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.