Deep and lovely. A little “Coming of Age in [insert exotic space the author will be our POV character to] but it’s done with such love, delight, and gDeep and lovely. A little “Coming of Age in [insert exotic space the author will be our POV character to] but it’s done with such love, delight, and grief it didn’t bug me. Octopuses are almost certainly sentient. Wow. ...more
Utopian, dystopian, hopeful, grim, elegiac, overwhelming, unsettling, full of grief, full of joy. I suspect this book will haunt me the way Aurora hauUtopian, dystopian, hopeful, grim, elegiac, overwhelming, unsettling, full of grief, full of joy. I suspect this book will haunt me the way Aurora haunts me.
One day in the near future, a heat wave hits India and twenty million people die. In one village, only one man survives, Frank, an aid worker who had a few more resources and a bit more luck. He survives deeply burned and deeply scared. After years of therapy, he tries to join an Indian ecoterrorism group, The Children of Kali. They will not have him. But they encourage him to freelance.
Meanwhile, the Ministry for the Future is the United Nations agency tasked with speaking for the future as the climate and economic crises accelerate. Through most of this book, it is run by an Irish bureaucrat, Mary, who had been a political leader once upon a time. Mary is doing her best with her tiny team. One night, Frank kidnaps her and howls in anguish that she is not doing enough. She retorts she's doing all she can. But 20 million dead. Extinction accelerating and oceans rising. When her Switzers come, he escapes into the night. But his words echo.
Mary asks her chief of staff if they should have a black-ops wing. Turns out they might already. She maintains -- mostly -- plausible deniability. As she lobbies bankers to establish new currencies back by carbon sequestration and somebody knocks planes out of the sky and coal fired power plants out of commission. At some point, her chief of staff might himself claim to be Kali and ask the children to stand down. (391). Chiefs of staff are freaking terrifying.
It's a strange book. Heroic scientists and engineers stop the glaciers from sliding into the ocean - some dying in the process -- and heroic kayakers we meet for an instant pluck strangers and neighbors from the flooded streets and save them from the flood, never to be seen again. Through efforts big and small, good and bloody, CO2 levels drop and the seas recede.
There's a lot of death. And also habitat corridors and a general repudiation of extractive capitalism. Some of our survivors watch a family of wolverines eat a dead deer. It's affirming and terrible.
Among the bits I particularly liked:
Remember what Margaret Thatcher said? There is no such thing as society! We laughed out loud. For a while we couldn't stop laughing. Fuck Margaret Thatcher, I said when I could catch my breath. And I say it again now: fuck Margaret Thatcher, and fuck every idiot who thinks that way. I can take them all to a place where they will eat those words or die of thirst. Because when the taps run dry, society becomes very real. A smelly mass of unwashed anxious citizens, no doubt about it. But a society for sure. It's a life or death thing, society, and I think people mainly do recognize that, and the people who deny it are stupid fuckers. The kid of stupidity that should be put in jail." (169)
Yes. You can short civilization if you want. Not a bad bet really. But no one to pay if you win. Whereas if you go long on civilization, and civilization (therefore) survives, you win big. So the smart move is to go long. (240)
Everyone know me but no one can tell me. No one knows me even though everyone has heard my name. Everyone talking together makes something that seems like me but is not me. Everyone doing things in the world makes me. I am blood in the streets, the catastrophe you can never forget. I am the tide running under the world that no one sees or feels. I happen in the present but am told only in the future, and then the think they think they speak of the past, but really they are always speaking about the present. I do not exist and yet I am everything.
You know what I am. I am History. Now make me good. (385)
The story jumps from hand to hand. From Frank to Mary. From a slave in a mine to a privileged asshole at Davos. From a photon to history ("Now make me good."). From blockchain to taxes. From a refugee to a kayaker plucking people from a flood. From debt strikers to a scientist on a glacier. Saving the world will take all of us.
I hear a rumor this is the last Kim Stanley Robinson novel. If so, it is a worthy capstone....more
Interesting historical artifact. Pryor is a “behavioral biologist� who worked with B. F. Skinner in Hawaii’s Sea Life Park. She’s used operant conditiInteresting historical artifact. Pryor is a “behavioral biologist� who worked with B. F. Skinner in Hawaii’s Sea Life Park. She’s used operant conditioning to train everything from fish to orcas, cats to elephants, children to co-workers. She was one of the early proponents of clicker training. An accessible review on dog training with some interesting suggestions for adapting it to in-law management and tennis practice.
I can’t say that I loved the book. It was more than usually self-aggrandizing, which would have been easier to accept if she hadn’t had a cat put to sleep because she couldn’t figure out how to train it out of an unpleasant behavior (peeing on the burners). I don’t know why she included that particular story, other than perhaps show she’s not a woo-woo sentimentalist. Also I don’t care about tennis. But it gave me some new ideas for trying to teach my young lab not to bark at the neighbors quite as much. ...more
Charming, in that way a book about a young boy who goes to the city and decides to create a poo museum can be charming. A book meant to be read aloud Charming, in that way a book about a young boy who goes to the city and decides to create a poo museum can be charming. A book meant to be read aloud to sensitive children, I suspect. Warning: contains wyvern poo. ...more
Tells the story of an unnamed colony expedition to Tau Ceti to settle a new world, Aurora. The narrative hands off mostly between Freya, the daughter Tells the story of an unnamed colony expedition to Tau Ceti to settle a new world, Aurora. The narrative hands off mostly between Freya, the daughter of the chief engineer, Devi (who dies before she reaches the promised new land) and an unnamed computer, who runs the ship and debates with herself whether she has gained sentience. Devi told the computer to tell the story of the colony expedition, and she does, while wresting with the halting problem, her own emerging sapience, and the possible extinction of the colony she harbors.
This book may be a rejoinder to the old libertarian sci fi classic, The Cold Equation. The story justifies murder as a moral response to artificial scarcity. See . Yeah, sometimes, the lifeboat is not big enough for all of us, but I want my scifi to explore who the hell inadequately equipped the ship with the lifeboats. There are scarcities on board, but they never intentionally throw anyone overboard because of it.
On the way (view spoiler)[ and back again (hide spoiler)] it touches on the problem of what do after some in your community are used as a means to someone else’s means. (Nuremberg or Truth and Reconciliation Commissions? The children of the triangle trade? How do we live with those who remind us that we have created a world where the happiness of some depends on the misery of others?) But the text does not dive deep into those questions. For the most part, the characters just muddle on. (for what is done and not done/may the judgment not be too heavy upon us).
The computer spends a lot of time thinking about the halting problem. Can we ever rest?
Much less optimistic than 2312 or his Mars book. There is much failure here. And some deaths that hurt.
It begins and ends in the water, as characters learn to sail new (to them) seas. Might be a rejoinder to On The Beach too.
Suspect I’ll be wrestling with this one for a long while....more
I read this book because of the absolutely marvelous New York Times article, Zoo Animals and their Discontents, I read this book because of the absolutely marvelous New York Times article, Zoo Animals and their Discontents, .* I’ve come to love the zoo down the street as an adult and remain mortified by the zoos of my youth; concrete boxes with unhappy animals. Dr. Virga seems to be part of why zoos today now are so much better. He and those like him brought in positive (rather than negative) feedback and the idea that animals, too, grieve and get anxious and bored.
There are pieces of a very good book here. When he was a vet student, students still did operations on living, healthy dogs slated for euthanasia because no human wanted them. His description of spending some time with the dog he would later kill made me cry. It’s making me cry right now as a write this. It’s good prose:
At lunchtime while most of our classmates were eating and reviewing their surgery notes one last time, a few of us quietly slipped away to the kennel where the dogs stayed until lab began. Without many words but a look in our eyes that clearly expressed why we each were there, we opened the door and walked into the kennel to meet the dogs we would be working with soon � to take them for a walk; play with them on the lawn; let them sniff at a lamppost, the bushes, the trees; sit with them on the grass and do nothing together; pet them and hug them; let them know we cared. At times in that hour, we’d catch a glimpse of each other and I saw in their faces what I’m sure was in mine: a respect for the lives of the dogs we were with.
. . .
I still think of those dogs, though, all these years later � the joy in their faces as we walked into the kennel; the simple abandon in our hour together; that soft, grateful look when their eyes would meet mine. And given what was required of us in that era of training, I could not help but choose to spend that hour with them. (88-89).
What a compassionate, clear-eyed, courageous thing to do. I hope, though I am not confident, that I would have the strength and love to do that too. I’m not sure I would. The day we adopted Aleister (black lab, sitting beside me) there was a chocolate lab at the vet whose heartrending attempt to get my attention still gnaws at me. Well done, doctor.
While there are pieces of a good book, it got a little too woo-woo for me at times. It needed another editing pass; there were some actual typos. The parables largely missed me, though I don’t doubt there is wisdom in them, encountered at the right time. The subtitle (“What Animals Can Teach Us About Being Human) seemed forced. But I really enjoyed his own stories of successes and appreciated his stories of losses; animals helped and animals lost and the world made better by his work.
*Having read Civilization and Its Discontents several times, that’s a hell of a title. Kudos, headline writer. Kudos. ...more
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