Ringworld

 
 
Ringworld

by Larry Niven

Del Rey

1970, reprinted 1985

 

 

Ringworld is reasonably famous work of science fiction. It's probably Larry Niven's best-known work. It's the culmination of all the other books and stories in his Known Space setting. Barlowe included one of its aliens in his Guide to Extraterrestrials. It won both the Hugo and Nebula awards, and you can probably find a copy in just about any used bookstore you check. It's long been on my 'probably ought to read this sooner or later' list, and before reading it, I kind of assumed it would eventually get adapted into a prestige miniseries, although now I rather doubt it.
 
The idea of the Ringworld itself is definitely the best-known part of the book, certainly more so than the plot or any of the characters. The Ringworld is an artificial habitat meant to provide almost unlimited living room. It's a circular hoop around it's own star, occupying approximately the entire orbit of Earth. The ring is about a million miles wide, bounded by walls a thousand miles high. For reference, the Earth is about 8000 miles in diameter, so you could stack about 100 Earths from wall to wall. The high walls keep the atmosphere from escaping, giant solar panels in a narrower orbit provide shade to create a day-night cycle, and the whole thing spins very fast to create a centrifugal force approximating Earth gravity. It's a thought experiment, not a thing that could actually exist, and one thing that makes it interesting is that it's very difficult to imagine it without shrinking it to more comprehensible dimensions.
 
The basic plot is that two humans and two aliens go to investigate the Ringworld, they crash land, and then have to use flying motorcycles to try to find help getting their spaceship off the ring. They see the sights, learn more about the history of the place, meet people who can't help them, eventually meet someone who can, and then finally leave. In structure, it's actually quite similar to Jack Vance's Big Planet, Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity, or Jack Chalker's Midnight at the Well of Souls. The success or failure of a plot like that is going to depend on how much you like the characters, and how interesting what they find on the surface is. No matter how cool the big-picture premise is, it can't save poor execution - and notably the big picture here doesn't imply much about the details. The ring could have almost anything on its surface, the same as any alien planet.
 
I'll touch on both of those in a minute, but I first want to note that I found the pacing of the book kind of weird. It's a 300 page book, and we don't arrive at the Ringworld until a hundred pages in, a third of the way through. And we don't meet anyone living on the ring for another 50 pages, at the book's halfway point. Because their flying motorcycles can go at supersonic speeds, the crew of characters we're following travel many times farther than it's possible to travel on Earth, but only interact with a few things, flying over and ignoring the rest. They encounter a village, some dangerous plants, an abandoned city, some dangerous weather, and then an inhabited city where they find help. For all that the ring is huge, Niven doesn't exactly stuff their trip across it with events.
 
I have a fondness for what I call Sapir-Whorf scifi, stories like Samuel Delaney's Babel 17 or China Mieville's Embassytown, that take real properties of language and amplify them until they're basically supernatural. Niven does something like that here (and really, in everything of his I've ever read) with Malthus's ideas about population growth and Darwinian evolution. The pressure created by population growth is more-or-less THE reason why any sentient species does anything. Growth plus evolution means, in Niven's view, that neoliberal economics, selfishness, rational-choice and game-theory decision-making are objectively true, and any attempts at kindness or altruism will give way to necessary cruelty within a few generations. And more generally, cultural change within any sentient species isn't actually driven by culture, but by the success or failure of how they manage their biological evolution. Nivens characters all believe this stuff, and the only times they're ever wrong are when they don't believe it enough.
 
This can potentially make for interesting fiction, although it can also just be offensive and pedantic, and not coincidentally, Niven pairs it with some pretty extreme sexism. What women are 'for' in Ringworld is providing men with children, with pleasure during sex, and otherwise staying out of the way. Both the aliens on the crew come from species where their females are literally non-sentient animals used solely for breeding. The human woman on the expedition is only there because the man likes having sex with her. At one point, to cheer her up when she's sad, he tells her if she weren't there to keep him happy, he'd be forced to rape the aliens. (Yes, this is really something Niven wrote as a reassuring sentiment!) When they later meet the person who can help them, her previous role on her crew was as ship's prostitute, whose job it was to keep the otherwise entirely male crew happy. She uses her sexual skill to try to enslave the main protagonist, something he claims any human woman could do to any man.
 
I sort of presume Niven's eugenic beliefs must've been racist too, although here we see that only by what's excluded. With the exception of the leading man, who is Asian, all the other humans in the book are White, including everyone on the Ringworld. Certainly Niven seems to think that each planet should be a monoculture, and each colony world should remain subservient to the home planet. Even the incomprehensible vastness of the ring seems to home to only one culture with one language, and a consistent way of signaling social class via hairstyle. I'm honestly annoyed that this book gets held up as an exemplar of good scifi!
 

 
Beyond all that, there are two other things you have to contend with. One is just the 1970s-ness of the setting, especially the way Niven chooses to mix humor into his writing. A lot of it just seems silly now. The sole curse word is 'tanj,' an acronym for 'there ain't no justice.' Two human space colonies are called 'We Made It' and 'Mount Lookithat.' Of the two aliens, one looks like a humanoid tiger, and the other, the Puppeteer, looks like a hunched-over person using their arms to make two ostrich-faced hand puppets. The woman on the crew, thanks to the success of human eugenics, is supernaturally lucky, like Domino from the X-Men, and the other three spend an awful lot of time trying to deduce from events just exactly how lucky she must be.
 
The other thing is that this is one of the last of Niven's Known Space works, and it sort of feels like he expects you to've read all the previous ones to fully appreciate it. The tiger-like Kzin have like, a 7 book series detailing their many wars with humanity. The Puppeteers build all the spaceships, and are in a bunch of earlier stories that I've read but mostly forgotten, at least one of which, I assume, explains why the hulls and inner walls of their ships are transparent like glass, which otherwise just seems bizarre. This omission especially surprises me, considering how many words get used telling us how cool the ring is and all the safety features built into the flying motorcycles. Niven does retell several of the earlier plots, which is part of why it takes Ringworld a hundred pages to actually get to the Ringworld, but a lot of ideas are also tossed out like you'll know what they are and why they're significant without him having to describe it. And some things we learn about the history of Known Space are clearly meant to be shocking revelations that recontextualize everything - but you had to believe something different first to fully appreciate that.
 
Anyway, if you can put up with all that, and a plot that's like half introduction, your reward is 150 pages of our heroes figuring out why civilization has collapsed across the Ringworld, and puzzling out how to get their ship off the ring. The collapse was primarily because all electricity, and thus all long-distance travel and communication, relied on a single system that failed and couldn't be fixed. Also no new electricity-generating devices could be built because the builders used atomic transmutation to supply materials, and so there's no metal not already in use on the ring. That all seems egregiously short-sighted on the builders' part, though Niven presents these as totally rational decisions despite their catastrophic (and foreseeable!) consequences. I was even more interested how impoverished Niven's view of nature is. The whole ring is like a giant city park rather than a real ecosystem, because after all, as Niven's characters remind themselves, why would you both including any desert landscape, or bringing along any pests or predatory animals? And at no point is this portrayed as a problem or mistake.
 
This will be my last book of 2024. I need to make sure the next scifi I read is something better than this!

I Saw a Peacock with a Fiery Tail

 
 
I Saw a Peacock with a Fiery Tail

art by Ramsingh Urveti

Tara Books

2012

 

 

Ramsingh Urveti only credits himself as the illustrator of I Saw a Peacock with a Fiery Tail, perhaps because the text of the book consists of only the title poem, a folk poem from England in the 1600s, and according to the preface, often included in collections of poetry for children. Urveti's version takes the form of a children's picture book, and the poem is simple enough to be enjoyed by children; but I think adults can enjoy this as well.
 
The poem's first few lines go like this:
"I saw a peacock with a fiery tail
I saw a comet drop down hail
I saw a cloud with ivy circled around..."
 
Read this way, it's a series of strange images. But the poem's 'trick' is that it can be read another way, no longer rhyming, but making perfect sense.
"I saw a peacock

With a fiery tale, I saw a comet
Drop down hail, I saw a cloud..."
 
Urveti's art allows both readings at once. Each two-page has one of his black-and-white ink drawings, and a half-stanza of text. Each also has a hole in the paper that reveals the next half-stanza. So it reads more like this:
"I saw a peacock with a fiery tail
With a fiery tail, I saw a comet
I saw a comet drop down hail
Drop down hail, I saw a cloud
I saw a cloud with ivy circled around..."
 
At the beginning, the cut-outs only show text, but as the book continues, they reveal glimpses of art too, and the cut-outs themselves become an increasingly important part of each new drawing.
 
I don't know why, exactly, but this book feels very appropriate for the Solstice and New Year. Perhaps the images of darkness, of lights in the sky, perhaps the way the dual readings suggest transformation.

Shady Hollow

 
 

Shady Hollow

by Juneau Black

Vintage

2022 

 

 

Shady Hollow feels both brilliant and inevitable, because what author Juneau Black has done is to take the plot conventions of a classic cozy mystery and place it in the setting of a contemporary cozy video game, like the Animal Crossing series. It makes perfect sense, because both already take place in the same sort of environment - an isolated small town where everyone knows everyone, and where there usually isn't any real hardship or trouble. What separates Shady Hollow from other cozy mysteries is that all the characters are lightly-anthropomorphized animals.
 
I want to note briefly that Juneau Black is the singular pen name of a pair of authors working together, like James SA Corey or Lewis Padgett. This isn't a secret; they explain it in the preface and pose together for the author photo at the back of the book.
 
So, Shady Hollow is a little town tucked away in the northern woods. (I love the double meanings of the word 'shady' here.) The town borders a river, and its chief industry is the wood mill owned the the industrialist von Beaverpelt family. The town has a newspaper, a thriving coffee shop run by a moose (or perhaps a caribou?), a bookshop run by a raven, and a new vegetarian restaurant run by a recently immigrated panda. The police are bears, the usual suspect is a raccoon, the college professor's an owl, and most of the townsfolk seem to be mice, rabbits, etc, wild animals, the kind that usually live in forests. So "A Murder in Richard Scarry's Busytown" remains an available concept to any copyright-courageous writer wanting to turn Black's insight into a subgenre.
 
We start with an introduction to the cast of main characters, written to cast suspicion on absolutely everyone, a map of the town, and then we're off to the races, when the hummingbird gossip columnist spots a dead body floating in the mill pond - the grumpy old toad who lived by the pond and liked to argue with everyone. Aspiring star reporter Vera Vixen picks up the story, determined to both report the news and solve the mystery! She talks to the other townsfolk to try to understand the victim and his relationships. Meanwhile the murderer isn't idle. Someone else is attacked, and then Vera becomes a target herself...
 
The concept of using animal characters gives Black permission to make them all a bit simplified in a way that works well for the story. The dynamic between Vera and her boss, for example, reminds me of Lois Lane and Perry White, or Mary Tyler Moore and Ed Asner. Not flat, but archetypal, iconic. Each character has only a few traits, so you feel like you get to know them quickly, including some of their secrets. This is not a dense or difficult book, it's a page-turner, and at just 200 pages, a quick, enjoyable read.
 
I honestly appreciated that the solution to the mystery was relatively straightforward. There was no locked-room puzzle to untangle, and unlike a couple mystery miniseries I watched recently, no too-clever implausible twist at the end. The answer is grounded in the relationships between the relevant characters that Vera and the audience discover together.
 
Black is also quite careful and playful with language. The townsfolk are 'creatures,' never 'people,' never even 'women' or 'men.' There are 'pawkerchiefs' and folks considering things 'on the one paw,' but never any 'hands' or 'feet.' There are a few little puns and other language jokes, especially in the bookstore, but not so many that they dominate. The snake medical examiner talksss like thisss, but only gets a handful of lines. It's funny without bring overwhelming, a neat balance.
 
As I was reading, I found that the way I imagined the characters shifted between various visual inspirations. At times, I imagined them like the stop-motion puppets from Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr Fox movie. Other times I pictured them looking like Hannah Barbara cartoons, like Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound, and so on. The racoon I kept imagining as the vagabond from the boardgame Root; the sheep I pictured as Lambchop. And once, when the bear police detective picks up an injured Vera to help her to safety and her heart flutters with romantic excitement, I saw them as Little John and Maid Marian from Disney's foxy Robin Hood. It made me wonder how the authors imagined their own characters, and how other readers picture them.
 
Using the same rhyming logic employed here, of combining genres because they share a word in common, it's easy enough to imagine a cozy catastrophe with a cast of talking animals. For all I know, that'll be Juneau Black's next project. But I'm curious if anyone's ever mashed up the cozy mystery and cozy catastrophe, and had an amateur sleuth poking around a murder in the one town that's miraculously unaffected while the rest of the world succumbs to an off-camera apocalypse?

The One-Bottle Cocktail

 
 
The One-Bottle Cocktail

More than 80 Recipes with Fresh Ingredients and a Single Spirit

by Maggie Hoffman

photos by Kelly Puleio

Ten Speed Press

2018

 

 

I got a copy of The One-Bottle Cocktail a few years ago when it first came out. It was getting talked up on NPR and maybe some other news services I was following at the time. And a lot of the drinks in it do sound good, but this is not a book for me. The recipes collected here, most of them anyway, are intended for foodies with well-stocked kitchens. For me, the need to pull a second bottle of liqueur or amaro or bitters out of my cabinet is much less of an obstacle than a recipe that calls for me to prepare my own fresh fruit juice or infuse an unusual vegetable syrup.
 
There's an irony here. In her introduction, author Maggie Hoffman mentions the frustration of finding a cocktail recipe that calls for buying a a bottle of some ingredient that won't have any other uses. But almost all the homemade ingredients in the book are used in only a single recipe, possibly something you wouldn't buy to cook with otherwise. The way Hoffman collected her recipes means that across the book, there are two different simple sugar syrups, and three different concentrations of honey mixed with water. Is that better? It might be a little cheaper, and they'll go bad if you don't use them, instead of hanging out in the back of your cabinet, either to haunt you or to be used again later. Maybe it's a matter of preference.
 
Hoffman found recipes from professional bartenders all over the country, and each recipe credits the original creator and their bar, along with Hoffman's own notes and instructions, and sometimes a photo, either of the preparation or the finished drink. The recipes are organized into sections based on the one bottle they use - vodka, gin, tequila, rum, brandy, and whiskey. At the end of each section is a list of cocktails from the other parts of the book that Hoffman thinks would taste good with that spirit.
 
The recipes vary in complexity, but are mostly on the higher end. There are only a few that only need jam or a single homemade syrup, and maybe lemon or lime juice. Hoffman is very big on the idea of making your own fruit juices by chopping something into cubes, dropping them in the food processor, and first pouring, then pressing the juice through a fine mesh strainer. One recipe notably calls for juicing an entire watermelon this way, something I doubt I have either the stamina or patience for. Other times, she suggests just muddling the fruit before dropping it into the cocktail shaker along with the other ingredients, and double straining during the pour.
 
The size of the recipes also varies, with most making single drinks, a handful making pairs, and a sizable minority making batches of 8 or 12. The punches might be where the idea of this book shines best. They're often for a special occasion, where you don't mind doing a bit more work, and where all the prep can be handled well before everything is combined. The lower alcohol of these recipes is probably also good for most kinds of parties, and by making many drinks at once, you'll use up all the juice or syrup you made, with no leftovers.

The Real Dada Mother Goose

 
The Real Dada Mother Goose

A Treasury of Complete Nonsense

by Jon Scieszka
art by Julia Rothman

adapted from the book illustrated by Blanche Fisher Write

Candlewick Press

1916, adapted 2022

 

 

Like many of the children's books I read, The Real Dada Mother Goose was recommended by my sister, and I'm really glad I listened to her!
 
I had a copy of the book this one is based on, growing up, a black-and-white checkerboard hardback of The Real Mother Goose, illustrated by Blanche Fisher Wright, originally published in 1916. It's been a long time since I've read Jon Scieszka, who you might remember from The Stinky Cheese Man or The True Story of the Three Little Pigs, but what he's produced here is wonderful. It's both a playful expression of human creativity, and hopefully an inspiration to kids to remixing something they like to create something new.
 
The book has six main chapters, plus a section of notes at the end. Each chapter has a reprint of the first verse of a nursery rhyme, and then six variations on it. Each variation is like a little game, applying a specific procedure to the text to change it in a specific way. There are chapters for 'Humpty Dumpty,' 'Jack be Nimble,' 'Old Mother Hubbard,' 'Hey Diddle Diddle,' 'Hickory Dickory Dock,' and 'Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.'
 
I'm pretty sure the variations include actual Dada tricks and games, as well as others that Scieszka added. In many of the games, words are put in some kind of code, Morse, pig latin, a rebus, the Military Alphabet, simplified Egyptian hieroglyphics. Sometimes there are substitutions, using the same rhyme scheme with new words. In others, the whole form is changed, creating a haiku, a pop quiz, a comic strip.
 
The notes section explains some of the more complex games so that child-readers will have the instructions they need to try making their own variations. They also give some history of Mother Goose, and dada, and they explicitly confirm that - like cartoonist Matt Madden - Scieszka was inspired by Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style. I think this could be a great resource for someone who wants to cultivate their own creativity, but could use a little help getting started.
 
Whenever the original text of the rhymes is repeated, it appears in black, while new words are printed in blue. Artist Julia Rothman has a bit of drawing depicting dada geese hard at work remaking the rhymes, but a lot of what she's done here is to collage and modify the original images, breaking them up, rearranging their parts, adding something new - exactly the same way Scieszka does with the text. Again, it could easily inspire kids to add to existing drawing as a way to get started on their own art.
 
I probably want a copy of The Real Dada Mother Goose for myself, and if you have a creative child, you probably want it for them too.

The Unaccountability Machine

 
 
The Unaccountability Machine

Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions - And How the World Lost its Mind

by Dan Davies

Profile Books

2024

 

 

The Unaccountability Machine starts with with author Dan Davies introducing the relatively accessible idea of 'accountability sinks.' The paradigmatic example of an accountability sink is a gate agent at the airport. Your flight is delayed or canceled, your plans are upended, you might incur significant costs, and the only person you have access to, to complain about all this, is the gate agent, who has no control over the situation, no ability to change your fate, and possibly no way to escalate your complaint to a higher level, beyond a direct supervisor who can only remind you that all this is company policy, and can you please stop being rude to the human shield?
 
Davies, an economist by training, who used to work for the Bank of England, and who is clearly trying to translate complex academic and legal ideas into accessible prose that can be understood by a broad public audience, makes two moves from there. First, he diagnoses this kind of breakdown in accountability, when a problem is caused by 'a decision no one made' with no one to blame or even complain to, as a problem of organizational structure, where there is a break in what should be a feedback loop, and the acted-upon have no way to communicate with the actors and the people who decide how they should act. Second, he broadens outward to a claim that broken feedback loops and the absence of accountability are why we live in a society where nothing seems to work, and for example, the biggest banks in the country can crash the global economy by selling bad mortgages that make people lose their homes, allegedly without any crimes being committed.
 
The rest of the book is Davies' intellectual history of how we got here. I found this account interesting, and I'm going to give a basic outline in a moment, but I kind of disagree with his equation of certain things. I think there are meaningful differences between companies using their lowest level employees as accountability sinks, the unintended consequences of 'decisions no one made,' and the inability (or I think more accurately, the refusal) of our law-enforcement to punish executives for the harms caused by the companies they lead.
 
Davies thinks that unaccountability is an unavoidable but accidental consequence of certain organizational structures. I would argue that assigning (or withholding) accountability and blame is always a choice. Executives may deliberately set up their 'customer service' points to avoid actually hearing from their customers, and may generally structure their companies to allow profitable law-breaking while avoiding the creation of incriminating evidence because they want to avoid both public scrutiny and prosecution, but it's not actually impossible, or even unfair, to hold them accountable - to blame and punish them. That's a choice, and it could be made differently.
 
There's also a difference between true 'decisions no one made' and when decision-makers try to hide their role to escape accountability. Things like central banks worldwide setting 2% as their inflation target happen because of what sociologists DiMaggio and Powell called 'institutional isomorphism' - the leaders of one organization copying another until the copied choice becomes an unofficial standard by default. Situations like that can arise by accident, but we're not necessarily just stuck with them. People can meet to discuss, negotiate, and change the standard. They can do this more than once, even routinely! But that's different from Boeing executives showing callous disregard for safety by rushing crash-prone MAX jets to market, and I think Davies errs when he conflates the two.
 
When companies decide to seek profit in ways they know will cause harm or even death, to their workers, customers, or just unfortunate bystanders, that too is a choice. When a leader, whether political or organizational, decides that they have a right to act, and that the acted-upon do not have or deserve a right to have a say in the decisions that affect them, that is also a choice, and an ideology, not an accident. And, as recent events have reminded me, while a government or an organization can made it impossible to give meaningful feedback through official channels, people still retain the ability to go around those channels, as whistleblowers, or protesters, or through direct action.
 
Anyway, those critiques aside, I was interested in the intellectual history Davies presented to explain how we got here. In brief, after WWII, two different schools of thought developed theories if how organizations work and how they ought to behave - the interdisciplinary field of cybernetics, and the newly invigorated discipline of economics. Cybernetics accidentally undid itself by developing the information theory behind modern computing (which then proved to be an attractive alternative career), while economics embedded itself in government and industry, eventually providing both the instructions and intellectual justification for neoliberalism and rising inequality. In Davies' telling, the decisive victory of economics (and if he's lucky enough that his book gets a Big Short style Hollywood adaptation, the moment that will definitely be the climax of the movie) occurs when the democratic Chilean government of Salvador Allende, advised by cybernetician Stafford Beer, is overthrown by dictator Augusto Pinochet, backed by the CIA and advised by economist Milton Friedman, on September 11th, 1973. Afterward, we get Reagan and Thatcher, private equity conducting leveraged buy-outs, and the general rise in corporate leaders focusing on quarterly profits at the expense of long-term sustainability, which culminates in the Great Recession in 2008, and the post housing bubble world of today, where nothing works but no one is to blame.
 
Today when we think of the term 'cybernetics,' we think of human-machine hybrids, but as an intellectual field, it refers to the study of complex systems, including the ways that they regulate themselves in response to a changing environment. The paradigmatic cybernetic process is the feedback loop - the system acts based on input from its environment, its actions change the environment, and that change becomes an input that affects the next action. A stable system helps to maintain its own environment, unstable systems eventually destroy themselves by changing the environment in ways that are not survivable. Think of an ecosystem.
 
Many disciplines contributed to cybernetic thought, including medicine, computing, and sociology. One of my favorite theory books, Anthony Giddens' Modernity and Self-Identity is all about the 'reflexivity' of modern organizations, the way they collect data and change their behavior in response to it - that is, the way they incorporate feedback loops. In the 1940s through 60s it seems to have been a respectable field, but ironically, the great success of some of the projects led to the coalition separating back into its component parts.
 
I think Davies is at his best when he's explaining this part, which is unfamiliar to him too. His discussion of economics benefits from his insider-knowledge, but it felt like he assumed a bit too much familiarity with terms and concepts, despite his efforts to make the book accessible to non-expert readers.

The Phantom Scientist

 
 
The Phantom Scientist

by Robert Cousin

translated by Edward Gauvin

MIT Press

2023

 

 

The Phantom Scientist is a French graphic novel set at a mysterious, isolated institute, where scientists from a variety of fields are invited to advance their research. The institute itself is a kind of experimental project. The idea is that incidental interactions with peers from other fields will produce novel, serendipitous discoveries ... but it also produces a rising tide of chaos that will eventually force the institute's current director (a sociologist!) to call in the army to evacuate everyone for their own safety. This is the fourth iteration of the institute, and when it inevitably collapses, it'll be restarted with new researchers and a new director.
 
Our viewpoint character is professor Stephane Douasy, a physicist who studies fractals and spirals, who is interested in applying those ideas to understand plant growth. Based on the acknowledgments, it seems he's closely based on a real person, Stephane Douady, so I suspect that the discovery he eventually makes about leaf shapes is a real finding from the actual Dr Douady's research. The fictional Stephane is the last of the 24 scientists to arrive at the institute. A new one comes at regular intervals to dampen the chaos. Now that Stephane has arrived, the institute should function at maximum capacity for the final 6 months of its 7-year cycle before collapsing. But there's a problem - there's already way too much chaos, and it doesn't seem to calm, so the institute may not survive its full span...
 
Stephane is an outgoing fellow, and he quickly befriends two other scientists in his building - Louise, a linguist who was working on teaching computers speech but has given up since the appearance of chat-bots, and Villhelm, who's written a computer program that accurately predicts his own future actions, but that works so slowly that they always arrive late. (Ominously, each set of predictions includes his percent chance of death.) Their building also has the office of the never-seen Dr Paniany, the 'phantom scientist' of the title.
 
Stephane is basically doing what the institute is supposed to - he gets his introverted colleagues to leave their labs and talk to each other for the first time in forever, he insists on checking inside Paniany's office (the other two had been assuming he'd either never or arrived or left before they got there), and gaining new insights from seeing his research. Vilhelm figures out how to make his program run faster, and Louise gets reinvigorated out of her torpor, and decides to find where inside the institute Paniany is camped out.
 
Dr Paniany was researching the P vs NP problem. In math and computing, some problems just don't have a single right answer. Among those that do, there are problems that are 'easy to solve' called P, and problems that are hard to solve but 'easy to check' called NP. Easy to solve here means you have a set of instructions, an algorithm, you can follow that lets you find a solution without needing to guess or use trial-and-error. Easy to check means you can tell that a right answer is right. The NP example author Robin Cousin gives is a jigsaw puzzle - hard to solve, but very easy to tell if it's put together correctly or not. (Complex as they look, Rubik's cubes are P. If you know the steps, you can solve one, from any starting arrangement, in seconds.) There's a longstanding debate about whether or not P = NP, if every problem we can easily check has some algorithm that would let us solve it easily too, even if we haven't found it yet, or if there are some problems that can only be solved by trial-and-error.
 
In reality, we don't have an answer either way. In the comic, Paniany has proved that P = NP, and written an algorithm using his proof that helps every other researcher who encounters it do their own research much better and faster. He, and his proof, are the source of the rising chaos that overtakes the institute during the second half of the comic.
 
Cousin's art style reminds me a bit of Jason Shiga. His figures are cartoony, with relatively little detail, fairly thick outlines, and bright colors.
 
It's pretty rare to see a sociologist show up in contemporary scifi! The other example I can think of is Connie Willis's Bellwether, which was also about how the 'chaos' of interactions between people who might not otherwise meet can produce unexpected creativity or start trends and fads. This is, in fact, a real sociological finding, although both Cousin and Willis play it up for effect, in the same way scifi authors have been doing with ideas from physics forever. But one of the earliest findings in the sociology of networks is about how you can get more new information from acquaintances rather than close friends and family, a phenomenon called 'the strength of weak ties.' That name comes from Mark Granovetter, although if you've heard the idea before, it's probably because of Malcolm Gladwell, who's done the most to popularize it. It's too bad the seismograph-style Organizational Chaos Index the institute director keeps consulting isn't a real measure; it'd be awfully useful!

Glass Town

 
 
Glass Town

The Imaginative World of the Brontes
by Isabel Greenberg

Harry Abrams

2020

 

 

Glass Town is a graphic novel that presents a lightly fictionalized telling of the life of Charlotte Bronte that centers on the game of make-believe she used to play with her siblings Branwell, Emily, and Anne.
 
The book opens near its ending, with Charlotte visiting the grave site of her recently dead siblings, and being visited by a vision of Charles Wellesley, one of her imaginary characters, the one most like herself in Greenberg's telling. In conversation with Charles, Charlotte remembers her siblings and their make-believe game, and the rest of the book appears as an extended flashback from this 'present day' moment that we return to again at the end.
 
The earliest time we return to is also a funeral. The two eldest Bronte sisters have just died of illness they caught at boarding school. Charlotte is now the oldest, and with Branwell, Emily, and Anne, she starts a game they can play together, imagining the city of Glass Town, on a British-colonized African island called Angria. Greenberg portrays Charlotte as a natural leader, but one who defers to Branwell because she believes that, as the only brother, he ought to be in charge of the girls.
 
Throughout the book, the invented character Charlotte is most interested in is the womanizing poet Zamorna. She clearly loves him, gets jealous of the fictional women she pairs him with, and even changes the narrative to punish them for getting the attention she wants for herself but can't have. Greenberg depicts Charlotte as kind of romantically obsessed with cruel, patriarchal men; she wants someone who can boss her around, but she's so strong-willed that she keeps creating tyrants in an attempt to find someone to rule her. Charlotte seems to try to mold Branwell into this same kind of man, but he crumbles beneath the pressure she puts on him.
 
The siblings build up Glass Town in the stories they write for each other, especially Branwell who wants war and adventure stories, and Charlotte who wants romance and domestic drama. They spend all day every day playing. Eventually Emily and Anne get tired of always getting overrun and invent their own island, Gondal, to tell their own stories their own way, without their older siblings taking over.
 
Eventually, their father sends Charlotte to boarding school again. She and Branwell write each other letters to keep the game going initially, but when he stops writing, Charlotte carries on by herself. Things come to a head when the various ongoing plots in Glass Town come to a climax - overlapping love triangles intersecting with a revolution for African independence - and Charlotte worries that she's becoming unhealthily obsessed. She turns away from her fantasy world, she and her sisters publish their novels, and then all the siblings but Charlotte fall sick and die within a year. This brings us to the 'present' when she has the chance to choose again, to return to her fantasy and get lost in it, or to stay grounded in reality.
 
Greenberg's art is noteworthy. The proportions of the people and the perspective of the buildings resemble's children's art, an impression that's reinforced by the rough linework, which looks more like charcoal than ink. The color scheme of the entire book is autumnal, with reds and pinks, oranges and browns, splashes of yellow and purple, but no blue or green at all. Scenes and characters from Glass Town are in full color, while the living Brontes are monotone. Grey in the present day when Charlotte is in mourning, brown before the game starts, red at the height of the excitement, pink and orange when Charlotte is at school. You really feel that the fantasy world is more lively than reality, both brighter and more saturated with emotion.
 
Greenberg published in 2020, Catherynne Valente write a YA novel about the Brontes a couple years earlier called Glass Town Game. I'm not quite sure why a 200 year-old kids' game made it into the zeitgeist just then, though I'd guess that it helps that Oxford published a collection of the Brontes' Glass Town writings in 2010.
 
Lots of kids play let's pretend, but the Bronte siblings wrote their imaginary world down instead of only describing it verbally to each other. And because they became famous, various people had reasons to collect, preserve, and transcribe these childhood writings, which is why we're able to know or care about them. Whereas if you or I did something similar when we were kids, we would each likely be our own stories' only reader, if we kept them at all, instead of boxing them up in the attic or tossing them in the trash, the usual fate of kids' art, even the stuff that once got displayed on the fridge.
 
I've actually seen essays claiming that the Brontes invented roleplaying games 150 years before Gary Gygax wrote Dungeons & Dragons, or that one or the other of the sisters were the world's first Dungeon Master, but I don't really think that's true, any more so than I think HG Wells invented wargaming when he wrote Little Wars. At most, I think these might be the earliest examples of someone documenting in writing (that survived, and could become part of the historical record) the sort of games that many people played in their heads as kids and young adults, without usually leaving any record behind. And actually, I doubt they're even the earliest, probably just the best known, because these game-players became world famous, and their records got reprinted, rather than being anonymous writings that remain confined to an archive.
 
Which is not to say there's nothing of value here! Glass Town has kind of caught my imagination, and I'll probably read Valente's book about it at some point too. Lots of kids probably had their own make-believe world, but it's not so surprising to think that the future authors of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights might've had fantasy worlds that were more interesting than most, just as Wells and his opponent Robert Lewis Stevenson probably described their battles between toy soldiers more entertainingly than your average wargamer.

Wuhan Diary

 
 
Wuhan Diary

Dispatches from a Quarantined City

by Fang Fang

translated by Michael Berry

Harper Collins

2020

 

 

Wuhan Diary is a book that collects a series of 60 daily social media posts by the Chinese author Fang Fang that she made from her apartment in Wuhan, starting at the beginning of a strict mandatory city-wide lockdown in late January 2020, and lasting until late March when the re-opening date was announced.
 
Last year, I read Deadly Quiet City by Murong Xuecun, a journalist who entered Wuhan just after the lockdown lifted, and who interviewed people from a variety of stations in life about what they did and how they survived. If you were only going to read one account of the Wuhan quarantine, I would recommend Murong's. Fang Fang's diary has value as a direct account at the time things were happening, and Murong notes that she inspired him to do his project, but she's also just one person, a fairly affluent older woman with a lot of friends and family members able to deliver food to her doorstep. Her experiences in isolation were not too different from mine! But Murong was able to interview a doctor, a delivery person, an unlicensed cab driver - people who had a much more direct experience with the coronavirus outbreak.
 
Each day, Fang Fang notes how long the outbreak has been going on, talks about the weather, discusses whatever news about the coronavirus has been making the rounds that day (often the death of a doctor or another public figure), she shares updates about how she's getting food and how her family members are doing, she comments on the latest specific rules of the lockdown, she reports on conversations she's had with friends who are doctors or who know other important information, she calls on her readers to follow the quarantine procedures and help each other as best they can.
 
And, as time goes on, her diary comes to be dominated by a few other topics - questioning the government's early inaction on the coronavirus, calling on government officials and hospital administrators who made mistakes to admit them and resign, talking about the lengths she has to go to publish each new day of her diary when her social media accounts have been suspended and each new post is often taken down by the time the next day's goes up (due to her large audience resharing her words, they stay in circulation, but corporate or government censors try to limit her reach), and responding to the nationalist 'ultra-leftist' trolls (who sound a lot like America's alt-right) who denounce her, threaten her, slander and lie about her, and who generally attack anyone who shares negative information or who criticizes the government.
 
Especially early on, when the lockdown has just started, and the diary itself has not become a topic of discussion, Fang Fang's experiences in quarantine remind me a lot of my own early isolation in mid-March 2020. Like me, she started off fairly optimistic - a two-week shutdown that will stop person-to-person transmission and reveal all the people who are already infected but haven't shown symptoms yet, allowing them to get treatment. Like me, like a lot of us, I think, she quickly realized it wouldn't be that easy, and that the quarantine period would need to be longer, and was forced to stare into the blank space where the future used to be and wonder what would happen next.
 
Early on especially, but kind of throughout her diary, Fang Fang remains pretty optimistic that the quarantine will work, the coronavirus will be brought under control if not defeated, and she mostly has a very vocal, positive faith that people are trying their hardest, doing their best, and that people cooperating with government regulations would be the cause of an eventual return to normalcy. Honestly, this annoyed me, and at times made me feel sick. I don't want to be unfair to her, especially how much she got pilloried by Chinese readers for the opposite reason, but her positivity was sometimes upsetting to me.
 
It's also hard to square with her acknowledgment that the city government of Wuhan and the national government of China both did everything in their power to hide the existence of the virus, to deny that it was contagious, to conceal how many patients were coming into the hospitals and how many doctors and nurses were getting sick and dying while treating them. They knew, for sure, by the end of December 2019, and should've know weeks sooner, and instead of announcing the existence of the virus and trying to keep it contained, they attempted to keep it secret and allowed it to spread around China and across the world. For at least 20 days, the Chinese government allowed mass events and huge movements of people associated with New Years festivities, and during those 20 days, any chances of preventing a pandemic were lost.
 
Arguably the American government, and our largest agricultural businesses, are doing the same thing, right now, with the bird flu. If H5N1 becomes another pandemic, it won't be because it evolved too fast for anyone to stop, it will be because everyone chose to prioritize secrecy and quarterly profits over making any real attempt to prevent another plague. (Incidentally, this is the actual reason for the much-vaunted high price of American eggs right now, even if none of our politicians will say that out loud.)
 
There's a sick dramatic irony to reading Wuhan Diary, because by mid-March, just as America was going into a panic, the new coronavirus cases in Wuhan were finally (and only temporarily) going down to zero. By the end of the diary, Fang Fang's city is about to reopen and she thinks her life will go back to normal. And meanwhile, the worst was still yet to come, not just for Wuhan or China, but for the whole world.
 
Fang Fang also thinks the ultra-leftists and the people within the government who pushed for secrecy will be discredited, that they still might be forced to resign, and that the public will turn away from them and demand something better. Staring down the gun barrel of my own dark future, I admire her hope and optimism. But again, there is terrible dramatic irony in knowing that the censors and authoritarians were actually empowered, that Xi Jinping was about to start a massive consolidation of power, making China less free and less democratic, and probably more like what the ultra-leftists want it to be. I fear similar changes are coming to America, and I can't muster any optimism of my own right now.

Imelda and the Goblin King

 
 
Imelda and the Goblin King

by Briony May Smith

Flying Eye Books

2015

 

 

Imelda and the Goblin King is a children's picture book that retells an older fairy tale in a way that seems an awful lot like a modern political allegory. I didn't really care for this one! The reasons for that probably have more to do with me, and with when I read it, than they do with what Briony Smith has written and drawn. But so be it; right now I don't know how to give Imelda a fair reading.
 
Imelda is a human girl. She lives in a house on the edge of the forest, and spends all day every day in the forest playing with the fairies and the Fairy Queen. One day, the Goblin King comes stomping into the woods with all his little goblins, declares that he owns everything, kicks some fairies, and generally makes an un-ignorable nuisance of himself. The Fairy Queen invites him to a shared banquet to smooth tensions. He eats everything, then kidnaps her and locks her in a cage.
 
The fairies go to Imelda and beg her for help. She bakes a magic pie that's half safe and half poison, and offers to share a (safe) slice with him if he'll release the Fairy Queen. Predictably, the Goblin King steals the pie from Imelda, eats the whole thing, and turns into a worm. Without the king, all the little goblins become friends with the fairies, and everyone lives happily ever after, except for the very angry, bossy worm.
 
Like I said, this feels like a parable. You've got a woman politician going up against a shouting megalomaniac who wants everyone to pay attention to him, who wants to own everything, control everyone, who wants to lock up women in cages. Smith published this in 2015, thus probably wrote it in 2014, and also probably wasn't making the overt parallels to American politics that seem so obvious now.
 
As a political fable, I hate it. It's too simplistic - which, I know, is laughable criticism of a kids' book, but still. Everyone is happy and gets along until the Goblin King arrives. The moment he's gone, they do again, with absolutely no conflict between the fairies and the goblins. And how do you get rid of an opposing politician you don't like? Imelda's answer is, effectively, assassination.
 
But even as a kids' book with no larger implications, I don't like this. The message that it's important to stand up to bullies instead of appeasing them is sound, but I kind of don't think you should encourage kids to poison their enemies - a real thing it is actually possible for them to do! 'But if he hadn't stolen the poisoned food, he wouldn't have gotten sick' is typical kid logic, and may even appeal to some adult sense of fairness, but I assure you our legal system doesn't see it that way.
 

I had the same complaint about the movie Brave. Merida is justified in not wanting an arranged marriage. But her solution is to find a witch, buy poison from her, and then use that poison on her mother. For all she knows, the poison will kill her! That's usually what it does! And, she leaves the leftover poison out, where her three little brothers can find it, eat it, and, again, as far as Merida knows, be killed by it. And she is the hero of the picture! The film treats her actions as totally appropriate!
 
Look, I know that what to do about a bully politician who runs on a platform of hurting everyone who doesn't vote for him is a complex question, and that as an adult, I shouldn't be looking to a picture book for answers. But a kid might! And while I don't expect any children's book to avoid simplification, I'd hope for one whose answers aren't quite so insipid. 'Just kill him, and then he won't be around anymore' isn't a good answer for a number of reasons, among them, it's not really practical or actionable.
 
Two of my favorite superheroes are Word Girl and Squirrel Girl, because they both address the question, what do you do about a bad guy, besides just be stronger than him and beat him up?
 
Squirrel Girl is probably better known. She had an ongoing Marvel comic series for awhile. About half the time, she uses her strength to simply stop the villain from whatever they're doing so she can talk with them, find out why they're rampaging, and see if they could be redirected to some more constructive activity instead. The rest of the time, talking doesn't work, but neither does simply being super strong and having the powers of a squirrel. To win, she needs a coalition, both other superhero allies, and reformed supervillains she previously talked to and made friends with.
 
Word Girl is probably less well known. She has a PBS kids' show that I used to watch all the time in grad school when I couldn't fall asleep. She's super strong, flies, and officially, her shtick is that she teaches you several vocabulary words every episode. And sometimes her villains are just wacky guys like The Butcher, who buries you under a pile of lunchmeat so you're immobilized while he robs you. But sometimes, she faces off against an evil businessman who uses mass hypnosis in his advertising to get people to buy his worthless products and/or revere him. Sometimes she faces an elderly woman who uses a 'sweet old grandmother' routine to trick people into helping her with her crimes. And in those cases, Word Girl can't win just by flying fast or punching hard. She has to convince the public that a crime has been committed at all, show them how they've been fooled, persuade them to turn against the villain. So she's not just teaching vocabulary, she's teaching critical thinking.

 

These stories are still simplified, but they're not simplistic. They model, at an interpersonal level, what you need to do when you can't win just by being physically strong. And one benefit to this, is that this kind of organizing is fractal - the same actions need to be repeated at several scales. Because a mass movement isn't just a gathering of millions of unaffiliated individuals. It's not even an organization made up of organizations - it's a coalition of coalitions. 

 

Organizing a mass protest is a lot like putting together a holiday parade. Yes, you invite everyone you can to show up and join the audience (and the audience absolutely is a part of the event) but the core of the event is made up of pre-existing groups, which normally meet separately and each do their own thing, cooperating on a shared goal. The bridge work connecting group to group and collection-of-groups to collection-of-groups is important, but so is the work of building and maintaining each of the individual teams and clubs. And practicing at the interpersonal level is how you learn to make connections between groups. Cooperating with friends is both an excellent first step, and a guide to what you should do next.

 
Is it fair to hold Imelda and the Goblin King to this standard? No, absolutely not. I ought to engage with it on its own terms, rather than imposing judgment based on American politics a decade after it was written and my own idiosyncratic test for the 'right' way to teach kids how to handle conflict. But that's where I'm at. Right now, I don't know how to be fair.

Building Stories

 
 

Building Stories

by Chris Ware

Pantheon

2012 

 

 

Building Stories is cartoonist Chris Ware's masterwork, a collection of 14 smaller comics that together make up one larger graphic novel. Each of the smaller comics is a different size and shape, and they're all collected in a large box. There's one like a Little Golden Book, one hardcover, one the size of a daily newspaper, a trio of comic-book sized comics, a 4 panel board that unfolds like a boardgame, and several others. Supposedly you can read these in any order, although there's a suggested order on the back that I followed, and that felt satisfying.
 
The majority of Building Stories follows one woman across a decade or so of her adult life. She has dark hair, a prosthetic leg from a below-the-knee amputation after a childhood accident; she aspires to be a writer or an artist, and her sections are narrated by her in a stream-of-consciousness style, like we're listening to her internal monologue, or reading her diary. Throughout her life, she's self-conscious about her weight and wants to be thinner and prettier, she worries a lot about the current state of the world, she ruminates a lot on her past choices, she's lonely but has trouble connecting with others, even her husband, and once their daughter is born, she worries a lot that she will never have an important accomplishment apart from being a mother.
 
The other recurring characters, whose stories are more minor and seem to complement the main woman's, are an unhappily married couple who live downstairs from her for awhile, the old woman who owns the apartment building, and Branford the Bee, who is a fictional character the main woman reads stories about to her daughter, and also a real bee who intersects with other characters' stories at various points, and also also, I think maybe Branford's perspective might be pretty similar to the main woman's husband's viewpoint.
 
The unhappy couple fight constantly - he finds her ugly since she's gained weight, she is sick of his lack of affection, critical comments, and his attempts to control what she wears and where she goes. The old woman lives alone. She never had a steady boyfriend or got married, which she blames on needing to take care of her sick mother. They both kind of seem like alternate lives - things that could've happened to the main woman but didn't.
 
The Little Golden Book, which was my starting point, shows all three - the main woman, the unhappy couple, the old lady - over the course of a single 24-hour day. It's narrated by the apartment building itself. At this time, the main woman has graduated art school, lives alone, and works at a florist's shop. This is the day she'll meet her future husband for the first time and hook up with him at a party.
 
In the graphic novel, the woman remembers art school, her first boyfriend who got her pregnant, her abortion, and her time working as a live-in nanny for a couple of working professionals.
 
In the newspaper, the woman and her husband move from Chicago to the suburbs. She worries a lot about her identity - she doesn't want to be a suburbanite mother - and she deals with a couple of major losses, including her best friend who dies at 40.
 
The trio of comics revisits each of the main three and brings some resolution to their stories. And then the game board shows kind of a narrative diagram that maybe summarizes and maps out everything else in the box, including points of intersection you might otherwise have missed.
 
What Ware has produced here, despite its formal experimentation, feels very much like a very classic novel. It's a book about the ordinary lives of ordinary people, told through close observation of their thoughts and behavior. We see a few big moments, but also a lot of little ones. We range across time to cover entire lives, but also focus closely on specific days or periods.
 
Ware is very frank and unsentimental about sexuality. Characters are shown naked or undressed as the situation calls for. Everyone wants sex, but they all have a terrible time trying to fulfill them, and each person's own feelings of self-doubt or self-loathing end up being bigger obstacles than the presence or absence of someone else wanting them.
 
A recurring theme, especially for the main character, but also for her sort-of doppelgangers, is passivity and regret. She continuously feels like she's not living the way she wants to, including being unhappy as a wife and mother; she continuously wishes she'd made different choices, and also keeps doing things she'll regret later, in part because she keeps fixating on the past. But this is true of all the characters. You might ask, why can't they be happy? But they literally don't know how.
 
The main woman feels overwhelmed by the twin burdens of keeping up with what's going on in the world, and being a mother. Over and over, we see her not paying attention to her husband or daughter who are trying to engage with her, because she's thinking about the news, or housing prices, or oil, or she's stuck in the past regretting a previous time she ignored someone who needed her. She ignores the moments she has now in favor of regretting not treasuring the moments she could've had in the past. It's infuriating and very human.
 
I think Ware has captured something that's true for a lot of us, where you might feel a bit dissatisfied with your daily routine, but you don't know how to change it, don't even know how to set aside some time out of it to plan or prepare or act in a different way. It's very easy to make resolutions, and very hard to change habits. But the alternative is spending decades saying 'any day now, I'm going to do something different...'
 
Ware's art is famously very controlled and precise. In some of the smaller formats, I struggled to make out what was being shown in a tiny panel, or to read some miniature text. In a few of the larger ones, it wasn't always clear how to follow the panels in the correct narrative order. In terms of scale and scope, artistic consistency, experimentation, in terms of telling an ordinary human story from multiple allied perspectives, Ware has done something truly impressive here.

A Half-Built Garden

 
 
A Half-Built Garden

by Ruthanna Emrys

Tor

2022

 

 

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

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

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

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

Heroes Reborn

 
 
Heroes Reborn

America's Mightiest Heroes

Marvel Comics

2021

 

 

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

The Butcher of the Forest

 
 
The Butcher of the Forest

by Premee Mohamed

Tor

2024

 

 

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

The Best American Comics 2016

 

Best American Comics 2016

edited by Roz Chast

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

2016

 

 

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