Comfort Reading

2022

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

I have been remiss in not doing these annual reviews more regularly. I have no excuse. Other words get in the way sometimes. 

But this, one year into my “official” retirement, I have no excuse not to do. So.

I read, cover-to-cover, 89 books in 2022. Compared to 48 in 2021. I try to make it through 70 to 80 a year, but some years…well. A handful in ’21 were doorstops, but really, I have no excuse for not getting through the nearly 100 books I read only partly. 

Of the 89 this past year, 40 were some species of science fiction. That’s up in percentage from the past few years. A handful were rereads, like Samuel R. Delany’s Tales of Neveryon, Heinlein’s Space Cadet, Laumer and Dickson’s Planet Run, Greg Bear’s Heads. As I’ve noted before, I rarely reread. I read slowly, compared to some, and I have too many books on my TBR pile to choose to go over something I’ve already been through. This past year, I’m finding that to be a mistake.  (I started this a few years back with Charles Dickens. I’d read most of his work in high school, came away hating it, and deciding that I needed to revisit that impression. It has been…instructive.) 

Planet Run by Keith Laumer and Gordon R. Dickson is an anomaly for me. It’s what a friend of mine calls a “shitkicker”—and adventure with not much else going for it but the adrenaline. A crusty old spacer is hauled out of retirement to participate in the planetary equivalent of the Oklahoma Land Rush. He’s seasoned, wizened, world-weary, but gets saddled with the wet-behind-the-ears son of the politician who has blackmailed him into doing this. Bad guys abound, betrayal happens, it would have made an excellent Bruce Willis film anytime in the past 20 years. I read it first at 13 and there is something about it that just does it for me. I’ve read it four or five times since and it is always fun. Nothing deep, nothing timeless (or maybe there is), nothing one couldn’t find in a good Zane Grey or Louis L’Amour (it is basically a western). But it still makes me smile. It is one of the few books I loved as a kid that does not make me cringe to read now.

The Bear…well, Greg Bear passed away November 19th, 2022, from complications from heart surgery. I still have a few unread Bear novels on my shelf, but I read his Queen of Angels for the first time and realized that there are 5 books in that universe, including Heads, which proved to be as wickedly clever this time as the first time. The jabs at Scientology are impossible to miss, but it’s not satire. Queen of Angels was fascinating and a book one wonders if it would be  fêted today. It hues close to a few stereotypes that, while I felt he subverted, might nevertheless be read as problematic today. At its heart are questions of nurture vs nature psychology and the costs of potential intervention—therapy of a more intrusive type.

Of the SF read for the first time, then, right off the top was Gregory Benford’s Shadows of Eternity, which produced a curiously nostalgic reaction for me. Benford “borrowed” an alien species from Poul Anderson and wrote a very different sort of first contact novel that took me aesthetically right back to the Eighties, even as the approach to character and extrapolations of technology are very much of the moment.

I heartily recommend Stina Leicht’s Persephone Station, first in a series (?) that gives as an all-female crew (and supporting cast) in another “shitkicker” that has no lack of adrenaline and ample speculation involving corporations and indigenous rights and a neat Magnificent Seven riff. 

Andy Weir’s Artemis could have come from an outline left behind by Heinlein. Enormous fun, set entirely on the moon, action, problem-solving, and—again—corporate shenanigans. 

I read Ken McLeod’s trilogy beginning with Cosmonaut Keep, continuing with Dark Light and Engine City, which is a large-scale space opera somewhat in the mode of Iain M. Banks an involving interspecies intrigue, vast machinations, and ending on an ambivalent note where what problems have been plaguing the characters seem to be solved but not exactly resolved. He handles the whole time dilation question rather well and manages to tell family sagas and personal relationships against the background of centuries.  (It’s tricky to do these kinds of sagas which center on families without it becoming A Family Saga, with all the kind of homey baking bread sentimentality one usually encounters.)

I want to make special note of Nicola Griffith’s Spear, which is a compact and compelling retelling of the Arthurian—or, rather, the Percival legend—done from an unexpected point of view. Firstly, the writing is, as we expect from Griffith, first-rate. Secondly, she delivers a feminist twist which is only that in retrospect. As always, the story comes first. But story and character are bound up in the double helix of narrative. Griffith is doing some of the best history-based fiction around. The sequel to Hild is coming out soon and we should be prepared for a treat. 

Arkady Martine’s A Desolation Called Peace is the sequel to her marvelously complex debut, A Memory Called Empire. It picks up where the first left off and enriches the universe she has built, quite well. This is the kind of immersive world-building long-valued in SF/F, particularly effective because of the juxtaposition of cultures which throws the aspects of each into relief. Martine’s main character is herself something of an outsider, groping for Place in a milieu of which she has too little experience. 

Another epic work in SF I think very important is Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry For The Future. This is in many ways not a science fiction novel—in fact, it could be argued that a good chunk of it is textbook—but it is speculative, in that none of the specific events detailed have happened but the world is very much ours. It presents a scenario in which the world finally tackles climate change. In that so many things work and come together to positive effect I suppose render the novel SF, but…

Becky Chambers’ new series, Monk and Robot, continues with A Prayer for the Crown Shy, part of the tor.com series of novellas. All I can say is that Chambers is one of my favorites authors. She writes about community is ways I find remarkable and refreshing in science fiction. 

Two novels about radically altered futures I found compelling. Monica Byrne’s The Actual Star, which is reminiscent (in structure) of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, and Benjamin Rosenbaum’s  The Unraveling. Both novels offer views of future social arrangements quite removed from our own and both present backgrounds of unexpected breadth. The writing in both is amazing and the ideas will linger.

To my great pleasure, John Crowley published a new one, Flint and Mirror, which indulges his penchant for presenting magic as a potential more than a reality and offering a view on the borderlands. This one is a historical, about the Irish Problem at the time of Elizabeth I. Unexpected. 

I continued with Jacqueline Winspear’s Maisy Dobbs series. I haven’t decided yet whether she’s doing history with embedded mystery or the reverse, but the novels have been tracking Miss Dobbs chronologically as the world heads for WWII. The last two so far, war is upon Britain and Maisy finds herself doing more security work than private investigation. We have grown up with these people now, so to speak, and the world Winspear is investigating is marvelously evoked.

Not intending to, really, but I did  a partial reread of the Ian Fleming James Bond novels. I indulged in a marathon review of the movies and wrote commentary and decided some comparison to the original novels and stories was in order. I was surprised both by how well-written many of them were and at the same time how shallow. I recall as a teenager plowing through them with relish. This time it was an academic review that yielded a few surprises, but on the whole I came away feeling I never have to look at them again.

I read Emily St. John Mandel’s new one, Sea of Tranquility. Whatever she might say, this is straight up science fiction, with time travel and an apparent time paradox. Given another fifty pages, she might have made it a very good SF novel. As it stands, it was enjoyable but derivative and relied too much on the good will of the reader. It was reminiscent of several older works by SF writers, most especially Poul Anderson’s Time Patrol stories. My best guess is, her point is to suggest that we all live in closed loops. (She might try to remember next time that gravity is different in other places and that someone who grew up on the moon might have a very difficult time standing up on Earth. Such details, which may seem fussy to literary writers, can make or break a narrative in science fiction.)

I finally read a Paul J. McAuley trilogy I had been meaning to for years, starting with Child of the River. In many ways it reminded of Gene Wolfe’s magisterial Book of the New Sun. Out in the hinterlands of galactic space, an artificial world with a long history that has evolved into a mythic background and a kind of avatar of a past race come to fulfill, etc etc. The adventures and worldbuilding are exceptional, but it ended with the feeling that another book would have been in order to satisfactorily wrap things up.

One last SF recommendation is Annalee Newitz’s new one, Terraformers, which draws on her strengths in anthropology and ecology and tells the story of the denizens of a world that has been remade by a corporation intending to lease it out to rich vacationers. The beings who did the actual work, however, presumably designed to die off when their utility is at an end, are still there and a struggle begins to claim rights. High finance, environmentalism, indigenous issues, and all the related politics combine in a rich, fascinating novel of generational evolution.

I’ve been dipping back into the past and catching up, filling in gaps. A couple of Clifford Simak novels, a reread of Ian Wallace’s Croyd (which is remarkably weird), early Le Guin (Rocannon’s World and Planet of Exile), and….

David Copperfield. Yes, the Dickens. I read this one aloud to my partner and came away with a modified view of Dickens. At least in this novel, what to a modern sensibilty comes across as verbosity, is actually very careful scene-setting and social explication. The 19th Century did not offer  movies and the stage was not universally available. I found very little that might be excised from the narrative. It all mattered.

I read Piers Brendon’s The Dark Valley, which is a heavy history of the 1930s, from the onset of the Depression to the start of World War II. Brendon takes a global view and examines each major political aspect—America, Europe, Britain, Asia—and gives a narrative of the runaway cart that took the globe to war. The parallels to the present are clear, but also deceptive. Yes, there are movements and conditions, but the failure of solutions then should not be taken as inevitabilities now.

I read Walter Isaacson’s Code Breaker, the biography/history of Jennifer Doudna, the geneticist who has given us CRISPR and whose work was part of the technological foundation thst produce the COVID vaccine is apparently record time. Isaacson, as usual, does an excellent job of making the science accessible. The people, though, shine in this lucid view of modern science.

As is my usual habit, I read some odd bits of history. For my writing, I rarely do project-specific research. Instead, I cast a wide net and gather a variety of details until suddenly they become useful. To that end, I read the following: The Future of the Past by Alexander Stille; There Are Places In The World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness by Carlo Rovelli; Utopia Drive by Erik Reece; Freethinkers and Strange Gods by Susan Jacoby; A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson; Worldly Goods by Lisa Jardine; Beyond Measure by James Vincent.

And the rather impressive History of Philosophy by A.C. Grayling. 

I can recommend all of the above whole-heartedly. 

I also read Sherlockian novels that surprised me. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (yes, him, the former basketball player) is a serious Sherlockian and did two novels centered on Mycroft. I recommend them. Sherlock is in them, of course, but not yet out of university. They are surprisingly good. Or perhaps not so surprising, Maybe the word is uniquely good. There have been pastiches and homages to Holmes and most of them are forgettable if enjoyable. These two I feel contribute meaningfully to the mythos.

Along those lines, the Victorian Age has become almost a genre in itself, and I read my first Langdon St. Ives book by James Blaylock. I’m still unsure what to make of it, but I was impressed. We shall see if I continue the series.

There are a number I have left out. Not that they were bad, but I’m not sure what to say about them here. I discovered some new-to-me authors that I recommend—Sarah Gailey, Daniel Marcus, Nadia Afifi. 

I finally read a classic I had long avoided. High Wind In Jamaica by Richard Hughes. I’m still trying to decide how I feel about it. In many ways it is an ugly story. Children captured by pirates, who turn out to be quite not what anyone would expect. It seems to me to be a study of what happens when childhood fantasy collides with the fantasized reality. In that way, it is well done and evocative.  What it says about human nature and the condition of childhood is complex and layered.

I may have further thoughts later. For now, this review has gone on long enough.

I’m looking forward yo 2023.

Good reading to you all.

Bridges, Circles, the Pleasure of Continuing On

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

As I’ve gotten older, my reading has taken turns I would never have expected. My preferred genre is science fiction, and yet I find the number of SF books I read per year shrinking. Perhaps I’m getting more selective—and it is getting more difficult to choose, what with the wealth of new possibilities—but the total number of books I read per year has not shrunk much. 

I’ve been reading more nonfiction. (I’m a writer, I have to do a certain amount of investigation of the world, of history, of science, so…) But also my consumption of mysteries has increased.

In particular, mystery series.

Decades ago, I would have been working through science fiction series. I cut my teeth on Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom, Doc Smith’s Lensmen, Asimov’s Foundation novels, the Dorsai, Pern, even L. Sprague DeCamp’s Krishna books. But then I limited it to trilogies and finally, over the past couple of decades, my preference has been for stand-alones in science fiction. I love the field no less than ever, but I don’t have the patience for series anymore.

Mysteries are another matter. In the last couple of decades I have found myself waiting for the next novel in any number of mystery series. Nero Wolfe started it. As a teenager, I was not so interested in sticking with them, but I had read a few. Recently…

Among my favorites are Laurie R. King’s Mary Russell novels; Jacqueline Winspear’s Maisy Dobbs; Kerry Greenwood’s Miss Fisher; Martin Walker’s Chief Bruno; a handful of others.

Especially Christopher Fowler’s marvelous Bryant & May series.

As eclectic goes, these are difficult to beat, and as each novel arrives, it seems more and more that Fowler has an end game in mind.

Arthur Bryant and John May are the oldest still-working detectives in the London police system. They should long since have retired, but you realize quickly that they simply have nothing else to do. May, the more grounded of the pair, has pretty much run through what passes for a normal life, and has not been particularly successful at it. Bryant is anything but ordinary and has a dedication to his city that amazes and mystifies those with whom he works. He is a historian, an out-of-box thinker, tenacious, eccentric, and genuinely cares nothing for what other people think of him.

They are the chief detectives in the Peculiar Crimes Unit, an oddball division set up during World War II with a strange remit that lands them in cases that sometimes border on the occult, sometimes conspiracy, sometimes have roots going back centuries.

And the regular police department—the Met—and forces in the Home Office want very much to see them gone. They are unclassifiable. They are occasionally an embarrassment. What keeps them open is a combination of Bryant’s (unnamed) connections in government and their well-above-average success rate.

Bryant and May are circling around 80 and you know this can’t go on much longer, but with each novel their reprieve—for their careers, for the odd assemblage of people who make up the rest of the Unit, for the sheer pleasure of seeing the Suits at Whitehall thwarted—gives another chance to take us through a London by way of criminal investigation not to be found in any other series of which I am aware.

Rabbits are regularly pulled out of aging hats by the end of the novels to lead to one more bizarre outing. The byplay between the partners is delightful, Bryant’s network of informants are among the strangest and most diverse to be found, there is humor, weirdness, and the villains are always unexpected. 

The new one, London Bridge Is Falling Down, opens up a new level in the history of the Unit itself and offers a set of resolutions I did not expect. The remit so often mentioned throughout the series gets a new look and the revelations are more than satisfying. Fowler shows us an aspect of the aftershocks of the War that we have come to expect but in ways that make it fresh and with consequences for the characters that are surprising and terrible. The long story of the Unit is on display, the roots and branches are the target of the crimes, and the resolutions…

There is in this current volume a level of pathos long hinted at and now realized, a sense of inevitability that, while consistent with the  arc of the series, points up the power of fiction to draw us into relationships that genuinely matter.

Among the many pleasures of Bryant and May’s adventures is the pointed critique of bureaucracy, useless officials, and politics-at-the-expense-of-results which all plague our modern era. This should not be mistaken for a blanket condemnation of such systems, for a parallel consideration is how such systems remain necessary even to the rebels and outliers if they wish to be effective. Bryant’s constant complaining about the modern world is not about the basic idea of it but about the ham-fisted way in which so much of it manifests. He does not object to technology as such, only in its apparent ability to separate people from each other. He refuses to Google, preferring to find someone who knows something and talk to them. As lonely as he seems to be—as opposed to the more socially-adept May—he is the one insisting on the human connection, while his partner, who connects often, just as often fails at such connections.

Bryant solves cases obliquely, with apparent side-trips into historical cul-d-sacs and by ways regular police find pointless and, frankly, embarrassing. Among Bryant’s confidantes is a white witch, who manages to regularly point Arthur in a useful direction. 

May, on the other hand, who is fastidious, fashionable, and facile with the very modernizations that seem to frustrate his partner, is the one who grounds the Unit in the world of forms and protocols. He is a traditional cop. 

It is amazing the two of them get along at all.

But as with other long-running series, the heart of it is the friendship. They are partners. Time has joined them in ways neither understands or would wish to change.

London Bridge Is Falling Down takes them back to their early years in unexpected and tragic ways. Things done back then now come out in the open in ways neither could have foreseen. Following the trail of a hapless functionary who thinks he has found a way to extricate himself from the mess that his life has become leads from body to body and the only way to make sense of it all is to go back to the beginnings.

Fowler has brought us around a long circle through the series. One hopes it is not yet closed. Bryant and May ought really to live forever.

Bones Of Time

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / 1 Comment

What are we talking about when we talk about science fiction? A genre defined by its trappings, its tropes? Or a mode of exploration of a kind of telec reification that only came into being with the advent of what we now recognize as science? A form of Gothic? An inversion of the historical drama? A subset of fantasy?

Or all of the above?

When encountering a writer like Jack Vance, it may be understandable that definitions (or at least taxonomies) fail to clarify how this can be the same as work by Gregory Benford. Aside from certain obvious aesthetic differences, there is the problem of, for want of a better term, scientific verisimilitude.

At a certain point, in conversation with anyone who does not “get” science fiction, it comes down to an ineffable quality that, while sharing much with all other forms of fiction, sets the experience apart, both aesthetically and culturally, and the only answer to the question “What is it about this stuff that appeals to you so much?” is: it lights up the imagination like nothing else.

(“I like it.” Why? “Why do you like Regency Romance? Or Gothics? Or murder mysteries? Something about them appeals and opens you up to an emotional and aesthetic experience you find no where else.”)

Before I continue I want to state that this is about Gregory Benford, not Jack Vance, whose work I mention as an example of the range to be found within the expanding pond called Science Fiction. It is about his new novel, Shadows Of Eternity.

Amazon.com: Shadows of Eternity: 9781534443624: Benford, Gregory: Books

This novel gave me an experience I have not had in some time, or at least only in some dilute form, embedded within texts that privileged other aspects of the fictive practice, that I almost forgot about it, namely the pleasure of didactic prose in service to the larger qualities of a science fiction novel. Shadows Of Eternity is done in the form we know as Hard SF, which only means that considerable attention is paid in the text to the presumed scientific justifications for the actions. In that, it is exemplary.

I say “presumed scientific justifications” because for the most part their accuracy is secondary for most readers, and many examples over the decades have proven unreliable in that. This is a novel, not a textbook, and the primary concern is to convince the reader in the moment that what is happening conforms, or can conform, to legitimate scientific understanding. “Getting it right” is edifying, both for the reader and, in a different way, the writer. Acknowledging that accuracy to a certain number of decimal points is less important than the Idea of accuracy is like saying that a reader of a novel set in the reign of Henry II does not, in the end, care if every single historical detail is correct as long as it feels correct and cannot be contradicted by a cursory glance at a history of the period.

That said, getting it right is a point of pride and, possibly, an ethical requirement, depending on the kind of story being told.

This gets tricky when writing about the far future and exotic physics and technological developments that might come about. We are talking about speculation, after all, which is one of the principle pleasures of science fiction. In practice, the might-be of a given story must be consistent with the have beens and probably ares of the currently known.

What does this have to do with storytelling?

Well, if you go down that road—Hard SF—then, just as in any other genre, it is incumbent on the writer to include material that produces a satisfying sense of realism in which the characters move. Only in this case, that material is of a bit more rarefied nature, namely the science behind the world being examined.

One of the criticisms of SF in this has been that the story often seems to grind to a halt while some bit of arcane scientific exposition takes place. This kind of thing bores a certain kind of reader. So be it. But why should this demote the work on the scale of worthy literary practice? (One of the earliest franchise efforts in the James Bond cosmos post-Fleming spent, in my opinion, an inordinate amount of time on Bond’s sartorial choices, as well as minutiae of cars, food, and other fashion bits. I could not have cared less, but I acknowledge that there were and are readers for whom this was a distinct pleasure. Trivial, you say? Then in the case of historical novels in which paragraphs are deployed in describing family lineages, treaties, court etiquette, or the mechanics of travel. But all that bears on the story? Of course it does.) It seems not to occur to critics and certain readers that these expository bits are among the reasons for the readers to pick this author and not that. One should judge how well it is done, not whether it is there.

Which is a long-winded way of saying that, in science fiction, the World is as much a character as any motile actor.

(Which of course is why it is legitimate to explicitly link science fiction to Gothic.)

Literary tastes in recent decades have caused many writers to bury their didacticism more and more. The underpinnings intrude less and less, often resulting in a cinematic effect. (I note that some writers still deliver the fascinating expository bits, but rendered cleverly so that they can be ignored. I’m talking here now of work in which ignoring those passages is anathema to the author’s intent.) Partly, this can be gotten away with because of the last seventy years of science fiction film and television, which for large audience provides the visual shorthand for what is happening in a novel. Partly, also, this is possible because of the explicitly didactic work done in novels and short stories over and beyond the same period, so a basic “grammar” is now in place. And partly because a lot of work simply does not rely on that level of foundational support—the stories are not about the changes in the world but about the same old sturm und drang one could find in just about every other genre.

Benford’s new novel is, in some ways, an echo of SF from long ago. Reading it, I felt a cozy sense of nostalgia produced by the form and the tactics used. I found myself pleasantly remembering Clarke, Clement, Gunn, as well as Pohl, Chad Oliver, and even Simak. This is a mode of SF that seems of late to be disappearing, the dialectic. For decades, especially in the magazines, writers spoke to each other through stories, one responding to another and creating a chain reaction of alternative “takes” on ideas. This formed a dense fabric of historical conceptualizing. (Hence Heinlein’s Starship Troopers was “answered” by Joe Haldeman’s Forever War, which spark John Steakly’s Armor as well as Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game and so on. True, this happens in other genres, but it is not nearly so clear or connected.)

Shadows Of Eternity is part of this. Benford took a page (or more) from Poul Anderson by using Anderson’s flying aliens, the Ythri. (He borrowed a couple of other concepts from Anderson as well, one notion going all the way back to Anderson’s very early novel Brain Wave.) Yes, this is a form of homage, but it is more as well. Benford’s Ythri are his own. What Anderson created, Benford built on and made richer.

The core of the novel, though, is an examination of time. Deep time. (Benford wrote a nonfiction study of this subject.) The fact that the universe is old, so vastly old that when we begin peering into the abysses we will risk being swallowed up in the antiquity of it. Rachel arrives on the moon to join the staff of the Library, which is what has evolved from the early SETI attempts. The signals from old civilizations have been discovered and it is the task of the Library to curate and somehow translate them. Some of these signals turned out to be entire AI templates, and the Library now houses Minds.

Though technically qualified, Rachel understands that this will not set her apart. She must demonstrate qualities that she is unsure she possesses. But she blusters her way through, becomes a Trainee, and begins delving into these Minds.

As the novel proceeds, Rachel grows into someone she never expected to become. Confidence accrues, a taste for the edge emerges, and Rachel develops into—

She comes into her own with the arrival of visiting aliens—the Ythri—and becomes, often in spite of herself, the primary liaison with them. The Ythri have come through a wormhole and want to find their way back.

Benford sets before us puzzles and takes us through solutions and along the way does something the best science fiction has always sought to do—opens the vistas of what may be Out There for us and gives us a glimpse of the possibilities.

And those expository bits, filled with the how-to and what-is-it and where-did-this-come-from that science offers? Those set the stage for a conceptual apprehension that renders the view coherent enough for us to feel the awe of understanding what we’re looking at. This is what was meant by “Gosh, wow!” and Sense of Wonder.

The other thing to notice is not what is there, but what is not there—Bad Guys. There’s no war, no evil overlords, none of that. There are irritating people, foolish people, annoying situations, and a great deal of genuinely unnerving discoveries, but this is a world that presents as recognizable. The conflicts are, in some ways, quite ordinary, but set as they are in this interesting future, the ordinariness only becomes part of the puzzles that challenge Rachel.

Finally, Benford writes well. His descriptions can fascinate. The universe he sees, in reality and in his imagination, is vibrant and wonderfilled. This is science fiction for the explorer lurking inside us.

Why Read

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

In light of the last few years, the question bites. Indulge me in a venting plea.

In my experience, limited though it is, I have found that the better read a person is, the more likely they will be to cope with reality, to defend against the twisting delights of both conspiracy theory and pseudoscience, and to be less vulnerable to charlatanry.

Not always. Some deceptions come wrapped in marvelous packages that can appeal to the puzzle-solver in us all and present as aesthetically compelling. In my own life I have followed white rabbits in tweed down a number of holes, some part of me convinced that truth lay in some hidden recess along the way.

I have been relegated to many sidelines since childhood because of reading, sidelines which at the time seemed harsh and unfair, but in retrospect were actually relatively safe places. Time and space are necessary for a mind to develop. Exposure to stimulating material does not work its magic immediately, sometimes not even soon, but eventually all those books and stories and articles result in a set of pathways and memories and organizing concepts that allow for the skills to deal with what may otherwise be just confusion.

No, let me be more definite—“may” has little to do with it. People who read, in my experience, are generally more present, more conscious, more adaptable than people who only watch and subsequently go through life skimming a surface which too often becomes a mirror and allows them to ignore what is beneath. In fact, those surface presentations often depend on not knowing what underlies them, may actively resist analysis, and with few exceptions deceive by suggesting there is nothing more.

Not all. But it is also true that those not intended to deceive largely depend on an audience that reads to reveal their full meaning.

There are many studies about the physiological and cognitive benefits of reading, especially fiction. Here’s one. There is an increases in synaptic structure associated with regular reading. Memory improves. Your brain responds by providing better tools.

Then, of course, you have to apply the tools. For me, this makes fiction and, in a similar way, history indispensable. Reading other kinds of books, while important in many ways, can leave you unaware of irony, of conflict, or paradox, all of which are fundamental to the so-called Human Condition. We read novels to grapple with the contradictions of being human. We read fiction because in doing so we learn the value of Other Minds attempting to do this thing we all own as a birthright—-living.

Occasionally we see a nod to this in popular entertainment. In the tv series Castle, Detective Becket is presented as an exceptional and gifted detective. In the first episode we hear from one of her colleagues that he likes “a simple Jack killed Jill over Bill” rather than the “freaky” ones. Becket responds, “Oh, but the freaky ones require more.” And then she challenges them: “Don’t you guys read?” As the series progresses we can see that she just brings more to the game and in that first episode the difference is made explicit.

We undervalue reading, often while making a big deal about it. Writers become celebrities, usually once one or more of their books is made into a film. And their fans may well read everything they publish, but that’s not beneficial reading. Like anything else, if you do not expand your horizons, complicate your diet, move out of your comfort zone, you end up trapped in a self-referential, reaffirming loop that grows nothing.

We must read so our apprehension of the world is less frightening, amenable to recognition, and manageable. So that people are not so alien and culture not so forbidding. Certainly someone can read a great deal and still be unable to decipher the world, but I believe such people to be a minority, and most of us benefit from the increased clarity that comes from an ongoing encounter with Other Minds.

The greatest benefit comes from a catholic indulgence: read widely, daily—fiction, science, history, philosophy, memoir—because at some point you will find it all reinforcing, that insights gained in one place can be enriched and enlivened by another source. And somewhere along the way, we may find that we are no longer easily fooled.

The most valuable ability of late would seem to be this, the awareness to not be fooled.

I make no prediction that a sudden upsurge of deep reading would solve our problems. Humans can be contradictory, perverse creatures. But it seems obvious that an illiterate populace is an easily-tricked, easily swayed populace. Given that those who are invested in people watching their shallow offerings rather than go off somewhere to read are generally those who would sell us shiny bits that delight and fail, it would be a good strategy to take up books and stop being led like myopic sheep.

But I have a rather more personal reason for urging people to set aside whatever prejudices they acquired in primary and secondary schools that turned them against reading-for-pleasure. When I set a book aside, as one must, and go out into the world, I would like to have meaningful contact with other people, and ignorance is a depressing barrier to that.

Why read? To be more. To hopefully be yourself. And possibly to be free.

Scandal In Romania

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane, Nick and Nora Charles, Charles and Kate Sheridan, and in one unexpected offering Clark Gable and Carole Lombard—all have one thing in common: they are all detective marriages. Husband and wife teams, solving crimes, bringing their own domestic wrinkles to the task. Agatha Christie even wrote one, Tommy & Tuppence, as did Elizabeth Peters. The couple that solves crime together is more common than might first be suspected. And all of them have the unexpected about them, aspects of their relationship that would seem to make it unlikely, unstable, or unmanageable. And yet, they work.

The hallmark of these couples, of course, is the combined ability to solve murders, but that is only an aspect of what may be the chief attraction—for them and for the reader. Along with all the other (presumed) pleasures of the relationship, the intellectual rises to the top as an aspect of love. Unspoken though it may be in many instances, these are people drawn to each other by their shared appreciation for thinking.

And acting on the results.

Odd as many of them may seem, perhaps the least likely is the marriage of a young Mary Russell to her mentor/colleague, Sherlock Holmes.

When I encountered the first volume of Laurie R. King’s series, The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, I read the description and thought: And just how does that work? Sherlock Holmes is the most dedicated bachelor in detective fiction. Many writers have attempted to explain that, even work on the assumed “romance” between Holmes and Irene Adler, and have mined the subtext of his condition for decades, sometimes to good effect.

But married?

In a display of elegant reimagining, solid logic, and excellent prose, King convinces us that her version of the Holmes Story is the true tale underlying the gloss of fiction created by Dr. Watson. In the first twenty pages a new reality is established, making these novels feel more like revealed history than fanciful speculations. As it has turned out, she established a premise that has resulted in 18 novels (give or take) and some shorter works, each one adding to the Holmes mythos and providing terrific entertainment along the way.

The series proceeds chronologically and follows history closely. From time to time we have the added pleasure of seeing a fictional character enter the story as if part of actual history (the rescue of Kim, for example—yes, Kipling’s Kim) and the new one—Castle Shade—more or less continues in that vein.

Almost literally. After wrapping up a twisted affair in the Riviera, Holmes and Russell are summoned to Romania at the request of Queen Marie. They arrive at Castle Bran where they are presented with the problem (in the form of threats against the queen’s daughter) and tasked with finding those responsible.

We are in the thick of atmospheric evocations. Castle Bran is reputedly that castle—Dracula’s. The vampire haunts the novel. Both Russell and Holmes are grounded materialists, so obviously ghosts, devils, vampires and so forth are not the perpetrators. But they are tools.

Politics play a role—this is 1925 and Romania is slowly recovering from the shocks of World War I—as does folklore. Holmes and Russell must move carefully through a landscape fraught with the kind of peril born out of superstition and the frayed sensibilities of a people still trying to find their way into a new world without losing too much of the old.

King deftly portrays the country, the culture, the politics, and the history and moves her characters through this landscape on this most delicate quest. As in past novels, King displays a deep understanding of history, and her attention to detail is everything one would expect from a Sherlock Holmes novel.

But as I said, the pleasure of this novel and all the others in the series is in the dynamic between Russell and Holmes and it remains compelling and convincing. The biggest difference between Mary Russell and her husband is age and therefore experience, but they are intellectually matched and derive a significant part of their delight in each other from that fact.

King has humanized Holmes, perhaps more believably than most other attempts, which have generally focused on the uncommon intelligence and observational skills of the detective, so much so that many incarnations have rendered the character all but a machine. The original stories show a more rounded person, someone who it must be remembered could be extraordinarily kind. Whatever the reason—fascination with the exotic if nothing else—Holmes has been too often portrayed as some kind of intellectual freak. Conan Doyle, if he had any message beyond telling a good yarn, was that the chief distinction between Holmes and his fellow humans was his willingness to Pay Attention. Yet the message received seems to have been “thank heavens there’s only one of him, no one could be like that!” King has spent time in this series, it seems, undoing the various boxes into which Holmes has been placed. (There have been a number of stories presenting the idea that Holmes was, in fact, an alien, which explained his unique powers. Fun stories, to be sure, but again that trend of removing Holmes from the realm of the human.) King’s Holmes begins as someone who had fled London, tired of The Game, but who started his career much younger than the man in Dr. Watson’s tales (a nod perhaps to Aesop, who was said to have dressed as an old man in order to be taken seriously by those who would never accept wisdom from a young man?) and was interested in his bees, his solitude, and perhaps rejuvenating himself after near burn-out. The opportunity of training a protege in the form of a young girl who invades his quiet gives him a chance to…

Well, that would seem to be an ongoing journey, for both of them. Russell/Holmes is very much a spring-autumn romance—and there is romance, albeit understated and plausibly private (these are written in first-person by Mary)—but they have found each other as rough equals and by implication natural companions.

All that is well and good, but the best part of these novels is Mary herself, who is one of the finest sleuths to be found. Tough-minded, resilient, a scholar first, detective and occasionally reluctant spy, it is from her we learn all this, her voice that takes us through the adventures, and Holmes often takes a backseat to Mary’s navigation.

And the mysteries are fine. Just the sorts of unlikely, bizarre, exotic tangles one should expect from a Sherlock Holmes tale. But again, rendered in terms of human capacity and interest. In any event, so far each book has left me happily looking forward to the next. Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes have together reinvigorated what had come close to being overdone and overworked.

2020 and Reading for Purpose

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

In a year that felt more like some surreal historical melodrama that ought to be safely turned into a documentary rather than something to cling to the future like a belly-full of bad booze, what we read may have been one of the most important choices we were able to make. Our lives constrained by a pandemic, we may have lived more vicariously than ever before, but we also dealt with the world as a landscape of impending doom in ways that perhaps our parents and grandparents may have in different ways, but was unique in the manner of it collision with reality and ignorance.

I think it fair to say that never before has so much information, understanding, and intellectual resource been so available to so many and yet rejected in turn to such a degree as to challenge one’s sanity. It seemed like the more we knew, the more concrete things we could say about so many things, the more too many people flat-out denied those very things that might have made the world a better place. Watching and listening to the news day to day was an agony of frustration.

So we—some of us—turned to reading for answers as well as escape. Answers to try to make sense of things, escape to give us the spiritual resources to cope with what we learned and what we saw.

I read, cover to cover, 63 books in 2020.

What science fiction I read was related mainly to the reading group I host. I read a lot of history, political philosophy, mysteries. I did not quite finish a rather excellent biography of John Maynard Keynes, which has proven to be a timely work that throws light on the history that brought us to where we are now. Zachary Carter’s The Price of Peace should, I suggest, be read with Binyamin Appelbaum’s The Economists’ Hour. Between them they illuminate the 20th century struggle with finding our way through the morass of slogans, competing theories, political opportunists, and national identities that seem to rely on the 19th Century concepts of poverty, property, and progress to justify a kind of fearful reluctance to simply adapt.

Along with these, Shawn Otto’s The War On Science is history of the anti-intellectualism in America that has dogged us since the beginning and has resulted now in a precarious moment in which the knowledge we derive from sound scientific practice has never been more necessary to our survival while living in a time when more people refuse to acknowledge anything outside their own concepts and prejudices. Along with this, a somewhat more theoretical but complimentary work is Why Trust Science? by Naomi Oseskes.

It would seem that our greatest enemy remains ignorance. Demagogues and con artists have become far more adept at manipulating and defrauding us in greater numbers than ever before and the only defense is our ability to reason, to sort through and measure and recognize nonsense, especially when it seems enriching, empowering, and edifying. Everything has taken on an urgency that strips us of time and room to judge, to assess, to think through. Decisions must be made now, while the offer lasts, don’t be late, get yours now.

In this struggle, the only thing that we can personally do is equip ourselves with the wide gaze of grounded perspective. History, economics, philosophy. They can appear daunting. But you only have to pick a book and start. It accrues. In time, something seemingly so removed from our present experience as Jill Lepore’s The Name of War, about King Phillip’s War, which set the pattern for the European conquest of America, takes on currency in the here and now. Speaking of Jill Lepore, her newest, If Then, about the forgotten Simulmatics Incorporated and its effect on American (and global) politics is an eye-opening expose of how we managed to corrupt our political systems with introduction of demographic analysis, ad-agency thinking, and datamining.

Economics, history…what about philosophy?

Outside specialized texts, I believe one cannot do better than good science fiction. Mary Robinette Kowal’s latest in her Lady Astronaut series, Relentless Moon, offers some surprising relevancy to the present as well as a terrific yarn set in an alternate history. Annalee Newitz’s Future of Another Timeline is a rumination on choice as well as a good time-travel story. Blackfish City by Sam J. Miller examines near-future global changes and the consequences of corporate capitalism disguised cleverly as a quest/revenge/rescue narrative.

I’ve been reading aloud to my partner for a while now. We did John Scalzi’s most recent trilogy, starting with The Collapsing Empire. His approach is in some ways perhaps “irreverent” but once you get past that surface facility, it’s a first-class trilogy.

Possibly the most beautiful writing I encountered this year was Robert MacFarlane’s Underland. He’s a naturalist/explorer whose previous work has been concerned with climbing mountains and related landscapes. In this he went down. In a magnificent rumination on ecologies and the underground, both natural and artificial, he has written beautifully about a world we ignore to our peril.

Alex Ross, music critic for the New York Times, whose previous book The Rest Is Noise, about music and 20th Century history, is wonderful, has published his intricate study of Wager and the impact he had on, well, everything. Wagnerism in some senses is an expression of the often-unacknowledged influence of art on politics and identity. Ross examines how Wagner became the focal point for movements and countermovements up till the present with his outsized presence in film scores. An aspect of history that deserves a bit more attention.

I have my to-be-read pile already building for 2021. It includes several books that I hope will help me ride the unpredictable currents of our ongoing struggle with the world. But never more strongly do I feel that the encounter with other minds through the agency of the written word is one of our best tools for managing and emerging from darkness. We have such a wealth of resource. I look around at the world and cannot help but feel that if more people simply read more and more widely, things would begin to resolve. Never before have we had it thrown in our faces with such force the costs of ignorance.

Here is wishing you all a safe and aspirational year. Read on, read well.

Imperial Relevancy

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

Confession.

I read John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War when it came out. I enjoyed it. I then read Agent To The Stars and likewise enjoyed it. I bought a copy of Lock In and…

Lots of reasons one fails to continue reading a book or an author, many of them having nothing to do with either.  As a kind of funhouse mirror response to the long line of homages to Starship Troopers, Old Man’s War was fine, more interesting than most, and written in a manner that allowed easy enjoyment. I laughed out loud at Agent To The Stars and again, the voice was pleasurable.  I can’t say there was any valid reason to not keep reading Scalzi.  Other than the growing pile of to-be-reads, research for my own projects, reading I need to do for the day-job, and, well, life itself.  I have many books to hand that deserve a read and are languishing because I am mortal.

When the first volume of his new trilogy came along, I bought it, with the full intention of getting back to a writer I felt I ought to pay more attention to.  And then, it sat there. The next volume was released and finally the third. I bought them all, in hardcover, and when the last book arrived, I determined to read them straight through. Why not? I hadn’t done that in some time, read a trilogy in one go.

I’m glad I did. The pleasures of the whole work justify the time.

The Collapsing Empire is, firstly, a lot of fun.  The characters are nicely-drawn humans of wide ranging eccentricities, proclivities, and ambitions. Following them is rewarding, because even when they do something expected, the way they do it and the outcomes are not.

The setting is not unfamiliar, but Scalzi’s perspective is refreshingly realistic. The Interdependency is an interstellar community which relies on the Flow to move from one system to another. The Flow is a kind of extra-dimensional bypass. We are told repeatedly that analogies to rivers and so forth are inaccurate and also that no one actually knows what the Flow really is, but humans use it like a river system.  For a thousand years, the Interdependency has operated over numerous systems, its make-up based on an imperial hierarchy joined to a church and a collection of noble houses each with a monopoly.  The Emperox (an intentionally nongendered term for an old idea in a new form) has been from the same House since the Interdependency was established, the House of Wu, which holds the monopoly on shipbuilding and access to the Flow Shoals, the points of entry into the Flow.

It is clear from the outset that this system has found stability.  Throughout one thing is evident—this is a post-scarcity polity.  There are no poor, although there are discontented, the truly obdurate of which get sent to End, a world at the edge of the Interdependency where over time the malcontents have been deposited. Which has resulted in a local culture of anti-authoritarian rebelliousness that results in repeated cycles of revolution and the overthrow of the local Duke.

End also is the only human habitable planet in all of the Interdependency, the rest of which exists on stations and in surface colonies that have been dug out of worlds inimical to human life.

At some point prior to the creation of the Interdependency, these systems were cut off from Earth by a collapse of the Flow stream connecting them. Earth is legend. Within Interdependency memory, however, another system, Dalasysla, suffered the same fate. The possibility of such collapses is known, but other than those two it has never happened. The Interdependency has continued on as if it never would.

The story opens with exactly that happening. The Flow stream to End is starting to collapse.

At about the same time, the Emperox Atavio VI has died and a new emperox is being elevated, Cardenia, Atavio’s daughter by a former lover. She should never have become emperox. Atavio’s son, Rennered, was supposed to ascend to the throne, but he died in a racing accident.

Cardenia is an academic, raised away from the Court. No one knows much about her in terms of what kind of ruler she might make. But the forms are followed. Not that it matters.  Rennered was supposed to marry Nadashe Nohamapetan, of the House of Nohamapetan,  a house almost the equal of the House of Wu, thus joining the two most powerful houses together. The next heir would then be of both houses.  It is decided that Cardenia will simply marry Nadashe’s brother, Amit.

Cardenia has other ideas. But regardless what was supposed to happen, everything is derailed when on her coronation day a bomb goes off, nearly killing her, but successfully killing her best friend, who was to be her closest adviser.

She then learns two things that alter the course of her rule. One, she is introduced to the Memory Room, a chamber accessible only by the emperox where the personas of all past emperoxes are stored and where she can literally sit down and have a conversation with them.  There she learns the other thing—that her father, Atavio VI, knew the Flow was collapsing. His chief Flow physicist told him. Atavio VI then sent him off to End to continue his research, to verify and make absolutely certain about his findings in a place well away from the chaos of the Court. Which he does. And now the Flow stream to End is beginning to collapse, so he has to get the finished data back to Hub and the Court at Xi’an and the emperox, so some kind of planning might proceed to meet the inevitable isolation about to shut down the entire Interdependency. As another rebellion is happening on End, this one involving the Nohamapetans, he smuggles his son out with the data, sending him to the imperial court on Xi’an.

The stage now set, Scalzi takes us on a thoroughly engrossing ride through conspiracy, technological revelation, palace intrigue, and the discovery of history within a thoroughly imagined and well-constructed world(s).

The parallels to current-world issues could not be more obvious. Factions form over the question of the collapse. Some believe it won’t happen, others believe it won’t happen anytime soon, still others believe it won’t be a collapse so much as a realignment (and this latter group intend to take full advantage of that).  The work to convince enough of the right people that change is coming and the need to act is pressing envelopes Cardenia’s young reign.

Cardenia for her part proves herself up to the task of being emperox, surprising almost everyone. She is not a habitué of the Court, no one knows her, expectations are low.  That gives her an edge, which she uses.  It’s a pleasure watching her grow into the role.  She takes the name of a predecessor who faced similar difficulties, Grayland I, and forms some unexpected alliances that—

The pleasure is in the reading.

What is interesting here is the use of an old form cast in a new arrangement. It’s a valid question, though—why an empire? Why, therefore, an emperor?  Or in this case an emperox.

Empire evokes two broad images, one technical, the other romantic.

The technical side is one of practicality. Empires are, by and large, not practical. The extent of the territory, the problems of ruling a multiplicity of cultures and nationalities, and then the inevitable problems of security make them lumbering, inefficient, doomed-to-collapse bureaucratic fossils. On the relatively modest surface of a planet, it has proven to be untenable over any length of time (unless it is in name only and managed with a high degree of local autonomy, but even then…), the problems explode exponentially over interstellar distances. The idea that a political unit can be managed from a central location over many light years is, well, fantastic.

Which is why empires appear more in fantasy than science fiction.

But there is a long history of empires in science fiction and it is obvious that their creators were more than a little aware of the problems. In one of the most famous examples, Asimov’s Empire, it’s fairly obvious that “the emperor” is an isolated figurehead with no real command of the galactic polity of which he is the titular head. The bureaucracy functions as if he were utterly irrelevant.  Likewise in Poul Anderson’s Terran Empire, wherein the emperor is barely (if at all) mentioned.  The whole is not a homogeneous unit and the idea of empire is problematic.

Indeed, it is the British model that applies, if at all.  But even then, the cracks inherent in the structure virtually guarantee eventual dissolution.   So why “empire?”

That brings us to the romantic model, by which I do not mean anything more than a fabulation of the past superimposed upon a construct for the sake of nostalgia. The idea that somehow the past was more adventurous, perhaps simpler, and the issues more clear-cut. That heroics could be recognized and performed with less ambiguity. That the politics of the day were less tangled and knotty difficulties could be solved by the hack of a sharp blade.  And that monarchies were somehow “easier” than the squabbly morass of democracy.  Escapism, certainly, but you see the model used in fantasy all the time and for good reason.  And EMPIRE has such a ring to it!

And it allows for a kind of homogeneity across vast stretches of territory (and ethnicity) that enables a certain kind of narrative.

But if the point is to react against that system, it can also be…limiting.

Scalzi avoids that by redefining—or, at least, renegotiating the basic nature of empire. Here, more than anything else, it’s a business arrangement, with a large dollop of enlightened self-interest, and a mission statement which is considerably more practical than the usual. For one thing, there seems to be no expansion in this empire. The borders (boundaries) are set, presumably by the nature of the Flow, and there is no hint of conquest. Trade is controlled through monopolies and mutual support is guaranteed by the interdependent nature of the system.

This is more empire as corporation than anything mythic, with the emperox as CEO. (Which permits, in the end, a privileged viewpoint, from a single vantage.)

And the nature of that corporation? Stasis. Keep things running smoothly.  The added wrinkle here is that all the disparate nations/systems are bound to the system because none of them are self-sufficient. Being cut off is a death sentence.

Maybe.

With the revelation that the Flow streams are collapsing, Cardenia/Grayland II is now in a struggle to find a way to save as many people as possible while fending off attempts by the Nohamapetans to displace her and move the capitol to End.  Which, while End actually is a place where humans can survive on the surface of a planet, is by no means a reasonable solution for the billions of Interdependency citizens. End will not support them all or even a significant fraction of them without suffering degradation and eventual environmental collapse.

Of course, the Nohamapetans could not care less. They’re looking out for themselves, their clients, their privilege.

Scalzi has constructed a very neat allegory.  And then set it at arm’s length, because this is a far future space adventure after all, and the Flow isn’t really the Climate…

As if that were not enough, he then adds in the history behind the Interdependency, which has surprises of its own and contributes to the search for solutions in unexpected but perfectly logical ways.  (It may be no surprise to learn that the problem of the collapsing streams is not, after all, a “natural” phenomenon, but one humans inflicted on themselves, for reasons which are also not surprising.)

There are moments when it feels at the point of being too big a story for three rather efficiently-packed novels.  That Scalzi pulls it off so well is a compliment to his skill.  That he manages it so entertainingly is, well, admirable.  He has taken what is a model almost as old as the genre, turned it around, twisted it, and produced what is, essentially, a critique of that model.  We know these things don’t work the way they should, yet we also know that humans (silly humans!) will try them anyway, and that they inevitably collapse.

If there is another interstellar empire to which this bears meaningful comparison, it would be the one in Frank Herbert’s Dune, which is also an ecological tale.  The empire there is a multi-faceted monstrosity based on trade, with a byzantine religion underpinning imperial fiat.  Herbert showed us the flaws in empire by taking it apart and revealing to us the fragile assumptions behind it.

One additional observation before closing.  We read this trilogy together, aloud. It lends itself to that very well, and perhaps benefits from it by allowing some of these characters vocal expression that adds to the overall substance on display.

Time permitting, I will have to go back and see what I’ve missed between Old Man’s War and this.

Recommended.

 

 

2018 and Reading Lists

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / 2 Comments

I saw a great many lists in social media this past year. “One Hundred Books to Read Before You Die,” “Only a Genius Has Read 10 of These,” “The Best SF Books Ever.” Clickbait, certainly, but some of them were amusing and even added some titles to my Must Find list.

By and large, such things are amusing at best, rarely instructional, and often mind-numbingly dumb. Especially those derived from on-line polls, where instead  A Book, whole series end up included, and no one is vetting for obvious errors.  (Shakespeare did not write novels.) Not to say lists aren’t useful. One was published—as a real paper book—this year that I find really interesting.  1000 Books To Read Before You Die, by James Mustich. Part of a series of books with the same general idea. What sets this apart is that the books included really are remarkable and the list comes with excellent precis and commentary about why you should read them, plus ancillary articles on the authors and their other work. In other words, this would be a good text to use to create course work for literature. (Before you ask, I’ve read around 250 of them.  There are many I’ve never even heard of. Anyone working their way through this would be very well read by the end.)

All this prompted me to wonder—again—why we read in the first place. Harold Bloom has probably addressed this question as much if not more than anyone else and he warned that we should never presume to read for Self Improvement (at least not in a moral sense) mainly because, I assume, we can point to some rather well-versed monsters who clearly benefited not at all from extensive reading. But then he will argue that self-improvement is one of the chief by-products of deep reading. He sees it as a side-effect, though, because—again, I assume—you have to develop to a certain degree before you can decode what books offer. To me, it’s kind of a chicken-and-egg question because the two go along in lockstep so often.

But self-improvement comes to people who rarely read and others who read widely and extensively and find no lessons or edification in it and in the end I suppose it’s what you read as much as how well you read it.

As a practical note, since this has come to my attention as a Real Thing, no one—no one—should presume to be a writer unless they love reading and do a lot of it. I’ve encountered several people with pretensions to write novels who never read anything. Firstly, what motivates them if they don’t like books? Fame? Money? Secondly, they have no grasp of the mechanics, much less the purpose, of writing a novel. I have seen the attempts. They do not get it. At all. But arrogantly assume it’s no big deal. This wouldn’t be a problem but for the ease of self-publishing. Before you think to commit something to paper (or electrons) find out what it is you’re attempting. Read, lest you inflict on others your vacuous incapacity for empathy, art, meaning….or, I assume, the hard work.

Mr. Bloom aside, I do believe deep, regular, and diverse reading improves. The exposure to ideas alone has an effect. Reading requires that we open parts of ourselves to new understandings. There have been numerous studies to indicate that the capacity for empathy alone is enlarged through engagement with characters not of our own group and being vulnerable to change is certainly an aspect of engagement.

I’ve been reading for as long as I can remember.  Books have simply always been there. I can’t imagine a world without them could possibly be worth living in. If that’s a species of chauvinism, so be it.

2018 was a good year for self-improvement, if any was to be had.

I became acquainted for the first time with MFK Fisher. I’ve known of her for decades, but I don’t read food writing. She was more than that and in the course of researching a novel, I read her Map of Another Town, which is about her time in Provençe in the mid-20th Century. Loving portraits of two towns, one of them Aix-en-Provençe, which was the town I wanted to research. Other than a sense of atmosphere and smidgen of history, it did not give me what I wanted, but perhaps what I needed. She was a fine, fine writer, and I recommend it.

As well, in the same vein, I read Maria Fairweather’s biography of Madame De Staël, which, along with the much older Herrold biography, gave me pretty much all I needed in terms of when and where and with whom.

Memoir is another genre I do not read often, but I found a delightful one.  Daniel Mendelsohn’s An Odyssey. It recounts the author’s year when his father audited his course on Homer’s work. Moving, thorough, with some surprise revelations about Homer as well as the frustrations of paths not chosen.

This was also a year for reading things I should have read decades ago. In this case, That Hideous Strength, by C.S. Lewis. Ostensibly the third volume of his so-called Space Trilogy, which began with Out of the Silent Planet (recommended unreservedly) and continued with Perelandra (cannot recommend). I kept bouncing off this third volume, probably because I’d had such a disappointing experience with the second, but I sat myself down this year and plowed through. I’m glad I did. The book is about the struggle between genuine progress and sham progress and how, because the latter can look so appealing, we hand over our moral capacity to people who have no comprehension of what it means to be humanly caring. There are some marvelous scenes in it, and although I didn’t find the underlying True King stuff to my taste (as with much of Lewis, he tried to make everything about the Return of some pure King ala Christ) it was a fine examination of how we lose things without knowing why.

Others in the vein were all rereads. I reread Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light, Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, Conan Doyle’s A Study In Scarlet, and Pat Cadigan’a Dirty Work. I do not reread, mainly because I read slowly and I have so much to yet read that taking the time to reread seems…

Well, I’m wrong about that.  I don’t know if it’s going to change, but I read Jo Walton’s An Informal History of the Hugo Awards, which is wonderful, a great trip through a history of science fiction that I recall a good part of as a series of encounters with new books. This really is worth a read, because she not only goes over the books that made the ballot (including the Nebula ballot, when that began) but discusses what else was published at the time that might have made the lists instead. It’s surprising and informative and a pleasure, but the talk about how many times she and others reread a given book made me squirm rather self-consciously.

But this reading out loud thing we’ve embarked on has been a joy. We have indulged primarily in Kerry Greenwood’s Miss Fisher Murder Mysteries series and have dramatized our way through all but two of them now. They are fun, a bit daring, well-researched, and easy to read aloud—unless you’re trying to do the accents properly, which is impossible but I try. Set in Australia in the 1920s, Miss Phryne Fisher is a very modern woman with a knack for solving crimes. We saw the tv series first, which is a delight of adaptation.

One set of books I wish we had done this way is Martha Wells’ Murderbot series, published in four brief volumes by Tor.com. They are told from the viewpoint of a security robot/cyborg who/that has hacked its own governor module. It is independent, can make its own decisions. What does it do? Downloads entertainment media to watch. Of course, it gets drawn into protecting a group of humans which leads into investigating corporate malfeasance which leads into more nasty stuff, which is all an annoying distraction from its programs. These are terrific and I was sorry to put the last one down.

In my humble opinion we are possibly in the midst of a new vitality in science fiction. I’m seeing fantasy writers suddenly turning out SF—and very good SF—a reverse of the situation for the last few decades.  Mary Robinette Kowal’s Lady Astronaut novels, The Calculating Stars and The Fated Sky are excellent. Good SF, a great central character, an alternate history scenario that makes perfect sense, and done with rigor and humor to leaven the grim main storyline.

My friend Daryl Gregory published Spoonbenders last year and I can’t recommend it enough for anyone looking for the indefinable. I’ve been telling people that it’s a combination of the X-Files and The Sting. Daryl writes humor with the best of them, which can be especially effective nestled within a serious plot.

Other speculative fiction delights:  Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty (one of the better locked-room mysteries, nested within a fascinating SFnal conceit); The Fifth Season, N.K. Jemisin’s tour-de-force which kicked off a few years of drama within the SF/F community; The Strange Bird by Jeff Vandermeer; Binti, by Nnedi Okorafor; and the short but affecting Time Was by Ian McDonald.

One of the best SF novels I had the immense pleasure of reading was John Kessel’s The Moon and the Other, which is an examination of utopic constructs. Set on the moon, it follows the vicissitudes of a feminist enclave vying for independence on a believably fraught luna colonized by a number of competing systems. The social and personal dynamics are complex and delicately portrayed. I thought it one of the finest novels of its kind I’ve ever read.

Not science fiction per se but inescapably SFnal was Alec Nevala-Lee’s excellent biography of John W. Campbell Jr. Astounding. For anyone wishing to understand the formative years of this thing called science fiction (and here I mean what we mean when we point at something—say, Star Trek or Arrival—and say the words, not the academically problematic ur texts that might establish prior examples and possible launch points), this is a must-read. Many myths and legends surround this man, this magazine, these writers, and Nevala-Lee does a surpassing fine job of revealing the facts and placing all these people in context.

I also read, for the first time, Malka Older’s Infomocracy.  I will read the rest of the trilogy based on this novel, which is a page-turning political exegesis on alternative democratic systems and their possible pitfalls.

Finally, Charlie Jane Ander’s forthcoming The City In The Middle of the Night. Excellent. It releases in February.  This is a major novel by a major talent. I’ll do a fuller review later.

A smattering of other SF works:

Netherspace by Lane & Foster; The Sky Is Yours by Chandler Klang Smith; Tomorrow by Damian Dibben; The City of Lost Fortunes by Bryan Camp; The Million by Karl Schroeder; Avengers of the Moon by Allen Steele; Noumenon by Marina Lostetter.  All recommended.

I read Charles C. Mann’s Wizard and Prophet, which is a science biography of Norman Borlaug and William Vogt, the two men who pretty much defined the conflict between two schools of thought about environment and sustainability in the 20th Century. Borlaug was the developer of super grains, applying technological approaches to increased yields to feed more people, while Vogt was an ardent believer in austerity and cutting back and reducing populations. What might have been achieved had these two men somehow found it possible to work together we will never know. Vogt identified Borlaug as an enemy almost from the minute they met and history has been as it is.

Stephen Pinker’s Enlightenment Now is a weighty argument on behalf of the Enlightenment as a foundation for going forward. It is a hopeful book, anodyne for the fraught political times in which we live, if a bit more optimistic than might be creditable. Set it against Tim Marshall’s Prisoners of Geography and realities balance the optimism.

I’m finding a forceful new set of voices in support of scientific rationalism and a concern over facts muscling its way back onto the main stage of public discourse. We have labored in a soup of vacuous postmodern hand-waving for the last four decades so that now the very moral relativism decried by the Right as liberal softheadedness is now used by the Right to claim victory against Reason and Progress. Perhaps this move from fantasy back to science fiction is an indicator that people are growing tired of mystical pabulum and want something concrete to hold onto.

Maybe.

In any case,  these are some of the books that caught my attention this year. We’ll see what 2019 brings.

 

 

 

 

2017

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

Looking at my list, I read, cover-to-cover, 51 books in 2017. That doesn’t seem like much to me, but knowing there are people, even people I know, who haven’t read one book in that time, it’s probably in the top something-or-other of national averages. At 63, I’m not sure I care anymore. It never was about quantity, as I’ve told myself time and again, but there are so many good books and I want to read them all!

We have engaged another study group this year. Rousseau. When we agreed to join, we thought we were doing just one of his works, his Second Discourse on Inequality. Come to find out, our guiding light wants to cover all the major Rousseau. Next up is Emile. I haven’t read Emile since high school. I remember little about it, other than it served to enrich a later reading of C. J. Cherryh’s Cyteen. Very well. Rousseau it is.

But in 2017, I felt torn between two kinds of reading. Reading to escape—because, really, look at the world—and reading to understand how to deal with reality.

A third category was the books for my science fiction group at Left Bank Books. Twelve titles, mostly selected by me, but voted on now by the whole group. My intention in this group is to read a mix of new(wish) and classic. This year we’ll be doing our first nonfiction title.

It’s given me a chance to reread some of my favorites. In almost every instance, I’ve found a practically new novel. For instance, Delany’s Trouble On Triton. I no longer recall clearly how I felt about it when I read it back in the Seventies, but this time through it was fascinating in that Delany opted to tell the story through the eyes of a person incapable of any kind of satisfaction in what in many ways is practically a paradise (never mind the little war going on). He wrote it as a kind of response to Le Guin’s The Dispossessed and it works quite well as that, flipping the relationship on its head at almost every point. Bron Helstrom is not a misunderstood everyman in a society unwilling to accommodate his uniqueness. Rather, he is a perpetually ill-fitting square peg that refuses, constitutionally, to be accommodated, even by a society that has no qualms trying to help him “fit.”

We also read Joan Vinge’s magisterial Snow Queen. I confess this was the first time I managed to get all the way through. While some of it is a bit dated, I found it a magnificent piece of world-building.

Then there was Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee.  On the surface, this is an intense military SF novel, but it works with religious motifs, time and calendars, and the whole notion of long games and ghosts. The details of the world-building are impressive and the motivations for the conflicts are unusual to say the least. There is an element of Mayan cosmology buried beneath the surface, transformed into the kind of Otherness that gives the best science fiction its appeal.

Borne by Jeff Vandermeer is an odd novel. Compared to some of his work, which I find utterly unclassifiable (in the best sense), Borne is much more accessible, even though it presents as bizarre a world as any Vandermeer has ever offered. I came to the conclusion that this is a take on Alice Through The Looking Glass, done with an utterly different set of cultural expectations.

We read Keith Roberts’ Pavane, Chabon’s  The Yiddish Policeman’s Union,  Long Way To A Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers, Autonomous by Annalee Newitz, Use Of Weapons b y Iain M. Banks, Too Like The Lightning by Ada Palmer, Tim Powers’ The Anubis Gates, all of which generated excellent discussion.

Along with the other newer SF I read this past year, I conclude that the genre has never been healthier, more fascinating and inventive. The quality of imagination and craft have combined to produce some of the best work ever done.

Likewise in science writing, as exemplified by Carlo Rovelli, whose Reality Is Not What It Seems impressed me with its clarity and concision. (I’d been wondering what happened to string theory the last few years and this book told me.)

The Book That Changed America by Randall Fuller is more history than science. It details the initial encounter with Darwin in America and examines its impact. Both its initial welcome by people who saw in it a sound argument against slavery and then its later rejection as the assault on biblical fealty it became.

Sidharta Mukerjee’s The Gene is likewise marvelously accessible, a history and examination of the Thing That Makes Us Us.

In the same vein, but much more exhaustive in its historicity, was David Wooton’s The Invention of Science, a chronicle of how science came into being. He demonstrates that it was not the revelation popular myth suggests, but a long accumulation of understandings that depended utterly on the social context in which they emerged. (For instance, we have no science as practice without the printing press.) Reviewing first appearances of words and concepts, the book shows how culture had to change before the possibility of the modern concept of science could even begin to take hold. Just realizing that prior to Columbus there was no common understanding of the concept of “discovery.”

Just as enlightening were Charles C. Mann’s pair of New World histories, 1491 and  1493, which combined tear away most of the preconceptions about the world Europe destroyed when it crossed the Atlantic.

I read some excellent novels outside genre—Jacqueline Winspear’s well done Maisy Dobbs series (three of them), The Hot Country by Robert Olen Butler, Kerry Greenwood’s Cocaine Blues, the first Miss Fisher mystery, and travel writer William Least Heat-Moon’s first foray into fiction, Celestial Mechanics. But primarily, I read nonfiction and SF.  It was that kind of a year.

As a bookseller, I noticed a sharp rise in the purchase of science books. Overall book sales were generally higher than in past years.  People are reading things which seem to offer a more solid grasp of reality. Perhaps this is in reaction to the state of the world or just the state of the country.  People seem to want To Know, in very concrete ways, if their selections are indicative. I see less escapism, and when I do see it, it is not the sort that would leave the psyché unchanged.

I already have half a dozen titles read for this year. It will be interesting to see how all this evolves by December.

Good reading to you all.

2016

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

Tardiness comes in direct proportion to chaos. The year ended and all was in flux.

However, reading goes on.

I did not finish nearly as many books in 2016 as I tried to. At least, not other people’s books.  I did finish drafts of two of my own.  My desk, at the moment, is clear, and maybe I can do a better job in 2017 of keeping abreast here.

A good deal of my science fiction reading was pretty much for the reading group I host at Left Bank Books. That group affords me opportunity and motivation to read novels I might not otherwise get to.  So I reread Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination for the first time in three decades, but I also read The Left Hand of Darkness for the first time ever. I do not regret the delay. It is a mature novel, with a great deal my younger self may well have missed.  As to the former, it came very close to not holding up.  I had forgotten (if I ever realized it this way) just how brutal a novel it is, and not just in the character of Gully Foyle. Bester’s achievement way back in the Fifties remains remarkable for its unyielding insistence on a fragmented, painful, chaotic, and historically consistent future.

I also reacquainted myself with Tiptree, in the form of Her Smoke Rose Up Forever. It seems fitting in this period of reassessment and revolution, when the face of science fiction is—has—changed and brought forth a volatile reaction to that change.  Tiptree was doing much of what is being so rancorously challenged within the field today, but as she was a singular voice and not a “trend” she provoked different challenges then while becoming accepted generally as a brilliant writer and a jewel in the crown of SF stars.

I also reread (for the first time since it came out) Robert Silverberg’s Dying Inside, which I reviewed in the previous post.  I was much too inexperienced a reader the first time to appreciate everything Silverberg was doing, so I probably forgot the book as soon as I finished it.

It is true that some books must be “grown into”—I am currently rereading Samuel R. Delany’s Trouble On Triton for the book group and realizing that, while I read it eagerly the first time, I probably missed almost everything important about. Likewise with another reread, Gene Wolfe’s The Fifth Head of Cerberus, which is ostensibly a novel about colonialism.  I say “ostensibly” but that does not mean it isn’t.  It very much is about colonialism, all three of the novellas which comprise the whole.  But it is as much about how we colonize ourselves, sometimes to our loss, as it is about colonizing foreign soil, in this case another world with a native population that strives to adapt but may have found in the end their only options were extinction or counter-colonization.  As always, Wolfe’s subtlety is rigorously slippery, his points less direct,  corrosive of expectation.

Titan Books has rereleased Michael Moorcock’s Cornelius Chronicles, a story cycle that is the very definition of indirect.  Moorcock took as his template the Romantic poets—Byron, Shelley, et al—and displaced them into a near future chaos in the form of his “hero” Jerry Cornelius, who wants to save the world only to resurrect his dead sister so they can be together.  The prose are rife with Sixties hip, but not so overwhelmingly anachronistic that the novels aren’t just as readable now as they were then.  The response to them is perhaps necessarily altered and certainly the themes play out differently. Moorcock may have been the grown-up in the room at the advent of New Wave.  He did go on to write some marvelously rich books after these.

I finished Ann Leckie’s delightfully subversive Ancillary trilogy.  I need to do a full review soon.  Treat yourself.

A smattering of other SF titles I can recommend whole-heartedly:  Lavi Tidhar’s Central Station; Sylvain Neuvel’s Sleeping Giants; Carter Sholz’s Gypsy; Binti by Nnedi Okorafor.

And Nisi Shawl’s wonderful Everfair.  An alternate history steampunk done the way steampunk ought to be done.  I owe it a full review, but let me say here that this is one of the best first novels I’ve read in a long time.

I read two China Mieville books this year, one very good.  This Census Taker I have to count as a failure.  It has good writing fascinating bits, but failed to come together the way I’ve come to expect from Mieville.  The other, newer one, is The Last Days of New Paris, which is excellent.  This pair allowed me to understand that one of the primary passions Mieville indulges in his work is cities.  His best work portrays a city as a complete character.  This Census Taker lacked that.

Of the non science fiction read this year, I did Moby-Dick with my other reading group.  I resisted doing this book.  I’ve never liked it.  I find it turgid, convoluted, often opaque.  There is also a darkness to it that can be suffocating. Over several months we tackled it, dissected it, ran through various analyses.  I conclude that it is a superb work, fully deserving of its reputation.  It is A great American novel if not The American Novel, because America is its subject, though it takes place on a whaling ship far at sea.  It is not a flattering picture, though, displaying throughout the contradictions, hypocrisies, and shortcomings of the then young nation which continue to plague us.  It does this brilliantly.

I still don’t like it.  I find little pleasure in the actual reading.  That, as they say, is my problem.

A colleague and coworker, Kea Wilson, published her first novel, We Eat Our Own. I commend it.  I reviewed it here.

A novel that straddles the genre boundaries somewhat that caused some controversy upon its initial publication is Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant.  This is a post-Arthurian quest story with much to say about memory and community and the price of vengeance.

This was a big year for nonfiction.

Robert Gleick’s new tome, Time Travel: A History is an exceptional soliloquy on the concept, science, and cultural use of time travel, beginning with Wells and covering both the scientific realm and the popular fiction realm, showing how they have played off each other and how the idea has evolved and worked through our modern view of the universe and our own lives.  Previously in the year I’d read his magnificent biography of Richard Feynman, Genius.  Gleick is a great explainer and a fine craftsman.

As well, Carlo Rovelli’s Seven Brief Lessons About Physics.  They are brief, they are accessible, they are to be enjoyed.  And, along the same lines, Void by James Owen Weatherall, about the physics of empty space.  It’s far more fascinating than it might sound.

I can recommend Peter Frankopan’s Silk Roads, which is a history of the world from the viewpoint of the Orient.  The shift in perspective is enlightening.  Along the same lines I read Charles Mann’s 1491, which was eye-opening and thought-provoking—and in some ways quite humbling.

I also read Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers In Their Own Land, especially in the wake of what I think I can safely call the most surprising election result in recent history. This book is a study of the right-wing culture that has developed in many startlingly contradictory ways.  I believe this would be worth reading for anyone trying to make sense of the people who continually vote in ways that seem to make no sense—and also for those who do vote that way just so they might understand what it is about their movement that seems so incomprehensible to many of their fellow citizens.

I read a few short of 50 books in 2016 cover to cover.  I will be reviewing some of them in the future.

Here’s hoping for a good year of reading to come.