Underland

 
Underland
A Deep Time Journey

by Robert MacFarlane

Norton
2019

 

 

Underland was a Christmas present a couple years ago. It's non-fiction, combining nature writing and travel writing, as MacFarlane travels to a number of underground sites, and both writes about the experience and uses it as a jumping off point to talk about history or climate change or whatever else is relevant.

 
MacFarlane goes caving in the limestone karst sort of near his home in England, visits a dark matter detection lab inside an abandoned salt mine, learns about the 'wood wide web' of fungal mycelia in forests, spends a week in the Paris catacombs, visits an underground river, goes mountaineering around caves and sinkholes in Slovenia where Nazis and Communists hid out from and executed one another during WWII, visits cave paintings, meets a fisherman-turned-environmentalist who opposes off-shore oil drilling in Norway, climbs up a glacier, clumbs down a glacial crevasse, and tours a site being prepared to store nuclear waste.

 
MacFarlane often narrates via a series of images. He gets a bit elagaic in the latter half of the book. A few of his caving and climbing feats seem stupidly dangerous, and he reports feeling fear during them, although he must be a fairly experienced hiker and climber, the way he gets around.

 
There are recurring motifs of him being awed by the size or depth or oldness of something he's encountered, of having no words to describe these unhuman places. There's also a running thread of his awareness of the damage humans are doing to the planet, and the near geoligical scale of our pollution or the effect of global warming. You could easily read just one chapter on a topic that interested you, but I was glad to take the whole tour.

Berlin

 
 
Berlin

by Jason Lutes

Drawn & Quarterly
2020

 

 

Berlin is a graphic novel, and an absolute masterpiece. It's 550 pages long, and dense for a comic. Lutes's art is black and white with clean, precise linework that's highly realistic. I've see Lutes's art in a handful of roleplaying game book illustrations before, but his work here is a tour de force.

 

Berlin probably centers on Martha Muller - it begins with her arrival and ends when she leaves, but Lutes follows at least a half-dozen characters closely, and dozens more make repeat appearances, and the story covers the late 1920s to early 1930s. 

 
I don't know how someone who studies literature would classify Berlin (besides, obviously, calling it 'historical fiction,') but it reminds me of descriptions of the early social realist novels. We hear dozens of viewpoints and philosophies, from leaders making speeches to friends debating ideas, we see frank and unsentimental portrayals of everyday life, and at several points, hear the stray thoughts of a dozen people in a crowd.

 
Martha is fleeing an arranged marriage in Koln. She comes to Berlin to study art initially, and end up befriending and dating Kurt, a pacifict newspaper reporter, and fellow student Anna, who starts the book a lesbian and ends it a trans man.

 
We also follow the Braun family, who are split up by politics. Mother Gudrun takes daughter Silvia to join the Communists, while father Otto takes the other two children to join the NSDAP. Both groups provide food and communal housing to willing foot soldiers. Silvia ends up bounced around by fate, living briefly with the tramp, Pavel, and getting adopted for a time by the Jewish Schwartz family, before choosing her own path.

 
We see the Cocoa Kids, a Black jazz band from the US. We see several May Day demonstrations, and the violence visited on the Communists by the Socialist government. We see the rise and rise of the NSDAP. And in general, we see people trying to make lives for themselves in a cosmopolitan city in a time of conflict that we in the audience know is doomed to end in tragedy.

The Book Tour

 
 
The Book Tour
by Andi Watson
Top Shelf Productions

2020

 

 

I assumed The Book Tour was a graphic memoir, but it turns out to be fiction, a true graphic novel. Sea of Tranquility also had a fictional book tour. Despite the indignities of travel and any sort of meeting with the public, the actual hardest part seems to be being separated from one's family.

 
The fictional author touring in The Book Tour is GH Fretwell, an absolutely luckless fellow. His tour is one day behind another author who's written an genuine blockbuster hit. Meanwhile no one attends Fretwell's signings or buys his book.

 
Also, someone's been kidnapping women, including the owner of the first bookstore on his tour, and the police seem to suspect him...

 
We alternate between hotel check-ins, disappointing calls home, empty signings, and run-ins with suspicious police as Fretwell's situation devolves to become more and more humiliating.

 
Watson's art is simple and sketch-like, with cartoony faces and realistic backgrounds of the various bookstores and cobblestoned European cities. The repetition with variations captures the nightmarish quality of the tour, and there's a good balance between humor and rising dread as his circumstances get worse and worse at each stop, building to an appropriately anticlimactic conclusion.

The Devil is Dead

 
 
The Devil is Dead

RA Lafferty
Avon

1967

 

 

RA Lafferty belongs to category of authors who I classify as 'Catholic science fiction,' which is a category that really only exists inside my head. Into it, I'd place CS Lewis, Madeline L'Engel, maybe David Lindsay, Cordwainer Smith, and perhaps some others. 

 
They're all authors who wrote a blend of scifi and fantasy that's both heavily infused with religious symbolism and almost entirely unlike anything being written by their contemporaries. It's weird, in the way that outsider art is weird, because they're not really a part of the scene of scifi writers who are working with the same editors and publishers, whose work defines the genre. And it's earnest and moral (sometimes moral-izing) in a way that you don't see in the rational, atheistic mainstream of scifi.

 

The Devil is Dead is divided into roughly two parts. In both, we follow Finnegan, an alcoholic sailor who finds himself caught up in what appears to be a pre-historic plot to destroy human civilization. Writing in the late 60s, Lafferty described his story as taking place 'a few years ago.' I checked a calendar, and based on the date given for Easter, that means the first part takes place in fall 1947 and spring 48. The second part probably goes into 1949 or 50.

 
In the first part, Finnegan comes to from a long bender to find himself befriended to millionaire Saxon Seaworthy. He gets recruited to go on a round-the-world boat trip with a crew that includes the Devil, a mermaid, and an ogress. They look human, and in this part, it's unclear whether this is literally true, a metaphor, Finnegan's imagination, or some combination. We learn that Seaworthy previously killed the Devil, and plans to kill him again. Finnegan realizes that he and the mermaid are, and ought to be, on this second Devil's side. But after a climactic bit of mutiny and counter-mutiny, the Devil ends up dead again, and Finnegan flees with a million dollars of Seaworthy's money.

 
The second part is much more rollicking and loose. Finnegan goes on a year-long bender and meets a variety of tall-tale tellers, and gradually pieces together what actually happened in the first part of the book.

 
What we gradually learn is that there are people 'of the old blood' who form a second human species, who are at war with the people of the 'new blood,' which is us. These people are like nephilim or demigods, like atavistic Neaderthals or Cesare Lombroso's evolutionary throw-back 'Criminal Men.' No one answer is definitively right. Everything involving them ends up involving analogic equation with myth, uncanny doppelgangers, psychic communication, and the like.

 
Finnegan has some of the old blood, and has to decide if he will help Seaworthy burn the world down, or oppose him, possibly at the cost of his life. The last chapter takes place right before Seaworthy walks into a trap with Finnegan as bait, a confrontation that will probably lead to one or both of their deaths. Before the confrontation, we finally get a definitive account of where the two Devils came from, and what happened when Seaworthy killed the first, and the second took his place without anyone noticing. And then the book ends, right before the confrontation that would finish the story.

 
This was a weird one, but kind of fun. There's not much plot, but Lafferty takes a lot of pleasure in telling it. The characters swap tall tales and shaggy dog stories and boast of improbable feats. The central mystery probably sounds silly if you spell it out too neatly, but Lafferty talks around it instead, offering multiple almost-compatible explanations, like you might see as people try to make sense of something they don't fully understand. I have a sense that fans of Samuel Delany would like this one; it reminds me a little of his book Nova.

Detransition, Baby

 
 
Detransition, Baby

by Torrey Peters
Random House

2021

 

In my late teens and early 20s, I read a lot of books about trans people, most of them by non-trans authors, and most of them not so great. Since then, I've kind of avoided transgender lives as a subject for fiction reading, although there's been some very good sociology published in the last 10 years or so.

 
Detransition, Baby is written by a trans woman, and is by far the best trans fiction I've read. It also stirred up a lot of complicated emotions for me, so I read it much more slowly than I otherwise might.

 
Ames used to live as a trans woman, but has returned to living as a man. Katrina is Ames's current girlfriend and is unexpectedly pregnant. Reese is Ames's ex-girlfriend, and is also a trans woman. When Katrina asks Ames whether she should have an abortion, or if not, how they can provide a stable life for the baby, Ames suggests that the three of them co-parent together. Cue the Odd Couple theme music?
Well no, because this is not a comedy or farce. Peters alternates present-day chapters with flashbacks that tell about Ames and Reese's childhood and their transitions, how they got together, and how they broke up. 

 
Between the two of them and their acquaintances, Peters tells a variety of stories about what it's like to be a White trans woman. I could see some similarities to myself and my life in both of them, as well as a lot of differences. The characters are different enough from each other that there's no chance you could read it and think that any one of them has had like the typical transgender experience.

 
Reese in particular is self-destructive and messy, and unapologetically proud and self-righteous about it. She is also probably the most-developed character in the book. Ames is, at times, infuriatingly passive. (This isn't a flaw in Peters' writing - Katrina and Reese are often infuriated with him.)

 
In the present day, we see Katrina initially reject Ames's idea, then warm up to it, accept it, go through a honeymoon phase, experience the a setback that makes her want to cancel the whole idea, and finally return to the point of needing to make the decision again.

 
I suspect that non-trans readers will experience the book differently than I did. I imagine everyone is, at times, confronted by people, either real or fictional, who are similar enough to you that they could have (and perhaps, in your heart, you feel they should have) made the same choices you did, but instead they chose differently, which in turn leads you to reflect on the quality of your own decisions. I actually don't encounter people like that very often, but in reading this book, I did.

Radioactive

 
Radioactive
Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout
by Lauren Redniss
Dey Street Books

2010, reprinted 2015

 

 

Before reading Radioactive, I would have confidently called it a graphic novel.

 
But for one thing, it's not a novel, it's non fiction. Redniss tells the biographies of Marie and Pierre Curie leading up to their marriage, tells of their work together and marriage, and continues telling Marie's story after Pierre dies. She also tells a lot about radium and polonium, and interlaces the biography with vignettes of information about different "events" in the history of radioactivity, from the Radium Girls to Hiroshima to Chernobyl, at least a dozen in all. Redniss uses a lot of direct quotes, which makes her writing style feel journalistic.

 
Radioactive is illustrated, but it's also not a comic. There are no panels, and the art isn't sequential. Each page is a full-page illustration with text, like an artist's book. Redniss drew each page by hand, then photocopied it onto a transparency, then used that to develop a cyanotype - a kind of photograph where areas exposed to light turn blue, and the covered parts remain white. Some pages are orange, presumably from using a computer to invert the color, and others employ photographs in collage. Redniss also designed her own font and arranged the text on each page.

 
Marie Curie worked hard and made incredible discoveries about radioactivity, a term she coined. She won two Nobel prizes, one with Pierre in physics, and one alone in chemistry. After Pierre died, she had a love affair with a married scientist. Her children carried on her work, and as adults, her lover's son with his wife ended up marrying Marie and Pierre's daughter, and they also won a joint Nobel. Marie Curie's story is interesting in its own right, and Redniss's book is accessible and visually fascinating.

The Girl from the Other Side 1

 
 
The Girl from the Other Side 1

Siuil, a Run
by Nagabe
Seven Seas

2017

 

 

Siuil, a Run: The Girl from the Other Side is a manga series about a little girl named Shiva and a monster called the Teacher. 

 
The art is really lovely. Instead of just being outlines against a white background, it's full of dark shading and texture. There's probably more black space than white. It's some of the prettiest manga art I've see (though my experience is somewhat limited), on par with Witch Hat Atelier. The closest comparison I can think of are John Bauer's paintings of children meeting trolls in the Swedish forest.

 
Shiva looks maybe 5 or 6, and is really the picture of innocence. She has been abandoned in the forest, because her aunt wanted to save her life. Shiva's people think she might have been cursed by an Outsider, and are prepared to kill her to prevent the curse from spreading. The Teacher is an Outsider, and even as he takes care of Shiva, is careful to never touch her so that he won't curse her. He looks like a man in a black cloak with a bird head.

 
Shiva thinks she's staying with the Teacher for a few days until her aunt comes to get her. The Teacher doesn't yet have the heart to tell Shiva that her aunt is probably dead, and she'll never be allowed back inside the village walls.

 
In part 1, we learn all that, we see the Teacher protect Shiva from a group of soldiers from the village who are hunting for anyone outside the walls, and we see them meet another Outsider, who does touch Shiva, making her officially cursed. I'm curious what will happen next.

The Taiga Syndrome

 
 
The Taiga Syndrome

by Cristina Rivera Garza
translated by Suzanne Jill Levine and Aviva Kana
Dorothy Project

2018

 

 

The Taiga Syndrome is a Latin American detective story. It's marketed as a novel, but barely 100 pages long, with pretty generous font size and margins.

 
A rich man hires a woman who used to be a detective to find his second wife, who has run off with another man to the taiga, presumably in Canada or Russia. The wife has sent her husband a telegram at each stop along her journey, and the rich man wants the detective to retrace it. 

 
The man suspects his wife has 'Taiga Syndrome,' supposedly the urge one feels, when deep in the wilderness, to go even deeper and get completely lost.

 
So the detective flies off, she hires a man to be her translator, and they find the tiny village that was the missing wife's last known stop. She and the translator spend the majority of the novella trying to find out what the missing wife and her boyfriend did in the village and where they may have gone next. They make a few unsettling discoveries that are unrelated to the couple.

 
Eventually they do find the missing wife, who tells them that she's not going back. The detective returns home and reports to the man who hired her, he gets angry and beats her up.

 
The book is narrated first-person. The text is spate, and a bit dream-like, especially as things get weird. It reminds me a bit of Anna Kaven's Ice. The narrator occasionally likens the missing couple to Hansel and Gretel and herself to Red Riding Hood. I also initially thought the narrator might end up replicating the wife's story, but no, she solves the case and goes home. The whole story is quite brief and stays at an emotional remove, many events are implied rather than described. It really is much more like a long short story than a short novel.

I previously enjoyed Barbara Comyns' Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead, from the same publisher.

Invisible Kingdom 3

 
 
Invisible Kingdom 3

In Other Worlds
by G Willow Wilson
art by Christian Ward

Dark Horse Comics

2021

 

 

Invisible Kingdom is a science fiction comic book miniseries. I read the first two parts last year, and was finally able to get ahold of the conclusion. 

 
The first volume follows Vess - a 'None' who has joined the ascetic Renunciation - and Grix - a starship captain who delivers packages for the online everything store, Lux. Vess is a true believer who comes to realize that the Renunciation is being financed by Lux. She gets aboard Grix's ship while escaping the other Nones, and the two decide to broadcast the truth.

 
In the second volume, basically no one cares that Lux is both the source of materialism and financing the source of anti-materialism ... except for Lux, the Renunciation, and whatever government is ostensibly in charge of regulating such matters. So Vess and Grix are fugitives. The try to hide out with some space pirates, but the pirates want to sell them out. The two women are falling in love, but Vess took a vow of chastity. But then Vess breaks her vow to save Grix's life when Grix is injured and it turns out that Vess's species coveniently releases some kind of healing magic when they have sex.

 
In this new volume, running away from the pirates and everyone else leads Vess and Grix to a tiny forested planetoid, full of Nones who claim they're going to break Lux's corruption and restore the Renunciation to its ascetic roots. Vess has another crisis of faith and asks Grix to leave her with the Nones. But then it turns out the planetoid is some kind of Death-Star-like superweapon, which the Nones plan to use to blow up various Lux and Renunciation buildings. Vess uses an escape pod to go after Grix, but simultaneously, Grix's ship is making a suicide run to blow up the Death Star, and Vess is bereft. Fortunately, we discover that Grix used autopilot, and she and Vess are reunited and reaffirm their love.
 

The art in these comics is very vibrant, but this final volume was a bit unsatisfying. The Nones with a Death Star feel very deus ex machina - they come out of nowhere to supply a plot-driven ending, rather than allowing the established characters and factions to achieve any real resolution. (Also, however did radical ascetics living outside civilization get ahold of a planet-killing super-weapon anyway?) 

 
The problem may be that there is no easy or happy resolution. The story in Invisible Kingdom is relatable because it's timely - consumerism and debt are rampant, corporate power is high, governments are weak and corrupt, and many major religions feel more like allies to (or apologists for) capitalism and authoritarianism than like solutions to them. 'Tell the truth' and 'love who you love' are both good advice, but by themselves, they aren't enough to inspire a revolution or build a better system in this one's place.

The Royal Society

 
The Royal Society
And the Invention of Modern Science
by Adrian Tinniswood

Basic Books

2019

 

 

I think I originally saw The Royal Society in a museum gift shop, and decided I wanted to read it based on the catchy cover art.

 
Tinniswood delivers a short (125 page) and just-the-facts style account of the founding and development of the Royal Society of London. We don't go very deep into the psychology or personality of any of the founders, but we do get a succinct overview of the major issues the organization faced in its first 200 years.

 
Okay, so in the early 1600s, Francis Bacon proposes "what if, instead of assuming Aristotle et al were right about everything, what if we try directly observing the world and learning about it that way?" Bacon proposed this around the same time that some astronomers and surgeons were looking at the stars and dissected corpses and beginning to suspect that Aristotle et al were not, in fact, right about everything.

 
In 1660, a dozen college professors started meeting to perform and discuss experimental observations of the world, and by 1662, they had a Royal Charter. The Royal Society had (and in fact courted) a mixed membership of working scientists and rich men with a hobbyist's interest in science.

 
The rich hobbyists provided the money and political connections needed to maintain the existence of the organization, if not its intended spirit. Isaac Newton spent about 25 years as the Society president in the early 1700s, but most of the leaders were aristocrats. The split membership was an ongoing source of conflict until about 1850, when the scientists pushed through some reforms to the nominating process that resulted in it (eventually) becoming an all-professional organization.

 
Apparently the term "gimcrack" comes from a play called The Virtuoso, whose title character, Dr Gimcrack, was a parody of the Royal Society fellows, and his ridiculous experiments in the play are based on the playwright looking for the silliest articles in the Society's journal.

Sea of Tranquility

 
Sea of Tranquility
by Emily St John Mandel

Knopf

2022

 

 

Sea of Tranquility is a time-travel story, you realize very quickly, and also a bit of a mystery story, which emerges as you go.

 
A few years before WWI, a man goes into the forest and sees something strange, then meets an odd man who asks him about it. 

 
Then in 2020, a woman goes to a concert and sees a video of the same strange thing, and when she meets the composer after the show, the same odd man is there asking the composer about the video, and she remembers that she saw him as a child, and he looked exactly the same age.

 
Then in the 2200s, an author who grew up on the moon is giving a book tour on earth. (She's obviously a stand-in for Mandel.) Her book is about a pandemic and has just been turned into a prestigious tv show, and also a real pandemic is starting while she's on tour. And on the tour she meets an odd man who asks her about a scene from her book where something strange happens in a forest.

 
And finally, we switch to the perspective of the odd man and learn why he's investigating the strange thing in the forest. He also lives on the moon, in the 2400s, where time travel is real, and mostly used to investigate strange things in the past.

 
Mandel's writing style is very clear and spare. There's no flowery prose, and not a lot of description or speculation. Her vision of the future is hardly different from the present. The one really speculative element is her vision of future history as a series of pandemics and lock-downs, like 2020 happening over and over again, forever, surprising everyone anew each time.

 
In the 2400s, people sometimes wonder if they're living in a simulation. This provides a motivation to time travel, and also maybe seems like the reason Mandel sets part of her story on the moon, where the sky and weather are definitely simulations.

 
This isn't a fast-paced story, and there's no 'action,' but the book is a quick read. It's quite clear, calm, and straightforward, which is impressive for a time travel story. The characters are well drawn, even though the prose is spare and the worldbuilding is minimal, and I credit Mandel for saving a few unexpected surprises for the last section of the book.

 
I'm certain this won't be as famous among time-travel novels as Station Eleven is among post-apocalyptic novels, but I'm glad I read it. I think I might try her Glass Hotel next, and maybe Eleven after that.

The Legacy of Heorot

 
 
The Legacy of Heorot

by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Steven Barnes
Simon & Schuster

1987

 

 

The Legacy of Heorot  is a collaboration between Larry Niven and a couple other scifi authors. 

 
Like A Mote in God's Eye, it features humans encountering aliens who've taken evolutionary paths that make them especially dangerous. But in Mote, the humans were all roughly equals, and nearly the whole book was written like a mystery as they tried to understand the aliens. Heorot has less mystery, more fighting, and more conservative politics.

 

Heorot tells the story of the human colony on planet Avalon, as they encounter the native apex predator, which they call 'grendels.' The colony's security officer, and eventual wartime leader, is Cadmann.
In the first third of the book, the colonists think they're alone on the island, with just some 'fish' in the rivers. Cadmann worries about security and perceives signs of a predator. The other colonists think he's paranoid, and when someone dies, they think he faked the attack. Then a giant grendel ransacks the camp and kills several more people.

 
In the second third, the Cadmann goes off to be a hermit, the colonists make repairs and let him know they defer to his judgement, and everyone tries to figure out how grendels work. There's a second attack, they learn some biology, they go wipe out the half-dozen remaining grendels, and then realize they've made a mistake. 

 
The fish are actually 'tadpoles' and the grendels are 'frogs'. The adults lay eggs that become fish-like youths. The youths eat plants, the adults eat youths, and the very few surviving youths become adults. And with all the old adults dead, all the current youths are maturing into grendels.

 
The final third of the book is the interminable final battle, led by Cadmann.

 
The biggest problem with the book is the authors' hero worship of Cadmann. The colonists make mistakes in dealing with the grendels, but so does Cadmann. His hermit house, which becomes their siege fort, has a stream running through it... and grendels are amphibious river dwellers... But Cadmann's mistakes are because grendels are alien and mysterious, while the other colonists' mistakes are because they're too liberal and decadent to submit to his genius.

 
The whole structure of the book is set up to create a scenario where Cadmann is objectively right, the only correct government is military dictatorship by him, and everyone who disagrees gets eaten by a monster for failing to heed his wise counsel. Most of the colonists literally have brain damage caused by cryogenic hibernation in space, but Cadmann's mind, like his physique, remains pristine.

 

The whole situation is so slanted in favor of making the way Cadmann wanted to organize society from the start the only correct way to survive the grendel attacks that it reminds me of this essay by Corey Doctorowt reminds me of this essay by Corey Doctorow. As Doctorow notes, despite the convolutions the authors have to go through to make their way seem like the right way, even in a fiction they control, the authors themselves, and some portion of their readership, seem to treat stories like this like they're a persuasive argument that real-world society should be organized the same way.

 
The first third would've been better if the reader thought Cadmann might be faking a monster attack because he's paranoid, bored, and wants to force the others to listen to him - but the authors show you he's right before he knows it himself. And the last battle is much, much too long. Making it shorter, instead of forcing the audience to bear witness to Cadmann's tactical brilliance, would've helped a lot.

 
Also, the main personal stories revolve around the various women who want to sleep with Cadmann, and the one he most wants to but can't, because of her jealous husband. He does sleep with the others, but his truest love remains unconsummated, which is treated as a noble tragedy.

 
There's a sequel, but I won't be reading it.