A Half-Built Garden

 
 
A Half-Built Garden

by Ruthanna Emrys

Tor

2022

 

 

A Half-Built Garden is a recent scifi novel that, like the Star Trek film First Contact, imagines an encounter between near-future humans living after the apocalyptic collapse of our contemporary civilization, and a far-future, multi-species, apparently-utopian alien society.
 
Ruthanna Emrys imagines an Earth ravaged by greenhouse heat and extreme weather, primarily governed by a new form of human network - the Watersheds, technologically-enhanced direct democracies organized around protecting and rehabilitating regional water sources. The aliens, known as Ringers, are two species from neighboring planets who've formed a joint society they call Symbiosis, located on habitats forming a Dyson swarm around their star that's lasted a millennium so far. The Rings are home to 5 trillion alien people, and they want us to leave Earth before it's too late and we go extinct. But the Watersheds have done so much good work to repair the world; they're not eager to abandon it.
 

Garden is narrated by Judy, who by chance becomes humanity's first and primary representative to the Ringers. In the Watersheds, gender is a matter of personal choice. Most people identify with their birth gender - but kids are usually raises as nonbinary until they can express a preference, and trans health is as advanced and comprehensive as anyone else's. Judy has a trans wife and a newborn they both breastfeed. They live and co-parent with another couple (a recently transitioned trans guy and his wife) who have a toddler. Judy is on call for unusual sensor readings the night the aliens arrive, and brings her infant with her to investigate. Throughout the book, Judy breastfeeds in a rhythm that matches her child's needs, at times that are often inconvenient to the circumstances. But the Rings are matriarchal, and all diplomatic relations are conducted between nursing mothers, whose kids are present to keep both sides on their best behavior. So by accident, Judy makes a good first impression and becomes the Ringer's chosen human ambassador.
 
The Rings are home to two species. The first are green and look like pill bugs or anklyosaurs. The leader of the delegation, Cytosine, is from this group, as are half her crew / family. Her cross-species brother, Rhamentin, is from the second group, are red and furry and ten-legged, with no heads, but eyes and mouths on their knee joints. The Rings have encountered radio signals from three other industrial species, but always arrived too late, after they'd driven themselves extinct. They're thrilled to find humans alive, and also feel like 'saving' us by evacuating the planet is urgent.
 
The Watersheds use a network that's like 50% Reddit - with users' comments and votes weighted by their expertise in the subject at hand, allowing for quick and informed democratic / consensus decisions - and like 50% Internet of Things - with the natural world covered in sensors for environmental monitoring, and all manufactured objects tagged so their supply chain and carbon footprint can be tracked and minimized. The network algorithms are also supposed to give weight to values that the Watersheds agree on, but might not always act on without automated reminders. In addition there's vestigial nation states, whose governments don't seem to do much or have much power, and the remaining corporations.
 
What are called corporations in Garden's time are like, the descendants of the old billionaires and their entourages who fled to private, artificial islands when society collapsed. They do still manufacture some goods, and plot to get capitalism up and running again, but they're more like aristocratic estates than like companies of today.
 
Eventually we learn that for corporate citizens, one's actual gender identity is a wholly private matter. Gender as it is performed in public is truly a performance, a move in a status game meant to advance one's rank. They have six binary genders - prince and princess to demonstrate wealth, butch and femme for romance and seduction, and obre and tania (I'd guess named for Oberon and Titania) for asserting power and dominance. They have one nonbinary gender for people not adopting any of those roles, and another used to talk about a person whose current public gender is unknown. Like in the Watersheds, corporate citizens seem to use polycules for child-rearing, but only people at a certain level in the hierarchy are allowed to form households and have children.
 

Garden is as much about the future of gender and sexuality as it is about the future of political and economic organization, with the Watersheds resembling the success of leftist, communitarian ideals, and the corporations looking more libertarian, with self as private, public life as competition, diversity without equality, culture as costume. The Ringers believe in female power, and don't really think about gender separately from biological sex until they encounter the idea on Earth. Cytosine is annoyed that Judy won't tell her exactly who birthed her family's two children, and is scandalized when another Ringer picks up a they/them pronoun badge at the neighborhood party.
 
So, the Ringers arrive and make their offer to 'rescue' humanity, and are kind of shocked when Judy and her Watershed are less than enthusiastic. But what I like about Judy as a character is that she wants to find common ground and cooperate, not to 'win.' She also fully believes in networked decision-making, and is extremely reluctant to elevate herself or trust her sole judgment.
 
Unfortunately for her, the network crashes very early on, and remains in partial disrepair thereafter. The Watersheds suspect corporate sabotage, while the corporations suggest they should buy better equipment. The ways the network struggles closely mirror contemporary problems with social media. Like Arkady Martine did in A Memory Called Empire, Emrys makes the curious decision to introduce us to a character who starts the book with other voices in her head, then, before the reader has really had a chance to understand that, suddenly deprives the character of their internal support and forces her to become more of an individual - and sets us up to spend the rest of the book dealing with that loss.
 
After their initial meeting the Ringers visit Judy's house and neighborhood. NASA shows up to represent the US, and representatives from the corporations show up too. Cytosine wants to build an antenna to call for backup. There's a diplomatic mission to one of the corporate artificial islands. The antenna is built. A hurricane strikes. Passover is celebrated. All throughout, the characters wrestle with each others' philosophies, and with how to persuade people who have competing material interests to find a way to compromise instead of seizing everything they want. The beginning is a bit awkward somehow, but things really get cooking when we visit the corporate island, and Emrys keeps ratcheting up the social tension until we finally reach a resolution at the end. A lot of this book is characters talking in increasingly interesting locations. There's not just conflict, but also surprising alliances, friendships, even romance.
 

A Half-Built Garden was recommended to me by a friend at Underground Books, and I'm happy to recommend it in turn.

Heroes Reborn

 
 
Heroes Reborn

America's Mightiest Heroes

Marvel Comics

2021

 

 

Heroes Reborn is a Marvel Comics miniseries in which something is wrong with reality, in the tradition of Marvel's Age of Apocalypse and Age of Ultron, or DC's  Flashpoint or The Nail.
 
This time around, someone has changed history to prevent the Avengers from ever forming, and meanwhile, the world, or at least America, is being protected by Marvel's equivalent of the Justice League - Hyperion, Nighthawk, The Blur, Dr Spectrum, and Power Princess.
 
We get one issue of introduction, one issue each for the ersatz DC heroes, and then a couple more issues for Marvel's Avengers to re-form, save the day, and restore the reality where they normally exist. Blade is the first person to realize what's wrong, and he spends a few pages at the end of each issue re-assembling - unthawing Captain America, sobering up Thor, locating the hidden Black Panther, etc.
 
Hyperion spends his issue chasing down and recapturing super criminals who escaped the Negative Zone prison, including a Bizarro-like Hulk. He also rescues Peter Parker, who's like his Jimmy Olsen. Nighthawk investigates a breakout at the asylum, fighting mostly Spider-Man villains, plus Bullseye, led by a Green Goblin who acts like the Joker. The Blur goes on a Dr Strange-esque speendrun through the Dark Dimension while fighting a Scarlet Witch who inherited her brother Quicksilver's super speed. Dr Spectrum and his Rainbow Prism go into space and fight a very Lobo-esque Rocket Raccoon. And Power Princess fights a Thor villain while reminiscing about all the other Thor villain's she's killed.
 
For the most part, these heroes are more disturbing than their DC counterparts, in a way that's probably familiar to anyone who's read or watched an of the dozens of dark, gritty, postmodern superhero deconstructions that've come out over the years. Blur is hyperactive, impatient, and has the memory of a goldfish - his superspeed is like a permanent cocaine high. Hyperion is a Christian nationalist. Dr Spectrum projects amoral American supremacy not only internationally, but into space. Power Princess is just relentlessly bloodthirsty. Nighthawk seems basically okay by comparison.
 
Anyway, it turns out that the world is like this because someone made a deal with Mephisto to change history this way, but fortunately simply re-assembling a group called The Avengers significantly weakens the artificial construct, which is fortunate. To win, the Avengers just have to beat their counterparts in a fight, and even though we've seen a half-dozen issues of Hyperion's crew making mince-meat out of ultra villains who combine the powers of several ordinary Marvel foes, the new, untrained, hastily gathered Avengers win easily due to being the publisher's favorites.
 
As far as Justice League pastiches go, this one is decently fun. It was interesting seeing Marvel characters recast into supporting roles for DC. Reimagining Spider-Man foes as Batman villains was probably the best version of this. Blur's alienation simply due to the nature of his power, rather than because he's an authoritarian, was probably the most interesting critical take. Each issue had its own writers and artists, and James Stokoe's visuals in the Dr Spectrum issue stood out as interesting and unique among the others.

The Butcher of the Forest

 
 
The Butcher of the Forest

by Premee Mohamed

Tor

2024

 

 

The Butcher of the Forest is a dark fantasy novella, a fairy tale so grim that it slides into horror. Author Premee Mohamed has delivered the literary equivalent of the filmmaker's 'tight ninety' - a book that is taut, lean, and well-edited, where every scene advances the story, and every bit of action feels 'right' and appropriate and inevitable. This book is both excellent and economical, and has a literary heft that belies its slim size and its clear, readable prose.
 
From the moment Veris is awoken in the night by armored guards who drag her, in her nightgown, to a carriage to see the Tyrant who rules her village and all the surrounding lands, you know that things are going to go badly for her. And when the Tyrant himself tells her that his two children have wandered out of the palace and disappeared into the Woods, a cursed forest that absolutely no one - except Veris - has ever returned from alive, when the Tyrant tells her to go back in, and to do the impossible by returning with his children, and to do it all in a day or he'll slaughter her entire village as punishment, when that happens you know this is not going to be a story with a happy ending. The only questions are what will go wrong, and how bad will the consequences be? I was fully prepared, for example, for Veris to be successful but too late, and to come home to a village burned to the ground.
 
The edge of the woods are safe, but inside the mortal woods are another, different, otherworldly woods, and there's no obvious barrier or way of knowing when you've crossed from one to the other ... except until after you've gone too far. There are beings that live in the woods, that are sort of like people, but also very, very strange. Mohamed hasn't written any elves or faeries, nothing so safe or recognizable. Nothing with a name, except the unicorn, who's the most monstrous thing in there.
 
More than anything else, Mohamed's treatment of magic and supernatural creatures reminds me of SM Wheeler's novel Sea Change, which isn't even a helpful comparison, because hardly anyone else has heard of it or read it. But what I mean is that all the creatures of the forest are weird, and powerful, and dangerous, and Veris and the kids, when she finds them, are achingly vulnerable, nearly helpless, except for what they can get by being polite, and clever, and quick. But if something from the forest catches you, and it has you by rights of you breaking a rule - no cutting wood, no spilling blood, all deals will be unfair, no cheating or arguing or else they become unfairer still - there's nothing you can do, no way to fight, no way to win by strength.
 
So, Veris enters the woods. Through trials and by her own wit and determination, she finds the kids, and through more trials and hardships she leads them back toward the edge of the forest, back to reality, and their home, the castle of the Tyrant, as the day wanes, and time runs out, and you know it won't be quite that easy or straightforward... Time maybe passes differently in the forest, but Mohamed skillfully takes from morning to afternoon through a long evening into the night, without ever stating the phase of the day, just with the mood and the colors and the light. It's just one of many impressive things about what she's written here.
 
Along the way, we learn a bit about Veris and her village, about the Tyrant, how he fights, how he wins and conquers, about what happened to Veris when he first arrived, and she was just a girl, and her parents were still living, about why she came into the cursed forest the first time, before she knew she'd become a legend by making it back out. There's not a lot of worldbuilding here, but as with everything else in this jewelbox of a book, there's the right amount, there's just enough. We learn just enough about the cruel logic of the woods and its denizens, see just enough adventure as Veris passes through, see just enough of flashbacks and of the wider world.
 
This is a good one. You might give it a miss, if you think it's too dark. But if you like this sort of fantasy, combining realistic politics of conquest with unsettling and uncanny glimpses of the supernatural, this is an easy and rewarding pick.

The Best American Comics 2016

 

Best American Comics 2016

edited by Roz Chast

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

2016

 

 

The Best American Comics 2016 was edited by Roz Chast, who's probably best known for her cartoons in The New Yorker.
 
Chris Ware is back in this volume, and Gilbert Hernandez with a non Love & Rockets project. There's no R Crumb, but Drew Friedman has a comic about what a big influence Crumb was on him, including the couple times they met. Joe Sacco has a fictional comic about surveillance via our digital footprint instead of his usual reporting. There's actually almost no graphic journalism this time; nearly all the nonfiction comics are memoir. There's a lot of memoir! Ben Katchor shows up again with more comics about fictional trends in city life. And Kate Beaton got another batch of Hark! A Vagrant comics included.
 
Two comics I recognized from seeing them in bookstores this time are Lynda Barry's Syllabus, about teaching art to college students, and Cece Bell's El Deafo, about growing up hearing impaired after catching a nasty virus as a toddler.
 
There's always a challenge in these collections, posed by the very different lengths of the included comics. Artists who work in very short format can almost disappear among the longer works, though including multiple examples can help. For longer works, the editor has to decide whether to include the whole thing, and if not, how long the excerpt should be. Too short, and the reader doesn't really get a fair sample. Too long, and it dominates the collection, drowning out everything else.
 
I feel like Chast mostly erred on the long side, giving 15-25 pages to a number of works. El Deafo got 33. At the same time, a few people felt like their excerpt cut off short, before I got a chance to see their worth. Lots of the entries were only 2 or 4 pages.
 
So while I liked The Corpse, the Ghost, and the Hollow-Weenie by Casanova Frankenstein and Adults Only by Lance Ward, both graphic memoirs by troubled men struggling with low-wage jobs, tempestuous romantic relationships, and serious concerns about their sexuality - it's hard for me to think that my preference wasn't influenced by Chast's thumb on the scale. They got like 10 times as many pages to impress me, and I'm sure that helped.

Genesis

 
 

Genesis

The Evolution of Biology

by Jan Sapp

Oxford University Press

2003 

 

 

My reading this month got off to kind of a slow start because I was finishing kind of a heavier text, Genesis: The Evolution of Biology by Jan Sapp, which is both a history and a historiography, a look at how others have told this same history, of the science of biology, from the Lamarck and Darwin, through Mendel, and up to the start of the 21st century.
 
Along the way, Sapp describes key experiments and explains the prevailing consensus that governed various eras of research. He tells us what biologists thought, and how they came to be convinced of it, again and again, as the way they understood the natural world changed over the course of about 150 years. He notes major disagreements and competing paradigms alongside times of scientific consensus, and gives a lot of attention to why biologists believed various things, and how they sought to convince one another, both with empirical evidence, and with stories told to one another about other scientists. Sapp looks at not only how scientific ideas changed, but how the reputations and the accounts shared about important scientists changed, as their role in the history of the discipline got reimagined in light of current beliefs.
 
Sapp divides his book into four sections, and the two longest are about Darwinian evolution and Mendelian genetics. Those were also the two sections where I was already most familiar with the popular, textbook version of the history, and so probably the sections that were easiest to read and that I felt like I got the most out of. The other two sections - about cell biology between Darwin and Mendel, and about the search for a molecular basis for genes after Mendel, plus all the discoveries that became possible once we found DNA - were more new to me, so I was introduced to a lot of ideas, but Sapp's approach makes Genesis not the ideal format for a novice learner.
 
Sapp gives Darwin credit for the thoroughness and quality of his research. The idea that species change over time and new species emerge due to evolution was already a hypothesis by Darwin's time. One thing he provided was a mechanism, natural selection, that would provide a reason why evolution occurs - an idea he got while thinking about Malthus. In turn, social theorists later used Darwin to justify domestic inequality and international colonialism as necessary forms of competition. Throughout the book, I was struck by how conservative (and often racist) biologists have been whenever they've talked about politics. Darwin himself was probably a Social Darwinist too.
 
The other thing Darwin's work provided was a lot of meticulous evidence, combining paleontology and field biology. One of the biggest changes he proposed was that the traits individual are real while 'species' are just statistical averages, as opposed to the older Aristotelian idea that each species had an set ideal form with individuals exhibiting variations due to imperfection. Darwin specifically thought that mutations that gave advantages were the main cause of speciation. By the mid-20th century, the consensus was that each species contains a lot of variation, and that geographic isolation is the main cause of the formation of new species, as each population randomly ends up with a different mix of those variant genes, which then diverge further when they can't remix by interbreeding.
 
Cell theory came later. It holds that cells are the basic unit of life - they're the simplest, smallest thing that can truly be said to be 'alive,' and every living thing is made up of cells. It also holds that every cell that exists came from the division of an earlier cell. (Sapp doesn't say, but it seems to me that you have to believe in evolution to accept that.) Cell biologists wondered how genetically identical cells, all born from the same egg cell, could give rise to all the differentiated tissues of the human body. For generations, they believed it was the cytoplasmic structure of the cell, not the genes in the nucleus, that was responsible for successful cell division. That was another thing I noticed - scientists arguing that their specific object of study was the single most important thing, the ultimate cause that everything else followed from.
 
Amazingly, to me at least, biologists theorized 'genes' as things that hold and transmit information before they knew any of the physical basis of genetics. A gene was a tiny little black box for a long time before anyone knew what it was made of or how it worked. Which reminds me, at least, of some of the black box concepts in contemporary physics, like dark matter.
 
Mendel is remembered as a virtual hermit, a monk who conducted experiments on pea plants and discovered dominant and recessive genes, only to be ignored at the time and forgotten until he was rediscovered much later. Sapp notes that Mendel was a Lamarckian, and though a monk, he was 'isolated' by the dominance of Darwinism, not because he was at a monastery instead of a university. And he was 'rediscovered' by two competing scientists doing lit reviews only after they'd both independently replicated Mendel's findings. Both were happy to credit the dead guy rather than let their living rival get the glory, but if I understand correctly, we'd still have the finding even if Mendel had never published at all.
 
The last section, about molecular biology, which uses methods borrowed from chemistry and physics to understand what's going on inside cells at the level of proteins, enzymes, and acids, including DNA and RNA. Sapp gives a chapter to the discovery of the double helix, but spends more time on the revolutionary discoveries enabled by these techniques, including figuring out how genes actually cause anything to happen, sequencing the human genome, and a whole host of discoveries made by finally expanding away from mostly studying plants and animals to paying a lot more attention to bacteria.
 
The study of microbial life is really fascinating to me. It was sequencing bacterial genes that revealed the existence of the archaea, extremophiles that thrive in Earth's least hospitable environments; that proved lateral gene transfer; that showed that eukaryotes came into existence when certain bacteria started living inside other cells as permanent internal symbionts, eventually becoming our mitochondria and plants' chloroplasts; and that showed the importance of bacterial and fungal symbionts in the microbiome of every multicellular organism. That last idea really was ignored! Someone thought of it in 1918, and Sapp goes on for about 2-3 pages showing all the times someone else reconsidered the hypothesis and dismissed it, only for it to become orthodoxy 80 years later.
 
I feel like I've had a good overview of the major discoveries and successive theories of the science of biology. I also feel like this was maybe not the best way for me, a non-expert, to try learning these things. I would've gotten more out of Genesis if I were already more familiar with that history, and using Sapp to supplement and enrich my existing knowledge.

Raven Girl

 
 
Raven Girl

by Audrey Niffenegger

Harry N Abrams

2013

 

 

Although she's best known for The Time Traveler's Wife, most of Audrey Niffenegger's books are more like Raven Girl - shorter illustrated books, that tell strange fairytale-like stories, blending hope and sadness, supernatural romance with realistic concerns.
 
Raven Girl is about the daughter of a postman and a raven who fell in love. She's born from an egg and has hollow bones, but otherwise looks human. She can read and write, but can't speak, and she longs to fly, she feels there's an innate wrongness with her body because she can't.
 
The raven girl grows up and goes to college. She catches the attention of a boy - I wouldn't go so far as to say she actually meets him, at least not for awhile - who has a crush on her from afar, who thinks he knows what's best for her, and who, like so many boys, is willing to commit acts of violence that he tells himself are for her benefit, although I'm getting ahead of myself.
 
At college, the raven girl also meets a biology professor, a plastic surgeon who performs rather outré surgeries for people who want them. He listens when she tells her about her body dysmorphia, and he's willing to try to replace her arms with giant raven wings if she thinks that will reduce her discomfort in her own skin, although he warns her, they might not be fully functional, and she might never fly.
 
Yes, that means Raven Girl is kind of a fantastical transgender allegory - something I had no idea of when I picked it up, solely on the basis of the author's other works and the cover art - and a shockingly good one at that.
 
Often, when scifi or fantasy stories include trans-like characters, they can use technology or magic to fully and completely become a cis-gender person in a way that avoids the way that real-world bodily changes are slow, partial, incomplete, painful, the way that you can change your body's future but not its past, that you can become a palimpsest but never a blank page. The surgical intervention in Raven Girl is much more like reality than it is like magic.
 
I'm also usually very hesitant about metaphors that relate being transgender to feeling like another animal species. I think these comparisons are often made in bad faith, and are used to belittle the transgender experience by making it sound akin to young children being unable to distinguish their imaginative dress-up play from adult decision-making. (The kids' book Fox the Tiger for example, reads to me like it's trying to convince trans kids that it's okay to play at being another gender as a game, but that after the costumes come off, Fox will always still be a fox and will never really be a tiger.)
 
I worry that even good-faith animal metaphors might be written from a place of ignorance, or might be too easily taken up and re-used in bad faith. But again, Raven Girl is thoughtful an emotionally realistic in a way that lets its metaphor capture something real.
 
So - the raven girl sets to work with the surgeon. The boy who likes her from afar tries to stop her, because he refuses to distinguish what he wants for her and what she wants for herself, and he manages to cause some harm. The raven girl's parents are surprised, but still love and accept her. And other ravens, now that her wings help them to see what's inside her, accept her too.

I'm very impressed with what Niffenegger has managed to create here!

Paintings of Japan Autumn & Paintings of Japan Spring

 
Paintings of Japan - Autumn

by Angela Pan

self-published

adapted from the zine 21 Days in Japan by Angela Pan 

2019, reprinted 2023

 

Paintings of Japan - Spring

by Angela Pan

self-published

2023

 

 

Paintings of Japan - Autumn and Paintings of Japan - Spring are a pair of art books by Angela Pan about two trips she took to Japan in 2019 and 2022. Autumn is an expanded reprinting of Pan's earlier art zine 21 Days in Japan, and Spring is wholly new. On both trips, she was based in Tokyo, and took additional day-trips by train.
 
In each book, Pan pairs essays about each site with a series of paintings she made there. Mount Fuji and historic Kyoto get plenty of space in both. Spring also features a lot of cherry blossoms. Each book is only about 40 pages long, so while these are bigger than zines, they're still quick reads.

Pan paints in acrylics. Her art is bright and colorful with lots of pinks and oranges, blues and purples. I felt like I noticed some improvement over the two books. The images in Spring seem a both tighter and more detailed than the ones in Autumn.

On the other hand, the art in Autumn seems a bit more varied and experimental. Pan includes images of food, people and cats she saw, and even inserts herself into some scenes. In Spring she focuses exclusively on cityscapes and broader landscapes. Those are the most common images in Autumn too, but not the only ones. Perhaps Pan's refinement of her technique has included a conscious decision to restrict her subject matter and focus on the larger scale. Or perhaps her goal of viewing the cherry blossoms on that trip made her want to give all her attention to the landscapes.