A hybrid speculative-theoretical text wherein 23rd century artificial intelligences convene to reflect upon the technological missteps of the 21st: prA hybrid speculative-theoretical text wherein 23rd century artificial intelligences convene to reflect upon the technological missteps of the 21st: predictive policing, surveillance capitalism, and inequity self-perpetuating through "neutral" data sets. Incisive criticism for the present moment (2022 but of lasting relevance even as reality catches up to its concerns). Maybe not the most groundbreaking if you're already following the conversation, but artists recontextualizing the discourse with an eye towards better future imaginaries are always essential....more
I'm reading these out of order when they appear at the library, which does not make them more coherent, but that's somewhat besides the point. I'm notI'm reading these out of order when they appear at the library, which does not make them more coherent, but that's somewhat besides the point. I'm not even sure all will be revealed at the end. No. 5 is Matsumoto's Heavy Metal-inspired psychedelic western about a rogue member of a future peacekeeping organization, motives yet undisclosed. This is much more action oriented than something like Sunny or Go Go Monster, but even at most visceral it has a tendency to spin off into abstraction, towards landscapes and animal life, actual or those of the mind's eye or generated by psychic force of elderly children. Just go with it....more
Sometimes you keep coming back to an author because even when their works don't quite click, you can sense the potential, that their ideal work is yetSometimes you keep coming back to an author because even when their works don't quite click, you can sense the potential, that their ideal work is yet out there somewhere. Perhaps, to me, from Volodine, this oneiric post-apocalyptic noir is mine. As usual for the pseudonymous Volodine, this exists in the hinterlands of his invented "post-exotic" literature, a book perhaps written by a character from within its landscapes of collapse, possibly fictionalizing or embellishing or conjecturing events the underlying reality of which we can't quite access. Even so, its story -- of a jaded investigator chasing a doppelganger and possibly undermining the political organs he ostensibly serves -- has plenty of narrative pull of its own, moreso due to the overwhelming sense of loss, personal and global and narrative, suffusing it. Like this more recent, prize-winning Radiant Terminus, this is a literature of futility and exhaustion (of possibilities, personal and global and narrative) but carries more emotional weight to bind it together, and, antithetically, a sense of enduring tenacity in the face of devastation. The conflicting layers of story through which it unfolds adds to the effect rather than becoming the medium into which all meaning dissolves (ultimately, in recollection, my complaint with Terminus, which I liked but wanted to like so much more). If this is any indication of older Volodine I hope more gets translated, more pseudonyms, more stories, more pieces of the strange post-modern mosaic literature he's been constructing alone for decades now. Perhaps as more pieces emerge, the whole body of work will take on more depth and nuance, beyond my piecemeal explorations thus far....more
Hyperkinetically bonkers. Time paradoxes, ancient Egyptian sorcery, a plot to own the world, cavorting sentient flames, rampant hair growth, period muHyperkinetically bonkers. Time paradoxes, ancient Egyptian sorcery, a plot to own the world, cavorting sentient flames, rampant hair growth, period murderers, London underbellies, migrating souls, double-identities, doppelgangers, surgical excesses, and ... laudanum-soaked 19th-century romantic poetry. Yes, this is a book about literature and don't you forget it. Even if the breathless chase sequences and non-stop action might make it easy to. Perhaps the rollercoaster plotting, the endless implausible chance configurations this necessitates, the sheer scope of story crammed in, the inevitable plot holes, perhaps it's all just much too much. But then it'll pause on a dime to be sidetracked by some historical note on Coleridge or Byron and there's an odd charm to it nonetheless. And for all the it's never long before the gears of plot churn up a set piece so rivetingly odd and original that I can't help but be impressed.
And where's this particular understanding of magic and its elemental and lunar idiosyncrasies coming from? It's not one I've run into before, but then I'm not much of a fantasy reader. Great heroine, too, despite the period trappings; I wish she got more page time. What a marvelously ridiculous ride. Many thanks to someone so erudite as Mark Fisher for giving this a section in The Weird and the Eerie, which I read meer days before spotting this in an overstocked book barn in my old home town while on holiday....more
For what seemed like it was going to be typical space adventure stuff about treasure hunters firing off to hazardous ends of the universe in discovereFor what seemed like it was going to be typical space adventure stuff about treasure hunters firing off to hazardous ends of the universe in discovered craft from a vanished civilization, this goes deep into the deathly alienness of space (minor Roadside Picnic shadings), notably rampant dystopian hypercapitalism, supporting collage-narrative though ephemera, and one of those terrible relationships that somehow managed to make me care and feel for the characters against all odds. The space adventure bits are actually more framing to the psychoanalytics of guilt, remorse, and denial, and even if those weren't handled all that gracefully AND they're all mediated by an obvious asshole, I still was weirdly caught up and wanted things to turn out much better for at least one of them....more
Don't be fooled by the tendency of Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ to jam everything into series strict chronologies, this was actually Octavia Butler's first novel set in Don't be fooled by the tendency of Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ to jam everything into series strict chronologies, this was actually Octavia Butler's first novel set in this distant-future Earth, and actually her first published novel of any kind. As such, it's very much a sci-fi adventure, dealing with telepaths warring for power in a feudal, post-collapse society. Where she distinguishes herself is in the strength of the characters, particularly fiercely independent healer Amber. And in the world-shading that reveal underlying concerns not fully addressed here. Remaining independent is a challenge in a society structured around a telepathic gentry who own their non-telepathic ("mute") servants and peasants, and much of the novel is concerned with the abuses of power that come with the mindset of such a tiered cast system. Her very next novel, Kindred, would take this on much more directly by looking not at our future, but at America's recent past. Here though, these are more world details than overt subject, leading to an especial dissonance when we realize that the mutated "clayarks" which attack anyone not under some lord's protection, are not monsters, but also people, just people viewed as completely sub-human and expendable by everyone else in the novel, hero or villain alike, the clear danger of living in a society where moral questions seem to have been swept aside by the exigencies of power and survival....more
I did not expect, in this first wild pulp novel twenty years back, to find already the themes and images that haunt all Vandermeer¡¯s recent work. HereI did not expect, in this first wild pulp novel twenty years back, to find already the themes and images that haunt all Vandermeer¡¯s recent work. Here are Borne¡¯s holding ponds, Hummingbird Salamander¡¯s charnel house, the fox¡¯s diatribe from Dead Astronauts. And as with those this is a novel of the late Anthropocene and its end, human structures falling apart and giving way to something else born partly from our own aspirations and errors, partly beyond us. That it¡¯s formed even more completely in the pre-literary vats of genre ¡ª though the chimeric genre of the new weird ¡ª in some ways removes the dissonance that comes when, say, the clearer sci-fi and horror tropes breach the more ambiguous nightmare landscape of the Southern Reach novels. I love hybrids and muddled genres, to be sure, but there's something to how this more completely settled into its fantastical world, without, presumably, seeking the wider readership later work would manage to reach. Though still chimeric: a transgenic cyberpunk Orpheus plumbing Bosch¡¯s inferno, with the compressed action of a fairy tale. And still unsettlingly relevant to our present path, twenty years on.
This is a well-deserved new edition, with excellent new cover art and a selection of related stories, including one of my favorites of his "Three Days in a Border Town." In The Third Bear, without knowing that it was a Veniss story, it was a strange and alluring mystery; here, in context, it resonates differently but is no less memorable....more
Recent panels and critical discourse has framed Vandermeer as an environmental writer, as part of an emergent "cli-fi", finding in Area X an eerie conRecent panels and critical discourse has framed Vandermeer as an environmental writer, as part of an emergent "cli-fi", finding in Area X an eerie contemplation of the anthropocene, the forces that we set in motion, the forces that must escape all our attempts at control. These resonances are elaborated in the compromised, mutated post-human landscapes of Borne and Dead Astronauts, but in these, Vandermeer's most feverishly weird visions, his images are unstable, irresolvable, powerful.
With Hummingbird Salamander, he's accepted this mantle and attempts to address these themes more transparently and unambiguously in the extremely near future: climate collapse, resource exploitation, ecoterrorism. The bones of the novel are a kind of noir puzzle intended to draw the protagonist (and reader along with her) further into an eye-opening shock of where we are and were we're going, but the intrigues feel a little contrived (if this is the real world, the protagonist's willingness to lapse out of her entire life on a wild goose chase at the drop of a hat feels mechanistically strained) and the conclusions feel all-too-obvious. There's nothing here, really, that wasn't conveyed with dazzlingly intensity by the fox's monologue in Dead Astronauts. And somehow in that bizarre and experimental work, it felt all the realer. There are some perfectly nightmarish images here nonetheless, and a plot that, for all its initial strain, does deliver a series of striking convergences (counterbalanced by jumps in time and continuity-of-action. How many times can we be told "that was the last time I ever saw him/her" before the plot tension unspools entirely?) An oddly lonely book for that, though perhaps the sensation that all our bonds and structures will dissolve and fail us is part of the point....more
Raphael Aloysius Lafferty is, naturally, a classicist, so here's his very own Odyssey. Diverging from the rough contours of the original at every turnRaphael Aloysius Lafferty is, naturally, a classicist, so here's his very own Odyssey. Diverging from the rough contours of the original at every turn, this is a romp through various colliding and reimagined mythologies, mostly just concerned with the act of storytelling, the mystifications of the legendary, and the ways in which events become rarefied into story, even at the expensive of narrative consistency. Breezily funny (bordering silliness, mercifully shy of zany) via various jabs at genre forms, wordplay, and clever sentence constructions, and completely unconcerned with fleshing character beyond archetype or the meandering path it takes, to the extent it eschews momentum or climax for another beginning. But it was always about the journey, wasn't it?
Bonus points for letting the sole recurring woman character start a feminist revolt among a race of giants, minus points for making her essentially fickle and self-serving (ambiguously recouping a few for suggesting that she was just written as a cat anyway (and at a point when all the men are also reduced to the simplest of animal archetypes, cats actually have the most nuance...so, I dunno, mostly glad she's there)).
(I'm marking this edition as the more widely indexed, but I actually have the Ace Double edition completely with Vaughn Bode cover and chapter illustrations.) [image]...more
Takes a much more direct course to adventure tropes than something like Stalker, but at best, it puts archetypes of barbaric history to use (as in DelTakes a much more direct course to adventure tropes than something like Stalker, but at best, it puts archetypes of barbaric history to use (as in Delany's fantasies) in exploring how civilization forms, and through irregular leaps and collapses in the maelstrom of history, perhaps even progresses towards something better. Plus more contemporary notes on the purges and the rise of fascism slipped in for good measure....more
A bit psychedelic, rather absurd, with a batty plotline advancing by whips and snaps in time so that every chapter starts in the middle of an often-inA bit psychedelic, rather absurd, with a batty plotline advancing by whips and snaps in time so that every chapter starts in the middle of an often-incomprehensible action, against all the invention over-reliant on some tossed off crime caper plotting to generate comprehensible momentum when purer weirdness might have been just fine, snappily characterized, bordering upon shaggy dog joke, a total mess of coincidence and surprise encounter in the fine details of plotting but too quickly-moving to care, with passages of deftly turned phrases, as omnivorously studied as its thirteen-years-in-undergrad protagonist. First Zelazny (probably cause he seems mostly known for one of those endless fantasy series I have such an impossible time scraping together interest in, despite that one PKD collab) and it was an unmistakably fun time, with off-handed cleverness enough to gloss its inattentions and weaknesses, reading a bit like a sharper, smarter Silverberg. I'll be back for more at some point....more
A few weeks ago, back at an earlier phase of work, I wasn't totally sure how well taking an actual book out and reading it on the job would be receiveA few weeks ago, back at an earlier phase of work, I wasn't totally sure how well taking an actual book out and reading it on the job would be received. But everyone was on their phones during downtime anyway, so I started doing my last class readings of the semester that way. Once class wrapped, I realized that I had at least one full book in my email, this one, sent my way by the author years ago, maybe 2016ish. I never actually read it because I hadn't at that time given in to reading on a screen, but two semesters of digital course packs got me over that I guess and I somehow dredged up memory of the title. My version is probably different from the one that eventually got published, so take anything I say with that bit of salt.
This is follows several characters, most of which will never meet on these pages, instead connecting only by vague thematic resonances, I suspect mostly conceived of as separate strands before they were incorporated. Robertstein drifts through life, golfing on borrowed clubs and somehow hitting it off with whoever he meets. Travis is on a train through Siberia, on his way to a fateful encounter. Cameron is working long hours at a convention center in Las Vegas, around which most of these events unfold. Oddly apart, an efficient professional(?) killer mulls over Nietzschean philosophies of morality. It's the future, but you wouldn't actually know it. There's a gritty void space surrounding all of this, in which undirection becomes possibility, until it starts to feel like aimlessness. But the sense of possibility carries this for a while. A long digression in the middle calls up classic lost media narratives, but instead of a mysterious video or manuscript, here its the discography of a really good high school band. It's a little tough to grasp what exactly made them so good, or how they fit into the rest of this, but there is a fleeting fascination conjured nonetheless. Adrift, inconclusive, and somehow still in my email after all these years, thus an odd surprise pleasure to pick up out of nowhere and fall into. I wonder how much shifted before this hit print? I may never find out. But thanks, Cymru....more
Here's an excellent book to read in a day while staving off covidpocalypse at a vaccination center. It's reassuring that 2020, in all its magisterial Here's an excellent book to read in a day while staving off covidpocalypse at a vaccination center. It's reassuring that 2020, in all its magisterial crisis, never even approached the economic-environmental collapse Butler envisions here. No, that's still to come, even if she spotted it back in the early 90s. Gripping throughout, though taken at all at once, it's the microcosm of society attempting to hold itself together against all evidence in the first half that holds the much greater philosophic weight than the kind of Prepper Fever Dream that takes over in the second half, which probably plays rather less well in 2020/1. Still, I devoured this like a slice of acorn bread.
Also, these Hachette covers for Butler's Earthseed books are completely awful. I guess they were trying to get away from the sci-fi pulp look (which Butler never really gets to have anyway) but surely this solution appeals to absolutely no one. This deserves better!
I tried reading some more of Alita in the meantime to avoid watching the film and despite the world-building and character... it was only to discover I tried reading some more of Alita in the meantime to avoid watching the film and despite the world-building and character... it was only to discover that it turns into a sports manga?! So now I'm back to Blame! which is so much more austere and mysterious anyway. After the initial burst of action, this is mostly a bit of a holding formation sequence full of endless eerie algorithmically built environments and vertiginous flashes of sub-conflict. I'd heard that this gets very abstract around now. We'll see....more
The action opens on mars, but the circumstances are purely prosaic: colonization has been mostly successful, but on the arid martian surface humanity The action opens on mars, but the circumstances are purely prosaic: colonization has been mostly successful, but on the arid martian surface humanity is eking out an existence with rationed water, failing equipment with replacements from Earth costly to ship out, bills to pay, power to hunger after, petty business conflict, domestic boredom, etc. As the main plotline emerges from the stories of a handful of initially disparate characters, it resolves into one of real estate speculation. Circumstances change, humanity doesn't. In the meantime, there's colonialism, eugenics, racism, appropriation of indigenous lands. So classic new wave sf concerns, and classic Dick in that this is more ambitiously psychotropic than its initial terms but also rather messy about getting there. Particularly around the most ambitious, most hallucinatory aspects, which deal with the altered time sense of schizophrenics. This was probably based on some kind of an actual theory of the 60s, but neuroscience has come a long way since then (and was Austism actually ever classed as a type of schizophrenia?!) so this comes across as a total muddle now, and even somewhat fetishizing of mental health issues. As plotting and formal devices these elements elevate the novel into stranger and less predictable territory, but they really show the novel's age. On the other hand many of the social concerns remain sadly evergreen....more
Not really as inexplicable as claimed. The story and action are relatively clear: this recounts the events of an apocalypse, and if the particulars maNot really as inexplicable as claimed. The story and action are relatively clear: this recounts the events of an apocalypse, and if the particulars may be unfathomable by design, the trajectory is familiar. The dualing-government-agencies semi-noir plot attempts to humanize this for the audience a bit, but probably serves to muddle it further since Nihei doesn't seem interested in the interpersonal dimensions in the least. His concerns are fundamentally inhuman. To the extent that this doesn't work for me, its because without that human dimension it's difficult to care about all the action sequences, or about what happens at all when it escalates so quickly. But once the scope of the disaster dwarfs the human completely (in no more than an aside, we learn that (view spoiler)[everyone in the world may be dead!! (hide spoiler)]) and renders it completely unimportant, this becomes, instead, beautiful....more
The first novel I've read in these new 20s proves to be the first great work of the 20s, a definitive literature of now. Even if published in 2019, itThe first novel I've read in these new 20s proves to be the first great work of the 20s, a definitive literature of now. Even if published in 2019, it reaches forward. And by now I mean The Penultimate Decade, not in the sense or nearly-best, but in the sense of nearly-over (this is my wording and I'm going to stick with it because I must). The best, let's face it, are probably behind us, and there'll be struggles to come even if we make it into the 40s relatively intact afterall.
Here, in Lee's Maze of Transparencies, there have been struggles and a new post-digital era has begun. A period of hyper-data-driven-cultural-digitization collapses under mass data fatigue, resource stress, and attempts by a maybe-only-conceptual junta of postmodern Muses to "minimize" society back into a manageable form. Afterwards, connectivity and technology give way to small community links, barter, gardening, and a general recentering of value systems. What matters after the collapse? And by extension what should matter to us now? These are the questions Karen An-hwei Lee is asking, fundamental human ones, even if through a cloud-narrated soup of techno-linguistic acrobatics, a poetics of jargon befitting Lee's background in poetry, but with a fine-honed clarity of purpose shining through.
Tricky, unfamiliar, exhilarating. Brilliantly and urgently of-the-now-and-post-now.
What else, dear readers of our vast collective user intelligence book data matrix, is the literature of the Penultimate Decade?...more
I'm not usually one to pry back a narrative looking for the underlying experiences that informed it but this seems especially likely to have been a stI'm not usually one to pry back a narrative looking for the underlying experiences that informed it but this seems especially likely to have been a story of punk life in downtown Los Angeles in the 80s recoded as intergalactic sci-fi, and since I'm much more sympathetic to messy punk novels than middling sci-fi novels (despite the silly ultra-cool cover somehow calling me over to this obscurity in a book shop in Hawaii), this is actually completely in its favor. None of the elements see that much development, but as a palimpsest of city street life concerns (poverty, class, survival, work, exploitation, maintaining one's dignity under duress), with one of those overriding L.A. themes, real estate development, plus some commentary on racism and identity, the author's concerns here ring true, and perhaps lived. That the sci-fi context allows certain more desperate bits to be heightened into chilling brutality makes them no less believable. Enough to give this a gritty engagement despite flaws: the occasional Mary Sue elements the sci-fi context provides (how do Shade's actions really justify her importance in these events?) or glaring fails to provide (why is Shade the coolest in Deadtown? why does this matter at all?!), and a few yawning plot holes. It really feels like any weakness of the plot is a result of its actual extraneousness to the core events of one character's escape from her stifling earth-bound (read: suburban) life, attempts to make it in an unwelcoming world, extremely toxic friendship (this one has to have been lived, the characterization is so much more specific than any other and it feels almost familiar), actual camaraderie of the down-and-out, and near self-destructions. ...more
Released in the final moments of the teen years of this century, here's another essential of the Penultimate Decade Reading List, following Karen An-hReleased in the final moments of the teen years of this century, here's another essential of the Penultimate Decade Reading List, following Karen An-hwei Lee's Maze of Transparencies, books that push through the present into the speculative technicalities of survival in the critical periods bearing down on us and beyond.
Following the dissolving contemporary human world of the Southern Reach Trilogy, and the traumatic eking-out of existence in a world spun out of our control (because of our attempts at control) in Borne, Vandermeer's next major work dissolves the floundering anthropocene further. Here, the linear narratives humans impose on history have disintegrated into an inextricable tangle of contradictions and variations. Here, narrative and viewpoint themselves have been wrested from anthropocentric control by others. So has ideas of who, or what gets to tell the story. This is a polyphony not of storylines but of storysystems. The complexity of the world(s) demands it.
Despite the of-the-moment data-age relevance this has, it looks beyond. Vandermeer's transhumanism is, very significantly, biological rather than digital or even technological. Definitions of personhood and personal identity get very fuzzy, changeable, and permeable here, in a way that posits its own necessity for survival beyond the Anthropocene. Humans are over, but is that a loss on a global scale? We've never been alone. If we'd only accept that we are not, there's a possible deliverance from our collapsing towers in seeing beyond ourselves. The entirety of Dead Astronauts expresses this, not just as a formal structure, but as a moral position.
In this, it frustrates expectations. I've heard the novel described as interlinked stories and novellas. But it is very much a novel. The threads do not, cannot survive in sequestration and isolation, as nothing can. There's an intertextuality, within and in interaction with other recent Vandermeer, but it posits not discreet parts that communicate, but an entire thematic-conceptual ecosystem. The longest section here, The Three, seems at first to dominate: it's an almost-adventure story with recognizable central characters. We're drawn to them, seeking to relate, even as incomplete information and experience pushes us away. But it, and they, and their relatable qualities, are destined for failure, inevitable as the title. It's the rest of the pieces here that gradually shade in weight and substance and meaning, even as they pull away and reveal more importance beyond the story we cling to. The most essential section, then, is that which mocks my own complacent human narrative needs. Skewers my hope for human emotional relatability as a symptom of my killing anthropocentrism. Refutes our collective position as humans, whatever it may be, entirely. The shining success of this novel is that a vicious diatribe from a pinioned animal is the most directly devastating it has to offer, even amidst a shattered wasteland of loss. Here, again, form bolsters content. I turned a page and froze. The promise of structure-as-content, elsewhere in these pages playful or cryptic, cuts directly to the bone.
Welcome to the Penultimate Decade. Soon we will reach the Ultimate, the last. And then, if we're lucky, something else will carry on into some kind of worthy future, with or without what may remain of us....more
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