bid to build the fastest, most direct fibre connection between the Chicago and New York Stock Exchanges.
This is probably where I found Flash Boys. Somewhere along the way I learned the really fascinating fact that the stock market had been directly responsible for laying more direct cable between Chicago and New York, and that blew my mind. I wanted to know more, so I added this to my to-read list. To my chagrin, Flash Boys is less a Bill Bryson-esque “gee whiz” exposition on the technological reinvention of financial trading and more of an exposé-style encomium of Katsuyama and friends’ crusade. Don’t get me wrong—I am extremely anti-capitalist and am all for taking down the big guys and fighting the Man and whatnot. This is just not what I expected from the book.
Lewis also assumes a much greater familiarity with stock trading than I have. I could only barely follow his helpful attempts to explain everything with example scenarios. On the one hand, this helped me understand just how complex and unwieldy the stock market has become (more on that in a bit). On the other hand, I just didn’t enjoy Lewis’ writing as much as I have other non-fiction authors who seem to be better at explaining stuff to me.
Lewis makes a big deal out of how high-frequency trading (HFT) enables an activity called “front running,” where you can learn about someone wanting to buy or sell shares in a company and then manipulate the price before they actually do so, netting you significant profits. HFT isn’t necessarily bad, but it encourages bad behaviour when unchecked by regulations (either from the big banks or from the government). However, Lewis doesn’t really discuss the larger regulatory issues for the market. He just kind of tap dances through the whole 2008 recession—not eliding it, exactly, but only mentioning it as it relates to the characters of his story. Again, maybe this is just my unrealistic hopes for the book, expecting a larger overview of the issues with the present-day American stock market system. I still feel let down.
As I mentioned above, my biggest takeaway from Flash Boys is learning how much I don’t know. Plus, perhaps more frightening, is how much the people on Wall Street don’t know. Automation and algorithms have brought us to a point of staggering ignorance; the incentive to behave as badly as possible (without crossing any legal lines) to make money for oneself has motivated players of this game to make its rules as complicated and abstruse as possible. Any desire I ever had to play the stock market myself has been extinguished. Your “average” citizen has zero hope of ever understanding how the stock market works.
I also enjoyed learning about how these financial players interact. We hear names like Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, etc., but we don’t really understand what that means. Lewis actually goes into more details about how these institutions talk to each other (or don’t), how they compete (or collude), and what the consequences are for us in general.
One last thought: one date seems to loom large over this book, and that’s September 11, 2001. Lewis invariably relates where each character was on 9/11, no doubt because so many of them were near ground zero as a result of their employment. This is not a criticism of the book. Rather, it was really helpful, in my opinion, in understanding the mindset and motivation of some of these people. We think of finance as a global phenomenon, and it’s true that trading can and does happen everywhere. Yet the concentration of trading in New York means that the whole market was immensely affected by the psychic toll of 9/11 in a way that someone like me, slightly younger and Canadian and not involved in finances, couldn’t quite appreciate until now. Lewis manages to portray the shock, hurt, and re-evaluation of one’s world-view that must have accompanied that tragedy.
Flash Boys is a bit of a disappointment for me, overall. I can see why others would love this book and everything Lewis shares in it. But I was hoping for a much more comprehensive and comprehensible takedown of the markets. Lewis’ narrower scope and limited explanations leave me wanting much more. Maybe I’ll find it elsewhere.
Why does AI always end up being the bad guy? Because we love to explore evil in the form of the Other. Also, it usually turns out that the bad guy was us, the creators of the AI, all along! Anastasia Slabucho’s Waterdown retreads these ideas but within the context of the climate change crisis we currently face. She posits that someone might have the right combination of drive, ingenuity, and wherewithal to create an AI that can take over running our society, if only we’d just listen. But would such a life really be living? That’s what this novel attempts to explore.
Geo Spears created Fusion, the superintelligent AI that now runs the world. In this brave new world, humans are either Permanents or Temporals. Permanents, like Geo herself, have uninhibited memory and intelligence, yet they live socially isolated lives. Their purpose is to work every day on the administrative tasks Fusion assigns them, and in particular, they scrub history of all the nasty little records that might upset someone. Temporals, on the other hand, are the labourer caste. They can have the full range of human experience, but their cognitive landscapes are governed by a brain device that limits their long-term memory storage and mediates their perception of the world. When Geo discovers that she is dying, she wakes up to the problematic nature of Fusion’s dominance over humanity. She has to gain the trust of a group of rebels and help them take down Fusion before it’s too late.
I received a free copy of this book through NetGalley. The Kindle version doesn’t let you override the font choices. This is merely irksome to me, but for people who have accessibility issues that require them to use certain fonts, I can imagine it would be upsetting and potentially prevent them from reading the book.
As far as the story goes, Waterdown has its entertaining moments, yet it never quite comes together into the unified and coherent dystopian thriller it seems to want to be. Slabucho does her best to avoid needless exposition. I applaud this, in theory, yet in practice I was left wanting … more. We only get minimal hints of what society is like before and after the waterdown. The flashbacks remind me of low-budget sci-fi TV series from the early 2000s that would try to signal you’re in the future because everyone is wearing weird fashions and hairstyles—how has society actually changed by that point? Similarly, in the present, we get the barest of hints about the dichotomous lifestyles of the Temporals and Permanents, but it’s never explored very clearly.
I also have a hard time enjoying Geo as the protagonist. I get that she’s supposed to be an unlikable character, at least at first. Her face turn seems so abrupt, though—one moment she’s cruising along, enjoying life as much as one can as a Permanent, and then the next moment she has a terminal diagnosis and she starts fomenting rebellion. OK, I’m exaggerating. Nevertheless, whatever shock to the system Geo receives, she seems really willing to turn on her creation. And the others trust her pretty quickly at that. Even the crisis with Scott dissolves into a non-issue without much in the way of confrontation.
That’s probably the least satisfying part of the novel: the conflicts feel either forced or toothless. Take Hel’s bizarre dislike of Geo. It’s never explained nor justified; she is essentially a plot device to explain some loose ends and give Geo some of the final motivation she needs to take down Fusion. Scott receives time as a viewpoint character, yet he never really seems to have to make much in the way of decisions or contribute to the plot beyond, again, being there.
Finally, Waterdown runs into the same issue that similar stories with AI antagonists often face: faceless AIs are boring. There’s a reason why the I, Robot movie with Will Smith involves a lot of explosions and why the Terminator movies relegate Skynet to a backseat role. Yes, intellectually, the idea of an AI suborning humanity is certainly scary. But in practice, an AI villain lacks the chutzpah of a good, scenery-chewing bad guy. The confrontations between Geo and Fusion are so underwhelming, even when Slabucho characterizes Fusion as “gloating.” Fusion isn’t evil; it’s just following its programming. It’s a storm more than a villain—yet we attempt to sandwich it into the villain role, instead of treating it like a natural disaster, and it just isn’t menacing enough, at least how it’s portrayed, to fit that role.
I can’t fault Slabucho for the concepts within Waterdown. Those are definitely intriguing. And while AIs run amok have been done to death, this particular remixing of the concept is new. So it’s a really cool science fiction idea. But ideas alone do not make for great stories. The characters and the conflict have to surf the ideas along the ocean of story, and that doesn’t happen here. Lots of potential here, but it’s still very rough, still very much in need of polish and plot workshopping. And having done that, it would be possible to go even deeper into these interesting ideas, resulting in a novel that truly expands the mind as much as the waterdown diminishes it.
Geo Spears created Fusion, the superintelligent AI that now runs the world. In this brave new world, humans are either Permanents or Temporals. Permanents, like Geo herself, have uninhibited memory and intelligence, yet they live socially isolated lives. Their purpose is to work every day on the administrative tasks Fusion assigns them, and in particular, they scrub history of all the nasty little records that might upset someone. Temporals, on the other hand, are the labourer caste. They can have the full range of human experience, but their cognitive landscapes are governed by a brain device that limits their long-term memory storage and mediates their perception of the world. When Geo discovers that she is dying, she wakes up to the problematic nature of Fusion’s dominance over humanity. She has to gain the trust of a group of rebels and help them take down Fusion before it’s too late.
I received a free copy of this book through NetGalley. The Kindle version doesn’t let you override the font choices. This is merely irksome to me, but for people who have accessibility issues that require them to use certain fonts, I can imagine it would be upsetting and potentially prevent them from reading the book.
As far as the story goes, Waterdown has its entertaining moments, yet it never quite comes together into the unified and coherent dystopian thriller it seems to want to be. Slabucho does her best to avoid needless exposition. I applaud this, in theory, yet in practice I was left wanting … more. We only get minimal hints of what society is like before and after the waterdown. The flashbacks remind me of low-budget sci-fi TV series from the early 2000s that would try to signal you’re in the future because everyone is wearing weird fashions and hairstyles—how has society actually changed by that point? Similarly, in the present, we get the barest of hints about the dichotomous lifestyles of the Temporals and Permanents, but it’s never explored very clearly.
I also have a hard time enjoying Geo as the protagonist. I get that she’s supposed to be an unlikable character, at least at first. Her face turn seems so abrupt, though—one moment she’s cruising along, enjoying life as much as one can as a Permanent, and then the next moment she has a terminal diagnosis and she starts fomenting rebellion. OK, I’m exaggerating. Nevertheless, whatever shock to the system Geo receives, she seems really willing to turn on her creation. And the others trust her pretty quickly at that. Even the crisis with Scott dissolves into a non-issue without much in the way of confrontation.
That’s probably the least satisfying part of the novel: the conflicts feel either forced or toothless. Take Hel’s bizarre dislike of Geo. It’s never explained nor justified; she is essentially a plot device to explain some loose ends and give Geo some of the final motivation she needs to take down Fusion. Scott receives time as a viewpoint character, yet he never really seems to have to make much in the way of decisions or contribute to the plot beyond, again, being there.
Finally, Waterdown runs into the same issue that similar stories with AI antagonists often face: faceless AIs are boring. There’s a reason why the I, Robot movie with Will Smith involves a lot of explosions and why the Terminator movies relegate Skynet to a backseat role. Yes, intellectually, the idea of an AI suborning humanity is certainly scary. But in practice, an AI villain lacks the chutzpah of a good, scenery-chewing bad guy. The confrontations between Geo and Fusion are so underwhelming, even when Slabucho characterizes Fusion as “gloating.” Fusion isn’t evil; it’s just following its programming. It’s a storm more than a villain—yet we attempt to sandwich it into the villain role, instead of treating it like a natural disaster, and it just isn’t menacing enough, at least how it’s portrayed, to fit that role.
I can’t fault Slabucho for the concepts within Waterdown. Those are definitely intriguing. And while AIs run amok have been done to death, this particular remixing of the concept is new. So it’s a really cool science fiction idea. But ideas alone do not make for great stories. The characters and the conflict have to surf the ideas along the ocean of story, and that doesn’t happen here. Lots of potential here, but it’s still very rough, still very much in need of polish and plot workshopping. And having done that, it would be possible to go even deeper into these interesting ideas, resulting in a novel that truly expands the mind as much as the waterdown diminishes it.
Longtime readers of my reviews will recall I have a tumultuous relationship with Dan Simmons’ books. I didn’t like The Terror or Drood, but I warmed up to Simmons through his epic Hyperion Cantos. In my review for the final book of that cycle, The Rise of Endymion, I commented, “Even if you don’t like the series, it is hard to dispute the scope and style of it.” Simmons lives up to this judgment with Ilium, which does for the Iliad what Hyperion did for Keats and Romantic poetry (although I’d argue it goes further than that). I doubt I’ll ever refer to Simmons as one of my favourite authors, or even as one of my favourite SF authors. Yet I have no doubt he is actually a great SF author, one of the greats of our age, even if he isn’t one of my favourites. Let’s dive into Ilium and see why.
Summarizing Ilium is not an easy task, but I’ll do my best. It’s a couple of thousand years into the future. Humanity experienced a posthumanist singularity, including an event vaguely alluded to as “the rubicon,” and mastered nanotechnology and quantum tunnelling/quantum teleportation. Now, beings claiming to be the Greek gods inhabit a terraformed Mars and have recreated the Iliad in the flesh. They’ve also recreated Thomas Hockenberry, a twenty-first–century scholar of the Iliad, essentially to provide commentary on them? But Hockenberry gets pushed into a situation where he has to go off-book, and things soon prove … revolutionary. Meanwhile, some moravecs (self-evolving AI robots descended from robots sent out by humans) from the moons of Jupiter have arrived on Mars to investigate all this untoward quantum activity. Meanwhile meanwhile, on Earth, some slightly-not-baseline humans are living a peaceful yet empty existence devoid of culture or true learning/introspection, until of course, someone jolts them out of it. The result? By the end of the book, all hell has broken loose of course!
Look, the actual plot of this book is unimportant.
Seriously, the plot is one of the least interesting parts of the book, and I’m going to mostly ignore it. I want to talk about what Simmons is doing with regards to the intersection of classical literature and science fiction and why it’s so goddamned brilliant, and then I will slam him for some dirty male gazey bits. Read on!
For the record, I did read the Iliad (Fagles), but didn’t review it because it was … a difficult book. It’s really not a great book for reading silently to oneself in translation. It is meant to be declaimed, in ancient Greek, but that is not a skill I have. Although debates over its historicity and the extent to which it is an oral tradition abound, one thing is clear: the Iliad is, like so many epic poems from antiquity, a complex work that has been altered by each of the cultures who have translated it, studied it, and reinterpreted it through their own biased lenses. Also note that you don’t need to have read the Iliad to follow Ilium.
Ilium is, fundamentally, a story about literacy. Every relationship, every plot development, every conflict, is a facet of Simmons examining the meaning of literacy in various human societies, the role of literacy and storytelling, and the ways in which our technology might influence those two things.
I have often criticized the posthumanist stories I’ve read of late because of the tendency for the technology to be so advanced it’s basically magic. Simmons lampshades this and employs posthumanist SF to good effect by just leaning into the whole magic angle. Yes, at face value, the idea of recreating the Iliad in “real life” is absurd and impossible—but if you arrange the tech tree of our evolution just so, it becomes just incredibly improbable (and as the book explores, probability is a key underlying element of the story—not that that’s important, as I said). The Greek gods of this story are incredibly powerful, yes—but they are also illiterate. In a society where technology has progressed to the point that you can alter your form at will, communicate information through nanotechnology … what good is writing anymore?
Savi makes a remark at one point about the pre-literate meeting the post-literate when Odysseus meets Harman and Daeman, and it’s a very telling statement. Odysseus and the other Greeks represent humanity prior to the dominance of the written word. Simmons presents them as emphasizing action and embodiment over contemplation. Contrast this with Mahnmut and Orphu, whose human-like intellectual existences within their very non-humanoid bodies revolve around contemplation of Shakespeare and Proust, respectively. There is an irony that the only literate beings in this story are an anachronistic professor and robots from Jupiter’s moons! However, the moravecs have more in common with Harman et al than you might think—both have a dearth of lived experiences when it comes to the struggles of the human condition that we consider de rigeur. The moravecs, by dint of their access to the sum total of human literature, are more aware of the human condition. But as Mahnmut discovers throughout this story, he has led a very sheltered life and has not paid attention to much beyond his myopic niche interests.
Everything in Ilium is wrapped in literary texts—not subtext but actually part of the text. The antagonists, from the Greek gods to Prospero and Caliban and the mysterious Setebos, are all allusions to famous literary characters. Beyond that though, the textual references—the passages of Shakespeare dissected, the interrogation of characters like Falstaff—create the impression of a conversation between these authors and the characters of Ilium. Even Hockenberry marvels at his own role as a kind of ersatz intervener in a drama that was conceived by Homer and is now being re-staged by the enigmatic Zeus: he goes from observer to participant, driving events further away from the text of the Iliad. This makes him uncomfortable not just for the personal risk he accrues as a result but for the fact that it shifts his understanding of the people around him from characters in a farcical recreation of a tragedy to living, breathing humans whose autonomy and agency he must respect rather than ignore or co-opt. This is reinforced numerous times when he underestimates the guile or commitment of the Greeks and Trojans, particularly Helen.
As Mahnmut and Orphu debate the meanings of life explored by their literary crushes and Savi opens the eyes of her new friends to the ideas they never knew they were missing, Simmons invites us all to consider the different options with regards to literacy. Those of you who are able to read this, like me, take our literacy for granted to an extent—I don’t mean to imply that none of you struggled for this. Some of you might have had to struggle to learn to read, or struggled to get access to education in the first place. But we take it for granted that our species, our societies, are literate. Literacy is a technology, not a biological certainty. As Simmons demonstrates here, literacy is one way to add depth to a culture—but it is not the only way, and it introduces its own complications and dead-ends as well.
Whether or not our own technology takes us as far as the posthumans of Ilium get, it behoves us to consider how that technology alters our relationship with literacy. It’s already happening right now. As a teacher, I often ponder how my students (some of whom, because I teach adults in high school, are older than me) look at reading and writing differently because they have cell phones and the Internet. As a millennial, I grew up online. I am, in some ways, more comfortable reading and writing than I am speaking. My younger students, while even more attached to their devices than I am, are not necessarily more literate as a result—because the way we negotiate the digital spaces we’ve created has changed. While that sounds curmudgeonly, it’s more observation than complaint or criticism. It can’t really be either of those until we have a deeper, wider conversation about what’s happening—we need to stop saying “kids can’t read” or “kids don’t read” and instead check our assumptions about why we expect kids to read the same way we read. After all, we didn’t always read the way we do now.
Of course, the complex conversation happening within Ilium would be improved if it didn’t centre 2 dead white guys and a dead Greek poet to whom we attribute the Iliad. Simmons’ emphasis on the Western tradition of literature is an unfortunate limitation that ignores the rich history of both literate and oral traditions in countless other cultures around the world.
On top of that, I wish I could praise this book wholeheartedly, but I almost put it down only a couple of pages in, when Simmons has Daeman meditate all about the hot nude body of the woman he’s trying to seduce. Ew. And then there’s Hockenberry. It should have been redemptive, this flabby middle-aged white guy from our time running around the Age of Heroes and basically being unremarkable … but as much as I admire Simmons for undermining Hockenberry’s brief hero moments via the machinations of Helen, Andromache, and to a lesser extent Hector and Achilles … I can’t get behind Hockenberry’s utter male gaze and objectification of the goddesses and women he meets. The whole scene where he just goes and poses as Paris so he can have sex with Helen? Hello rapey and gratuitous and ew.
So … yeah. Ilium as a work of literature has vast chasms of thought-provoking ideas as deep as Olympus Mons is tall. I was enchanted by the way Simmons teases out the various contradictions around literacy. Simmons is a huge literary nerd and a talented SF author, and I love that combination. But I can’t praise that this book without calling out the intensely uncomfortable male gazey moments that are, unfortunately, all-too-common in books written by otherwise intelligent white guys. Seriously, do better.
Is this book for you? I don’t know! It’s big and convoluted and sprawling but oddly satisfying if you decide you want to put up with the lengthy digressions, the problematic stuff I noted, and the frustrating tendency to digress at length (as mentioned) but never actually reveal the really interesting stuff (what are the voynix? Who is Setebos?). I guess that’s what sequels are for.
Summarizing Ilium is not an easy task, but I’ll do my best. It’s a couple of thousand years into the future. Humanity experienced a posthumanist singularity, including an event vaguely alluded to as “the rubicon,” and mastered nanotechnology and quantum tunnelling/quantum teleportation. Now, beings claiming to be the Greek gods inhabit a terraformed Mars and have recreated the Iliad in the flesh. They’ve also recreated Thomas Hockenberry, a twenty-first–century scholar of the Iliad, essentially to provide commentary on them? But Hockenberry gets pushed into a situation where he has to go off-book, and things soon prove … revolutionary. Meanwhile, some moravecs (self-evolving AI robots descended from robots sent out by humans) from the moons of Jupiter have arrived on Mars to investigate all this untoward quantum activity. Meanwhile meanwhile, on Earth, some slightly-not-baseline humans are living a peaceful yet empty existence devoid of culture or true learning/introspection, until of course, someone jolts them out of it. The result? By the end of the book, all hell has broken loose of course!
Look, the actual plot of this book is unimportant.
Seriously, the plot is one of the least interesting parts of the book, and I’m going to mostly ignore it. I want to talk about what Simmons is doing with regards to the intersection of classical literature and science fiction and why it’s so goddamned brilliant, and then I will slam him for some dirty male gazey bits. Read on!
For the record, I did read the Iliad (Fagles), but didn’t review it because it was … a difficult book. It’s really not a great book for reading silently to oneself in translation. It is meant to be declaimed, in ancient Greek, but that is not a skill I have. Although debates over its historicity and the extent to which it is an oral tradition abound, one thing is clear: the Iliad is, like so many epic poems from antiquity, a complex work that has been altered by each of the cultures who have translated it, studied it, and reinterpreted it through their own biased lenses. Also note that you don’t need to have read the Iliad to follow Ilium.
Ilium is, fundamentally, a story about literacy. Every relationship, every plot development, every conflict, is a facet of Simmons examining the meaning of literacy in various human societies, the role of literacy and storytelling, and the ways in which our technology might influence those two things.
I have often criticized the posthumanist stories I’ve read of late because of the tendency for the technology to be so advanced it’s basically magic. Simmons lampshades this and employs posthumanist SF to good effect by just leaning into the whole magic angle. Yes, at face value, the idea of recreating the Iliad in “real life” is absurd and impossible—but if you arrange the tech tree of our evolution just so, it becomes just incredibly improbable (and as the book explores, probability is a key underlying element of the story—not that that’s important, as I said). The Greek gods of this story are incredibly powerful, yes—but they are also illiterate. In a society where technology has progressed to the point that you can alter your form at will, communicate information through nanotechnology … what good is writing anymore?
Savi makes a remark at one point about the pre-literate meeting the post-literate when Odysseus meets Harman and Daeman, and it’s a very telling statement. Odysseus and the other Greeks represent humanity prior to the dominance of the written word. Simmons presents them as emphasizing action and embodiment over contemplation. Contrast this with Mahnmut and Orphu, whose human-like intellectual existences within their very non-humanoid bodies revolve around contemplation of Shakespeare and Proust, respectively. There is an irony that the only literate beings in this story are an anachronistic professor and robots from Jupiter’s moons! However, the moravecs have more in common with Harman et al than you might think—both have a dearth of lived experiences when it comes to the struggles of the human condition that we consider de rigeur. The moravecs, by dint of their access to the sum total of human literature, are more aware of the human condition. But as Mahnmut discovers throughout this story, he has led a very sheltered life and has not paid attention to much beyond his myopic niche interests.
Everything in Ilium is wrapped in literary texts—not subtext but actually part of the text. The antagonists, from the Greek gods to Prospero and Caliban and the mysterious Setebos, are all allusions to famous literary characters. Beyond that though, the textual references—the passages of Shakespeare dissected, the interrogation of characters like Falstaff—create the impression of a conversation between these authors and the characters of Ilium. Even Hockenberry marvels at his own role as a kind of ersatz intervener in a drama that was conceived by Homer and is now being re-staged by the enigmatic Zeus: he goes from observer to participant, driving events further away from the text of the Iliad. This makes him uncomfortable not just for the personal risk he accrues as a result but for the fact that it shifts his understanding of the people around him from characters in a farcical recreation of a tragedy to living, breathing humans whose autonomy and agency he must respect rather than ignore or co-opt. This is reinforced numerous times when he underestimates the guile or commitment of the Greeks and Trojans, particularly Helen.
As Mahnmut and Orphu debate the meanings of life explored by their literary crushes and Savi opens the eyes of her new friends to the ideas they never knew they were missing, Simmons invites us all to consider the different options with regards to literacy. Those of you who are able to read this, like me, take our literacy for granted to an extent—I don’t mean to imply that none of you struggled for this. Some of you might have had to struggle to learn to read, or struggled to get access to education in the first place. But we take it for granted that our species, our societies, are literate. Literacy is a technology, not a biological certainty. As Simmons demonstrates here, literacy is one way to add depth to a culture—but it is not the only way, and it introduces its own complications and dead-ends as well.
Whether or not our own technology takes us as far as the posthumans of Ilium get, it behoves us to consider how that technology alters our relationship with literacy. It’s already happening right now. As a teacher, I often ponder how my students (some of whom, because I teach adults in high school, are older than me) look at reading and writing differently because they have cell phones and the Internet. As a millennial, I grew up online. I am, in some ways, more comfortable reading and writing than I am speaking. My younger students, while even more attached to their devices than I am, are not necessarily more literate as a result—because the way we negotiate the digital spaces we’ve created has changed. While that sounds curmudgeonly, it’s more observation than complaint or criticism. It can’t really be either of those until we have a deeper, wider conversation about what’s happening—we need to stop saying “kids can’t read” or “kids don’t read” and instead check our assumptions about why we expect kids to read the same way we read. After all, we didn’t always read the way we do now.
Of course, the complex conversation happening within Ilium would be improved if it didn’t centre 2 dead white guys and a dead Greek poet to whom we attribute the Iliad. Simmons’ emphasis on the Western tradition of literature is an unfortunate limitation that ignores the rich history of both literate and oral traditions in countless other cultures around the world.
On top of that, I wish I could praise this book wholeheartedly, but I almost put it down only a couple of pages in, when Simmons has Daeman meditate all about the hot nude body of the woman he’s trying to seduce. Ew. And then there’s Hockenberry. It should have been redemptive, this flabby middle-aged white guy from our time running around the Age of Heroes and basically being unremarkable … but as much as I admire Simmons for undermining Hockenberry’s brief hero moments via the machinations of Helen, Andromache, and to a lesser extent Hector and Achilles … I can’t get behind Hockenberry’s utter male gaze and objectification of the goddesses and women he meets. The whole scene where he just goes and poses as Paris so he can have sex with Helen? Hello rapey and gratuitous and ew.
So … yeah. Ilium as a work of literature has vast chasms of thought-provoking ideas as deep as Olympus Mons is tall. I was enchanted by the way Simmons teases out the various contradictions around literacy. Simmons is a huge literary nerd and a talented SF author, and I love that combination. But I can’t praise that this book without calling out the intensely uncomfortable male gazey moments that are, unfortunately, all-too-common in books written by otherwise intelligent white guys. Seriously, do better.
Is this book for you? I don’t know! It’s big and convoluted and sprawling but oddly satisfying if you decide you want to put up with the lengthy digressions, the problematic stuff I noted, and the frustrating tendency to digress at length (as mentioned) but never actually reveal the really interesting stuff (what are the voynix? Who is Setebos?). I guess that’s what sequels are for.
As with The Fifth Season I’m very late to the party with this one. So many more books in this series! But I finally got around to All Systems Red, and it was every bit as enjoyable as I was led to believe it was, even if it wasn’t quite as memorable as I’d like. Then again, considering this is a novella, I will cut Martha Wells some slack. Indeed, I appreciate how skilfully she selects which aspects of her universe to flesh out and which ones should be left as sketched tropes. It takes confidence and practice to develop a novella that works so effectively without becoming a hot mess.
Murderbot is a SecUnit, a cybernetic construct of cloned human bits and machine augmentations designed to protect people who rent it from the anonymous Company. Murderbot has hacked its own governor module, meaning it now has total volition—not that it wants anyone else discovering this. Contrary to its name, Murderbot has no particularly murderous agenda. Indeed, all Murderbot really wants to do is watch entertainment vids and try to keep under the radar—which isn’t easy, because if you haven’t noticed, humans die really easily. We are basically bags of water, after all. For this job, Murderbot discovers that a rival company is stalking its humans, attempting to eliminate them before they can discover the true worth of the planet they’re surveying. Can Murderbot keep its humans safe? Or will Murderbot kill them itself because they’re trying so damn much to be nice to it, and that’s really awkward? Read on!
Let‘s talk about gender for a moment. Murderbot never expresses a specific gender identity, nor which pronouns to use, and Well is careful to write the book in a gender-neutral way. So Murderbot may very well be agender. As a constructed being, gender might not even be a concept Murderbot has any use for. In keeping with the other characters of All Systems Red, I’ll refer to Murderbot as “it” throughout my review, until such time as Murderbot tells me it’s using different pronouns. Nevertheless, stereotypes in our society mean that we as readers will often assign gender to beings that are agender in ways consistent with our experiences of other media.
When we think about cyborg soldiers … well, we think about male cyborg soldiers, for the most part. Murderbot is what Robocop might be if OCP had totally bought out the Detroit Metropolitan PD and were cloning robots instead of harvesting dead cops. There are exceptions, of course—plenty of deadly female cyborgs out there too, yet they are usually depicted in heavily sexualized ways (Murderbot definitely is not). As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t visualize when I read. So I don’t “picture” Murderbot as ht even having any particular gender; when Wells talks about the other humans seeing Murderbot’s face (realizing it has a face), I didn’t picture a typically masculine or feminine face. Yet even I’m not immune to biases, of course, and because we’ve been socialized to see warfare and combat as an extremely masculine activity, Murderbot read as quite masculine to me (despite its obsession with soaps—dudes can have feelings too!).
Note that I’m not arguing Murderbot is male (nor am I particularly interested in your reading of Murderbot’s gender expression). Far from it—I’m happy for Murderbot to be agender (although, as always, that comes with a huge problematic disclaimer tag that SF needs to have more human agender characters to balance out the fact that agender representation is too often the domain of robots and aliens, which further relegates agender people as Other). But I do think it’s important to acknowledge up front the kinds of biases we have as readers, especially when reading science fiction.
As with many first-person narrators, Murderbot’s voice will make or break one’s enjoyment of the story. This is doubly true for novellas, I find, where we have such a short amount of time to get into a character’s head. What I appreciate most about Murderbot as a character is the way its self-deprecation doesn’t come across as snark. We spend so much time in Murderbot’s head, and if Murderbot were constantly snarking along with us and expecting us to just nod our head and hi-five it all the time, that would get old, fast. Rather, the self-deprecation clearly comes from a place of trauma. Murderbot has a lot of self-hatred, as a result of its past (which would get into spoiler territory, so I’m eliding it here, but let’s say it has to do with why it calls itself Murderbot). So part of it doesn’t feel deserving of sympathy from humans, and when it discovers it has landed in a group of fairly self-aware and progressive humans, it’s almost worse than being among humans that actively hate or revile it.
(I’m sure there are some apt comparisons here that trans people or racialized people could make about being among a group of cis or white people, but I’m not really the right person to make those comparisons.)
I love the dynamics Wells develops among the various characters and Murderbot. There’s a lot happening here for such a short book. And I really enjoyed the ending, because it just demonstrates so well how having the best of intentions doesn’t mean your help will be accepted, and it’s not a judgment on you if someone rejects your offer of help—they have their own things they’re dealing with.
Where All Systems Red loses my attention is mostly to do with the larger worldbuilding, which I found fairly bland. As I said earlier, I can chalk this up mostly to it being a novella. Wells leans on the decades of tropes we’ve built up—negligent corporations feudally lording it up around the galaxy, cyborgs and mil-SF set pieces galore, etc. This is not a book really concerned with explaining much of anything about how this universe works. And that’s all fine; that’s how a novella that is a character-driven story really should work. Unfortunately, the side effect is sometimes that I find it harder to hold onto the story for very long after I’ve read it. Murderbot is a cool character, yes. But I’ve also seen other cyborg characters, read other stories with first-person cyborg characters. It’s not that I’m saying Murderbot feels unoriginal or clichéd—not at all—but my poor, fallible meat-brain might not be able to keep it from melting into that other group of cyborg characters very well.
Maybe I’ll read some of the sequels, and that will help Murderbot stick around in my memory. Until then, I’m happy I read All Systems Red. It made for an enjoyable evening—I literally could not put it down, and I stayed up too late reading it. No regrets. Now I want to watch Starship Troopers….
Murderbot is a SecUnit, a cybernetic construct of cloned human bits and machine augmentations designed to protect people who rent it from the anonymous Company. Murderbot has hacked its own governor module, meaning it now has total volition—not that it wants anyone else discovering this. Contrary to its name, Murderbot has no particularly murderous agenda. Indeed, all Murderbot really wants to do is watch entertainment vids and try to keep under the radar—which isn’t easy, because if you haven’t noticed, humans die really easily. We are basically bags of water, after all. For this job, Murderbot discovers that a rival company is stalking its humans, attempting to eliminate them before they can discover the true worth of the planet they’re surveying. Can Murderbot keep its humans safe? Or will Murderbot kill them itself because they’re trying so damn much to be nice to it, and that’s really awkward? Read on!
Let‘s talk about gender for a moment. Murderbot never expresses a specific gender identity, nor which pronouns to use, and Well is careful to write the book in a gender-neutral way. So Murderbot may very well be agender. As a constructed being, gender might not even be a concept Murderbot has any use for. In keeping with the other characters of All Systems Red, I’ll refer to Murderbot as “it” throughout my review, until such time as Murderbot tells me it’s using different pronouns. Nevertheless, stereotypes in our society mean that we as readers will often assign gender to beings that are agender in ways consistent with our experiences of other media.
When we think about cyborg soldiers … well, we think about male cyborg soldiers, for the most part. Murderbot is what Robocop might be if OCP had totally bought out the Detroit Metropolitan PD and were cloning robots instead of harvesting dead cops. There are exceptions, of course—plenty of deadly female cyborgs out there too, yet they are usually depicted in heavily sexualized ways (Murderbot definitely is not). As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t visualize when I read. So I don’t “picture” Murderbot as ht even having any particular gender; when Wells talks about the other humans seeing Murderbot’s face (realizing it has a face), I didn’t picture a typically masculine or feminine face. Yet even I’m not immune to biases, of course, and because we’ve been socialized to see warfare and combat as an extremely masculine activity, Murderbot read as quite masculine to me (despite its obsession with soaps—dudes can have feelings too!).
Note that I’m not arguing Murderbot is male (nor am I particularly interested in your reading of Murderbot’s gender expression). Far from it—I’m happy for Murderbot to be agender (although, as always, that comes with a huge problematic disclaimer tag that SF needs to have more human agender characters to balance out the fact that agender representation is too often the domain of robots and aliens, which further relegates agender people as Other). But I do think it’s important to acknowledge up front the kinds of biases we have as readers, especially when reading science fiction.
As with many first-person narrators, Murderbot’s voice will make or break one’s enjoyment of the story. This is doubly true for novellas, I find, where we have such a short amount of time to get into a character’s head. What I appreciate most about Murderbot as a character is the way its self-deprecation doesn’t come across as snark. We spend so much time in Murderbot’s head, and if Murderbot were constantly snarking along with us and expecting us to just nod our head and hi-five it all the time, that would get old, fast. Rather, the self-deprecation clearly comes from a place of trauma. Murderbot has a lot of self-hatred, as a result of its past (which would get into spoiler territory, so I’m eliding it here, but let’s say it has to do with why it calls itself Murderbot). So part of it doesn’t feel deserving of sympathy from humans, and when it discovers it has landed in a group of fairly self-aware and progressive humans, it’s almost worse than being among humans that actively hate or revile it.
(I’m sure there are some apt comparisons here that trans people or racialized people could make about being among a group of cis or white people, but I’m not really the right person to make those comparisons.)
I love the dynamics Wells develops among the various characters and Murderbot. There’s a lot happening here for such a short book. And I really enjoyed the ending, because it just demonstrates so well how having the best of intentions doesn’t mean your help will be accepted, and it’s not a judgment on you if someone rejects your offer of help—they have their own things they’re dealing with.
Where All Systems Red loses my attention is mostly to do with the larger worldbuilding, which I found fairly bland. As I said earlier, I can chalk this up mostly to it being a novella. Wells leans on the decades of tropes we’ve built up—negligent corporations feudally lording it up around the galaxy, cyborgs and mil-SF set pieces galore, etc. This is not a book really concerned with explaining much of anything about how this universe works. And that’s all fine; that’s how a novella that is a character-driven story really should work. Unfortunately, the side effect is sometimes that I find it harder to hold onto the story for very long after I’ve read it. Murderbot is a cool character, yes. But I’ve also seen other cyborg characters, read other stories with first-person cyborg characters. It’s not that I’m saying Murderbot feels unoriginal or clichéd—not at all—but my poor, fallible meat-brain might not be able to keep it from melting into that other group of cyborg characters very well.
Maybe I’ll read some of the sequels, and that will help Murderbot stick around in my memory. Until then, I’m happy I read All Systems Red. It made for an enjoyable evening—I literally could not put it down, and I stayed up too late reading it. No regrets. Now I want to watch Starship Troopers….
I was reading a very different, unrelated book last night before bed, in which someone says that the key to a good story is usually obsession. Laini Taylor has learned this storytelling lesson well, for her characters are distinguished by their obsessions. From Lazlo’s obsession with Weep or Thyon’s obsession with alchemy in Strange the Dreamer to Skathis’ obsession with power or a new antagonist’s obsession with revenge here in Muse of Nightmares, this motif runs throughout the series and touches every event. Obsession can be powerful, but by its very nature it also tends to be unhealthy, for it prevents us from seeing when we’re about to run headlong off the edge of a precipice.
Spoilers for the first book but not this one.
Muse of Nightmares picks up where Strange the Dreamer leaves off: Sarai has died, but her soul is captured by her sister Minya. This leaves Sarai … undead? Around, at least—but in Minya’s thrall, her free will more like a very short leash. If Lazlo doesn’t agree to bring Minya down from the citadel into Weep, then Minya will let that leash go, and Sarai will evanesce into … well, wherever it is that souls go. But if Lazlo does that, then Minya and her ghost army will wreak devastating revenge on Weep. So it’s a stand-off: Minya can’t get to Weep without Lazlo’s help, and Lazlo can’t outright refuse her lest he lose Sarai again.
So the first half of the book plumbs the depth of Minya’s trauma as a teenager trapped in a 6-year-old’s body. Sarai must venture into Minya’s dreams in order to try to heal her sister, or at least help her—but it is, of course, not that easy. With this gentle excavation of Minya’s psyche underway, Taylor must turn to another antagonist for conflict with the Mesarthim. Rather than further investigate the politics of Weep, however, she reaches deep into the past of her worlds, introducing a new character who, like Minya, is really just after revenge. And so the last half of the book becomes a mad dash to stop this character, whose power is much more formidable, from destroying everything and everyone they love.
In a way, Muse of Nightmares feels uncomfortably like two books spliced into one, or lack a backdoor pilot for another series. Kora and Nova’s story, first told at the beginning of each part of the book, before spilling over into the main narrative, is rich and fascinating in its own right. Similarly, I love how Taylor continues to expand our awareness of this multiverse of hers. The little links to her previous series are nice touches, and there are so many tantalizing opportunities for more stories here. Yet this new narrative is an intrusion into the arcs established in the first book. I praised Strange the Dreamer for its dearth of infodumps. I cannot give this book the same compliment.
The main victims of this decision are the supporting cast from book 1. Thyon and Callista are back—kind of. They spend the book digging around an ancient library, but they have no arc or conflict of their own. Each time we cut to them it almost feels like a diversion from the main story, especially considering their pairing is one of comic relief. With most of the citizens of Weep evacuated during the events of the previous book, the whole town is a shadow of its former self. There’s no substance here. Taylor focuses so much on her core cast of characters that the resulting story feels more intimate yet also simpler. Reduced.
This is true as well for the overall plot. Not only does it feel spliced together, as I previously said, but the last third of the novel feels rushed. There’s a big climax with a fight scene that is … eh. And then a long denouement in which we are quickly told the fates of the various characters while Taylor sets us up for what I assume will be the next series in this multiverse. And I like it! But it’s like a movie where the director comes back to do pick-ups and decides to add an entire new ending to the film: the events themselves are fine, yet the way in which these events unfold feels perfunctory and contrived for reasons of plot.
There are certain moments that work so well and are so satisfying—I’ll give Taylor that. Like Minya’s realizations when all that psychic weight is lifted off her shoulders. As we learn more about the Mesarthim’s past, not to mention their actual origins, we better understand what led Minya to her current state of mind. Taylor has a flair for tragedy and tragic back stories in particular. From star-crossed lovers in one book to separated sisters and survivor guilt in this one, Taylor’s writing never fails to deliver maximum emotional weight. It’s why I can enjoy these novels so much despite the plots not always measuring up.
The confused nature of this book can be summarized in one element: its title. Minya and Nova are more the main characters of this book than Sarai, yet she gets the title billing. She and Lazlo have their moments, but it’s the two heavily traumatized girls—one of them in the body of a 6-year-old, the other centuries old and bitter with failed revenge—who dominate this narrative. Taylor does her best to give all the other characters a chance to shine (hi, Sparrow!), and to her credit, she does it in a way that fits into the rest of the story. I guess what I’m dissatisfied with isn’t the quality of the story but its structure and organization.
So, please, don’t take this review as an overly negative one. Not only did I enjoy Muse of Nightmares, but I positively inhaled it. I was turning pages as fast as I could read them for the first night I was reading it. Nothing about this book has diminished my enjoyment or appreciation of Taylor’s writing. And this story delivers its fair share of emotional wallops. Its structure, and the way Taylor decided to weave in additional backstory, just didn’t work well for me. However, if you liked Strange the Dreamer, you will also like this book.
Spoilers for the first book but not this one.
Muse of Nightmares picks up where Strange the Dreamer leaves off: Sarai has died, but her soul is captured by her sister Minya. This leaves Sarai … undead? Around, at least—but in Minya’s thrall, her free will more like a very short leash. If Lazlo doesn’t agree to bring Minya down from the citadel into Weep, then Minya will let that leash go, and Sarai will evanesce into … well, wherever it is that souls go. But if Lazlo does that, then Minya and her ghost army will wreak devastating revenge on Weep. So it’s a stand-off: Minya can’t get to Weep without Lazlo’s help, and Lazlo can’t outright refuse her lest he lose Sarai again.
So the first half of the book plumbs the depth of Minya’s trauma as a teenager trapped in a 6-year-old’s body. Sarai must venture into Minya’s dreams in order to try to heal her sister, or at least help her—but it is, of course, not that easy. With this gentle excavation of Minya’s psyche underway, Taylor must turn to another antagonist for conflict with the Mesarthim. Rather than further investigate the politics of Weep, however, she reaches deep into the past of her worlds, introducing a new character who, like Minya, is really just after revenge. And so the last half of the book becomes a mad dash to stop this character, whose power is much more formidable, from destroying everything and everyone they love.
In a way, Muse of Nightmares feels uncomfortably like two books spliced into one, or lack a backdoor pilot for another series. Kora and Nova’s story, first told at the beginning of each part of the book, before spilling over into the main narrative, is rich and fascinating in its own right. Similarly, I love how Taylor continues to expand our awareness of this multiverse of hers. The little links to her previous series are nice touches, and there are so many tantalizing opportunities for more stories here. Yet this new narrative is an intrusion into the arcs established in the first book. I praised Strange the Dreamer for its dearth of infodumps. I cannot give this book the same compliment.
The main victims of this decision are the supporting cast from book 1. Thyon and Callista are back—kind of. They spend the book digging around an ancient library, but they have no arc or conflict of their own. Each time we cut to them it almost feels like a diversion from the main story, especially considering their pairing is one of comic relief. With most of the citizens of Weep evacuated during the events of the previous book, the whole town is a shadow of its former self. There’s no substance here. Taylor focuses so much on her core cast of characters that the resulting story feels more intimate yet also simpler. Reduced.
This is true as well for the overall plot. Not only does it feel spliced together, as I previously said, but the last third of the novel feels rushed. There’s a big climax with a fight scene that is … eh. And then a long denouement in which we are quickly told the fates of the various characters while Taylor sets us up for what I assume will be the next series in this multiverse. And I like it! But it’s like a movie where the director comes back to do pick-ups and decides to add an entire new ending to the film: the events themselves are fine, yet the way in which these events unfold feels perfunctory and contrived for reasons of plot.
There are certain moments that work so well and are so satisfying—I’ll give Taylor that. Like Minya’s realizations when all that psychic weight is lifted off her shoulders. As we learn more about the Mesarthim’s past, not to mention their actual origins, we better understand what led Minya to her current state of mind. Taylor has a flair for tragedy and tragic back stories in particular. From star-crossed lovers in one book to separated sisters and survivor guilt in this one, Taylor’s writing never fails to deliver maximum emotional weight. It’s why I can enjoy these novels so much despite the plots not always measuring up.
The confused nature of this book can be summarized in one element: its title. Minya and Nova are more the main characters of this book than Sarai, yet she gets the title billing. She and Lazlo have their moments, but it’s the two heavily traumatized girls—one of them in the body of a 6-year-old, the other centuries old and bitter with failed revenge—who dominate this narrative. Taylor does her best to give all the other characters a chance to shine (hi, Sparrow!), and to her credit, she does it in a way that fits into the rest of the story. I guess what I’m dissatisfied with isn’t the quality of the story but its structure and organization.
So, please, don’t take this review as an overly negative one. Not only did I enjoy Muse of Nightmares, but I positively inhaled it. I was turning pages as fast as I could read them for the first night I was reading it. Nothing about this book has diminished my enjoyment or appreciation of Taylor’s writing. And this story delivers its fair share of emotional wallops. Its structure, and the way Taylor decided to weave in additional backstory, just didn’t work well for me. However, if you liked Strange the Dreamer, you will also like this book.
Reader, I have done something I didn't think I would ever do. Not only have I had to DNF another book just before the end of the year, but I …
… I skipped to the end!
Yes, I know! Sacrilege! But I could not finish Crosstalk. The constant storm of interruptions from Briddey’s phone and the people in her life was literally causing my introvert brain to feel anxious and stressed. If I have any praise for Connie Willis in this book, it’s only that her writing is good enough to manifest the negative symptoms of over-connection in my own body.
Chocolategoddess’ review captures pretty much all of my thoughts about this book, from the potential to cause anxiety all the way to Briddey’s lack of intelligence or agency, to the problems with all the other characters. She goes into much more detail about this than I’m willing to.
Briddey a bimbo. I don’t use that word lightly. When the story begins, she is head-over-heels for this guy Trent, who is so obviously a basket full of red flags. But no, she—and all the women in her office—think it’s “so romantic” that Trent wants to get an EED with Briddey before he proposes to her so that she can “feel how much” he loves her. I can feel the contempt and sarcasm dripping from every sentence Willis has written; Crosstalk is a deliberate pastiche and send up of romance and also an ersatz romantic comedy (more on that when I discuss the ending). Briddey is supposedly in some kind of executive position at a tech company, yet it’s unclear what she actually does (or how she ever accomplishes any work with everyone interrupting her).
The constant interruptions are supposed to be funny, a social commentary on how we are all too connected these days. I get it. I empathize and sympathize, Willis. Yet exaggerating it to the level of farce creates a new problem, because it undermines Briddey’s credibility as a protagonist. She has boundary issues in the sense that she literally has no boundaries. She lets her family access her apartment any time they want and hasn’t communicated clearly the fact that they can’t constantly be calling her at work. I would get if it’s one problematic family member, but it’s all of them, including the 9-year-old who acts more like a 13-year-old. (Having skipped to the end, I understand there’s a plot justification for Maeve’s precocity, but it is still jarring and she is still a total Mary Sue by the end of the book.)
Carrie at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books has another great review that echoes a lot of what I’ve said here as well.
Briddey’s lack of agency bothers me so much because there’s really no point in spending all this time in her head (literally) when she’s just along for the ride instead of coming up with ideas herself. After she has her EED installed, she literally spends the next day or so letting other people make decisions for her. And that’s kind of the point where I stopped reading, because I was just done.
I skipped to the end because, despite my misgivings about the writing, Willis had me wondering what was actually going on. The revelations are both more and less interesting than I was hoping. This could have been a much better book had Willis taken things in a different direction. (I’m reminded a bit of Slan.)
Read the two reviews I linked. Don’t read this book if you might feel at all overwhelmed by constantly having the narrative interrupted. I’m not joking: near the end of the book Briddey is trying to have a conversation with another character and Maeve butts in every two lines of dialogue.
To echo another reviewer: “Even though I did not finish it I know I did not like it so - 1 star.”
… I skipped to the end!
Yes, I know! Sacrilege! But I could not finish Crosstalk. The constant storm of interruptions from Briddey’s phone and the people in her life was literally causing my introvert brain to feel anxious and stressed. If I have any praise for Connie Willis in this book, it’s only that her writing is good enough to manifest the negative symptoms of over-connection in my own body.
Chocolategoddess’ review captures pretty much all of my thoughts about this book, from the potential to cause anxiety all the way to Briddey’s lack of intelligence or agency, to the problems with all the other characters. She goes into much more detail about this than I’m willing to.
Briddey a bimbo. I don’t use that word lightly. When the story begins, she is head-over-heels for this guy Trent, who is so obviously a basket full of red flags. But no, she—and all the women in her office—think it’s “so romantic” that Trent wants to get an EED with Briddey before he proposes to her so that she can “feel how much” he loves her. I can feel the contempt and sarcasm dripping from every sentence Willis has written; Crosstalk is a deliberate pastiche and send up of romance and also an ersatz romantic comedy (more on that when I discuss the ending). Briddey is supposedly in some kind of executive position at a tech company, yet it’s unclear what she actually does (or how she ever accomplishes any work with everyone interrupting her).
The constant interruptions are supposed to be funny, a social commentary on how we are all too connected these days. I get it. I empathize and sympathize, Willis. Yet exaggerating it to the level of farce creates a new problem, because it undermines Briddey’s credibility as a protagonist. She has boundary issues in the sense that she literally has no boundaries. She lets her family access her apartment any time they want and hasn’t communicated clearly the fact that they can’t constantly be calling her at work. I would get if it’s one problematic family member, but it’s all of them, including the 9-year-old who acts more like a 13-year-old. (Having skipped to the end, I understand there’s a plot justification for Maeve’s precocity, but it is still jarring and she is still a total Mary Sue by the end of the book.)
Carrie at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books has another great review that echoes a lot of what I’ve said here as well.
Briddey’s lack of agency bothers me so much because there’s really no point in spending all this time in her head (literally) when she’s just along for the ride instead of coming up with ideas herself. After she has her EED installed, she literally spends the next day or so letting other people make decisions for her. And that’s kind of the point where I stopped reading, because I was just done.
I skipped to the end because, despite my misgivings about the writing, Willis had me wondering what was actually going on. The revelations are both more and less interesting than I was hoping. This could have been a much better book had Willis taken things in a different direction. (I’m reminded a bit of Slan.)
Read the two reviews I linked. Don’t read this book if you might feel at all overwhelmed by constantly having the narrative interrupted. I’m not joking: near the end of the book Briddey is trying to have a conversation with another character and Maeve butts in every two lines of dialogue.
To echo another reviewer: “Even though I did not finish it I know I did not like it so - 1 star.”
Not sure what motivated me to add this to my to-read list at some point, but I did, and my library had a copy, so here we are. Enter Title Here is a metafictional novel about an extremely ambitious, driven, single-minded young woman who will stop at nothing to achieve her goals. Rahul Kanakia asks us to consider the current ways in which we rank, judge, and evaluate students in the American education system, and whether “meritocracy” is the right word to describe what’s happening. For all that this is a book about systemic issues, however, it is as ruthlessly focused on Reshma’s downwards spiral into abject nihilism as Reshma is on getting into Stanford AT ALL COSTS. The result is a novel that kind-of-sort-of works, a novel that exists in that liminal space between “thanks I hate it” and “oh wow this is fun.” Love it, like it, despise it, Enter Title Here definitely has relevant comments on our current society and the types of people we are creating within it.
Reshma Kapoor is an 18-year-old set on getting into Stanford, doing pre-med, then becoming a doctor—not because she wants to be a doctor, but because it’s the “safest” way to guarantee she will make good money and therefore be “set” in life. Prior to the start of the novel, Reshma and her parents won a lawsuit against her private school for changes it was making to its GPA calculation that would have cost Reshma her top spot, and thus damaged her chances at Stanford. Despite this triumph, Reshma feels she needs every edge she can get. So she’s decided to write a YA novel about a ruthlessly ambitious girl who does “normal girl things” for a month and the changes her ways, and then she’ll sell the novel to a literary agent and use that agent’s recommendation as part of her application package. What could possibly go wrong?
Quite a lot, of course.
Trigger warnings in this book for: racism, abuse of prescription drugs (study pills), discussion of suicide/suicide ideation, and negligent therapy.
Let’s start with the obvious, that which you might glean from a cursory reading of my summary or the book jacket: Reshma is an unlikable character and an antihero to boot. Kanakia is himself quite ambitious with this combination, because it demands a lot from the reader to be able to sympathize with her. She doesn’t get better through the book, either, although there are certainly moments of hopefulness, moments of morality, moments where she realizes she needs to stand on some kind of bedrock of principles. Don’t expect much schadenfreude from watching Reshma hit her nadir either. If anything, the absolute sense of hopelessness Kanakia cultivates in those climactic chapters made my skin crawl in a very uncomfortable way.
See, I read this book as a parable about how we need to be more careful about the messaging we send to children in our society. There’s a really interesting passage narrated by Reshma early in the book:
Mmm, yeah. That’s the social commentary I’m craving in my YA books (or, indeed, books in general). Enter Title Here is not a spectacular story, in my opinion, yet it has these little gems scattered throughout. This takedown of meritocracy occurs after Reshma reflects on how hard her parents worked to becomes the best of the best in India, a country with orders of magnitude more people than Canada or the United States. So this is a salient point that we white people often forget in our discussions of the so-called merit-based system we have here: there are probably more smart Indian kids in total than there are kids in my country, Canada. Just statistically speaking.
The novel in general spends a lot of time discussing the inherent unfairness and inequity of the systems Reshma is caught up in. As opposed to someone who tackles these systems from a social justice perspective, however, Reshma prefers to manipulate or try to game the system. She thinks she can play by the rules so well that she transcends the rules. Kanakia’s theme, then, is that this is an illusion, that the inequities of the system will always find a way to bend the rules to beat you down if you get too good at playing the game. It’s important to not that the proximal cause of Reshma’s downfall is not racism per se—though it’s in the mix—but her own hamartia, developed through years of nurturing herself into the perfect study machine. Whether or not Reshma’s ethnicity plays into a stereotype here is beside the point. The racial dimension is an enabling factor in Reshma’s position in the game. But more pertinent is her lack of healthy relationships with … well, anyone.
This is probably the most tragic element of the book, at least for me. Reshma makes very inflammatory, off-hand remarks that had me shaking my head—things like how there’s no point to reading for pleasure! Lol. Kanakia is quite good at manipulating our emotions in this way, creating this dualistic mode of reading Reshma as simultaneously worthy of pity and yet also revolting in a way. There’s a little bit of the “there but for the grace of God go I” feeling at play as well. I excelled at school, was at or near the top of my class depending on how you measure those things (we didn’t have GPAs). I didn’t have much of a social life or do the things that “normal” high schoolers often experience—and most of that I don’t regret missing out on anyway. Yet I was never as callously amoral as Reshma. I had empathy that she lacks. And I refuse to believe this is an element of her nature. Yet we can see it doesn’t come from her parents and it doesn’t come directly from friends, so it must be a combination of messages Reshma received growing up.
Of course, in order for Reshma’s brokenness to be narratively satisfying, we need a redemption arc, yes? Enter her novel, which is the novel you’re readying—kind of. The story is metafictional in that, being written in first person, we are reading some draft of the novel Reshma references within the novel—because she’s writing a novel about a girl like her who’s writing a novel about girl like her. Savvy? Good, I’m not repeating that.
I liked and loathed at alternating times aspects of how Kanakia handles the meta element. In general, I adore metafiction, yet I’m also very judgmental about it. I like the asides that Reshma tosses us, her casual cynicism about the process (“how hard can writing a novel be? You don’t even have to do research!”). The therapist who is obsessed with writing terrible mysteries himself and becomes a kind of meta-commentator on Reshma’s novel-writing process is funny, yes. But as my trigger warnings above indicate, I found it a little bit insensitive in general to the whole idea of therapy and what a therapist should be. Dr. Wasserman is not a good therapist. True, Kanakia lampshades this by the evidence of his increasingly diminished client list and his deepening obsession with plot diagramming on whiteboards. Yet in a novel where mental health is such a significant motif, this playing off of therapy for comedic effect worries me, because therapy is an important and often crucial element of treating mental health issues. Reshma needs a good therapist, not a comic relief character.
My final critique centres on Reshma’s friendships (or lack thereof) with people like Alex, Chelsea, Aakash, and George. As Kanakia lampshades a few times, Alex’s storyline could be better. There’s something missing, something incomplete, in her portrayal. The same goes for the others—Kanakia uses them all as foils for Reshma rather than fully-developed additional main characters, and it’s frustrating. Reshma’s deteriorating relationship with Ms. Ratcliffe is another example. The teacher seems to morph into whatever archetype is most needed by the plot at that moment. I keep comparing this book to other YA novels with similar motifs and finding that this one measures up short, mostly in the department of characterization.
(Holly Bourne, ok? I’m thinking of Holly Bourne right now. Just go and read her books. Don’t walk, run.)
Enter Title Here gave me goosebumps and chills sometimes. It made me angry other times. There are some moments of redemption, some moments of growth. Reshma has learned a little from her experience, I suppose. I don’t regret reading this book, yet I don’t really recommend it either, unless this specific subgenre (that is, “overachieving teenager obsessed with getting into an elite school”) floats your boat. It’s not that it doesn’t have good and meaningful things to say about our society—it just doesn’t quite unify those comments together into a truly remarkable narrative with memorable, dynamic characters. This is a novel that, like the novel it contains, feels like a palimpsest of various drafts, and it never quite achieves a more sublime state.
Reshma Kapoor is an 18-year-old set on getting into Stanford, doing pre-med, then becoming a doctor—not because she wants to be a doctor, but because it’s the “safest” way to guarantee she will make good money and therefore be “set” in life. Prior to the start of the novel, Reshma and her parents won a lawsuit against her private school for changes it was making to its GPA calculation that would have cost Reshma her top spot, and thus damaged her chances at Stanford. Despite this triumph, Reshma feels she needs every edge she can get. So she’s decided to write a YA novel about a ruthlessly ambitious girl who does “normal girl things” for a month and the changes her ways, and then she’ll sell the novel to a literary agent and use that agent’s recommendation as part of her application package. What could possibly go wrong?
Quite a lot, of course.
Trigger warnings in this book for: racism, abuse of prescription drugs (study pills), discussion of suicide/suicide ideation, and negligent therapy.
Let’s start with the obvious, that which you might glean from a cursory reading of my summary or the book jacket: Reshma is an unlikable character and an antihero to boot. Kanakia is himself quite ambitious with this combination, because it demands a lot from the reader to be able to sympathize with her. She doesn’t get better through the book, either, although there are certainly moments of hopefulness, moments of morality, moments where she realizes she needs to stand on some kind of bedrock of principles. Don’t expect much schadenfreude from watching Reshma hit her nadir either. If anything, the absolute sense of hopelessness Kanakia cultivates in those climactic chapters made my skin crawl in a very uncomfortable way.
See, I read this book as a parable about how we need to be more careful about the messaging we send to children in our society. There’s a really interesting passage narrated by Reshma early in the book:
Because my parents don’t understand that in America it doesn’t matter how hard you work. What matters is that you learn all the tips and tricks and do everything in the right way. And you know why? Because white people know that if hard work was all that counted, then my family would destroy them. We would own this country.
Mmm, yeah. That’s the social commentary I’m craving in my YA books (or, indeed, books in general). Enter Title Here is not a spectacular story, in my opinion, yet it has these little gems scattered throughout. This takedown of meritocracy occurs after Reshma reflects on how hard her parents worked to becomes the best of the best in India, a country with orders of magnitude more people than Canada or the United States. So this is a salient point that we white people often forget in our discussions of the so-called merit-based system we have here: there are probably more smart Indian kids in total than there are kids in my country, Canada. Just statistically speaking.
The novel in general spends a lot of time discussing the inherent unfairness and inequity of the systems Reshma is caught up in. As opposed to someone who tackles these systems from a social justice perspective, however, Reshma prefers to manipulate or try to game the system. She thinks she can play by the rules so well that she transcends the rules. Kanakia’s theme, then, is that this is an illusion, that the inequities of the system will always find a way to bend the rules to beat you down if you get too good at playing the game. It’s important to not that the proximal cause of Reshma’s downfall is not racism per se—though it’s in the mix—but her own hamartia, developed through years of nurturing herself into the perfect study machine. Whether or not Reshma’s ethnicity plays into a stereotype here is beside the point. The racial dimension is an enabling factor in Reshma’s position in the game. But more pertinent is her lack of healthy relationships with … well, anyone.
This is probably the most tragic element of the book, at least for me. Reshma makes very inflammatory, off-hand remarks that had me shaking my head—things like how there’s no point to reading for pleasure! Lol. Kanakia is quite good at manipulating our emotions in this way, creating this dualistic mode of reading Reshma as simultaneously worthy of pity and yet also revolting in a way. There’s a little bit of the “there but for the grace of God go I” feeling at play as well. I excelled at school, was at or near the top of my class depending on how you measure those things (we didn’t have GPAs). I didn’t have much of a social life or do the things that “normal” high schoolers often experience—and most of that I don’t regret missing out on anyway. Yet I was never as callously amoral as Reshma. I had empathy that she lacks. And I refuse to believe this is an element of her nature. Yet we can see it doesn’t come from her parents and it doesn’t come directly from friends, so it must be a combination of messages Reshma received growing up.
Of course, in order for Reshma’s brokenness to be narratively satisfying, we need a redemption arc, yes? Enter her novel, which is the novel you’re readying—kind of. The story is metafictional in that, being written in first person, we are reading some draft of the novel Reshma references within the novel—because she’s writing a novel about a girl like her who’s writing a novel about girl like her. Savvy? Good, I’m not repeating that.
I liked and loathed at alternating times aspects of how Kanakia handles the meta element. In general, I adore metafiction, yet I’m also very judgmental about it. I like the asides that Reshma tosses us, her casual cynicism about the process (“how hard can writing a novel be? You don’t even have to do research!”). The therapist who is obsessed with writing terrible mysteries himself and becomes a kind of meta-commentator on Reshma’s novel-writing process is funny, yes. But as my trigger warnings above indicate, I found it a little bit insensitive in general to the whole idea of therapy and what a therapist should be. Dr. Wasserman is not a good therapist. True, Kanakia lampshades this by the evidence of his increasingly diminished client list and his deepening obsession with plot diagramming on whiteboards. Yet in a novel where mental health is such a significant motif, this playing off of therapy for comedic effect worries me, because therapy is an important and often crucial element of treating mental health issues. Reshma needs a good therapist, not a comic relief character.
My final critique centres on Reshma’s friendships (or lack thereof) with people like Alex, Chelsea, Aakash, and George. As Kanakia lampshades a few times, Alex’s storyline could be better. There’s something missing, something incomplete, in her portrayal. The same goes for the others—Kanakia uses them all as foils for Reshma rather than fully-developed additional main characters, and it’s frustrating. Reshma’s deteriorating relationship with Ms. Ratcliffe is another example. The teacher seems to morph into whatever archetype is most needed by the plot at that moment. I keep comparing this book to other YA novels with similar motifs and finding that this one measures up short, mostly in the department of characterization.
(Holly Bourne, ok? I’m thinking of Holly Bourne right now. Just go and read her books. Don’t walk, run.)
Enter Title Here gave me goosebumps and chills sometimes. It made me angry other times. There are some moments of redemption, some moments of growth. Reshma has learned a little from her experience, I suppose. I don’t regret reading this book, yet I don’t really recommend it either, unless this specific subgenre (that is, “overachieving teenager obsessed with getting into an elite school”) floats your boat. It’s not that it doesn’t have good and meaningful things to say about our society—it just doesn’t quite unify those comments together into a truly remarkable narrative with memorable, dynamic characters. This is a novel that, like the novel it contains, feels like a palimpsest of various drafts, and it never quite achieves a more sublime state.