Angela Ambroz
Eleventy stars. I laughed. I cried. The art was beautiful. The story was tight. The pacing - okay, the pacing was a little off with the too-quick resolution. But it's fine. It's all fine. Such a great series.
Merged review:
Eleventy stars. I laughed. I cried. The art was beautiful. The story was tight. The pacing - okay, the pacing was a little off with the too-quick resolution. But it's fine. It's all fine. Such a great series.
I've had a huge rapprochement with bio and nature lately, and this book really hit the spot. The basic premise is that we should be looking towards nature to solve all of our most pressing problems: agriculture, energy, medicine, and even business/econ. You know, cuz of ev'lution and all. (Which is just mind-blowing in and of itself; can we take a moment to marvel at natural selection?) You don't realize until halfway through that the book was written in the 1990s - kind of amazing, given that it feels so fresh and crazy and revolutionary! That said, I was dying for an update; most of this stuff is 20 years out of date.
Each chapter followed a similar structure: the author, Benyus, would introduce a problem (“yo, computers are slow”), walk us through the way nature “solves” the problem (with some nitty gritty science; indeed, it often went over my head), and then introduce us to some “biomimics”, scientists who are actively researching ways to mimic, say, photosynthesis, or quantum tunneling, or a prairie.
The most exciting chapters, for me, were those on energy (mimicking photosynthesis) and medicine (Big Pharma hunting for new meds in the rainforest). I went on a walking safari recently with a reformed poacher-turned-bushman-tour-guide named Didi. Didi mentioned that, in addition to smoking elephant dung (!) for its mind-expanding abilities (!!), it's common among poachers/bushmen to keep track of what plants or water sources the elephants and chimpanzees use, as those are then deemed safe for humans too. He also mentioned certain plants being known to have medicinal properties. At the time, this reminded me of the wonderful science/tech blogger Xeni Jardin, who has breast cancer, mentioning that some of her chemo drugs came from a “healing tree bark” and a fungus that grows on a particular Italian castle. Mind-blowing! So Benyus's chapter on bio-medical research hunting for drugs in the rainforest - and even investing resources into preserving indigenous knowledge of which plants heal, etc. - was just really exciting.
Perhaps the weakest chapter was the final one, examining business and economics (“like a redwood forest”). This felt like the most fuzzy and underdeveloped chapter, lacking in the passion and clarity which Benyus imbued in the others. Also, I'm an economist, and I was a bit miffed that Benyus only focused on interviewing “industrial ecologists” - a field I'm unfamiliar with, but that sounded a lot like environmental economics. She basically touches on the main points of negative externalities, and trying to embed social and environmental costs into market prices, and the role of government in doing that, but it just felt uninspired and a bit blah.
That said, the whole book was great. Oh, and there's a TED talk.
Like Smile, Telgemeier writes well and poignantly about being a nervous, inward-looking middle school girl in America in the 90s. In this memoir, she recalls her nervous stomach, and her first visits to therapy. Touching, sweet, and authentic feeling.
It's probably sacrilege in some circles to say, but I find Arthur C. Clarke soooo unimaginative. Oh, how I do. Or I did, at least, reading this.
Presented as part of the excellent, British S.F. Masterworks series, the introduction to this book celebrates this as Clarke's best novel. It then goes on to make big promises about how it's not only the bestest Clarke novel ever, it's actually the most mind-blowing SF we mere mortals could ever hope to read. Yea, it is TRANSCENDENTALLY SUBLIME. Big words, intro man! After actually reading it, I can report not being sublimated into a higher state of aesthetic rapture. It was a page-turner, sure; the writing is super clear, it goes down a treat. But I also found it simple-minded, predictable, and really, really unimaginative - i.e. locked into a very narrow, ethnocentric, old timey perspective of the world (let alone the universe!).
In the near future, giant space ships arrive and hover over all the major US cities... or, rather, all the cities Clarke would have considered ‘major' (New York, London, Rome, Paris). The aliens are quickly dubbed ‘Overlords' (heh) and they seem to be wise, powerful, benevolent dictators. At least, they love the UN and the EU, and they want to restructure everything into a super-awesome World Government, and they talk a lot about purging humanity of its old-fashioned superstitions. These superstitions do not, however, include something as simple as women's lib - every female in this story (of which there are 3) is either (1) an infant, or (2) a wife. A wife, I should specify, who does nothing but WIFING (i.e. listening to Husband tell of the day, cooking, entertaining guests, looking sexy, and tending to the baby).
Thanks, Arthur.
The ostensible point - the AWE-INDUCING SUBLIMITY - of this book is meant to be unraveling the mysterious Overlordly mystery. If you're familiar with Clarke's other work though (e.g. 2001), it's not such a big mystery.
And pleeeeease don't call this hard sci-fi. This is not hard sci-fi. This is mansplaining for 300 pages; by which I mean, extended sections full of straightforward exposition (“Then history happened. This meant X. Also, people thought about Y. This was important because of Z.”), interrupted by shorter passages where a (male) character ponders the marvels of it all (again, via telling - ‘He pondered marvels.'' - rather than showing - ‘He gasped, his heart rate bounced.'). I define hard sci-fi as being sci-fi that uses existing or hypothetical science to do something which, at the moment, we can't do, but is really cool. Good hard sci-fi then uses this scientific future to examine something philosophical, and fundamental to humanity's perceptions of whatever (itself, the universe, etc). Examples include: Rudy Rucker's Postsingular (nanotech, wifi, fun), Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars (way too much NASA funding), or Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (post-scarcity economics in a replicator-happy world). Or anything from The Next Generation, really.
I don't call any fiction written by a trained scientist (as Clarke was) ‘hard'. There ain't no science in here. It's all just hand-waving, and sleek designs, and wonder-and-awe, and wives worrying about their (transcendentally?) intelligent children. It's not forward-looking, not by any definition I'd use, and it feels very much a product of its time (and its place, and its gender, and its upbringing).
I can't say I'm surprised. The Golden Age of sci-fi is mostly a good ol' boy's club, where women aren't really allowed (except as objects - cf. Bester) and everything is patterned on a very Euro-centric, post-WW2 worldview. Some of this stuff has a wonderful central idea that is unfortunately ruined by this narrowness (e.g. James Blish's Cities in Flight - awesome idea, but, seriously, Pittsburgh in space!?). That's also why I tend not to read anything before the 1970s New Wave period - and also prefer that period, since writers from then (Le Guin, Pohl) were actively influenced by the existing sociopolitical movements of the 60s and 70s, and so it's a lot more intentionally diverse, and open-minded, and quirky.
Clarke, though... Clarke's writing, his plotting, his ‘big ideas' (at least in this) just made me feel like I was being lectured to by a stodgy old British professor, who can't fathom things beyond his very specific life. Yes, it's a page-turner. I read it almost straight through. But no, I wouldn't recommend it.
This basically shifted my entire worldview. HA!
I've been deep in economics world for a long time. I do love it. I've said (for 15+ years now) that I “married economics, but have regular affairs with other topics”. I am/was so, so, SO deeply ingrained in the typical economist worldview that, e.g., Kim Stanley Robinson's critiques of economics in Ministry for the Future - that it's basically politics in disguise - made me roll my eyes and chortle and go, “Oh, silly KSR, no it's not, it's objective. It's as scientific as a social science can get!!”
Well, now those foundations have cracked. Because... “YEAH WTF!!!?!” to everything Marilyn Waring pointed out (in the 1980s!!!). And everything that Kuznets (and other enlightened economists have always implicitly KNOWN/complained about) said!!! Basically, yes, economics is a simplified model of the world... but what it chooses to abstract and not abstract are socio-political choices that have had and ARE HAVING enormous policy implications. The big/gigantic one being that anything typically counted as women's work - childcare, elder care, housework, etc - is... just not counted. And it's not about it being “hard to measure”, or “not traded on the market” - two flimsy excuses indeed, given that (a) there IS a market for care work (and you can certainly argue that its prices are still biased downwards since the market under values it)... but anyway, there's your numbers! And (b) the (predominantly male) economics profession has definitely worked pretty hard to e.g. count “underground”/”not formal” market activities like... organized crime. Also, Waring's historical analysis of how GDP (and thus our entire policy frameworks) is directly tied to the military-industrial complex. Tldr: War is good for the economy (all those tanks are pricey to make! $$$ for our GDP) while care work is NOT (since it counts for nothing).
Anyway, this book gave me the vocabulary to name a LOT of the stressors in my own life, as a working mom in America. Now, whenever the kids or husband ask me for anything, I simply exclaim, WELL ARE YOU PAYING? Wonderful.
I am now absolutely HUNGERING for more analysis in this direction: especially, e.g. how the Covid quarantines exposed the care economy's absolutely fundamental role in holding up the market economy.
Oh yeah, and Waring wrote with a ton of spicy fire - I loved her being like “this stupid statistician/economist told me XYZ and so I said no you're stupid” (I paraphrase).
Four short stories by Cory Doctorow.
Unauthorized Bread (4 stars)
This one was the most fun to read, harkening back to like early/innocent/fun Cory Doctorow: namely, refugee hacker girl figures out how to un-brick her Corporate Toaster (that only allows “authorized” bread from authorized bakers to be toasted). She liberates her other appliances and those of her similarly poor neighbors.
Fun, empowering, social critiquing, progressive. This made me want to hack my own appliances.
Model Minority (1 star)
Ooh, this one felt clunky and painful. Briefly: a Superman parody where Superman decides to intervene in the attempted murder of a Black man by some American police officers. This, obviously, triggers all sorts of disasters - with the story driving home that individual action will never be sufficient to undo the structural racism built into America.
I appreciate that message - and I appreciate that Doctorow's underlying progressivism is always couched in collective action - but this felt, ooooh, so painful to read. First, I just do not connect with midcentury modern comic books. They are an immediate turn-off. Second, the portrayal of race felt so clumsy (if well-meaning). Third, the writing felt kinda lazy - at least, I've read a bunch of protests by Doctorow, and this one felt like a copy+paste?
Radicalized (555555 stars!!!)
Oh wow. The last two stories in this collection BLEW. MY. MIND. They were both incredibly unsettling, fun, clever, and provocative.
In the titular story, we follow a Basic Middle-class White Guy who becomes, ahem, radicalized in his rage against the American healthcare system. If your immediate reaction is: well, fair. INDEED?! In the story, his wife is diagnosed with late stage cancer and their insurance refuses to pay for an experimental treatment that offers a slim (but real) chance of survival.
Ayyy. I found the portrayal of parenting, of mundane suburban existence, of rage at healthcare - IT WAS ALL VERY CONVINCING. Which made it particularly unsettling when terrorism enters the chat. Holy shit.
The Masque of the Red Death (5555555 stars as well, V GOOD)
I was pretty mind-blown from the previous story, but saw that people were saying the final story was “the best”. I... kinda agree? Without going into details (since it works better if you come in fairly uninformed), this story is basically a near future take on preppers and how preppering would play out, like, in reality. Honestly, I laughed and laughed. Doctorow makes such obvious points, it's - ugh - chef's kiss. I want to post this as a reply-comment to all those mainstream (NYTimes, New Yorker) concern-troll articles about preppers. Like, it's not just that the rich are building little fortresses... it's that they think this'll give them an advantage? Really, really enjoyable. And hopeful!
Brilliant! Ted Chiang is a master at his craft. I was frequently smiling with delight as I read this. Loved the longer stories - the digients-as-parenting-parable, the wonderful prism story about counterfactuals and fate vs. free will (aka networking with alternative universes). I could have done without the pontificating parrot, but - for a short story collection - that one was literally the only miss. All the others were hits. Bravo, Ted Chiang!
A good, solid intro to a valuable Life Philosophy! A book about the dichotomy between “growth” and “fixed” mindsets: growth mindsets praise hard work and effort, fixed mindsets believe some people are smart and others not. LAMBS AND GOATS, PEOPLE.
This is definitely something that anyone working in or near academia or other socially-certified “Smart People” would do well to read and absorb. I couldn't really buy aalll Carol Dweck's applications; the book covers these mindsets' effects on work, play (sports), relationships. Mostly because this mindset stuff ALSO overlaps with cognitive behavioral stuff, and cognitive errors feel more all-encompassing (to me, at least).
But that is a small critique. I did find this v useful, and goddamn do I wish I had had this book both during undergrad (where I did very well and unhelpfully just assumed it was cuz I had DA SMARTZ - but really I never challenged myself too much) and during grad school (which WAS challenging, and convinced me I was A STUPID and had a much smaller “full potential” than I previously thought). I noticed how only recently, when I taught myself to code in the privacy and seclusion of my home (boy, was that a game-changer on many fronts!), did I stop my reflexive “freezing” whenever something really intellectually challenging would appear, and I could really experience LEARNING, TRUE LEARNING. I'm also trying to apply the growth mindset stuff at work: when someone asks me something I don't know, instead of going into panic freeze mode (“I should know this, shit, what's wrong with me”), I attempt to go into “I have no idea what you're talking about and don't know the answer, BUT I SHALL LEARN!”. That has been very, very helpful. It is a hard habit to break.
In fact, I think the best and most interesting part of this book is its application to pedagogy and learning - a process that is very interesting indeed. And also interesting and heartening (and only obvious once you start losing your fixed mindset!) is how incredibly hamstringing the fixed mindset is, and how much MORE you can get done and how much better you can get at your job with the growth mindset.
So yeah. It's good. Learning is fun. Growth mindset-learning is better.
I normally don't read fiction, because what's the point of reading stuff that's made up? When there's stranger things in this ol' planet, Horatio? Anyway. I thought I'd give The Sportswriter a try since there were murmurs on the zeitgeist (Richard Ford has just published a couple sequels in the last few years) and because the sample I read of it was so meditatively dharmic, written with such clarity and vision. Couple something written in clarity, with great dharma spirit, and taking place in the nostalgia-inducing mundanity of 1980s America? You have the Great American Novel, my friends.
Alas, then. Alas that this was so quickly waterlogged that I eventually had to say, goodbye, Richard Ford, I'll just have to trust The New Yorker on this one and go back on my non-fiction way.
Specific incidences of waterlogging:
1. After a while, the great dharma spirit of the book - about a middle-aged American Man named Frank Banscombe, titular sportswriter, who still grieves for his dead son and lost marriage, and meditates extensively (EXTENSIVELY) on the virtues of living “within” ourselves, rather than subjecting ourselves to “dreaminess” - gaaaaasp anyway, the great dharma spirit of the book unfortunately starts to sour and mutate from Nice Meditative Book about Plain New Jersey Life (in Vein of Bruce Springsteen Classic) into the unwanted and unintended sequel to Catcher in the Rye.
Now, I ain't dissin' Catcher in the Rye, taught in high schools everywhere. I do, perhaps, note that one's feelings towards Catcher in the Rye mutate as one matures, until perhaps one settles on a feeling of, “Gosh, isn't Holden an entitled jerk sometimes?” (Just me?) It was starting to feel the same way with Mr. Frank Banscombe. His long soliloquizing about what's what and the nature of life was starting to feel less spot-on spiritual (which he was that, even, sometimes), and more entitled and tedious.
2. As many have noted, the unfortunate treatment of non-white people; specifically, Frank Banscombe's repeated use of racist slurs to describe folks. And, boy, do I mean repeated, casual, constant, repeated, did I mention repeated? I was doing all sorts of mental gymnastics to continuously forgive Frank Banscombe/Richard Ford for their anachronistic, offensive use of these words - constantly trying to rationalize and justify why it might make sense that a Southern white man of a certain age, writing about a transplanted Southern white man of a certain age, would constantly use these words. But then I was like: you know, I have better things to do with my time! And when Frank Banscombe/Richard Ford describes someone as having “N—roid” features, I was like, “You know, I could be doing something nice right now?” It wasn't a social justice judo chop, so much as a social justice withering-of-interest.
3. Similarly, the treatment of women, and Richard Ford's laundry list assurances of Frank Banscombe's lady conquests PLUS Vicki the airhead nurse from Texas PLUS the ex-wife being called only “X”... well, all of this just reminded me of an excellent Tiger Beatdown post about these types of books (i.e. anything written by these John Updike/Martin Amis/Salman Rushdie types about older men looking back on their lives, meditatively, while mentioning all the action they're getting from ladies OTHER than their shrewish, awful wives).
So yeah, the book sank for me. It sank down into a miasma of disappointment. But also spirit and hope! Because: despite the above, I bet Richard Ford has written some killer New Yorker short stories, and I'd be happy to read one or two (not 300+ pages).
And now: more New Jersey meditation. And more. And OK, one more.
A rich, satisfying historical fiction about Michelangelo, and his most famous commissions (the Sistine Chapel, in particular). The characterizations are fairly familiar, though without being too cliche: Michelangelo, for example, is a driven, impassioned artist; but he's also a diligent worker, thankfully breaking the stereotype of the “effortless genius”.
Recycled garbage, and I say that with a bit of affection. I say that in the French objet trouvé way. As in: it's sparkly, grimy, fun.
This book is to cyberpunk what Game of Thrones is to a medieval period piece. That is: superficial and indulgently recycled garbage. If you enjoy the trashier tropes of cyberpunk - reflective shades, an Orientalist fetishization of Japan, AIs with snarky personalities, rainy urban settings - then this has it in spades. It also has, as Game of Thrones has, lots of cheap thrills to keep you reading (and I read this in, like, a day): exploding heads and “ropes of blood” (gore!), tons of sex (sex!), and frequent drug use (drugs!).
Like Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell and When Gravity Fails, it's also a cyberpunk detective story. Which means we check off all the Raymond Chandler-type PI tropes too, and that includes, unfortunately for our garbage pasta, a lot of sexism garbage: there's virgins and whores (mostly whores), and there's lots of dead women. Sooooo many. Sooooooo many exploited, dead women. There's also a cop lady and a couple ninja ladies, so - er - I guess that's a bit redeeming? Whatever.
Brief plot overview: Takeshi Kovacs is a former super commando dude, now gun-for-hire, who was recently “resleeved” into a new grizzled white guy body, at the behest of a very very ancient rich dude (300+ years?) in order to Solve a Mystery. This is a far future world where humans wirelessly save their consciousnesses to the cloud, and can then, upon death and if they have enough cash, download that consciousness into a new “sleeve” (body). If they're wealthy, they grow clones of themselves so that they don't have to use new sleeves. If they're Catholic, they protest and argue that this sleeving business is totally not kosher.
So, I liked more the urban cyberpunk noir of Blade Runner. I liked more the “resleeving”/body download stuff of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. And I liked more the quoth writings of the sneakily female revolutionary primary document asides from The Dispossessed. So is fun, but it's super derivative and it's standing on the shoulders of giants.
Actually! An interesting examination of this book is how it's basically a recycled Blade Runner, if you had only absorbed the movie's aesthetics (macho Harrison Ford getting bruised by creepy android ninjas, rainy West Coast, damsels in distress) instead of reading the original Philip K. Dick - which is a lot more envelope-pushing and weirder (and more rewarding!). This book had all the face, but none of the - dare I say it - SOUL of cyberpunk. And thus, while I enjoyed reading it, I enjoyed it like I enjoy candy: fast consumption, but kinda gross and no lasting impression.
A better recyclage/objet trouvé, one that has the face and soul of cyberpunk, is the guy that recently trained a neural net to re-create Blade Runner. That's true cyberpunk. And better art! Not relying on the cheap thrills of exploding heads, ahem.
(Semi-LibriVoxed.) FINALLY. Ugh. The best thing about this book was the end. I don't mean that snarkily, I really mean that. The ending was actually quite touching and well-done. Everything else leading up to it, though: less so. Uggghhhh. I need a brain-scrub.
Llama continues to be a dramatic ass kid. I love it. I find it so satisfying when Mama Llama loses her shit and is like, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD. You tell him.
A breath of fresh, rational air. This was as good as I expected - as good as I was hoping for - and I would auto-add it to all baby registries.
Emily Oster is an economist and prof at Brown University who specializes in the empirical evaluation of policy programs around the world; specifically, she is one of the “randomistas”, i.e. economists who specifically worry about establishing good causal inference. (You'd think ALL economists worry about this - and they definitely, sorta, kinda do. Mostly. But the “randomista revolution” is a relatively new thing in economics, maybe ~20 years old.) She also wrote what I consider to be the best pregnancy advice book out there, Expecting Better.
Given this background, she brings three important - NAY, CRITICAL - skills to the How To Do Things genre:
1. An understanding of data and research quality; namely, the ability to disentangle correlation from causality. This is especially crucial for things like, for example, the research around breastfeeding (dramatic music).
2. The theoretical approach to dealing with risk and uncertainty. This is one of my favorite parts of economics: people are systematically irrational (as Dan Ariely would say) in their behavior around risk and uncertainty. GOD, I LOVE BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS - it's so wonderful. See The Undoing Project for an eminently readable, pop intro to the field. With regards to parenting, the best example of behavioral econ principles is our behavior around SIDS - people are (justifiably) terrified of SIDS, a low-probability, catastrophic event. “Safe sleeping” means placing infants on their backs, not in your own bed, with tight-fitting sheets and nothing else. But some infants don't sleep well (okay, ALL infants don't sleep well), so parents are tempted by co-sleeping/bed-sharing - something that, if you listen to the American Academy of Pediatricians, IS SO VERY CRAZY DANGEROUS OMG. But Oster notes that, if you look at the data, we are implicitly taking larger risks every day - for example, kids are more likely to die in car accidents than while co-sleeping (if done safely, i.e. no smoking/drinking parents, etc), but, well, the AAP isn't at all advising against driving with your child!
3. A decision-making framework, given this data and our understanding of the risks. That is, being explicit about preferences (utility!), costs (including mental health!), thinking about the marginal value of stuff, the expected value of stuff (i.e. its value to you multiplied by the probability of it happening), and the net present value of stuff (i.e. the value of some future something, discounted by your internal patience).
If you have a background in economics, if you've tinkered with econometrics and are wise in the ways of Stata, then all of this is your everyday bread and butter. Oster's genius is applying this field's wisdoms to a realm that is usually ignored by economists (though not all!) - parenting - and writing it as a pop advice book. I mean, Oster doesn't actually ADVISE anything - rather, she provides a methodology for making decisions and, where possible, the best data and research evidence to help make that decision.
Some TL;DR:
- “Breast is best” at reducing, in the first year of life, gastrointestinal infections from 13% to 9%, and reducing rashes from 6% to 3%. It has no long-term benefits to the child. It might reduce breast cancer risk in the mom.
- “Cry it out” sleep training improves sleep for everyone in the family, and the effects last for years - YEARS. It also reduces maternal depression, because sleep, people.
- Development milestones have enormous distributions. (i.e. The Wonder Weeks app is most likely bullshit - since how can we pinpoint “wonder WEEKS” when literally some kids roll over/crawl/walk/talk MONTHS before or after other kids?!) Where your kid falls in these distributions doesn't matter for anything in the long run.
- Daycare, nanny, stay at home, work, etc. - all have (basically) no effect on the kid.
- Marital satisfaction declines after kids - oh well!
- The discipline described in Bringing Up Bebe and Brain Rules for Babies - i.e. time-outs and an “authoritative” (not authoritarian) style - works.
- Introduce allergens early. Also, the food stuff from Bringing Up Bebe is evidence-supported.
Oster also includes a chapter that I think every pregnant woman should read: what happens those first few weeks postpartum!
My only critique is Oster's equivocation around some of the fashionable parenting ideas out there. Sometimes she's basically like “There's no evidence this works, but there's no evidence it DOESN'T work - so if you want to, go ahead!” My gripe about this is that - while she's correct, from a statistical philosophy POV - that is, “absence of evidence does not mean evidence of absence” - I would have stressed that Your Parenting Philosophy Du Jour is just as valid as believing that, say, the color of your car is a meaningful input into your parenting. My point being: something that is completely lacking in evidence, but fashionable, does not necessarily merit equivocating acceptance. But I guess Oster is (a) more generous/less judgey than me, and/or (b) casting a big net cuz sales!
Highly recommended. Yay econ.
Featuring one of the best sex scenes OF ALL LITERATURE. Has inspired my own writing in so many ways. The Earth moved.
Do you get giddy when reading loving descriptions of Renaissance Italian art and about Vatican imbroglios in the morally bankrupt Borgia style, coupled with hand wavey space opera stuff and gestures to FREAKY ALIENS? Are your two favorite character archetypes the rakish rogue type a la Han Solo and the fussy, tortured monk warrior type a la Obi Wan Kenobi? Do you think the creepy hive mind-educated little kid queen from Dune is one of the best parts of Dune? Do you like pulpy fun stuff? My friend, do I have the book for you.
In its best moments, it achieves Miyazaki or Moebius moments of weird, imaginative space opera. In its worst, it's crack trash that is hard to put down (well, except for some of the middle chapters that feel repetitive). Dan Simmons clearly had fun writing this. I had fun reading it. Much fun was had by all.
De plot
I wasn't sure how Simmons could continue after Fall of Hyperion, which basically ended with the Hyperion civilization, as we knew it, ending in one cataclysmic tornado of AI godheads, freaky aliens, and hallucinatory waterfalls into space. Several characters went to very mysterious ends, and I was sure that unveiling their destinies would convert all those bangs to whimpers. So Simmons doesn't. Instead, we stay in the newly-changed human universe, fast-forward 270 years to a galaxy now dominated by a Roman Catholic/Papal Dark Ages empire where people wear the creepy “cruciform” parasites, thus allowing (almost) everyone constant resurrection, and pray to various Catholic saints about never ever resurrecting AIs. We meet a backwater rogue, Raul Endymion (a young Harrison Ford?), in a bar fight (well, sorta). He's recruited by an old sage to protect a magical little girl, Aenea, who will be coming out of the Time Tombs' magical time portal in 48 hours and promises to be the usual sci-fi Chosen One/Messiah/One Who Teaches/blaahhhhh blah.
Meanwhile, the Vatican recruits the compassionate, disciplined torchship (?) priest-captain, Father Captain Federico de Soya (Luigi lo Cascio? Nino Manfredi? Silvio Orlando? Roberto Benigni? OK, well, maybe not Benigni...) to go hunt Aenea as well. There are many inventive scenes of action and gore (including marvelous appearances by everyone's favorite monsters made out of spikes - The Shrike! - and a Terminator-style commando (ahem) “hell-woman”), much fetishization of Catholic aesthetics and cyberpunk aesthetics, and a super obviously Americo-centric POV of the far future (year 3000+).
It is all very fun. And this is all recycled sci-fi stuff: the space Dark Ages with the (Catholic) Church as humanity's protector of data and information, encircled by jerkface ghosts in the machine, plus Han Solo, Dune, and ‘murca.
Dispassionate critical response
And now, allow me a loving paean to Father Captain Federico de Soya. They introduce de Soya as a compassionate, tormented warrior-priest with a heart of gold and IRON CLAD DISCIPLINE over his adorable crises of faith (since he's in the villain role, being the pursuer). I loved this guy so much I, first, became exasperated every time I had to switch back to the (much less interesting) Raul-Aenea-android storyline and, second, immediately searched my Kindle version of Rise of Endymion to make sure he appears in that too (no spoilers). Oh, de Soya! You so great. If you notice any de Soya fanfic appearing on the Internet in the near future... yeah, that'll be me. Sigh, de Soya! If you made a smoothie of Obi-Wan Kenobi, Man of La Mancha, that one movie with Nino Manfredi, all my personal love of Rome, Renaissance stuff, Monty Python's Spanish Inquisition, medieval stuff, and everything else I love about 15th-16th century shit, you would have de Soya. And I mean a literal smoothie of grist and gore, as that's how he spends half the book, thanks to the (incidentally hilarious) technology of super fast velocities coupled with hand wavey magical space resurrection voodoo. Did I mention I love this book?
Informed sci-fi fan/writerly response
What is it about the genre that provokes authors to write endless, interminable series where book 1 is an eye-popping masterpiece, and books 2 through infinity are of exponentially decreasing quality, rapidly approaching zero? Gateway, Ender's Game, Dune - they're all wonderful, and they all have like a billion shitty sequels. So I approach always with a long pointy stick. Hyperion was super inventive and great, super not embarrassing to recommend to non-sci-fi friends. Fall of Hyperion was approached with trepidation... and was OK! Still reasonable! Endymion (or, Hyperion 3: More Hyperion) was approached with even more trepidation... and I was shocked! It's still OK! Maybe even a bit better! Very different from Hyperion though. Warning.
Anyway, yeah. A big guilty pleasure. Enjoy!
Features a very manic pixie dream doctor, very pedestrian writing, and a planet blowing up in the first 10 pages for some cheap angst. TIE-IN NOVELS. WHY DO I NEVER LEARN? (Well, because of this. It can be done! IT CAN.)
An Iraq War veteran's poignant, spare poetry. Not the best poetry from a technical standpoint, but it's lyrical enough and it's important modern-poetry-of-witness enough that any technical weaknesses are more than made up for.
A children's book, written by John Oliver, about Mike Pence's bunny wanting to get gay bunny married. Mike Pence, as a stink bug, is displeased.
So, like the Anti-Racist Baby book and the “this is the Buddha” board book, this is one of those heavy agenda books where I feel self-conscious just kinda gracelessly promoting my values. I mean, yeah. I'm the parent. I will be explicitly and implicitly promoting my values for the next 18+ years. But I do feel like these books should be “showing” more, “telling” less. So being like, here's this stink bug, named after a politician who will probably be dead or like 90+ by the time you're voting, and he was an asshole, about this thing that people cared about a lot back in my day, but is now much more normal... It just seems like: outdated? Like the corduroy bellbottoms of “progressive” messaging? I just imagine (and hope) that my kid will roll their eyes and be like “yeah mom okay I know”. What would I feel like, reading a book like this about, say, how Henry Kissinger was an asshole? It just feels like this stuff will - and I really hope it will - be ancient history by the time my kids are of voting age.
I know, I know. Some of America's bullshit - racism, the patriarchy, homophobia - has been going on forever, for generations upon generations. That is so depressing. And so maybe, in 18 years, my kids will be facing the same bullshit homophobia that Mike Pence traffics in. I sincerely hope not. But I also kind of... optimistically think not? Like, just in the last 20 years, the whole “renegotiation of gender” (using Howard Dean's words - heya, there's another old timey politician, eh) what with the 2013 Supreme Court decision re: gay marriage, the #MeToo movement, and the growing visibility and acceptance of transgender folks, a lot has changed! In my lifetime! Like, when I was 15, being gay or lesbian was very progressive and different (and, in some parts of America, lethally dangerous). Corporate pride parades would have been unfathomable to me. So I do really hope - and expect! - my kids to be facing a very different and better gender world.
Anyway, with all that ADULT SOCIO-POLITICAL BAGGAGE out of the way, this is a kids book! How does my kid actually like it! So I think the illustrations are gorgeous, and this has actually been in heavy rotation for the last couple weeks.
Took me a while to warm up to it - given its very Golden Age, good ol' boy sci-fi style - but it eventually won me over with its awesome, scathing worldbuilding.
This is like good Phillip K. Dick, or excellent M.T. Anderson, or even the ur-text The Machine Stops. That is, Frederik Pohl (whose Gateway I ADORED) extrapolates forward from current trends - and it's horrifying. I would recommend this to (a) any libertarian/person who took Econ 101 and never learned about negative externalities in Econ 102, and (2) all social media users. Apropos, I would also shelve this by The Attention Merchants.
Pohl unveils the horror slowly: a world where government is subsumed by corporations, hideous inequality with a subclass of “consumers” and an almost priestly caste of “copysmiths” (Mad Men-style advertisers), sales and consumption and increasing GDP raised to moral ideals, the constant degradation of the environment and even just a humane life. E.g. being nickel and dimed by public 5-minute “salt showers”, and being told this is a luxury! Brainwashing lifestyle commercials for products with addictive additives! I.E. PROCESSED FOOD, HELLO.
Anyway, much of this is now par for the dystopian near future course. My favorite example of a corporocratic eco-disaster Earth remains Kim Stanley Robinsons's magisterial Red Mars, since - while both Pohl and Robinson are discussing the same basic premise (corporocratic, eco-greedy Earth set to spoil another planet in our solar system) - Pohl feels tongue-in-cheek, whereas Robinson feels GRAVELY SERIOUS (heavy stare, Karl Marx eyebrows, gong noise).
But this story's great. In usual dystopian style, we follow a brainwashed (male) drone as he is awakened by a femme fatale/manic pixie dream girl emancipator. (Seriously, this is how all dystopias are structured: Brazil, Children of Men, Code 46, Gattaca, even The Lives of Others (about a real-world dystopia - Stasi East Germany!).) The drone is Mitch Courtenay, a totally brainwashed advertisement Mad Man, who's just been given the “Venus account” to manage - how to convince millions (billions?) of people to embark on a treacherous space journey to a known-shitty planet so that his employer, Fowler Shocken, can harvest great profits?
Everything is peeled back, layer by plot-like-a-freight-train layer, and so it's an easy, enveloping read. You're like omggggg through much of it. Now I get Cory Doctorow's semi-fanfic, Chicken Little, (which I remember LOVING) so much more.
Anyway, fun and fast, so: recommended!
Ah! This was the - gah - the MASTERPIECE of my vacation reading. A magisterial TOMEY TOME of the Western hemisphere, it filled me with immense awe and fellow-feeling at being a person living in the “New World”! I do not exaggerate! I was filled with a sort of pan-American (North and South) solidarity, as I looked upon the Colombian cities I read this in and thought, WE ARE ALL SIBLINGS.
Of course, the core of this book is an immense, cataclysmic tragedy: the complete destruction of a hemisphere's worth of culture and people. The loss of these cultures and societies is enormous; and the fact that their near-complete destruction renders our understanding of them VERY limited is just salt in the wound. Charles Mann tries to, uh, un-salt the wound a little by discussing the more recent research evidence of what, indeed, this hemisphere was actually like pre-Colombus.
The main thesis of the book is that the hemisphere was (a) much more crowded, with much (b) older and (c) more developed societies. The (Eurocentrically self-serving) myth of a near-empty land populated by “under-developed” (euphemism!) “tribes” (insult!) with no written language and barbarous practices (yo, those Mexica/Aztecs and their human sacrifice, YEEEEEESH) is slowly dismantled, archaeological dig by dig.
Like 1493 (about the eco-clash between the hemispheres, AKA the Colombian Exchange), I feel too intimidated by the tomey-ness of this book to give a proper book report, so here are just some thoughts and highlights:
- I was really fascinated (and depressed) by the debate over the actual populations in the hemisphere pre-Colombus. Basically, by comparing accounts of the earliest adventurers to visit in, say, the early 16th century, with accounts of “second wave” adventurers in, say, the 1530s, there's already evidence of a crushing decline in population. The culprit: smallpox. The research community is then split between “High Counters” (who believe the “first contact” of Europeans with indigenous populations may have destroyed the latter by as much as 90% via disease) and “Low Counters” (who don't think it was 90%). Either way, there were MILLIONS of people in places like the eastern US.
- The Inca! Oh man, THE INCA! I loved learning about the two types of empire: hegemonic and, uh, I forgot the other one. But anyway: one type of empire is like the Borg - everyone gets assimilated. Another empire is more like, “you become my vassal and keep your gods, good luck” - loose-knit but VERY effective. The Inca did the latter.
- The Andes! Vertical civilization!
- Talking knots!! AKA quipus! AKA potentially a completely distinct and unique system of writing. Quipus are bunches of colored string with intricate knots. It's believed they were used throughout the Inca Empire like abacuses - but there's a lot of research to decode them even further, since they may have been used as a form of writing (encoding not just numbers but an alphabet?). This is just one specific example of the broader wonder (and, again, tragedy) that is the (loss of the) Western Hemisphere: after human settlement across the Bering Strait, the two hemispheric humanities developed independently - they had independent agricultural revolutions (!), independent math and science and philosophy and art, and, with the quipus, independent (and radically differently imagined!) systems of writing. While the eastern hemisphere was a mish-mash of cultural exchange (India/China/Middle East/North Africa/Europe), the western hemisphere was not: they just did a bunch of different stuff! Incredible.
- MAIZE. Don't get me started. It really is a wonder crop. I mean, everything we eat in America (and even diapers!) is touched by corn. And it's the most giant and successful and long-reaching genetic engineering humans ever did!
- All the crop stuff, actually.
- EVERYTHING about the Haudenosaunee. From the founding myth of the stuttering, inspirational Deganawida (the Peacemaker) teaming up with the charismatic speaker Hiawatha to convince the bellicose Onondaga nation to lay down their weapons and join the other nations in a league of peace and collaboration. That story was amazing! I loved the convincing attempts to back-date it to a likely founding of 12th century (WOW) - the Haudenosaunee council fire still burns! That's nine centuries! Also, the influence of the Haudenosaunee “radically free” Great Law of Peace on the US Constitution.
Okay, one more note about the Haudenosaunee. Okay, as I've been saying, all the wonder that you have when you read about this hemisphere's humanity is made sour by the tragedy that we lost so much in the “Colombian Exchange”. So many people, so much culture and history was lost. And so a bittersweet “what if”/alternative history scenario is always: what would it have been like if smallpox and conquistadors hadn't destroyed a half-planet? Kim Stanley Robinson's epic alt history The Years of Rice and Salt actually includes a lot of stuff about the Haudenosaunee. I'd love to re-read those sections now that I've learned a lot more about them.
Anyway, that's it (for now!). If it isn't plainly obvious, I highly HIGHLY recommend this book.
Charged and electrifying. I'd been meaning to read it forever, and I'm glad I did. Made my bus trip back from NYC sunny and dramatic and perfect.
Maybe this was something meant to be seen, rather than read. I love Tom Stoppard (or I love Shakespeare in Love, anyway), but sometimes I don't get him (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead). I blame this solely on myself.