Witch Hat Atelier 11

 
 
Witch Hat Atelier 11
by Kamome Shirahama

Kodansha

2023

 

 

In the previous volume of Witch Hat Atelier, we met a new witch who uses forbidden magic, a young witch who could easily pass for a fellow student. She threatened Coco and Tartah unless they can get into the Silver Eye parade and cast a spell that impresses the king enough to earn a private audience. It's a seemingly impossible request, especially since the parade is the next day! But Coco agreed to try, and then immediately started worrying herself sick over the difficulty of it.
 
Volume 11 opens with Coco accidentally waking Agott up because she's panicking. She's exactly like a student trying to do a big assignment all in one night. (I mean, I guess she's not just like that, I guess she technically is that, but it's not like Coco procrastinated; the assignment got sprung on at the last minute by a bully who goes to another school!) Coco breaks down crying, begging Agott for help. She has writer's block, and she's overwhelmed by the stakes of what she's trying to do, although she can only tell Agott part of what's going on.
 
Agott catches herself thinking that Coco failing would mean less competition, and realizes she doesn't want to be that person anymore. She tells Coco about her own self-doubts, and that everyone feels like a hopeless failure sometimes. Everyone produces drawings they don't like, starts drafts they're not sure how to finish. (There's a bonus comic at the end of this volume that shows Master Olruggio working through these exact same doubts.) Agott encourages Coco to draw some spells for her own enjoyment, just to clear her head, and shows her a set of glyphs that, when added to another spell sigil, cause the finished spell effect to look like an animal.
 
Agott tells Coco about how she's sorry she was unfriendly when Coco first came to the atelier. This seems like a turning point in their friendship, like they'll be closer after this. Coco even stands up for Agott when another student witch who knew her before her falling out with her family tries to tease her.
 
Master Qifrey has noticed that something's up with Coco that she's keeping a secret. Olruggio has correctly noticed that Coco and Tartah are experiencing some form of young love, and encourages Qifrey to give her some privacy. Qifrey still thinks there's more than that going on, and he's right too, although I doubt he realizes Coco's being coerced, or that she and Tarah are harboring such intense doubts about the laws against healing magic.
 
Agott and Coco both get their spells finished and approved by the parade committee, so when the sun sets and the parade begins, they'll both get their turns to show off on one of the elevated platforms. The king is there watching (he secretly belongs to the last family of witches to know healing magic), along with large crowds of ordinary people. They reactions will help decide which spells the king will meet with the caster to buy.
 
When it's Coco's turn, we see that what she's made is new infrastructure for the sanitary disposal of sewage! Currently people empty their chamber pots into cesspits, and channels carry all the effluent to a single magical gate. As the sewage passes through, the water in the canal turns clear, and the concentrated filth drains off into a side channel. We learned earlier that in every city, this side channel drains into a Muckpool, which is always borders the poorest neighborhood. Coco's innovation is a purifying pot for each home. Empty your chamber pot into that, and you can dump cleaned water into the cesspits. Widespread adoption would dramatically improve life in the slums.
 
The crowd is not at all interested though. This would be a physically demanding extra step to dispose of their wastewater, and for people who don't live near the Muckpool, there'd be little direct benefit. Agott hops in to save the day though, making it look like Coco had only shown the first half of her spell, and like what happens next is the planned second part of the demonstration. (Agott marvels again at Coco's open-heartedness; that she accepts help easily without feeling threatened or undermined.) A new rune added to the spell makes to clean water flow back out of the purifying jug looking like flying fish, and the fish swim themselves through the air before diving into the nearest cesspit. Now the crowd is excited! No more lugging a heavy clay pot of wastewater to the dump site? That bit of saved labor appeals far more than the cleaning alone. Together, Coco and Agott have basically invented flush toilets.
 
They get a moment to celebrate their success, but only a moment, because from atop her parade float, Coco sees something, and the whole crowd sees it a moment later - a towering monster approaching the city from the harbor! The creature looks really weird, in a way that's hard to describe. It's hugely tall, but seems to be made of some kind of organic strands, so it's also quite insubstantial. 

We learn the truth, though none of the characters know it. In a jail cell in the king's palace, where no magic works inside, the witch ambassador and the guy who was selling glasses that can see through clothes, both of whom were arrested in volume 9, are imprisoned together. The ambassador smuggled in some ink for drawing spells, and convinced the other guy they could use it to escape by sticking an arm out the window, outside the spell dampening effect. I thought they'd try to draw a sigil on the outer wall, or perhaps on a scrap of fabric that they could just hold out the window ... but it seems the ambassador tricked the other guy into letting him draw on his skin, with disastrous consequences that will play out in the next volume.
 
I think Shirahama uses magic as a flexible metaphor that lets her talk about a number of different things, under the guise of simply telling a children's story about witches. So when some character asks, 'what is magic for?', they're really asking what is art for? what is technology for? what is power for? Why do we have these things? What are we supposed to do with them? Just because we can do something, should we actually do it? What are we doing it for? And at different times, magic is a stand-in for each of those different things. Because the spells are drawn, it's easy to see how the students' struggles to perfect their spells resembles the more general challenge of learning to draw well, including the importance of repetition, and the frustration that comes with struggle. We even saw that in this volume.

But some of the most interesting debates, I think, come when magic is being used as a metaphor for technology. In Shiraham's world, spells that are drawn are spells that are most useful for creating enchanted objects. And yes, there are unique works with a single owner, or specialty creations that only other witches ever use, but most enchanted objects, once they are invented, start being mass produced, used as city infrastructure, or owned and used directly in the households of the non-magical masses. So when Qifrey and Olruggio teach the girls about which spells should be allowed to be public, and why, they're instilling a set of values about what people deserve, and what they should be allowed to have if they want, and what should be forbidden.
 
Shirahama has created a flawed utopia, intentionally so. This magical world is upheld by artificial restrictions of who is permitted even to learn magic, and what they're allowed to do with it, and these rules are enforced in some of the most draconian ways possible, short of execution. But the world those rules create, the world they allow to flourish, is one where ordinary people have access to universal basic services that deliver a fairly decent standard of living to everyone, and where at least some of the people in power are constantly thinking about how to use their power to make people's lives better. 

There's a certain irony in Coco and Agott's new spell. Last volume, Master Qifrey gave a speech defending unobtrusive, reliable spells as more important than big flashy ones - but here it is the flash, the water turning into fish and flying away, that makes it work. 

 

Flush toilets and sanitary sewers are also emblematic of a certain way of thinking about what people need, and deserve. Access to clean water, the ability to go to the bathroom when you need to, and a way to dispose of wastewater so that it doesn't sicken you or contaminate your drinking water - these things are literally vital to human health, to life itself. They're also generally considered impolite or embarrassing to talk about. Milan Kundera devotes a whole chapter of The Unbearable Lightness of Being to the idea that you cannot truly love humanity unless you also love shit. You can't really help people if you're only willing to help them when their problem isn't distasteful or unsavory. 

In the early 20th century, the term 'sewer socialism' was initially used to mock the politicians and members of city government in Milwaukee who kept bragging about the benefits of the city's new sewer system. But they embraced it, and they were right to be proud, because they accomplished the very thing Coco hopes to do for the poor residents of the Muckpool neighborhood - save them from having to live alongside the stench and disease of an entire city's waste collecting beside their homes. There are a lot of magical effects Shirahama could have picked for Coco's spell. Through her choice, she's inviting her young readers to think about certain conveniences they've likely always taken for granted, and to consider why they're so important.

Donald's Happiest Adventures

 
 
Donald's Happiest Adventures

by Lewis Trondheim

art by Nicolas Keramidas

translated by David Gerstein

Fantagraphics

2023 

 

 
Earlier this year, I read a comic by Lewis Trondheim and Nicolas Keramidas that pretended to be a reprinting of a rare (and incomplete) Mickey Mouse comic from the 1960s. It was a wild ride! They exploited the metafictional conceit to show only the high points of a globe-spanning adventure, without needing to worry about how to connect them. Any transitions or bookkeeping just became 'lost chapters' and 'missing pages'. That also made any dialogue briefer and more episodic.
 

Donald's Happiest Adventures also pretends to collect a 1960s comic, although this time, it's a complete sequential storyline. Donald is once again called in to search for lost treasure at Uncle Scrooge's behest, but this time he's looking for the secret of happiness. What follows is still a madcap trip around the world, with stops in an Eastern European dictatorship and a Himalayan monastery, but the story this time is a bit slower and more coherent, with fewer locales and more talking. The most important thing happening here is the sharing of ideas, as Donald (and us alongside him) hears many different perspectives on the philosophy and psychology of happiness.
 
Years ago, I attended an undergraduate philosophy presentation. Each of the students had picked a philosopher and studied up on their writings so that they could adopt their chosen thinker's persona, so you had some wearing bed sheet togas and others in thrift store suits. The theme of the event was something like how to be a good person, or how to live a good life, and what the students said was improvised instead of scripted. Anyway, the thing that stood out to me was that at first, they all seemed to try to out-compete each other to see who could prescribe the harshest asceticism, and then later, once they all agreed they could take it as given that of course being a good person meant forsaking all worldly pleasures, giving up rich foods and alcohol and music and dancing and sex, once they agreed on that, then they started to argue about what else you might add to this life of austerity and self-denial to make it truly good, things like education and charity and so forth. (And of course various forms of worship and devotion to one of the many interpretations of God.)
 
I feel like attending that talk actually got me to clarify some of my own thoughts, because instead of thinking of total self-abnegation as the starting point for any life worth leading, hearing that claim articulated over and over again clarified for me that what I believe in is hedonism. I don't really want a life of unlimited dissipation; I understand the argument that too much pleasure-seeking has diminishing returns, that it can come at the expense of worthier pursuits. But as a baseline, as a starting point? I say yes, give me hedonism! Give me pleasure; give me happiness! Yes, we should cultivate the higher virtues of education and art. Yes, we should seek to spend time with others, and help them when they're in need. But I agree with Maslow that we can only really focus on those higher goals once our basic needs are met and baser desires are fulfilled. People deserve to be happy, they deserve to be comfortable, deserve to feel good. It is those feelings, and not their denial, that should serve as the foundation of life.
 
Anyway, Donald Duck hears many different ideas, but Trondheim and Keramidas seemto favor the idea that it's harder to seek happiness than it is to avoid unhappiness, and that a big part of that, beyond having enough for basically comfortable living, is to avoid setting too-high expectations or making comparisons to others who have more. Both will tempt you to chase something you can't catch, and diminish your ability to enjoy what you already have. That's an idea that comes up not just in the philosophical discussion, but that we see played out by watching how other characters act.
 
Mickey's Wackiest Adventures is definitely the wilder of the two books, and possibly it's just all around better - more fun, more ideas, more experimentation, more adventure. But I did like Donald's Happiest Adventures, and I think there's some merit to its more thoughtful writing and slower pace. 

Ancillary Sword

 
 
Ancillary Sword

by Ann Leckie

Orbit

2014

 

 

Ancillary Sword is the second book in Ann Leckie's trilogy that started with Ancillary Justice. In the first book, we followed Breq, the last surviving human component of what used to be the AI mind of a starship, that used to be shared by the physical ship and by cybernetically augmented members of its crew, called ancillaries. From the moment they receive their implants and are linked to the ship's mind, all previous traces of ancillaries' former personalities are erased. Breq has essentially the same personality as the ship, Justice of Toren, although if there had been two surviving components, not linked to each other, they would diverge as a result of their different experiences.
 
That is, essentially what's happened to the mind of Anaander Mianaai, the supreme ruler of the Radchaai space empire. Her mind is three thousand years old, distributed across hundreds of clone bodies at all times, and they communicate with each other, but there are time lags. (Like King Gnuff!) We learned in the last book that Mianaai's mind is split into factions as the result of an incident from a thousand years ago, when soldiers from a newly conquered planet tried to assassinate her with an alien weapon, and she ordered the execution of every single person on the conquered world.
 
As Breq observes early on in this book, when you do something so terrible, you have a choice afterward. You can acknowledge it as a mistake and try to change so you'll never make it again, or you can insist that you acted correctly and re-commit to the beliefs and actions that led up to that point. (You could also, I guess, try to avoid knowing that what you'd done required making that choice.) 
 
And that's what Anaander Mianaai has done - split into a reformist faction that has replaced enslaved ancillaries with regular soldiers, opened up the officer corps to meritocracy, and stopped annexing new planets; and a conservative faction that wants ancillaries, aristocrats ruling serfs, and wars of conquest forever. She's also spent the last millennium trying not to acknowledge the split, with a few selves running spy ops against each other while the others attempt not to notice.
 
It was one of Mianaai's plans that caused almost all of Justice of Toren to be destroyed, leaving behind only Breq. In Justice she acquired one of the alien weapons and used it against a conservative Mianaai, forcing the reformists and conservatives to recognize their split, and plunging the entire Radchaai empire into a travel communications blackout amid the palace coup.
 
Now in Sword, a reformist Mianaai has brought Breq back into the military and made her a Fleet Captain. She has her own ship, but can theoretically outrank and command any other ship's captain she meets. Mianaai sends Breq to a particular star system, officially just to secure it and prevent open civil warfare, and also to meet the (now adult) younger sister of Lieutenant Awn, who was Justice of Toren's favorite officer, and who died during that ill-fated final mission.
 
Breq and her new ship, with her new crew, arrive in the Athoek system, where the densely populated calital city is inside a space station orbiting a planet of tea plantations. On both the station and the planet, Breq finds situations that resemble the one Lieutenant Awn was facing on her last mission - ethic minorities living in poverty or indentured servitude and denied any chance to improve their lives, and aristocratic leaders who profit directly from this situation, and who feel free to violate individual members of the underclass without fear of legal retribution. 
 
In some ways we replay the events of the first novel, but with Breq better able to use her power to steer Athoek a little bit away from hierarchy and toward greater equality precisely because she saw how Awn navigated the earlier situation. 
 
That choice, after doing something terrible, to become better or become worse, is a choice several characters face. Breq herself is the product of such a choice. Justice of Toren and its ancillaries committed countless atrocities across two thousand years of planetary annexations. But on its final mission, Mianaai ordered the ship to execute Awn for refusing to fire on peaceful civilians. It did, but then it broke apart and died, and now Breq, all that's left of Justice of Toren, is determined to do better. 
 
In the course of figuring out all the ways that the poorer ethnic minorities of Athoek are treated badly and deprived of their human rights, and all the ways that a few wealthy leaders profit, Breq does uncover some secret maneuvering related to Mianaai's split that I think will form the basis for the plot of the final book in the trilogy, Ancillary Mercy. But the plot of this one was largely self-contained, and mostly about Breq trying to use their authority to make Athoek more just and egalitarian. 
 
A few things are worth noting here. This book takes place entirely inside Radchaai space, and so every character is referred to as 'she' in the text. I felt like this book makes it clear what Leckie is trying to accomplish by writing the Radchaai as having no concept of gender, and by calling everyone 'she' instead of 'he' or 'they'. 
 
First, by removing gender as a consideration, Leckie is able to focus on inequality based on status, wealth, and race. If crimes were committed by a rich man's son, we might be tempted to blame masculinity as much as anything else; when the same acts are done by a rich woman's daughter, we more clearly see how her sense of impunity results from her wealth. 
 
And that is really only clear because Leckie does use feminine terms for everyone. If she called them all 'he,' I suspect that we'd scarcely notice, because we're used to books about soldiers and politicians being full of men, with few or no women characters. No matter how many times Leckie reminded us that they're not really men, that's probably how we'd think of them. There were times I wondered what sort of body this character or that might have, but we get no hints, and it doesn't matter, because in this society at least, that's not why people act the way they do.
 
Another cool thing was getting a sense of what distributed consciousness might be like. As captain, Breq gets frequent updates from her ship about what her officers and soldiers are doing, and Leckie interlaces these with Breq's own actions. So even though the book is narrated in the first person by one character, we can also watch and follow several plot strands at once.
 
One downside of this setup is just how quickly I got tired of all the military discipline and Radchaai politeness whenever Breq interacted with anyone under her command. The number of times someone begs for the fleet captain's indulgence before speaking feels like it could fill an entire chapter. If Breq resembles any Star Trek captain, it's probably Benjamin Sisko from Deep Space Nine, who also bristled at unnecessary ceremony and seemed more aware of racial injustice than others. 

All the Beauty in the World

 
All the Beauty in the World

The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me

by Patrick Bringley

Simon and Schuster

2023

 

 

 

All the Beauty in the World is a memoir by a man who spent a decade, from his mid-20s to his mid-30s, as a museum guard at the Met. Bringley initially takes the job as a way to process his grief over the death of his older brother. He spends his time in the museum in an almost meditative state, allowing himself to see the art, to be emotionally moved by it, while practicing not having any conscious verbal thoughts. Eventually, without quite noticing it happen, he begins to heal, to become friends with other guards, to have opinions and preferences again. With more time, he starts wanting more than guard work can offer, and eventually leaves the museum.
 
Bringley spent his teen years idolizing his brother, and his time in college worrying after he's diagnosed with cancer, then spends a long time in the hospital, then dies. After college, Bringley worked briefly at the New Yorker, and I suspect that the same skill at writing that got him the job there helped him convert a decade of experiences and memories into this rather slim volume. 
 
Grief weighs heavily on the first half of the memoir. When Bringley finally starts to open back up again in the second half, we learn that he's been married since before his brother died, which felt like a surprising revelation to me, like a thing I'd have expected him to mention earlier.
 
We learn about Bringley's first day on the job, about medieval Christian art, about how he mentally absents himself to experience the art in a kind of flow state, about his brother's illness and death. We learn a bit of history of the Met, and about the job of being a guard, the stations they occupy, the familiar types of patrons they see. We see Bringley moving from being the new kid to being experienced and starting to mentor others. He becomes a father. And finally he starts wanting to move on, to find a job where he can more actively talk to people instead of disappearing into his role.
 
Although the book is short, I did begin to feel a bit bored by the end, around the same time Bringley was getting bored with his job. Scattered throughout are sketchy pencil drawings Bringley made of some of his favorite artworks. They add a nice touch. 
 
Reading this also reminded me of Peter Bearman's Doormen, which is an ethnography of people who work as doormen at luxury apartment buildings in New York. They are also mostly working class, mostly men, and have a job that nominally provides security to a very wealthy people in an environment that, in truth, needs relatively little protecting. Bearman's book doesn't have the borrowed prestige of the Met, but because it's based on many observations and interviews, he's also able to paint a somewhat broader portrait than Bringley. 

The Tea Dragon Festival

 
 
The Tea Dragon Festival

by K O'Neill

Oni Press

2019

 

 

The Tea Dragon Festival is sort of a prequel to K O'Neill's Tea Dragon Society. The older gay couple who serve as mentors in Society are young men here, still active as fantasy adventurers and bounty hunters, not yet settled down as tea shop owners or tea dragon enthusiasts. I think we may see the moments when Erik and his boyfriend Hesekiel decide what they eventually want to do when they retire, but it's not a pivotal moment in the story, just a conversation we see them have near the end of the book. A lot of O'Neill's storytelling is like this. The pace is slow, the plot is minimal, and key moments of characterization are so brief and so gentle that you only recognize their importance in retrospect. 
 
Erik and Hesekiel are the only recurring characters, and the tea dragons - who are the only other connection between Society and Festival - play a very minor role this time around. The stars this time are Rinn, who is Erik's 'nibling', a term that's the nonbinary counterpart to nephew or niece, and Aedhan, a dragon in humanoid form who's just woken up from almost a century of magical slumber. Rinn is an aspiring cook who really excels at foraging for mushrooms in the forest. They live in a fairly isolated village (though it does have a train station), and they find Aedhan sleeping in a ruined shrine. Aedhan was sent by their dragon clan to be the village guardian, and he's shocked when he realizes how much time has passed.
 
We follow Rinn as they show Aedhan around the village and take him on a foraging trip. Erik and Hesekiel are visiting in pursuit of a bounty on an ancient spirit that puts people to sleep. 
 
We see Rinn and Aedhan become friends, and possible develop the beginnings of a romance. I know Rinn is nonbinary because the four main characters get one-sentence biographies at the front of the book. No one ever uses a pronoun for them in the actual text, though you could probably read the book without noticing. The closest we get to explicit acknowledgment is Erik calling Rinn nibling, and a brief exchange where Rinn asks Aedhan is it's true that some dragons are skilled enough shapeshifters to not only change between humanoid and dragon form, but to also change between male and female forms, and when Aedhan says yes that's true, Rinn says that sounds nice. Without the bio at the beginning, I don't know if I would've read that as an expression of Rinn's identity, as opposed to like, Rinn being impressed by how cool dragons are. Aedhan's admiration for Rinn's mushroom hunting gives them the courage to keep cooking as a hobby instead of a career, and to focus more pn foraging. (K O'Neill has come out as nonbinary since this book was originally published, which makes me wonder if Rinn is at all a representation of the author.)
 
Erik and Hesekiel find the ancient spirit. It puts them to sleep, and they dream of the forest as it was in the magic-filled days of the ancient past, a place of awe-inspiring beauty. The two manage to wake up, but decide the spirit doesn't understand human lifespans and isn't trying to hurt anyone, so they politely ask it to stop. They seem to think this will work, and I guess the audience is meant to as well. Since they didn't capture the spirit, they won't collect a bounty - I think this is the turning point that leads them to think forward to their eventual retirement from adventuring, decades hence.
 
The last thing that happens is the titular tea dragon festival. The handful of tea dragons in the village are like communal pets. The mountain chamomile dragon is very fluffy and adorably grumpy looking. For the festival, they get dressed up with ribbons, and the villagers eat a feast and drink tea. Rinn shares some tea-dragon tea with Aedhan, which shows him some memories of village life that help relieve his guilt about his delayed start to being a guardian, and kind of affirms his friendship with Rinn.
 
There's a deck-building board game based on the tea dragon books, where each player has a tea dragon and tries to give them the most fulfilling experiences while reigning in their misbehavior. (They're very cat-like.) The game has two versions, one based solely on The Tea Dragon Society and one based on both Society and Festival, and the second version is probably better. It's more intuitive, has fewer turns where it feels like you can't do anything, and just generally seems to capture the intended play experience better. I think The Tea Dragon Festival is the same way. O'Neill seems better able to tell the kind of story they want here, to tell a stronger version of the same sort of coming-of-age tale about a young person deciding on their career befriending someone just returning to society after a debilitating magical illness, helped by mentors, and needing to give help to the fussy little tea dragons. 

The History of the Computer

 
 
The History of the Computer

People, Inventions, and Technology that Changed Our World

by Rachel Ignotofsky
Ten Speed Books

2022

 

 

I really like Rachel Ignotofsky's art, and her illustrated non-fiction, aimed at middle-grade and young adult readers, seems well-balanced to me. She provides a broad introduction with just enough detail to get you started, and hopefully inspire you to seek out more information about the parts that interest you most. Her writing is clear and accessible, without seeming to over-simplify or dumb anything down. The experience of reading her books is a lot like visiting a good museum - it provides a good overview and probably whets your appetite to learn more.
 
In The History of the Computer, Ignotofsky shows us advances in calculating and computing devices, and in the advances in human knowledge and understanding - including math and information theory - that allow us to invent and then build new devices.
 
As in The Wondrous Workings of Planet Earth which I read previously, Ignotofsky starts with an overview that defines key hardware and software terms, explains the basics of how binary logic works, and then shows timelines of important on/off switches, storage mediums, video games, and robots. We get a couple chapters about precursors to the modern computer, including numbers and the abacus in the more distant past, and Boolean logic and mechanical calculators during the industrial revolution. The first 'computers' were human workers who could devise and then solve math equations for governments and businesses, so that others could simply look up the answers on a printed table. (The conversion tables in every school notebook, showing how to switch from Standard to Metric would be like the simplest version of this.)
 
We join the 20th century as new electronic computers were invented and immediately put to work in World War II, breaking codes and calculating missile trajectories. After WWII, the American government continued funding computer research as part of the space race. Initially, the only computers were housed in government agencies, prestigious universities, and large corporations, but over time they proliferated.

 
In this and every subsequent period, the sorts of advances we see are switches and memory storage getting smaller and more electronic; truly exceptional thinkers creating new programming languages and user-interfaces (including graphical and tactile interfaces) that make computers easier for everyone else to use; and new applications, previously only theorized, becoming feasible because of the increased speed, enlarged memory, and greater accessibility those innovations provided. For virtually anything you can think to do do with computers, someone was theorizing it and someone else trying to build it much earlier than you probably think.
 
In the 1970s, new inventors working outside of the big businesses that manufactured room-sized mainframes and refrigerator-sized 'mini-computers' began to build much smaller devices for small businesses and households - the 'micro-computer' or personal computer desktop. In the 1980s, artists and other creative people used computers to make their work, leading to a flourishing of computer animation, electronic music, and video games.
 
In the 1990s, existing government, business, and academic computer networks were combined to make the hardware of the internet, and the software protocols of the web made it possible for the public to get online. In the 2000s, computer components were finally small enough to combine multiple devices and still be small enough to fit in someone's hand - the 'all-in-one device' or smatphone.
 
At the end, when she talks about the newest inventions that might drive the next stage of computing, Ignotofsky singles out self-driving cars, cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence (by which she means Machine Learning, since ChatGPT and genAI didn't exist yet), smart homes and internet-of-things, and using Big Data in science.
 
Ignotofsky gives attention both to 'firsts' and to iterations on an idea that lead up to its most famous form. She provides us with the names and a bit of biographical detail for lots and lots of thinkers and workers. You can't read this book and come away thinking that a handful of geniuses did everything themselves, and you probably notice that the people who got famous are not necessarily smarter or more creative than the ones who didn't. Fame seems to follow money, which comes from making the first really commercially successful version of something - which is not the same as having the idea, making and of the prototypes or intermediate steps, or even actually being the first one to sell it. Fame and success are both fickle, and it took a lot of other people doing less-noticed work to make each Jobs or Gates or Zuckerberg possible.
 
I mentioned I like Ignotofsky's illustration style, and it seems especially suited to kid-friendly technical drawings. She draws outlines that are filled in with block colors, but crucially, the outlines aren't just black, they're in color too, which provides an awful lot of extra information. Her drawings of the old mechanical calculators, the early computers likes ENIAC and UNIVAC, and the prototype quantum computer are especially good looking, possibly because they have a lot of visible parts. Every improvement makes the parts smaller and the connections harder to see, which is aesthetically a bit of a shame, but Ignotofsky also shows us all the many housings and cases computers came in too. 

Fakes

 
 
Fakes

An Anthology of Pseduo-Interview, Faux Lectures, Quasi-Letters, 'Found' Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts

edited by David Shields and Matthew Vollmer

WW Norton & Company

2012

 

 

Fakes is a collection of 40 literary short stories in the subgenre we might think of as 'gimmick fiction', where the writing is very visibly constrained by some higher concept that shapes the text. Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style and Matt Madden's tribute to it, 99 Ways to Tell a Story are veritable catalogs of gimmicks, each retelling the same simple story over and over again with a different high concept each time. One common type of gimmick is to imitate the form of another kind of writing or document; not every gimmick is like that, but the ones in Fakes all are.
 
Despite the connotation of the title, the stories collected here are not actually trying to trick anyone into thinking they're really whatever style of writing they appear to be. No one reading JG Ballard's "The Index", for example, is going to be fooled into thinking that it's the only surviving remnant of the autobiography of Alexander Hamilton's secret son, who inspired and was then denounced by every major historical figure of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Ballard's story definitely qualifies as ergodic fiction - where the narrative is implied rather than told, often because our only access to a character is indirect, mediated through a document supposedly prepared by the character - but most of the stories here are more straightforward than that. The most oblique is probably Donald Barthelme's "The Explanation", which is a surreal sort of interview. Also, with the exception of these two luminaries, most of the stories are from the 1990s and 2000s.
 
There are a few commonalities among the stories. One is that an awful lot of them are humorous, likely because of the playful nature of this style of writing influences what sort of story you want to use it to tell.
 
Another is that many of these authors play up the irony of a style that's usually fairly business-like or professional to talk about parts of life or express emotions that are inappropriate for that setting, such as loneliness or romantic desire, over-the-top misogyny, a too-crude interest in sex or drugs, self destruction or other symptoms of mental illness, or grief or mourning over a recent death. The effect of this disjunction is sometimes funny, sometimes sad. It almost always communicates that the narrator of the story has feelings so powerful that they can't be contained by social norms of propriety.
 
A few stand-outs for me include "Officers Weep" by Daniel Orozco, a police blotter that shows two patrol partners falling in love while ineffectually following a vandal with a chainsaw cutting a swathe of random destruction through town (it also reminded me of Carmen Maria Machado's "These are There Stories," which does something similar with fictional Law & Order SVU episode summaries); "Our Spring Catalog" by Jack Pendarvis, where we infer a publishing intern's crisis over her status in the industry and the overall direction of her life from the deteriorating quality of the summaries she writes to advertise upcoming books; "Life Story" by editor David Shields, which is told entirely in bumper sticker slogans and variations; "Reply All" by Robin Hemley, where a poetry club falls apart when one member accidentally sends a love letter to the entire email listserv instead of solely to the woman he's having an affair with; and "National Treasures" by Charles McLeod, an auction catalog where the object descriptions tell the seller's very troubled life story.
 
A few stories missed for me because there just wasn't enough going on, like a letter to a funeral parlor complaining about their use of the word 'cremains,' or an essay about depictions of the crucifixion that seemed to be straight nonfiction as far as I could tell.
 
A few others I didn't personally care for because they seemed to me to be trying to express grandiose and exaggerated inappropriate sentiments in a way that should be humorous, but I couldn't really find them funny. I found that I couldn't quite forget the reality that there are people who truly think and do things like this, which made them more troubling than funny. Joe Wenderoth's "Letters to Wendy's" is supposedly a series of letters sent by a disturbed young man to the fast food company, where he announces his drug use, speculates about other customers' genitals, plots to physically assault employees, plots to sexually assault the non-existent Wendy herself, and declares his plans to get his dock out and wave it around the store. Stanley Crawford's "Some Instructions to My Wife Concerning the Upkeep of the House and Marriage, and to My Son and Daughter Concerning the Conduct of Their Childhood" is a maniacally over-controlling set of instructions for a wife from her husband governing every aspect of her appearance, behavior, inner life, and an exhaustive list of chores, all woven through with an extended metaphor about how the house is the marriage. (Incredibly, both those two were story-length excerpts from book-length complete works!) Editor Matthew Vollmer's "Will & Testament" is supposedly written by a young man just before his suicide, and supposedly sent to strangers chosen from the phone book, asking them to dismember his body and send the parts to all sorts of people, including all his ex-girlfriends and former bosses, and to then engage in a lifetime of ritual mourning on his behalf.

There's also a real bibliography at the end, listing other works that could've been included in a much, much longer collection. I was aware of a few of the book-length recommendations, but most of them, and essentially all the short stories, are news to me, and have the potential to keep me busy looking them up.