Kingdom of Characters

 
 

Kingdom of Characters

The Language Revolution that Made China Modern

by Jing Tsu

Riverhead Books

2022

 

 

Kingdom of Characters tells the history of seven different innovations of the 20th century that Tsu narrates as a single century-long effort to 'modernize' the Chinese language, to allow China script to be reproduced mechanically, and later electronically.

 
Throughout, the challenge is that Chinese script consists of characters that represent whole words (or that pair or triple up to make compound words, like 'boardgame.') Because of this, there are thousands of characters in very regular use, and tens of thousands in an expanded vocabulary. And these characters are not phonetic - there's no relationship between how the character looks and how the word sounds when spoken. These features can make Chinese challenging to learn to read, and means that it's not easily retrofitted into technologies designed for alphabetic languages.

 
Tsu tells this story in seven chapters, each focusing on a key technology, and proceeding chronologically from 1900 to the 1990s. The events he describes parallels, and sometimes intersects with, China's political history. I knew a bit of this, but more familiarity would've helped me. She describes what's most necessary at each point, but doesn't say much more than that. At points I would've liked more of an overview or more context. Other times, it seemed strange to me that something like the Cultural Revolution or the Tienanmen Square Massacre gets mentioned only in passing, and solely to help timestamp another event. I'll readily acknowledge that my reactions say as much about me as they do about her.

 
Tsu doesn't glamorize - several language reformers are imprisoned or tortured, by leaders spanning from the Qing dowager Empress to Mao Zedong, and Tsu's sympathies are for the people, not the leaders. However, it also becomes increasingly clear that he is most concerned with Chinese as it's written in the mainland People's Republic of China. At several points he'll briefly note that something is different in Taiwan, Hong Kong, or Macau, but it seemed to me he found those developments to be of lesser importance. And in the couple places where Taiwan and the PRC make different linguistic choices, or come into direct competition, he picks the side of the PRC.

 
One thing Tsu does well throughout is to explain the features of written Chinese to the unfamiliar reader, and to make analogies to the Latin alphabet. I'll make an analogy of my own that's based partially on what I learned from Kingdom of Characters and partly on my looking up various concepts on Wikipedia as I went. Written Chinese is a bit like written Latin, the official script used to communicate publicly, while Mandarin and Cantonese are only the best-known versions of whole families of dialects that are at least as different from each other as Spanish is from Italian. Chinese isn't vernacular, but does enable communication between members of an enormous population who would otherwise find each other mutually unintelligible.

 
Tsu's story starts around 1900. China is still suffering from the aftermath of the two Opium Wars and the ongoing Western occupation of close to a hundred of its port cities. Only about 10% of the population is literate, mostly scholars, civil servants, and members of the royal Qing court. It's clear that Western countries have technology that China doesn't, and civic-minded people wonder how their country can 'catch-up' and participate in international society as an equal. Some blame the complexity and difficulty of learning Chinese script, and suggest abandoning it in favor of alphabetical writing.

 
The first innovation is a set of phonetic symbols drawn from written Chinese rather than the Latin alphabet. The innovator here develops the symbols as part of a new system for teaching Chinese writing, which did sound much easier to me than the Reverse Cut system used up until that point. The same guy is also partially responsible for Mandarin beating out Cantonese as the official pronunciation of the characters. He was a staunch advocate during the convention where it was debated, but arguably won due to his procedural tricks to influence how the delegates' votes were counted. A later phonetic syllabary known as Bopomofo (like 'the ABCs,' it's named for its first few sounds) lingers in the background of Tsu's narrative at least into the 50s. Bopomofo also uses calligraphy-derived symbols, but each is also explicitly paired with a Latin letter.

 
The second innovation is a Chinese language typewriter. Tsu discusses several prototypes, but I don't know if any made it into mass production. Most tried to use whole characters. One, developed by Chinese students studying in the US and Chinese American professors, builds the characters out of strokes the way a calligrapher would. That one caught the eye of the CIA, and rather than allow it to help members of the public communicate more easily, they reserved it for translating intercepted documents.

 
Third is a code for sending Chinese-language telegrams. In addition to resisting transliteration into the Latin alphabet, the Chinese inventors have to figure out how to order the four-digit numerical codes in a way that's sensible and allows quick look-ups, and they have to argue about pricing, since Morse Code numbers are all longer than letters, making Chinese telegrams much more expensive to send.

 
Fourth, and related to the above, was figuring out a way to put the words in a meaningful order to allow them to be looked up easily. The Kangxi Dictionary had provided an order since the 1700s, but it still required checking the dictionary first. The system that seemed most interesting and intuitive to me was Lin Yutang's idea to create an indexing order based on the strokes used to draw the characters as calligraphy, with the first stroke serving the same function as the first letter in an alphabetical word. The Four Corner system that became most widely used didn't seem particularly intuitive to me, but it was developed by a bigshot in the publishing industry, so he could sell the books explaining his method cheaper than his competitors, and ensure that his method was used in the index of every book he published.

 
In the background of these chapters, China is in political turmoil. In 1911, the Qing empire collapsed and was replaced by a nascent democratic government. This progressively collapsed as regional governors and opportunistic warlords ruled over their own little fiefdoms. Japan invaded and claimed territory. The Nationalists and Communists cooperated to defeat the smaller local governments to reunify China, then went to war with each other.

 
In the 1950s, the CCP launches twin initiatives to create an official Latin alphabet transliteration of the language, and to simply written Chinese by reducing the number of strokes needed to write each character. The transliteration is called Pinyin, and it replaces the missionary-developed system Westerners had been using until then. This is when 'Peking' becomes 'Beijing' - not because the city was renamed, but because the way Westerners wrote and pronounced it changed. I think Pinyin also fully supplants Bopomofo, or maybe Tsu just stops mentioning it. Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau all continue using the traditional, non-simplified version of the characters.

 
The sixth innovation is a computerized version of Chinese. Initially, instead of the four-number codes of the telegraph system, someone invents a four-letter code corresponding to each character, based on the first letter of the Pinyin name for the first four calligraphy strokes used to write it. He came up with the idea for this system while he was imprisoned for intellectualism during the Cultural Revolution.

 
The seventh innovation in a unified international coding scheme so that when you write a Chinese character on a computer, no matter which country you're in or who manufactured the computer, someone else can open the file and see the same character. Unicode accomplished this initially in 1992, and Taiwan moved first to ensure that the traditional versions of the characters were the official Unicode versions, with the simplified versions used in the PRC considered 'variants' (like how the yellow-skinned emojis are official and default, with all the human skin tones treated as variants.) Conferences to debate, add to, and amend Unicode continue to the present day, and Tsu has attended several to observe the process.

A Small Miracle

 
 

A Small Miracle

by Peter Collington 

Knopf

1997

 

 

I'm visiting relatives for the holidays, and my little niece has a current favorite book. At her request, someone has read it to her several times a day for the past few days, and I've taken a turn as well!

 

A Small Miracle is made like, and employs the painted art style of, other children's picture books, but Collington also put several frames on each page to tell a sequential story - so secretly, it's also a comic. This is a wordless book, so the entire story is told through the art.

 

On a cold winter morning, an old woman wakes up in her small wooden house. There's frost on the windows and holes in the floor. She checks her stove, but she's out of fuel. There's no food either, and no money to buy more. She wraps up in a coat and shawl, and takes her accordion, and goes outside. We see that her house is a wagon at the edge of a field by the woods. Based on the visual cues, I think the old woman is Roma.

 

She walks across several snow-covered fields and passes a church before she gets to town. It looks like she's somewhere in Europe, or maybe Britain, in something like the present day. She sees someone unloading a nativity display from the back of their car. Despite the snow, the town is bustling with people out shopping. She sets up between two shops and plays her accordion, but everyone passes her by. She falls asleep, and when she wakes up, it's nearing the end of the day. She has no money from playing, so she sells her accordion at the pawn shop.

 

As she leaves the shop, a thief on a motorbike drives by and snatches her purse. She follows the trail of his bike through the snow, and sees that he's gone into the church. He bursts out the front door on his bike holding a donation bucket, but the old woman grabs it and wrestles it from him, then rushes into the church and locks the door. She sees that he's knocked over the nativity display. She puts the bucket back and sets the nativity scene back up. She checks outside and the thief has left, so she starts her long walk home.

 

Along the way, she collapses in a field. The colors go from afternoon, to evening, to night. The woman's body is progressively covered by a blanket of snow. It's at this point that the titular small miracle occurs. (I think? You could also read this as the moment of the old woman's death, and what happens next as her symbolic welcome into the afterlife. But for the purposes of reading aloud to kid, it's definitely a miracle!)

 

The figures from the nativity scene - Mary and Joseph, baby Jesus, and the three Wise Men - come to life and rush from the church to the field. They lift the old woman and carry her to her wagon. They put her to bed. Mary and the baby Jesus sit by her bedside to comfort her. Joseph sets to work chopping wood for her stove. 

 

The three Wise Men take their gifts to the pawn shop, where the shopkeeper is thrilled by the gold and gives them a big handful of money. They buy back the accordion and then head to the grocery store. The other shoppers are like, very lightly surprised, but like the pawn shop owner, accept the little walking statues with remarkable aplomb.

 

Back at the wagon, there's fire in the stove, and Joseph is busy repairing the hole in the floor and any other flaws in the woodwork. The Wise Men cook the woman some dinner, and set out the accordion and remaining cash where she can find them. All the nativity figures leave to return to the church. The old woman wakes up, and is hugely surprised to see that she has warmth, and food, and money, and even her accordion back!

 

Contained in this story, I think, is a message from Collington about the worth and dignity of ethnic minorities, and about the proper use of the church's resources.

The Storm of Echoes

 
 

The Storm of Echoes

by Christelle Dabos

translated by Hildegarde Serle

Europa Editions

2021

 

 

The Storm of Echoes is the last book in Christelle Dabos's Mirror Visitor quartet. When I started the series, I expected it to be a supernatural romance, and the first two books made it seem that perhaps we were watching Ophelia's long, arranged engagement to Thorn either because we were going to watch them fall in love despite themselves, or because she was going to reject him in favor of a real romance of her own choosing. Instead, what happens is that the pair, and Ophelia especially get caught up in events related to the fate of their world, and that is what the latter half of the series is about. By the time they realize they love and trust each other, it's clear that the stakes are so much higher than that by now.
 
Ophelia's world is a New World made of of 'arks,' islands of land amidst a sea of fog, that remain in position relative to each other just as they were in the Old World, when the Earth was still a whole intact planet. Each ark is ruled by a giant, supernatural Family Spirit, and is home to great extended human families who all posses Family Powers that derive from the spirit.
 
Ophelia is from Anima, where everyone has powers that animate or interact with objects. Ophelia can 'read' the history of anything she touches with her bare hands, and pass through any mirror to arrive at another nearby. Thorn is from the Pole, where everyone is some kind of psychic. Thorn can inflict pain, others create illusions, others are telepathic. The first two books take place at the Pole, in the frozen cold, amidst the courtly intrigue.
 
But by the end of the second book, we've learned that God, who sundered the Earth an turned it into the New World, who created the family spirits and gave everyone their powers, God is on a mission to take away everyone's free will, while God's mysterious counterpart, the Other, is loose in the world, causing it to fracture even more. And somehow Thorn is on a personal mission to stop them, so Ophelia, who as I said, has finally, voluntarily become Thorn's wife and ally is on a mission to help him. So books 3 and 4 take place on the ark of Babel, where the locals have supernaturally powerful senses.
 
The pacing of all this is strange! Things that seem like foreshadowing don't always foretell much, other developments arrive unexpectedly. But I'll say this for Dabos, she never ceased to surprise me, never gave me expected plots or cliche characters. The familiar names create a sense that you might know these people or understand what they'll do, but that's belied by the winding and dream-like nature of the plots.
 
In each volume, Ophelia ends up trapped, in disguise, undercover, in sort of perilous situation. This time around, she's in a sort of mental asylum for 'inverts.' At the end of the previous book, Ophelia learned that the mysterious God is really children's author Eulalia Gonde, who described the New World and Family Spirits in a book that was written before the Rupture. Ophelia somehow has access to some of Eulalia's memories, and enters the asylum, where Eulalia once stayed, to try to learn more about the past.
 
At the start of this book, the whole world is being shaken by echoes and by more and bits of the arks vanishing into the misty void. Babel responds by preparing to expel all its immigrants. Staying in the asylum is the only way for her to stay on the ark. Ophelia's inversion dates back to the time when, as a child, she got stuck in the space between while traveling between mirrors. Ophelia has begun to suspect that she somehow released God's Other when she got free, and hopes that experiencing more of Eulalia's memories will help her understand. And Thorn is there, in disguise as an inspector evaluating the care given in the asylum. But while she's trying to use the asylum, it's using her too, and the treatments are making her clumsiness and inversion worse.
 
What happens next would be hard to explain, but by the end, Ophelia has learned even more secrets about God and the Other, about the Rupture and the nature of the world, and she even gets to see a glimpse of what her life would've been like if she'd never got stuck in the mirror. She and Thorn both have visited the strange, languageless, color-reversed world on the Wrong Side of the mirror. And there's a climactic confrontation with the author of all the world's miseries, and some painful sacrifices needed to save what can still be saved.
 
This is not a Harry Potter pastiche; not a Twilight retelling, supernatural romance, or romantasy; and any early resemblances to other stories mostly serve to lull you into a false sense of familiarity that will only make the strange, fever-sleep qualities of the story seem all the more surprising. In both plot and mood, Dabos has created something really new.

Berlin Girls 1923 & Berlin Girls 1925

 
Berlin Girls 1923

Flirty Magazine Illustrations from the Weimar Republic

edited by Thomas Negovan

Century Guild

2019

 

 

Berlin Girls 1925

Flirty Magazine Illustrations from the Weimar Republic

edited by Thomas Negovan

Century Guild 

2022

 

 

I read Berlin Girls 1923 and Berlin Girls 1925 in such close succession that I'm going to treat them as a single entry. They are certainly not a single work spread across two volumes, but they are easier to talk about in direct comparison than they would be individually.

 

Both are art books put together from the Century Guild's excellent collection of 1920s and 30s German illustrations, and both consist almost entirely of images except for brief introductory essays by editor and museum curator Thomas Negovan. The images here come from a handful of Berlin magazines that I think were about bars, restaurants, theater, goings on, the night life, etc.

 

In 1923, Germany was experiencing hyper-inflation, money was essentially worthless, and the future seemed grim. The pictures from this era employ thicker line work, and have an almost pencil sketch quality. The colors are muted and spare and remind me of pastels. 

 

A lot of the images show women alone, often in their slips or other states of undress. There's something candid and un-self-conscious about these solo images, as though the artist actually caught someone getting ready to go out on the town for the night, or unwinding before bed afterward. When the girls are shown with men, half the time they're still in just a slip, while the men are inevitably decked out in tuxedos. I think those images are supposed to look sexy and fun, but there's an undercurrent to them that I find unsettling, like the men know they have the money and power, and the women can't quite hide their desperation.

 

By 1925, Germany's economy had improved. Hitler and his Brown Shirts had made a first attempt at a coup and been imprisoned for it. Prospects for the future seemed brighter. The changes in the visual style are dramatic. The lines are thin, often invisible. The images are in full color, and to me, it looks like watercolor. Instead of realistic proportions, a lot of the figures are boxier, more like statues than living people. They're also larger, or maybe zoomed in, filling the page instead of being surrounded by negative space. The two covers actually do a great job of showing the difference. As a matter of personal taste, I like the 1923 art style much better.

While many of the earlier illustrations showed 'behind the scenes' activities, most of what we see here takes place in public. There are more groups, fewer women alone. In general, the women are dressed nicer, in clothes that look new and maybe expensive. There's a recurring motif of a woman trying on clothes, and being outraged to notice that a man is spying on her. There are also a lot of beach scenes and women in bathing suits. 

 

Aside from the images of a man invading someone's privacy, these images are both less risque and less sinister than the ones from 1923, but on the down side, a lot of them are also more boring. The larger-than-life figures, the artificial poses, the fact that so many of the scenes are of people displaying themselves in public, all contribute to a sense that we're being shown how rich Berliners like to think of themselves, how they would like to be seen. In contrast, the more intimate and relaxed setting of most of the 1923 images appear to show more of what life was actually like for women in the night life.

Sea of Stars 1

 
 

Sea of Stars 1

Lost in the Wild Heavens

by Jason Aaron and Dennis Hallum

art by Stephen Green

Image Comics

2020

 

 

My first book of December is Sea of Stars 1. This is a scifi comic that treats space, or at least a particular region, as analogous to the ocean, and brimming with life. That much I knew going in.  

 

It's also about a space trucker father trying to reunite with his lost son when they're separated by disaster when a space whale eats his space truck. Initially this means he's in survival mode, trying to repair a derelict ship so he can get flying again, cobbling together a new space suit to incorporate a tiny cop-bot navigator and a man-eating piranha plant as a source of oxygen. Later it means getting captured by a band of Zzaztec hunters, who take him to their holy moon, where his son is for some reason...  

 

All this alternates with the son, who's maybe 6 or 7, having his own adventures with talking animal sidekicks. The truck was hauling the contents of a defunct space museum back to earth. When the space whale attacked, the boy accidentally grabbed an artifact, a war club that belongs to the Zzaztecs' living god. The weapon merges with the little kid and grants him godlike powers - he can survive in space with no suit, eat anything he wants, and understand the space monkey and space fish he meets.  

 

A disgraced Zzaztec woman meets the boy and brings him and his sidekicks back to the holy moon, hoping to remove her dishonor by bringing the god's power home. The high priest plans to retrieve the war club with a human sacrifice, but the dad, the animal sidekicks, and even the disgraced woman all try to stop the priest from killing the boy. And then the giant space whale shows back up...  

 

The pieces of this one never really came together for me. The juxtaposition of the dad's brutal, almost horrific survival tale paired with his son's light-hearted discovery of his new powers (which reminded me of Simba meeting Timon and Pumba in The Lion King) was jarring. And the 'barely even trying to disguise the source of inspiration' nature of the Zzaztecs felt uncomfortable to me, especially since they were cast in the roles of cannibalistic hunters in the dad's story, and child sacrificing religious fanatics in the son's.

Witch Hat Atelier 2

 

Witch Hat Atelier 2

by Kamome Shiarahama

Kodansha

2019

 

 

At the end of the first volume of Witch Hat Atelier, Coco and the other apprentices were in town to buy new 'wands' (actually pens) when they were teleported to a strange new place by the masked witch. In this world, magic is drawn, so in principle anyone could use it, but that fact is a closely guarded secret.
 
Coco is a very rare outsider who has learned the secret of magic and been allowed to keep her memories, mostly because her teacher, the witch Qifrey, has kept Coco a secret from other witches, especially from the Knights Moralis, who have the authority to erase memories.
 
Coco learned about magic because she saw Qifrey drawing a spell when he thought he was out of sight ... and because she'd been given a book of spell diagrams and a pot of magic ink by the masked witch. Coco tried copying some of the diagrams from the book, and accidentally turned her mother to stone. Qifrey hopes to turn her back, but he'll need Coco's help, so she gets to learn magic for real now. (I'll try not to lead with such a long recap every time, but it's all relevant to this volume.)
 
Anyway, as I said, Coco and Qifrey's other apprentices got transported into a magic maze by the masked witch while Qifrey's back was turned. The maze looks like a city, and it's home to a hungry dragon! The best student, Agott, blames Coco for this. One of the other girls tries to cheer Coco up with a spell she's been developing - fluffy clouds for taking a nap on. That's the goal anyway, although for now they just end up surrounded by clouds.
 
This gives Coco the idea to make a large cloud that the dragon will want to take a nap on. The others realize they can grind the city walls into sand, then use the sand to give the cloud some solidity. It works! And the four girls find the return portal home, but not before the masked witch nabs Coco, puts her to sleep, and puts an idea in her head...
 
Back at Qifrey's atelier, we meet the witch Ulruggio. He mostly makes contraptions - objects with magic diagrams that anyone can use - so he's not as sociable as Qifrey. I credit Shirahama for her creativity. Once complete, magic diagrams are 'always on,' so devices that use them often split the diagram into two parts, so they work when the parts are pressed back together. She's come up with a number of cool uses, like the ubiquitous 'sylph shoes' worn by older witches that let you fly when you hold your feet together.
 
A few days later, there's a rainstorm, and a traveling merchant comes to the atelier begging for help. A bridge collapsed, and his wagon, with some family members still inside, is trapped in the river, threatening to get washed downstream. This will pose a challenge to the witches, because they're not allowed to reveal how magic works to outsiders, even to save a life. So they'll have to pull off the rescue while using a bit of showmanship to hide what they're really doing.
 
Agott sees this as an opportunity to prove herself. We eventually learn that while she's the star student of the atelier, she's considered a disappointment within her family.
 
The initial rescue goes well, and Qifrey and Ulruggio each take a student to go check up- and downstream for more danger, leaving Coco and Agott with the merchant. The dashing teenage son tries to rescue some cargo by rappelling down the embankment. Unfortunately, more of the edge washes away, and Coco ends up clinging to the shore next to the son, who's trapped under a large rock.
 
Agott wants to save the day, but she can't. She realizes what she can do is create a distraction, a bird made of light, that will get the adult witches' attention, and keep the family members looking away so that Coco can draw some magic to save the boy. Coco doesn't think she can do it, but combines several lessons from this volume to use many small sigils to turn the boulder to sand, then draw a larger levitation diagram on the inside of her cloak and float them both to safety.
 
Everything seems okay again, but then the Knights Moralis show up and arrest Agott and Coco for using forbidden magic. Somehow, a large and spreading area surrounding the original boulder is continuing to turn to sand. This should be impossible, but I bet it's related to whatever the masked witch did to Coco as she was leaving the maze. The Knights threaten to erase Coco's memories, although we'll have to wait until the next volume to see if they already did, or if we only saw them put her to sleep.

Coco is basically an ascended fangirl in this story, someone who loved magic from the outside who unexpectedly gets the opportunity to learn it. She's curious, irrepressible, and modest (we'll have to wait to see if her esteem grows with her abilities) and the other students find her either endearing or annoying, though Agott seems like she's getting won over. If the stakes were lower, Coco's never-say-die attitude might be a little grating at times, but in both emergencies in this volume, that attitude has been key to making sure no one has actually died. I'm really looking forward to the next one!

Minor Detail

 

Minor Detail

by Adania Shibli

translated by Elisabeth Jacquette

New Directions

2016, reprinted 2020

 

 

I mentioned last time that I was in the middle of slowly reading a literary novella. That book was Minor Detail by Adania Shibli. In its slim hundred pages, Shibli tells two stories - first a faithful piece of historical fiction about a real event, and second a narrator who seems much like Shibli herself who tries to learn more about that event. Since the narrator's search in the second half is set in motion by her reading a real newspaper article from 2003, I suppose it qualifies as historical fiction as well, or at least, very historically-situated contemporary fiction.
 
I should mention now that the event at the heart of Shibli's book was the rape and murder of a Bedouin girl by a unit of the Israeli military in 1949. According to the Haaretz article, 20 soldiers, including the unit leader, were court-martialed and imprisoned for this.
 
I should also mention that I only heard of Shibli at this time because Shibli was going to receive an award for Minor Detail at the 2023 Frankfurt Book Fair, but on October 13, the Fair announced that were canceling the prize-giving ceremony this year, and Shibli and her German translator's talks were also both canceled. So I requested a copy of the book from a local library, because I wanted to know what had made the people behind this decision so afraid. Having read it, I don't think they could've been afraid that Shibli would be some sort of firebrand. I'm worried they were afraid that she would inspire empathy for Palestinians.
 
My empathy does not operate on some kind of zero-sum logic. I have lost none of my feelings for the Israeli civilians killed or the hostages taken on October 7. I will say that my empathy for Palestinian civilians has increased since then, both because so so many have been killed by Israeli bombs and soldiers (and presumably by lack of food, clean water, and adequate medical care) and because I have been learning a lot about what the conditions in Gaza and the West Bank were like before this latest war.
 
Let me state that I am opposed to killing civilians to achieve political goals. I'm not all that fond of the idea of killing soldiers either, to be perfectly honest. But if you're looking for someone who'll say that you're right, and your side should be allowed to kill their children, then I don't even care which side you're talking about, keep looking. You're wrong.
 
So, Shibli's novella is compact, and highly symmetrical. The first 52 pages tell one story, set in 1949, the second 52 tell another, probably set in 2003. Important events occur at the halfway point of each story. And each of the protagonists makes a fateful, consequential mistake without realizing it very early in their story.
 
The protagonist of the first half is the unnamed Israeli unit leader who will eventually authorize his soldiers to rape the girl and who will eventually order her killing. Shibli grants him no direct interiority, narrating in the third person, but we stay very closely fixed on him and his activities during this section. The story starts with his unit's arrival at their new base, where they set up camp and are ordered to patrol the surrounding desert and kill any Arabs they find. 

 

The leader is a meticulous man who is very careful about cleaning himself of sweat and dirt, shaving, and keeping his uniform neat. On the first night, he's bitten on the leg by a snake or spider or something. The wound is nasty, becomes infected, and starts necrotizing almost immediately. You could almost feel sorry for the guy.
 
After several days of discipline and routine during which the soldiers find nothing and the leader's wound gets worse and worse while he stoically and steadfastly ignores his own obvious health crisis, one morning their patrol of the desert discovers a family of herders. The soldiers kill them all, and their animals, except for a teenage girl and her dog, who they take back to camp. The leader calls the camp together, tears off the girls' clothes, orders her publicly cleaned with a hose, and her hair cut and dipped in gasoline to prevent lice. He then gives the other soldiers permission to rape her. That night he also rapes her, although his wound impairs him. The next day he orders her execution.
 
In the second story, we're introduced to a young Palestinian woman who has just read about this crime in the news. The day the girl died was on this young woman's birthday, 25 years before she was born. (I'll note that Shibli was also born in 1974.) The narrator works in an office, and tells us she is basically happy, although she's also anxious, and she worries that her morality is becoming defective. For example because when Israeli soldiers bomb the building next-door to her office to kill three men inside, she is more upset about being late to work about about all the dust in the office than she is about the deaths, and she recognizes this isn't how she wants to feel.
 
So, this narrator, who talks in the first person, who seems generally kind and chatty, tells us that she read the story in the news, but wants to understand something of what the girl felt. Not to read the event from the perpetrators' perspective, but to empathize with the victim. She calls the reporter, and he tells her the museums and  archives where he found his information. Because she can't leave the neighborhood, she gets one coworker to lend her her ID card and another coworker to rent her a car, and she sets out to go to the museum. Almost by accident, she buys some gum from a beggar girl while she's stopped in traffic at a military checkpoint.
 
When driving, she has to consult several maps, and keeps comparing the current Israeli map to a map of the region from 1947, and she keeps noticing and despairing about the villages that are no longer there. She takes a roundabout route to the museum because she thinks the most direct path will have too many checkpoints in the way. She arrives at the museum at the halfway point in the story. She sees uniforms, guns, jeeps from that time, but no information she thinks will help her. 

 

She drives to the Israeli settlement with the same name as the site of the crime, and visits the archive there. She learns that the original settlement was destroyed by the Egyptian army in 1948 and it was rebuilt on this new site a few years later. So she's in the wrong place. She takes a brochure, and realizes that it has a website, suggesting she could have learned all this from home.
 
She goes out to the site of the original settlement, the scene of the crime, but finds nothing, learns nothing. She stops for gas and spills some on herself. She comes back to the settlement and an Israeli man rents her a room for the night. In the morning, she should go home, but continues driving around the area, and stumbles on some Israeli soldiers doing a training exercise, and in that moment, she finally learns what the girl felt.

Although this book is short, the writing is dense with detail. Shibli gives very different narrative voices to the two halves, but then connects them through the repetition of imagery, and the structuring events.

Nanotech

 

Nanotech

edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois

Ace Books

1999

 

 

I'm halfway through a short but emotionally intense literary novella and needed a little break before continuing. Nanotech, an anthology of scifi short stories that were originally published in the early 90s. In the introductory essay, editors Dann and Dozois credit the 1986 nonfiction book Engines of Creation with more or less single-handedly inspiring nanotech as a topic for science fiction. Writing in 1999, they also note that at some point, nanotech became a basically ubiquitous part of the consensus vision of the future. Very very small robots of the type imagined here do not exist yet (and might never) but I think they're still a common form of imaginary future-tech today.

I'd be curious to know what uses Engines of Creation proposed for nanoscale robotics. The most common use in this collection is medical technology. All but two stories think of nanotech primarily as something that goes inside of people to supplement our own biological processes, to keep us healthy and young in ways the unassisted could only dream of. In a couple stories, the nanobots are also capable of changing our minds, allowing people to voluntarily choose to make themselves feel emotions or believe truths, and to make themselves permanently incapable of not feeling or not believing those things afterward.

I think every story in this collection is pessimistic. (Ironic, since I turned to it for a bit of emotional relief.) The nanotech either doesn't work as intended in some dangerous way, or it does, but it's the intentions themselves that are bad.

The most famous works in the collection are Greg Bear's "Blood Music," where sentient medical nanos decide to convert their human hosts to unmoving tree-like creatures, and decide to spread to as many new hosts as possible, Greg Egan's "Axiomatic," where a man who wants revenge on the guy who killed his wife buys a nano drug that will allow him to stop believing in the sanctity of human life, with one expected and one surprise consequence, and Stephen Baxter's "The Logic Pool," where a scientist on a moon of Neptune programs nano computers to competitively evolve new theories of mathematics.

Baxter's story is unusual for being set in the far future, and for imagining nanobots mostly as a computing medium. The others are all set in the present day or near future.

In the worst story, Michael Flynn's "Remember'd Kisses," a man mourning his dead wife uses nanobots to biologically and psychologically overwrite a homeless woman's body and mind to turn her into a facsimile. (Seeing a pattern here?)
 

The last dead wife story, Kathleen Ann Goonan's "Sunflowers," follows a man whose wife died after ingesting terrorist nanos. They allowed her to more easily envision possible futures, and tempted her to keep on imagining to the point of self-destruction. The man voluntarily takes the same nano drug to understand why his wife chose to die. He's aided in getting through his initial trip by another woman who once took the same drug at a party, and by viewing Van Gogh's paintings with her. Because they've taken the drug, they'll both have to resist its temptation for the rest of their lives. Goonan seems to understand the almost gravitational pull that the idea of death can have on the mind of a depressed person, and that psychological realism strengthens her story. This actually seems a lot like Inception, just with a very different future tech at its center. Darryl Gregory has stories like "Damascus" and "Second Person, Present Tense" where people experience externally imposed psychological states, but he imagines prions and pharmaceuticals, not nano drugs, as the source of the ideas you can't un-think.

Ian McDonald, in a story that later grew into the novel Evolution's Shore, gives us the closest to a 'gray goo' scenario when alien nanos start xeno-morphing Africa into a copy of their native planet's environment. 'Gray goo' is the result of nanobots that disassemble everything they touch and turn them into more nanos, so this is close, but distinct. "Blood Music" is also a disaster, but the humans are getting remade into better hosts, not just into heaps of bots. "The Logic Pool" actually ends with a true gray goo event, but fortunately it's a small uninhabited Neptunian moon that gets eaten, rather than Earth.

The best story in the collection is the novella "We Were Out of Our Minds with Joy" by David Marusek, someone I've never read or even heard of outside this collection. It's set a few hundred years in the future,  after present-day humanity discovers nanobots as a source of eternal youth and biological immortality. Because few people die, few are permitted to be born, so most people who are alive in this future were born before immortality was discovered, in our present day. There's a caveat here that there's a servant class of clones who apparently lack the full rights of personhood, including the right to immortality, and they are all much younger.

Marusek's world is permeated with nanobots, and besides the ones in our bodies, they're mostly hostile. All cities are domed to filter out the 'nasties' that fill the air and water of the outside world. A powerful organization simply called the Militia monitors for nasties that get inside the domes or inside human bodies, and protects the welfare of the collective at the violent expense of the infected individual.

"Out of Our Minds" follows a millionaire artist who falls in love with and marries a billionaire lawyer, just before the lawyer's star really starts rising when she gets involved with the government. The pair are even permitted to conceive a baby, which is why they're as happy as the title suggests. While telling their love story, Marusek shows us the world, and skillfully foreshadows just how badly someone can be ruined by a single rogue nano nastie, and by the Militia's predictable overreaction. While his wife is probably the real target, it's the poor artist who eventually succumbs to the doom we've feared was coming from the first page of the story. There's always someone jealous of another's good fortune, inevitable as the evil eye.

Marusek has the most complete vision of how nanotechnology might change the world on a societal scale. What will it look like when health, youth, and petty revenge are no longer restricted to a handful of mad scientists smuggling their latest discoveries out of the lab to use for personal reasons - when the changes are produced industrially, and affect everyone, everywhere? In this collection, really only Marusek has an answer. He's not looking at the very first moment of change, but at what comes after, when the transformation is complete.

Islands of Abandonment

 
 
Islands of Abandonment

Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape

by Cal Flyn

Viking

2021

 

 

In the introduction to Islands of Abandonment, author Cal Flyn explains that she started her project of visiting and reporting on places that humans no longer lived or used expecting to talk only about the devastation. There are good reasons why humans have designated these places as off-limits, and yet what Flyn found, when she looked, was evidence that the absence of humans was more beneficial to life in these places than presence of whatever we're avoiding (the radiation, or toxic spills, or unexploded ordinance, or whatever) was harmful.

The general finding at each site she visited was that slowly, eventually, after humans had been away long enough, diverse plants and animal species moved back in to the place people left behind, and these places often go on to become some of the most biodiverse places the world, providing stopping points for migratory birds, habitat for endangered species. These are some of the most dangerous and polluted places on Earth, and they are also refuges for species that might otherwise be extinct.

The technical name for this process is 'succession.' Pollen and spores blow in. Roots extend. Different kinds of plants jockey for space, then settle into niches. Often, forest regrows. Insects lay eggs. Animals seek temporary shelter, then make homes. Without intervention, a new ecosystem thrives. There are few areas of untouched wilderness left, but these reclaimed spaces represent a kind of feral nature.

Flyn goes to Chernobyl, closed off due to radiation, to the Zone Rouge in France, where forest grows over denuded WWI battlefields, except for a spot where they burned all the unused chemical weapons, and still nothing grows in the toxic ash. She visits the DMZ dividing the island of Cyprus, and to the abandoned collective farms left fallow after the fall of the USSR. She goes to a former colonial botanical garden in Tanzania, to a small island off Scotland where the people left but the cows remained, become feral and de-domesticated along with the land.

Flyn's book is divided into 4 parts. In the first part, she looks at clear success stories of re-wilding. In the second, she focuses on partially-abandoned places where people still live, including depopulated Detroit. As Flyn notes, every place she visited has some human presence, both people who stayed, and people who moved in after the others left. In the third part, she looks at places where the human impact lingers, so that it's not a return to the previous ecology but the birth of something hybrid and new.

And in the last part, she looks at the island of Montserrat, where volcanic ash now buries ⅔ of the land, and the Salton Sea in California, where over the course of the 20th century, suprise flooding turned a desert basin into an inland sea, and then evaporation turned it first toxic, then back to desert. These are places made unlivable by natural processes, but in their scale and scope, Flyn sees premonitions of the effects of climate change and pollution caused by human activity. If most of the book has seemed sort of hopeful (that the Earth can and has recovered from some of the worst we've done to it, just by being left alone) this section reminds us to still fear what human survival will look like as the planet continues to warm and change.

Catwoman: Lonely City

 

Catwoman: Lonely City

by Cliff Chiang

DC Comics

2022

 

 

Catwoman: Lonely City is an excellent superhero comic, one of the best I've read in the past few years. The 'present day' of the comic is set 10 years after a traumatic event that separates it from the main DC comics continuity. Like The Dark Knight Returns and Old Man Logan, this is a comic that follows a protagonist who's come out of retirement to travel through a dystopian near-future world for one last job.

 

On 'Fool's Night,' the Joker arranged for a flash mob of ordinary but aggrieved Gotham citizens to don Halloween clown masks and commit a wave of robberies and assaults all over the city. Meanwhile, Joker himself put on a bomb vest, and committed suicide by blowing himself up, killing Batman and Commissioner Gordon in the process. Catwoman was helping Batman, but was blamed for his death, and spent a decade in prison.

 

Lonely City starts at the end of that decade, with Catwoman released from prison, returning to a Gotham that's been transformed by the city's response to Fool's Night. A reformed Two-Face is now the mayor, and looking for an excuse to re-arrest Catwoman to help his reelection campaign against a wheelchair-using Barbara Gordon. Masks are banned citywide (even on Halloween), everyone's movements and spending are tracked by their G-Buck wristbands, and Bruce Wayne's donated fortune has funded numerous good works ... and some incredibly heavily armed and armored police. Barbara Gordon's campaign promises to reduce the over-policing of the Gotham's communities of color, and inspired by Catwoman's release from prison, protesters wearing illegal cat masks turn up to picket sites of gentrification.

 

For her part, Catwoman wants to break into the Batcave, to try to understand Batman's last words to her before he died in her arms. She needs to practice her gymnastics and get back into shape, (and do so without wrecking her aging knees), and she needs tools and allies, and the funds to pay for both, if she's going to get past the Batcave's elaborate security. It's the last thing of Batman's the city hasn't been able to claim, even after his real name and life story have become common knowledge. And, oh yeah, she needs to avoid getting arrested again before she finishes this final heist.

 

This dynamic, of Catwoman gathering allies and committing smaller crimes to collect the resources she needs for her one last big crime, while trying to stay out of reach of a mayor and police force who know she's guilty but can't prove it, yet, defines much of the action of the book. Early on, she connects with a costume designer to get a new outfit, and tries stealing an abandoned Green Lantern ring to circumvent all the Batcave's defenses at once. When that fails, she reconnects with Killer Croc, the Riddler, and some other familiar faces.

 

Eventually, there's a climactic race to the finish, as Catwoman makes her attempt on the Batcave, and learns the meaning of Batman's last wishes, while Two Face sends the cops en masse to Wayne Manor to catch her in the act. Without spoiling exactly what happens, let me say that Catwoman makes a kind of personal peace with the conflicted emotions that have been driving her throughout the book, and that she's able to make an impactful decision about what to do with Batman's legacy.

 

Lonely City is part of DC's Black Label line of comics for mature audiences. Beyond the violence and swearing, what's most adult here is really the themes - surveillance and control and over-policing, scapegoating the poor and racial minorities for political benefit, and the emotions - regret, mourning, and ultimately acceptance of human mortality. Plus, Catwoman defeats a lot of the police profiling simply by being more analog than the system is prepared for - using cash and a flip phone, staying off social medial and away from electronic banking, which I think you maybe appreciate more if you also used to do the things she still does, because her habits were paused by her time in prison.

The Plain Janes

 
 
The Plain Janes

by Cecil Castellucci

art by Jim Rugg

Minx Comics

2007

 

 

The Plain Janes is a young-adult graphic novel aimed, I think, at kids growing up in the aftermath of 9/11, in the pervasive fear and parental over-protection of that time.

Jane is a high school freshman whose family has just moved to the suburbs in the aftermath of a bombing in the city. I say I think this is a 9/11 analogy because it's an American comic released in the 2000s, but the details are vague enough that you could see parallels in any number of terror attacks. Jane was close to the site of the bombing, and while she was in the hospital, she started a one-sided relationship with a John Doe coma patient who was next to her when she woke up. Throughout the book, Jane's internal monologue takes the forms of letters she writes to this unconscious young man.

In the city, Jane had long blonde hair and popular friends. But after the attack, she gave herself a pixie cut and dyed it black, and at her new school, she rejects the advances of a popular girl who's much like her former self, and tries to befriend three outcast girls who sit apart, together, and eat their lunches in silence. They're all named Jane. Several attempts to befriend them fail, including trying out for Science Club, the school play, and the soccer team in the hope of winning over nerd Jane, theater Jane, and jock Jane.

Then Jane (art Jane?) gets an idea to do a guerilla public art installation on an empty construction lot. Rather than trying to join the others, she recruits them, getting them interested and excited in her new project. The secretly form PLAIN, People Loving Art in Neighborhoods, and take on more projects, all whimsical public displays. The police overreact, calling these "art attacks" and declaring a public curfew. Jane's traumatized mom also panics and grows more possessive.

Jane gets a crush on a cute guy who is also a loner and outsider at school. The other Janes all find themselves becoming more confident. And PLAIN, despite its general secrecy, gets at least one surprise recruit. An interesting turning point comes when PLAIN starts advertising participatory events, for example, asking everyone to sing at a specific date and time. The town's teens, bristling under all the new restrictions and collective punishments the school and police have been handing down, are happy to join in. What started as a playful solo art show becomes a collective resistance to unjust authority.

I think, somehow, this year I've been enjoying a multimedia subgenre of coming-of-age stories about girls forming or joining clubs. This and Loveless and This is How We Fly and Six Angry Girls, but also the movie Whip It, and anime like Laid Back Camp and Do It Yourself and Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken. Mostly by accident, I've found a series of stories that would've been excellent advice to my younger self, (and that still resonate with me today as I increasingly try to return to the world after the Covid lockdown) - go out, find friends, do things together.

I hope there are comparable stories addressing boys and young men, because if anything, they are even more lost and lonely than their femme and enby peers, and the hateful rightwing radicalization offered by the online Manosphere should not be the only voice showing them a path to camaraderie, companionship, and a cure for being alone.

Gideon the Ninth

 
 

Gideon the Ninth

by Tamsyn Muir

Tor Dot Com

2019

 

 

Gideon the Ninth is obviously very popular, and some of my friends absolutely love it. My initial reaction was a sense of alienation from the text - at first Muir seems to be targeting a specific audience, and despite being a queer woman in the Millennial age range, I don't think I'm part of it. In the early chapters, Gideon the book seems to borrow from the tropes of fanfiction, and Gideon the character talks like a Very Online person posts. Muir's close third person narration, centered on Gideon, adopts the same sort of netspeak whenever she needs a metaphor or analogy. I did warm up to the book though, and really enjoyed it from about page 150 onward.

 

The book starts out on the sepulcher homeworld of the Ninth House, one of eight royal families who each have their own planet, ruled by very Catholic-seeming necromancers, who serve the Immortal God Emperor of the First House. The Emperor's self-resurrection, ten-thousand year reign, and unceasing interplanetary war against unspecified enemies bear more than passing resemblance to Warhammer 40K.

 

Harrow is the royal daughter of the Ninth House, and Gideon is a commoner and indentured servant with the demeanor and vocabulary of someone who spends about 12 hours a day on Twitter and Tumblr, although what she actually does is practice swordfighting. How it's possible for Gideon to be the way she is is never addressed, you just have to accept it. 

 

Harrow and Gideon are both in their late teens, and are the only two people under 40 on the whole planet. This ominous fact is stated once, early on, and then rarely referred to again until about 300 pages later, when we get the official version of what happened, and then the truth like 1 page after that. So the amount of foreshadowing and pace of information reveal could've been better, in my opinion. 

 

Because they are the only two children, Harrow and Gideon grow up a bit like sisters, but with a vast inequality in their relationship that makes them seem like rivals who hate each other at the start of the book. Early on, I assumed they were in an enemies-to-lovers romance arc, which is basically a fair statement of their trajectory. To make sense of their behavior, I think you have to be pretty familiar with that trope, and/or assume that they always loved each other but neither knew how to express it, or else their eventual reconciliation and pairing seems awfully fast and not well supported by events shown in the text.

 

Okay, so, the Emperor invites one necromancer and their sworn cavalier from each House to come to the First House and learn to be his new Lyctors, since the original immortal house-founders are finally ready to be replaced. Harrow's actual cavalier flees the planet, so Gideon is recruited to tag along and pretend to be Harrow's faithful, loyal servant, in exchange for freedom from her indenture afterward. To help with the ruse, Harrow also orders Gideon to pretend to be a nun under a vow of silence.

 

Pairs from each of the eight Houses gather in the disused and gigantic First House building, where they're told that they're there to learn how become Lyctors, and that the first thing they'll have to learn is how to learn that. Harrow sneaks off to start studying immediately, and Gideon is a mute witness to everyone else's interpersonal drama without really understanding any of it. 

 

One thing that's clear is that the Ninth House is unusually small, devout, and isolated, like a remote convent. The others are still necromantic royalty, but they vary in their degrees of ceremonial pomp, religious intensity, kindness and cruelty, and most of them know each other from previous state dinners and the like. Everyone's last name is based on their House number, which is convenient for a reader trying to keep track of the large cast, and also contributes to the tongue-in-cheek nature of the worldbuilding. The characters all take themselves very seriously, but Muir has set them in something like the Adventure Time version of the 40K universe.

 

For me, the point where things finally really got interesting was when Harrow realizes that she can't do this alone, asks Gideon for help, and starts sharing information. We get some very D&D-esque scenes where the pair explores the halls of the labyrinthine First House looking for secret doors, then studying tableaus of objects trying to discern what they indicate about the previous occupants. 

 

The way Harrow and the other necromancers learn here is to find preserved ten-thousand year old laboratories where they can repeat key necromantic experiments that show them how to cast new spells. In what feels like a nod to Jack Vance, the spells are essentially equations or proofs - math that has become magic. The labs date to a time just before the Empire, and belong to a world that's recognizably the near-future of our own contemporary Earth. The experiments all require cooperation between necromancer and cavalier, which forces Gideon to trust her body and spirit to Harrow's magic, which she does more readily than you'd expect.

 

And this is the other interesting thing about this section. We finally get to see who Gideon really is, as revealed by her actions, rather than her words, ironically, especially so once she discards the fake vow of silence. Gideon talks like a shitposter and fancies herself a super cool tough-guy badass, but behind her bravado, we eventually see someone who's much kinder (and much more vulnerable) than she thinks she is. She's also kind of a pushover for any pretty girl who's nice to her. My regrettable tendency to see reflections of myself in fictional red-heads led me, in spite of my initial annoyance, to sympathize a great deal with the Gideon we see in the latter half of the book.

 

The final element of the plot, that adds time-pressure to everyone's search for new spells, is that about halfway into the book, necromancer-cavalier duos start turning up murdered, and suddenly we're in an Agatha Christie And Then There Were None style locked-room mystery. I didn't care for this development when it cropped up in Seanan McGuire's Every Heart a Doorway, but it really works here. Interestingly, to me at least, despite the fact that everyone's magic is powered by death energy, and they've mainly learned it so they can go off and fight in whatever war the Empire is engaged in, they're all shocked by the murders and consider the killings to be immoral.

 

So, the femslash romance, the magic school competition, and the whodunnit plots define the middle and most interesting section of the book. Initially you wonder if it's Obvious Suspect, before eventually discovering that no! it was Unlikely Suspect all along. This is another area where I think Muir leans on her audience's familiarity with the tropes to make up forestall questions you might ask based on what she wrote alone. Because I think Unlikely Suspect does a few things that are difficult to square with the eventual revelation of their guilt. It's clear Muir knows the tropes well and is skilled at playing with them, but I wish she didn't seem to lean on them to supply logic to actions whose motives she doesn't explain herself.

 

Once all three plots resolve, what we get for the last 50 pages or so is one long climactic fight-for-your-life fight scene. And to give Muir credit, she certainly knows how to write action. If someone wanted to make a movie out of this, I think they'd be happy with the tour de force boss fight that caps off the story.

 

This is an ongoing series, and to judge from the fan response, continues to improve after the first book. I haven't decided if I'll continue. Certainly not right away. I am glad I stuck with it through my initial reservations and doldrums, because once the pace picked up and the stakes of the story were revealed, I really liked reading from that point on.

Tokyo Jazz Joints

 
 

Tokyo Jazz Joints

by Philip Arneil and James Catchpole

Kehrer Verlang

2023

 

 

I think the best way to enjoy Tokyo Jazz Joints is probably while drinking a cold beer and listening to a jazz album. Coltrane seems to be quite popular at the venues in the book. This is a photo book, which documents Arneill and Catchpole's visits to hundreds of jazz bars and cafes in Tokyo and across Japan.
 
The book opens with essays by Arneill (who took the photos, and seems to have been the driving force behind the project) and Catchpole (an aficionado who acted as the tour guide.) Both speak fondly of the jazz joint as a place where the owners are serious fans who've amassed and catalogued enormous collections, and where the customers enjoy both the music and a space of freedom from the structures of work and home life.
 
The rest of the book is photos of the pair's favorite sites. I think each joint appears multiple times. Arneill seems to be aiming for a kaleidoscopic effect, showing us everything, but in fragments. We see interiors of the spaces, the bars, the record collections, the sound systems, the music menus, the memorabilia, the front entrances and back exits, the framed photos, the bathroom graffiti.
 
My favorite shots are from a far enough distance to take in several features at once. Initially I was disappointed by some of the close-ups, though that feeling lessened once I realized they weren't the only images of any bar, and disappeared entirely deeper into the book, once I understood their purpose. A lot of these places are absolute dives, and seeing a faded door sign or a markered-up bathroom wall communicates that. And those images are only part of the mix, not the whole thing.
 
The one change I'd make, if I had the power, would be to include a bit more prose from Arneill and Catchpole. Both seem to be competent narrators, and I would've enjoyed hearing a bit more about some of the places they visited.

Galaxy

 

Galaxy

The Prettiest Star

by Jadzia Axelrod

art by Jess Taylor

DC Comics

2022

 

 

Galaxy: The Prettiest Star is probably one of the better-known of DC's young-adult graphic novels. It got some attention in the press for introducing a new trans character, and was nominated for a GLAAD Media Award. It's not really a superhero story at all, although the idea gets mentioned a couple times, and apparently Galaxy has appeared as a supporting character in some recent Hawkgirl comics.

 

Galaxy is metaphorically like a trans person, but what she literally is in the book is an alien princess who goes into something like witness protection, and is completely biologically transformed into a human boy as a disguise. When the story opens, she's been living as 'Taylor' for 6 years, watched over by a couple guardians who are disguised as her dad and older brother, and accompanied by an adorable talking corgi who records everything she does for security reasons. So she's not actually transgender in the way that I am, but she's living in a metaphor for trans-ness that can only happen in fantasy or scifi.

 

We're told that these disguises were chosen because Earth tv gave the dad guardian the idea that they'd be inconspicuous. Giving Galaxy a boy's body is another security measure. But the logic seems flawed since we're also told that the aliens hunting Galaxy can detect a crystal hidden in her chest, meaning she doesn't really need to appear human, or live in a town near a telescope where no one can use cell phones to avoid appearing on social media. All those measures seem mis-aimed, protecting against the wrong kind of threat. Which is convenient for the narrative, because it means when it's time, Galaxy can shake off all these precautions without consequence, since they never served a functional purpose.

 

Early on, we see Galaxy as Taylor going to school, playing basketball, experiencing something akin to gender dysphoria, and missing her dead parents and her previous life as a beautiful princess. A new girl comes to school from Metropolis, where aliens are common and accepted, and Galaxy gets a crush on her. Kat is Black, queer, has dyed green hair and a prosthetic leg, and no romantic interest in Taylor ... until Galaxy steals her guardian's push-button disguise device and transforms back into her alien body for the first time on Earth. After that, Kat and Galaxy start dating, and then Galaxy accidentally breaks the disguise device, which conveniently leaves her stuck in her alien femme form with no way to go back to looking human.

 

We get a montage of trans pain scenes after that. Galaxy fights with her guardians, gets kicked off the boy's basketball team, gets bullied at school by mean girls in the restroom and a lunchroom where no one wants her at their table, has a fight with her one previous friend, and gets expelled because the school board doesn't want to allow an alien to attend. (So, not even for changing gender.)

 

After all that, Galaxy is sad, argues with Kat, contemplates suicide, considers trying to wreck the school building, then makes up with her family and Kat, and the girls go to the homecoming dance together.

 

Jess Taylor's art is very colorful and has no outlines. It's a style that reminds me of some queer fan-art I've seen, as well as the webcomic Lore Olympus. I particularly like the way they rendered what humans look like through Galaxy's eventual alien super-vision. And it's cool that DC found a trans author and nonbinary illustrator to make their trans-friendly comic.

 

I have a sense that Galaxy is written more for non-trans audiences, to convince them to empathize with Galaxy, because she grew up as a non-trans girl on her home planet, then was forced to into a male body that is literally foreign to her and literally a disguise. She's very meek and polite, she doesn't intentionally cause a fuss. She's unable to stand up to her bullies, for example, and she only starts living as an alien because of an accident that leaves her unable to change back. She doesn't really decide; it just happens. Later she can stand up to her guardian because his security measures really were pointless and excessive, and again, because there's nothing any of them can do to reverse the transformation. 

 

So like, most of the potential points of conflict, or areas where Galaxy could have exercised agency, where it might've been possible for the audience to wonder if she was doing the right thing, have been written in a way that precludes any question or choice or doubt. These are authorial decisions that I suspect are aimed at persuasion, at simplifying a complex reality to an unambiguous metaphor that you can't argue with, so hopefully you just accept.

 

In a pretty short format, Axelrod is trying to tell a complete transition story - from vague dysphoria, to wanting to be a girl, to coming out to one person, experimental cross-dressing alone and with a trusted friend, to suddenly coming out to family and attending school as a girl, to experiencing initial rejection, to arriving at a place of self-acceptance. It's a lot of plot, especially combined with all the alien backstory. 

 

I think if I'd read it when I was a teenager, I probably would've felt Galaxy's story was a kind of wish fulfillment - I too wanted to magically and instantly have a non-trans woman's body, and to have everyone just have to accept it because it was an irreversible fait accompli. Sadly the reality is much slower and less satisfying than that. But maybe as a closeted teen, I'd have appreciated seeing the dream come true for someone. At the time, I didn't know there was a real, non-magical, non science-fictional path to go from being a teenage boy to being an adult woman. 

 

Today, as an adult who cannot possibly still be considered 'young,' what I want is less trans magic and trans metaphor, and more trans reality. But that's not really a fair demand to make of a YA superhero comic. So I hope that Galaxy's intended audience enjoys her origin story.

The King in Yellow

 
 
The King in Yellow
by INJ Culbard

adapted from the short stories by Robert Chambers

Self Made Hero

1895, adapted 2015

 

 

The King in Yellow is a graphic novel adaptation of the first four stories in Robert Chambers' 1895 collection of the same name, by British comics artist INJ Culbard.

 
Chambers' stories remain pretty well known among fans of weird fiction, inspiring, among other things, some of the imagery in the first season of True Detective, as well as the indie D&D adventure Carcosa. I know Culbard from his comic Brass Sun, but I gather he has a number of these illustrated adaptations.

 
The four stories each contain characters who read the fictional play The King in Yellow. Supposedly its performance and even script are banned, but it circulates by being passed from reader to reader. The first act is fantastical horror story, and Chambers introduces each story with an epigraph supposedly from Act I. The second act isn't directly described, except that people who start reading it aren't able to stop partway through. They're driven mad, and are compelled to share the script with others. People who've read the play seem to believe that The King in Yellow is a real person (or god), that they serve him, and that his symbol, The Yellow Sign, can be used to identify both fellow believers and the King's commands.

 
In "The Repairer of Reputations," Hildred is a troubled young man who was recently released from an asylum where he was kept due to severe personality changes after falling off a horse and hitting his head. He's convinced that he can be crowned as some sort of royalty, but that first he needs to kill his own cousin (whom he believes is a rival heir). I love Culbard's rendering of Hildred as someone with an overly intense stare, who very clearly unnerves the people around him. Hildred has read the play, and after the violent conclusion of his plan, it's mailed to a friend in Paris.

 
In "The Mask," the sculptor who reads the play develops a chemical that converts living matter into something like white marble. He likens this process to the sculptural equivalent of photography. After preserving a rose and a rabbit, he gets the idea to try his chemical on a person...

 
In "The Yellow Sign," the play next arrives by mail for another artist. He and his life-model girlfriend are both troubled by nightmares, and then both read the play, which makes everything worse.

 
Finally, in "The Court of the Dragon," the young man from the previous story, already mostly out of his mind, is tormented by visions and phantom music.

 
This is a nicely spooky adaptation. "The Repairer of Reputations" remains my favorite. It has elements of science fiction and alternate history, though it's sort of ambiguous if these are 'real' or symptom's of Hildred's madness. As a stand-alone, it's equally ambiguous if the play is special or just something he's fixated on. Its recurrence in the other stories is what makes the play's power over its readers definitively 'real,' as we see life after life ruined by reading it. Honestly, given Hildred's instability, it would be hard to take his beliefs seriously if not for the later stories, which retroactively lend him a bit of credibility.

 
Culbard makes a couple key changes, though I think they're faithful to the spirit of the originals. Most importantly, he treats these as four chapters of a single novella, rather than stand-alone stories. The young man from "The Yellow Sign" appears in both the earlier stories as a friend of the other characters who is alarmed by their fate. It is literally the same copy of the cursed play that is read and passed on each time. The final story (originally the third), is rendered nearly wordlessly, as this character has been driven mad, the pages filled with stylized musical notes and visions of the King.

The idea of the play The King in Yellow is still compelling today, I think. It's a kind of thought experiment, a book that probably should be banned. The idea of a text that, if you read it, changes you in a way that you can't prevent or reverse, remains frightening. It's probably the basis for David Langford's 'basilisk' stories and the contemporary 'cognitohazard' concept - it's a danger that you can only escape by avoiding all contact with it. There's no safe way to study the text without succumbing to it; worse still, you can encounter it entirely by accident simply by doing the thing we all do all day long - read text without knowing what it says already. I think it's that idea that keeps us coming back to Chambers over a century later.