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Year in review

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

I read 94 books in 2024. 

Not what I was shooting for, but not by any means unsatisfying. Upon retirement, I imagined myself spending at least two or three hours a day poring over all the books and devouring the things I’ve always intended to.

Well. That didn’t happen.

But as things get more settled, I might exceed my goal of 100 a year. (The highest number I ever reached was my senior year of high school. I had taken a speed reading course the year before, I was cruising through texts at an average of 2000 words a minute, and I cut class most of my senior year. I spent most of those days at the local library—seriously—and got to where I was doing a book a day. I plowed through many of the so-called classics that way and I might have read 300 books that year. Now, I can’t read that fast anymore and I’m much happier for it, because what I read at the more modest pace of maybe 150 to 200 words a minute means more, has more impact, and stays in my memory. Lately I’ve been revisiting some of those classics I read back then and it’s like reading them for the first time. I remember I read them, but not much else, with a few exceptions.) That would be a respectable number, I think. 

I did a lot of filling in this past year. Books I’ve owned for decades and never got around to, some works of SF that are important if not seminal works that I simply passed up. To that end, I read several of the original Ace Specials, edited in the late 60s-early 70s by Terry Carr. While a couple of them did not quite pass the test of time, I was pleasantly surprised by the D.G.Compton’s—Chronocules, Steel Crocodile, The Silent Multitude, and Synthajoy. I found them very mature works, dealing with human interaction in ways much more sophisticated than a lot of popular SF at the time, with premises that, while certainly science fictional, did not dazzle with hi-tech glitz, but supplied a satisfying substrate for the real action, which is how we treat each other. Compton, I believe, holds the record for the most titles published in the Ace Special line. As well, I read a couple of Bob Shaw’s, a writer who has unfortunately been largely forgotten today. The Two-Timers and The Palace of Eternity are sophisticated stories of seemingly minor shifts in the given tapestry of our lives with outsized effects. 

I also filled a couple of Michael Moorcock gaps with The Ice Schooner, The Black Corridor, The Distant Stars, and The Warlord of the Air. Moorcock can be uneven, but he possesses a singular approach to science fiction that, when effective, elevates his work to a remarkable degree. 

I also tackled a lot of Robert Silverberg. There is a lot of Silverberg. He is one of the most prolific writers, in any genre, and he crossed genres significantly. In his early career, he wrote a great deal of popular SF, potboilers really, and some of it has not aged well. When Silverberg is firing on all cylinders, he can be brilliant. But the volume of work…well, not all of it rose to such vaunted heights, and we shouldn’t expect it to. But in some ways, work which was once seen as cutting-edge and groundbreaking, especially socially, has worn poorly. But among those I read this year that I think remain remarkable I would put Downward To The Earth. It’s a riff on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Silverberg has claimed Conrad as one of his favorites, so it’s not surprising that he would take a page from him from time to time, and this one is rather well done. Another worthy tale is Sailing To Byzantium. It’s elegant and picturesque and in the end poignant. 

There are novels one should read at the right age or, really, when they first appear if possible. I read several older works that, for a variety of reasons, simply have not held up well, despite clever ideas. Sad, really, because I can see in many cases where I would—at age 15 or 16 or 26—have been utterly enthralled by them. Some of this has to do with the natural changes of style that come with the passing of time. We’ve learned how to write this stuff better. Some of it has to do with the priority given to aspects of certain stories we know were they done today would be differently deployed. Times have changed, tastes have evolved, and for better or worse I am someone who has a difficult time Going Back. I can’t read a lot of older work that I know I loved when I first encountered it, because, well, it doesn’t flow anymore. Expectations have mutated, grown, what have you. (I have this problem with period novels. I know people who can happily get lost in the works of Trollope or Galsworthy, but I trip over the prose and stumble. Oh, there are writers from those periods I can read, there are exceptions, but a great deal of popular work from previous eras just doesn’t work for me and it’s not the fault of the work itself.) I will confess here that there is one type of novel I simply grind to a halt with and that is the broad satire. I attempted to read John Sladek’s Mechasm (another of the original Ace Specials) and it’s Vonnegut-esque, which would be a recommendation for many people. But it’s…well, smart-alecky. Tongues visibly in cheeks, caricatures, and just…clever ideas packaged as a series of absurdities. I’m willing to cop to tone-deafness on my part, but too often I’ve been in the middle of work like this before realizing I’m trying to read smart-ass prose as if they were deadly serious. I’m working on that.

Then there are writers whose approach to subject—their strategies, if you will—fails to engage. I have blindspots about this. I read things others tell me are just marvelous and I find them clunky and all but inaccessible. But so many people extoll the virtues of these writers so much that I suspect many of us who are simply not impressed say nothing for fear of spoiling the party. 

One classic, so called, that was surprising in many ways? I finally read The Man In The Gray Flannel Suit. Sloan Wilson’s first novel and  cultural touchstone of sorts. My review is here, so I won’t go into it. I read a few books that in their day were heralded as important. Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow, which I found clever if not altogether revelatory. And then there was The Futurological Congress by Stanislaw Lem. I understood something about Lem after this one that I hadn’t quite realized before. Lem did not like mot science fiction, especially American SF, and this novel offered a clue as to why that may have been. Lem, I believe, didn’t think humans were…improvable. That we might develop amazing technologies, even make major breakthroughs in science, but we ourselves? Hopeless. I think he may have reacted negatively to the kind of Higher Frontier cheerleading a lot of SF indulges. 

I continue to be impressed with the tor.com series. I’ve read a number of great books from them and not yet encountered a bad one. This year continues with the latest entry in the Murderbot seriea, System Collapse. A Season of Monstrous Conceptions by Lina Rather pushed the boundaries of Steampunk in interesting directions, although I’m beginning to feel that category ought to be retired, at least in many instances. Just because a story is set in a more or less Victorian milieu it should not automatically be regarded as steampunk. Sometimes it’s just alternate history. More often, it seems, it’s an example of horror. Be that as it may, another fine work from tor.com is Aliette de Bodard’s Navigational Entanglements, a very satisfying kind of space opera. Top of the list from that publisher, though, is Ray Nayler’s The Tusks of Extinction, a sobering contemplation on the economics and sociometrics of poaching and the costs of solutions.

Continuing my desultory attempt to catch up on what may have been my Golden Age, I read a couple more Clifford Simak novels—Cemetery World, in particular—and James Blish novels. Blish is another mixed bag. Some of his books have aged poorly, while some are surprisingly still very good. Titan’s Daughter is a mixed bag novel reminiscent of Wells’ Food of the Gods. A thriller of sorts. And Mission To The Heart Stars would seem to be a response to Heinlein’s Have Space Suit, Will Travel, both dealing in different ways with the idea of humanity having to pass muster before a galactic civilization that holds our fate in its grasp. 

Two of the most surprisingly pleasurable reads (for completely different reasons) this year were C.S.E. Cooney’s World Fantasy Award winner  Saint Death’s Daughter and the Booker Prize winner Orbital by Samantha Harvey. The first because normally I would never have picked it up, but it’s a title in my book group’s roster (this month actually), the second because…well, an SF novel written by literary writer that, being SF, won one of the most prestigious literary awards on the planet.

Saint Death’s Daughter is a sprawling bit of world-building that, despite its excellent background construction and detail, is very focused on its characters, who are wide-ranging and unique. Despite some touchpoints that suggest this world is some past (or future) iteration of our own, it quickly becomes irrelevant to the plot, which is twisty and engaging and in certain ways compellingly perverse. It deals with necromancy, includes ghosts, resurrection, and an original take on magic which, by the end of the novel, left me wondering if this were fantasy at all. The world is not Earth, not in any traceable way, and I began to see the traces of a nanotech explanation for much of the so-called magic. But it is written in the manner of a fantasy. It appears to be a fantasy and, as such, is not something I would normally pick up. But it more than paid off the investment in a 640 page novel. 

Orbital on the other hand is exactly the sort of thing I would pick up, as much out of a desire to see how well it was done as for its content. I should be used to finding well-done SF written by otherwise non-SF writers by now. These are artists who have come of age steeped in the brew of science fiction that has soaked contemporary culture. It’s not like the “slumming” that one used to find from mainstream authors who attempted the form that they might otherwise have felt a subspecies of Good Writing. It has become much more acceptable for someone like Kazuo Ishiguro or Emily St. John Mandel or Mat Johnson to produce a work of unapologetic science fiction (even though some publicists still balk at embracing it), but I’m still cautious and surprised when one is done well. In fact, very well. To be sure, Orbital is easily read as mainstream literary, the SFnal elements smoothly entwined with all the rest to make it feel contemporary. But if one of the chief values of science fiction is how is elucidates the human changes wrought by science and technology which are themselves game-changers—paradigm-shifters, if you will—in anticipatory modes, then Orbital qualifies, and it is the respectful flower of internalizing SF as a valid literary form with significant implications.

This past year I’ve read more SF than the last several. Largely, this was a consequence of having to devote myself to more research, but also because my nonfiction-for-pleasure has increased, and in that regard some of the highlights of 2024 have been: 

Christendom by Peter Heather; Democracy Awakening by Heather Cox Richardson; The Existentialist Cafe by Sarah Bakewell; The Second Sex by Simone de Bouvoir; White Holes by Carlo Rovelli; Plato At The Googleplex by Rebecca Goldberger Goldstein; Orientalism by Edward Said; The Witches by Stacy Schaff. Again, some catching up going on there, books I should have read but never got to.

So, 94 books. I may tally fewer this coming year as I have several on my pile of epic proportions. That and I don’t know yet how my next couple of projects will distort my strategies. But all in all, I’m pleased with this last one. I have not mentioned several others, many of which were quite good but other than noting that I read them would add little to this summary. One of these years I may start linking to a spreadsheet so everyone can keep track.

I’ll end by pointing out that the last few years have seen declines in reading rates across several demographics. This saddens me. I know the pressures of daily life can make reading seem like a luxury—or a chore—that one cannot afford, but given the state of, well, everything these last several years, I think it is a necessary survival habit. The level of ignorance—specifically, the degree to which people simply do not know things—demonstrated quite publicly by too many people is having a corrosive effect on life itself. Regardless how bad one’s school experience my have been, reading is one of the most civilizing skills available to us. Not just the casual cruising of an internet feed but the kind of reading that stretches the imagination. Take a book, turn off the feeds, sit down, and dig in reading. It seems more and more that we’re going to let the world burn because we just don’t know any better.

Have a better 2025.

Ad Stellas Per Musica

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

Jason Heller’s Strange Stars is an overview of music of the 1970s that referenced, overlapped, or otherwise advanced science fiction. As such, it gives us a unique musical history that sidesteps much of what dominated the Seventies, but which was central to what made that decade unique in contemporary, pop, youth, and/or rock music, however one registers the soundscape of the period.

His take-off point is Davie Bowie’s appearance as a kind of avatar of unapologetic science fiction concepts through music, especially his Ziggy Stardust persona. Given the chronology, I can’t argue with that, even though at the time I was only marginally aware of Bowie, and when I did notice him I was not especially impressed. But Heller touches on many of the bands and performers who did exemplify that strain of music for me.

Reading Strange Stars, I’m reminded of how much it is possible to miss, even while—or perhaps because of—living through it all. For instance, George Clinton and the whole Funk movement passed me right by. I was aware of its importance only in retrospect. Likewise with a great deal of Glam. It seemed to me at the time to miss the point, but I can’t say why exactly since I paid it little attention, intentionally or otherwise.

But Heller is right that the Seventies encapsulated the emergence of science fiction in popular culture in ways it never had before, and in popular music it came to the fore in unique and unexpected forms. There were precursors, of course—the instrumental bands like the Ventures and the Tornados, the novelty acts, and then the whole psychedelic movement that gave us bands like Pink Floyd, which, despite Heller’s dismissal of them in later albums due to a lack of overtly SFnal lyrics, remained aesthetically connected to SF compositionally—that led to a flowering and full embrace by 1969-70.

Heller searches for and finds ample connection to science fiction through lyric content, Easter eggs and unapologetic references to classic SF and thematic explorations, and certainly all that was present, especially in a lot of Bowie from that early period of his career. But for me, it was the composition and performance itself, regardless of lyric content, that spoke to my geeky SF fan backbrain. All those novelty songs from the Sixties, which Heller catalogues, never said “science fiction” to me because musically they were still products of 1950s rock’n’roll and rather cheesy and absurd, albeit amusing and catchy.

He catches this when he tags Bowie and, especially, King Crimson as the first full on manifestations of a SFnal aesthetic. What I recall listening for was, in a way, a departure point, perhaps a gateway into a future like those I found in novels by Heinlein or Clarke or Norton or Asimov. As the decade continued, I felt that many of these bands were acting as guardians at the gate of a tomorrow we might actually live in. If we were mindful. If we were careful.

So for me, it was Yes that signaled the future. Yes and Genesis (up to A Lamb Lies Down On Broadway) and Emerson Lake & Palmer. Especially ELP with Emerson’s embrace of synthesizers and compositional experiments like nothing else in Rock till then. I heard this music in the same way I read science fiction, as manifestations of different worlds.

Emotionally, I imagine that the first time I heard Tarkus I felt—reacted—the same way audiences back in 1913 heard The Rites of Spring. Something so unexpected, so divergent, so….tomorrow….that it was like a wrench.

For whatever reason, Bowie didn’t do that for me, for all that I liked Space Oddity. But Heller’s thesis is valid just the same. After Star Trek it became a popular aesthetic movement that more and more took on the surface, at least, of science fiction. The music perhaps has been an underappreciated aspect of that. I remember as an earnest adolescent searching for the next bit of music that fed that need for the next phase of civilization. (I found a great deal of it in what later became known as Electronica, especially with Tangerine Dream, whose albums were all racked in Rock along with James Taylor, Chicago, The Doors, and Joni Mitchell.) When I settled down to listen to an album or go to a concert, I was looking to be transported. Often it was just rock and I loved all that offered, but there were those acts and albums that, for me, were gateways in the same way many of the books I read were.

I very much enjoyed Heller’s book. It took me back. I learned things I never knew (like that the backing band for an obscure album by Ramases, Space Hymns, which is a curiosity more for its cover art than for its music, later became 10cc), and so many creations I never knew about. One is limited by time and, often, money. I didn’t have the budget to acquire most of the albums I would have loved had I known about them. It was a rich period of musical ferment and worth a new look. You could do worse than use Heller’s book as a guide.

Formative Times and Moving Forward

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

It is true, the music that first inspired you tends to be the touchstone for the rest of your aesthetic life. Those songs encountered when the hormones begin their rampage through your limbic system and set all your neurons dancing form the core of what you seek and appreciate going forward. For perhaps five years, what you listen to will anchor you. Five years between, say, 13 and 18. Or 15 and 20? Give or take, that half a decade will be the source you return to till senescence sets in.

If one is very lucky, that music will be excellent. I suspect the difference between someone who keeps listening to those pieces over and over for the next 50 years and someone who goes on to find new music, expanding from that initial thrill, is entirely dependent on the quality of that initial exposure.

Yes, I’m going to indulge in a bit of snobbery now. Sorry. I believe there really is a difference between forms, performers, and examples. I’ve known people who, over the course of thirty or more years, always—ALWAYS—opt for that old Bob Seeger album over and above anything else and seem impervious to everything else. For them, the nostalgia—and the ritual—is everything.

Recently I filled my CD changer with a selection of older albums. Jefferson Airplane’s After Bathing At Baxter’s, the first Jefferson Starship album, Carlos Santana and John McLaughlin’s Love Devotion and Surrender, Emerson Lake & Palmer’s first album, and Live Cream Volume II. All these albums I first encountered during that particular phase when I was discovering MUSIC. 

With the exception of one track, nothing on any of them made the Top 40 of the day.

All of them are complex, unpredictable, indeed unusual by the popular standards of the day. The Santana-McLaughlin was one of those records I played over and over again. The intricacies of construction, the use of key changes and tempo modulations, the inherent expectation that the listener was going to do nothing else but listen…

This was the sort of music that set my taste for life. But it was still a starting point. From there I found my way in jazz, into classical, into electronic, into the variations of rock, into some forms that defy categorization. What seemed to me an obvious trajectory was to keep looking for newer works (meaning new to me) that teased those same responses to the tonal pageant on offer. 

Which of course initially meant following those musicians where they led, but along the way trying related artists, then stepping out of that stream altogether into new waters. Admittedly, without ELP and Yes I might not have discovered either Stravinsky or Sibelius. But once discovered, the library doors were opened, and the treasure of centuries lay before me.

But I confess, there is something about those works heard then that hold a deep fascination for me still. Those anchors still hold. It may be bias (and if it is, fine, I welcome it) but when I listen to those albums from back then, parts of my aesthetic are triggered in ways no other music manages. Even those works I no longer listen to very much if at all, when I hear them, a part of my spirit wakes up. I have no doubt this is as much a kind of imprinting as any other emotional attachment may claim. The question I have is, why do so many people remain locked in those periods, and others…don’t?

I suppose one could ask the same question of books and films. I suspect it has to do with the kinds of questions posed by those initial encounters. They leave one attuned to the next thing—or not.

As in other areas, I was always out of step with my peers. I tried to get enthused about the songs they seemed so turned on by, but for the most part the Top 40 model left me unsatisfied. On their part, they lacked the patience for what I preferred. And then there’s the whole cultural mode of music as background, as if its only function was as wallpaper, a room in which to carry on conversations or drink (or smoke), and for too many people the notion that one should shut up and listen was just odd. (You do that with classical stuff, don’t you? Yes, that’s why I don’t listen to it.)

We went to a club once because of the band playing that night, one of our favorites, and it was annoying that here were these superb musicians, doing amazing things, and yet the hubbub of ongoing chatter was constant and dismaying. They were missing something marvelous, and yet it seemed more important to talk about what-all even in the presence of brilliance.

I’ve always wanted to share my enthusiasms. It takes a while to sink in that in some instances, no one cares. Not that way, at least, and by pushing the issue you just seem weird.

But nostalgia, whatever it is, has its place. It is useful and pleasurable and I wanted to talk about it a bit. For me, it’s a special place, but was always just a starting point. All that I have heard since those first few years of being immersed in so much beauty has given me the standards…perhaps that’s too definite a word…the basis, then, to continue to find more beauty. 

Thank you for indulging me. 

An Observation: The Personal and the Proetic

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

Formative influences can be doggedly resistant to reassessment. There’s some accuracy in suggesting that they should be left alone. But once the idea occurs, leaving it alone can become a species of stubbornness rather than any kind of self-nurture. 

Still, care is required, especially in an age in which so much information, much of only marginal relevance to the main subject, is available and forms the basis of a kind of revisionism that too often only serves to widen the gulf between beginnings and the present. Analyzing a body of work in the light of personal revelations is tricky. Certainly there’s a connection, but how and with what effect is a subtler question than the ready dismissals of previously seminal work in the light of a creator’s shortcomings allow. 

On those rare occasions my opinion about this is solicited, I say that “If you find someone whose work you really like, then go read it all, see it all, hear it all before you find out one personal detail about them. What you later learn about the artist may alter everything, but you should give the work a fair encounter.” Obviously there are exceptions, but few I’ve found that cannot be deduced from the work itself. Deciding in advance that X is a bigot of some sort may be accurate and fair, but even a catastrophe of a human being is capable of producing worthwhile art. (Ezra Pound is still regarded as a poetic genius despite the fact that he was an apologist for fascists. I assume the fascism does not manifest in the work in any deleterious way—I wouldn’t know, I’m simply basing this on the reputation, both of the man and the work.)

On the other hand, I always found something off-putting in D.H. Lawrence in his treatment of women. In its day, perhaps, it seemed radical and somewhat enlightened, but despite the beauty of much of his writing, it somehow struck an off note. Later, when I learned about his life, some of this made sense. But had I known about him beforehand, I might never have read the work. Worse, I may have dismissed it as not worthwhile in a more general sense. As it is, my understanding of the work is enriched by the later knowledge in a way that does not bleed the work of its artistic value.

We can go down the list. Great artists with personal characters problematic at best who nonetheless produced amazing work the world would be less for ignoring because…

The quasi-academic practice of reanalyzing such works in light of current standards of behavior only to relegate such artists to a suspect file can do damage in a different way. Among the various problems is the conclusion that an artist cannot be more than his or her personal limitations. That, somehow, a given artist cannot be “trusted” once such personal scandals are revealed.

Trusted how?

This can be particularly difficult in our own personal relation to, say, first influences.

I credit Isaac Asimov with the work that set me on a path to being a writer. Of late, his personal tendencies to be a, hmm, “dirty old man” have cast a pall over his reputation. Fair enough. He wasn’t an exemplary human being. His habit of forcing himself—publicly—on unwilling women with uninvited kisses is cringe-worthy. This is the hallmark of someone who in many ways was still an adolescent, albeit one with a sense of privilege born of reputation.

But what does that have to do with the Foundation Trilogy?

I read Foundation and Empire when I was 13. Because of the nature of where I got my books then (Luekens Drug Store, from a spinner rack just inside the door), I got what was available. I had no idea about ordering or anything, I just perused the rack and bought what looked cool. (This was the same place I got my comics.) So the second book in the series was the first one I saw. It surprises me now that I fell into it so easily, but then when later I learned that these three books are really just compilations of short stories and novelettes, it made sense. I didn’t have to read them in order, though that helped.

There was something vast and impressive on the page, the scope he conveyed in a few paragraphs, and the epic importance of what was happening. This connected with my young imagination in ways that are difficult to convey, other than by pointing out that first encounters that become touchstones seem to carry with them a universal sense of vitality and significance against which everything else is diminished. (I find the same issue when discussing with anyone under, say, 45 the impact that the original Star Trek had on us.) All I remember afterward was how badly I felt the urge to create something that did the same thing. Later I realized that this meant writing.

Soon after, I discovered I, Robot and then the rest of Asimov’s novels and short stories.

His treatment of women was, in retrospect, prepubescent. Virtually blank slates. There were women. Sometimes men married them. (He managed Arkady as well as he did by sticking to her youth sans sexuality. Which made her like Nancy Drew or a Bobsey Twin. Unsatisfying for a more mature reader, but nothing terrible.) The closest he came to maturity in fiction was in The Gods Themselves, but that is a curious case, and nothing much is actually there. It might be argued that his lack of female characters as characters who are women is pathetic, but I see it as someone who knew virtually nothing about women avoiding the topic lest he make a fool of himself. (He did anyway, as in The Stars Like Dust, but this is a matter of complete cluelessness, not a manifestation of hidden perversity.)  Much of science fiction published in the 1940s and 50s is like this. Many factors played a role, not least of which was editorial expectation. The general expectation of women’s “place” was pervasive and retrograde and awaited the social revolutions yet to come before people raised to not notice would become aware. Two magazines were launched partly on the grounds of writers feeling constrained by such innate prudery,  The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Galaxy, but even in these examples of what we might consider responsible views of women and relationships were the exceptions. Mostly, it was a vast unexplored sea that awaited writers with the chops to deal with the subject more fully. And a publishing environment that allowed for it.

My point being, his later personal proclivities, unpleasant as they were, seem to imbue his fiction not at all except by an absence. 

There are many writers (and painters and musicians and actors, etc) who I doubtless would dislike personally and some of whom I would have serious problems with, whose work I nonetheless have enjoyed and value. I do not believe we are reduceable to single traits. When engaged in an act of creation, my past certainly comes into play, but the requirements of the work put me in a mode outside of my daily tactics. I give the work authority over my private foibles. It may not always work, but I hope (and believe) that the result defies analysis by biographical specificity.

In other words, the work is a thing unto itself. It may be flawed, it may fail, and certainly some of those failures may be traceable to personal aspects of the way I see the world, but the work remains its own thing, to be judged by its own content. This is a standard of apprehension that, for me, is only fair, and seeks to avoid a priori condemnation based on similar personal aspects of a given viewer/reader/listener. The work is the work. 

Exposure to honest work done by flawed people is one way to learn to recognize propaganda, which is dishonest work done for flawed reasons. If we do not learn the difference, then art has failed us.

23

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

It’s interesting that one of the axioms of retirement is that once entered one will have time to do all the things the day-job obstructed. Like read as much as you like. And like so many such things, it turns out not to be true. The habits of decades are still in force, and while maybe you get more chores done, you find reordering all those deeply-rutted paths more difficult than you thought.

I’m sure in some ways I am reading more, but not the way I’d hoped. I average around 70 books a year, cover-to-cover, with a great deal of spot reading, fragmentary, excerpts, short pieces, dipping into and out of research or sidetrips. I suppose if I did a page count I might find myself in the 150 plus range (total book equivalent), because this past year I did a lot of that, as I’m back at work on a new historical novel and much of my reading is taken up with research, most of which is not whole books.

But other things have also gotten in the way. Well, that’s an ungenerous way to put it. Since my dad’s death, my time spent on mom has gone up considerably—and quite happily—and of course I’m still trying to settle into a new routine.

That said, I read—cover-to-cover—66 books in 2023.

Setting aside the research material, some of which I do include in this tally, quite a lot of it was spent on old novels either read back in my adolescence or for various reasons never read at the time. Catching up, so to speak, on the work that was part of my youthful encounter with, especially, science fiction.

There were a few writers I remember bouncing off of back then. I never quite connected with, for instance, Avram Davidson. I read Rork!, which is a colonial adventure with some curiously subversive takes on the whole idea of imperial encounters; The Island Under The Earth, which I’m still not sure I quite understood, but a sort of mythologically-oriented fantasy; The Phoenix and the Mirror, the first in his loose series about Vergil, again a fantasy (of sorts) and truly magnificently done, a pleasure to read; and A Clash of Star Kings, which could have stood a little more fleshing out, but given the publishing requirements of the time, he delivered a rather fascinating take on the idea that the ancient MesoAmerican “gods” were warring aliens. The pleasant surprise, even with the material I did not quite get, was the beauty of the prose.

I also reread a couple of D.G. Compton novels. Compton died recently, one of those artists one loses touch with and assumes has long since passed away. He published four novels via Terry Carr’s old Ace Special series, the most, I believe, by any single writer, and I know I read them back then (as I read all the Specials because, after all, they were special) but I barely remembered them. They were perhaps too sophisticated for me at the time. But I read Synthajoy and The Silent Multitudes and found both remarkably made narratives about the disjunction between expectation and new technologies or events. His handling of character was quite uncharacteristic of the majority of science fiction of that time (the Sixties) and psychologically fascinating. I will be reading another one for the reading group I host.

Other older titles I read included the complete Cities In Flight by James Blish, which in the end left me a bit disappointed. I thought it began very strongly with the mines of Saturn and the advent of longevity in They Shall Have Stars, but by the last book (chronologically), Triumph of Time, I thought it strained against the limitations of form available at the time. The characters and social milieu did not, in my opinion, match the more cosmological aspects Blish was attempting, but he was never an epic writer in the sense we think of it today. Somewhat more successful was his quasi-fantasy set Black Easter and The Day After Judgment, which dealt with an actual apocalypse and its aftermath. Thematically related to his classic A Case Of Conscience, Blish seemed to have been in his element dealing with the collisions of theology and materialism.

A writer who worked with such themes in quite different ways was Michael Bishop, who also passed away recently. Bishop should, in my opinion, enjoy a much larger and wider reputation than he seems to. At his best, he was compelling and richly engaging. I decided to read those of his early titles I never got around to and with that in mind I read A Little Knowledge and Under Heaven’s Bridge, which he cowrote with Ian Watson. Both examine the impact of aliens on human philosophical concerns, both in different ways. Neither was a great work, but you can see the greatness to come. I also reread his excellent novella Apartheid, Superstrings, and Mordecai Thubana which, among other things, took a hard look at South African apartheid. Published before the collapse of that system, it is an uncomfortable read that deals with police-state mentality and brutality and tragedy of enlightenment within a system designed to snuff it out. It carried unfortunate resonances into today in unexpected ways, which the best fiction will always do.

We read Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca aloud. The elegance of her prose allows entree into a psychologically engaging family drama that involves murder and shattered illusions and the demands of expectations based on half-truths and lies. What begins as a rather pedestrian romance becomes inexorably a portrait of dysfunction and questions the sacrifices we make in order to find a place in the world with people we wish to love.

Another read-aloud we did was the superb satire The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. Russian to its core, it was Bulgakov’s last novel, unpublished during his lifetime, and it is a romp. The devil arrives in Moscow, takes over a theater, begins granting wishes, and thoroughly upends daily life for certain people and leaves the state with a puzzle it is incapable of solving. Delightful.

We also read a couple of Willa Cather novels, O, Pioneers! and My Antonia. Cather is among those authors I’d always intended to read but for one reason or another never got to. But I confess, when I was tearing through the so-called “classics” in high school, neither of these would have stayed in my memory very clearly. I’ve had to grow into a state of mind to appreciate them, so it’s just as well I waited. These are the kind of novels kids like me dismissed because “nothing happens.” Which is to say, the careful setting of character in landscape and examining the evolution of them in concert requires a certain interest. Not that I didn’t encounter such work back then and enjoy it, but it would have been the exception. I’ve now reached the point where I look at some of the works I praised as terrific then and have to admit that, really, nothing happens in them, other than a lot of frenetic running around.

However, I also finally opened up a novel whose virtues are so widely extolled that one feels like a literary troglodyte when its charms fail to excite. One Hundred Years Of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez. A few years ago I read Love In The Time Of Cholera and quite liked it. This, unfortunately, left me a bit perplexed. It’s not so much that nothing happens, but rather for all that does happen fails to change anything. Except, perhaps, the women. They change. They alone in this vast epic exhibit a capacity for change, for growth, for evolution, but then all of it is constrained to the task of adapting to men, who do not change and whose inability to do so distorts the lives of these women whose marvels and talents we will never see because they are in bondage to a stagnant domesticity. If this were written to suggest a criticism of such male intractability, then it might be something, but I found the narrative guileless in its acceptance that this is how the world is and one cannot alter it.

The older I get, the more I find my sentiments engaged by the women—writers and characters—who struggle to be themselves and stop conforming to long-desiccated expectations. Which is why I look forward these days to the next novel by Becky Chambers (whose The Galaxy and the Ground Within I read this year and found amazing) or Ann Leckie (Translation State, marvelous), or Malka Older (The Mimicking of Known Successes, a novella of remarkable invention)or S.B Divya (Machinehood).

One of the most remarkable novels I have read in a long time was Ray Nayler’s The Mountain In The Sea. Extraordinary visualizations, great characters, and a rich intellectual conceit. I reviewed it here not long ago.

Once again playing catch-up, I read Greg Bear’s last trilogy, War Dogs, killing Titan, and Take Back The Sky. On the surface, military SF, but that’s just the veneer. Beneath is a twisty interstellar puzzle, a clash of civilizations, and questions around the nature of knowledge and how to discern truth is an ever-changing environment. Bear died last year. I have only a handful of his yet to read. However one might have thought of his perspective, he was a boundary-pusher.

Of the nonfiction I read this year, the stand-outs are A Spectre Haunting by China Mieville, a well-considered reassessment of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto. While Mieville is sympathetic, he is no sycophant, and this book would be a good bridge into a reasoned examination of Marx and socialism itself. The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs by Steve Brusatte, a very good narrative examination of the history of those long ago creatures who somehow have never let go our popular imagination. Empire of Liberty by Gordon S. Wood, a long history of the early republic, one of the Oxford History of the United States entries.

But perhaps the best history read this year was Blood and Ruins by Richard Overy, a history of World War II. Overy casts a wide net, spanning the period between 1931, when he claims the events we now call WWII began, and 1945. He examines the military history, of course, but then he gets into the backgrounds, deeply, and the economics, and then the law, the underpinnings of all the tensions and terrors. He goes well beyond the actual fighting to look at the state of humanity at each stage and provides that ever-so-rare thing, context. It is a brutal read, and very long (I’m guessing a good 300K words) and in the end the book I would presently recommend to anyone who wants one book on the war. He has done an admirable job of maintaining objectivity. Whether he succeeded at that is debatable, but he is not partisan.

The research I’ve been doing has mainly to do with the colonial period of the St. Louis region. Kaskaskia, Cahokia, the Osage. I’m spending a lot of time on minutiae in the constructions of the next Ulysses Granger novel, which I am halfway through a first draft. Some of the books I did not cover here, I have done reviews already on the Proximal Eye.

The pile awaiting my attention is as usual stacked too high, and once in a while I find myself wishing I could recover some of my speed-reading skills from 50 years ago. But I enjoy what I read now and back when I was breezing through texts at 2500 words a minute, I did not. Nor did I retain as much as I’d like. So this suits me. I’m enjoying the meals now.

Have a great 2024, filled with wonderful books. I wish you all good 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.

Intrusions

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

The latest eruption of reaction from certain viewers of the new Sandman series on Netflix is another example of a phenomenon that I, in my 20s, would never have thought to indulge: the intrusion of the audience directly into the aesthetic choices of an author. I grew up in a time in which you either liked or did not like something, and if you did not like it you would then go off to find something you did like. What you did not do was presume to publicly dictate to the creators what was wrong with the work as if you had any place in that process.

Professional (and amateur) critics would analyze and examine and write pieces about a given work to explain what does and does not work, but rarely, if ever, would you find a demand that a work be different. Certainly lively discussions among those interested over a given work were common and healthy, but that work would be accepted as presented, to be dissected and studied, liked or disliked, as it stood.

Today it would seem the audiences harbor elements that take it as given that there is a right to tell the creator to rewrite, reconstruct, or otherwise revise a given work, based on the apprehension that said work is “wrong” and should be fixed. Among this group there seems little interest in examining those objectionable aspect to discern the whys of the creator’s choices—and thereby maybe learn something from them—or even the consideration to simply say “this is not for me” and go find something else. This intrusion of a self-assumed participation (which becomes strident, because obviously it ought not and seldom does have any result on the work in question) has become a fixture of the current literary and media zeitgeist.

We see this presently in the splenetic condemnation of so-called Woke aspects in something and an implied—or explicit—demand that they be gotten rid of. It seems not to occur to such tyros that maybe an examination—of self as well as the work (which, in the best of worlds, become one in the same, because that is what the best work does for us)—would be edifying and perhaps personal growth might result. It seems not to occur to them (and others not so vocal about their personal discontents) that the whole purpose of engaging with a work that may challenge preconceptions is to force a bit of self-analysis.

Given that the United States now ranks far down the ratings of literacy in the world today, it would seem that we have a massive group of people who have decided that the literary world, be it in print or film, must conform to their definition of acceptable and allow them the comfort of never getting out of their heads.

This is a level of intrusion I find toxic. Even though it may well be a minority, these days numbers seem not to matter in relation to degree of attention. For the purposes of this essay, let me just speak to the lone individual who, disgusted by Dr Who being a woman or the aspect of two boys or two girls kissing, or the appearance of any minority in a role long-assumed to be the province of white people, reacts with a public display of condemnation and a demand that this not be allowed.

You are to be pitied. You have locked your soul into a box so that it is never touched by anything other than the presumptions chasing each other inside your skull. You do not know how to read (and by that I mean the vicarious immersion through connection with a character and a text that offers something New for consideration; indeed, consideration itself would seem a foreign and hateful thing to you) and you no doubt have caged your empathy in such a way that you flinch at any suggestion that the world is not what you wish it to be. You see something like this (Sandman) and you look forward to being dazzled by the special effects and the novelty of magic and other worldly mysteries, yet any hint of the personal that might challenge your prejudices is unwelcome because what you want is to be wowed, not enlarged. Literature is, at its best, a gateway to parts and places in the world you have not had and might never have direct access to—that is the point.

You do not have the right—nor fortunately, as yet, the authority—to tell a writer he or she should take something out because it disturbs you. Go read/view something else and leave this to those who do appreciate it.

It’s this attitude, this sense of privilege that suggest because you are a fan you own the property and can dictate the landscape, that troubles me. It’s ugly. It’s selfish and small and poisonous. And, as I said, pitiable.

And just an observation…if something bothers you that much, odds are it’s not irrelevant at all. Rather it may be the most relevant thing about it and it would be a good idea to maybe look into that a bit deeper. If it was genuinely gratuitous, it likely would not cause even a minor stir in your psyche.

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.

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.

The Color of Sound

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

Ages ago, it seems, I stumbled onto a band that opened up for me the possibilities of what music could be.

Band. That word connotes things which seem oddly inadequate for this.

Back in 1973 I bought two records from a local store I favored (Play It Again Records, now long gone). I may have been advised to get them or it may simply have been the covers and the length of the tracks. I used a number of questionable metrics back then to find music, because not all of it was being played on the radio, and frankly almost none of my peers were into some of things I was into.

What I was into  I later learned was called Progressive Rock. In 1973, my favorite bands were, in no particular order, Yes, Emerson Lake & Palmer, Jethro Tull, Santana, and Chicago.  But I also owned Switched-On Bach and someone had told me about Beaver & Krause.  As my record collection expanded, odd records started showing up.

One of the things about most of these bands that appealed to me (not Santana or Chicago, no) was the use of synthesizers.  I played keyboard then, and bands that featured prominent keyboards caught my attention.  As time passed,  the aural landscapes created by synthesizers became more and more central to my musical æsthetic.  Curiously, much of this led me back into classical music (even as the better keyboard players reintroduced me to jazz, which it turned out I liked from a period before my adolescent record-collecting phase).

I loved synthesizer music.

Those two records I bought that day were by Tangerine Dream—Phaedra and Rubycon.

I was drawn into them completely.  There was structure, certainly, but little traditional formatting. Soundscapes. When I think of the term “tone poem” this is what comes to mind. Waves and currents of sound, overlapping, blending. I listened to those two albums constantly. This, to my ear, was Pure Music.  It was a separate reality.  I could drop the needle, lay in bed, and experience…

I have never done drugs. (Yes, this comes as a bit of a shock to people; even my father didn’t believe this.)  Chemical escape never appealed to me.  But this, I imagined, was pretty close to an hallucinogenic experience. Immersive, escapist, expansive.

Over the next few years I acquired a few more Tangerine Dream albums, but none of them captured me quite the way those two did.

Tangerine Dream became a band I would check up on from time to time. They went through periods of radical transformations, even as they remained true to their basic mode. Synthesizers were always primary, but eventually they began to sound more like a “band”—drums, guitar, the occasional saxophone, and compositionally shorter pieces that mimicked “songs.”  While I liked much of it, there were only echoes of what they had accomplished on those first two albums I’d bought.

Once the internet opened up and such things were searchable, I looked for what else they had done, and discovered a long history.  And, yes, distinct periods, often the result of changes in personnel.

Tangerine Dream alumni have gone on to do other things (Christopher Franke notably did the soundtrack for Babylon 5) but the single constant had been Edgar Froese.

Froese died in 2015. He, with the then current line-up, had been working on a new album.

When work had begun on this album in 2014, Tangerine Dream was a four-piece—Froese, Thorsten Quaeschning, Hoshiko Yamane, and Ulrich Schnauss.  Another new period, another re-imagining.

The longest surviving bands, unless they adopt a condition of perpetual stasis as a review act, constantly re-presenting their heyday, undergo continual change, both in personnel and in approach. Sometimes this just happens, an emergent property of natural evolution. Sometimes it is intentional.

Froese died before the project this new Tangerine Dream was completed. His wife, also Tangerine Dream’s manager, saw it through.

So here I have been listening to the result—Quantum Gate.  I’ve been playing it a lot.

It is possibly the most successful mix of what I found in those two albums from long ago and the various changes they embraced over more than 50 years. I hear the lushness, the abandon to “pure” music, but packaged in structures that allow the tracks to be heard as coherent pieces—not quite songs, as such, but perhaps sonatas.

The quality of the compositions and their execution are perfectly matched.  The range of sounds does not overwhelm.  Nor is this wallpaper, bland ‘scapes designed to be heard but not listened to. Close attention is rewarded, and surrender to the directions offered accomplishes the immersion that makes this kind of music so satisfying. The brain is massaged.  Coming out the other end…

I haven’t found a recording I’ve enjoyed on constant replay as much in years.

Tangerine Dream is a fascinating workshop, a pocket of unique music that fits no preconceived niche, not easily. There have been imitators, certainly, but few as successful or as continually interesting.