The Seven Deadly Sins of Science Fiction

 

 

 

The Seven Deadly Sins of Science Fiction

edited by Isaac Asimov, Charles Waugh, and Martin Greenberg

Fawcett Crest

1980

 

 

The Seven Deadly Sins of Science Fiction is an anthology of short stories that are ostensibly about things like pride, lust, envy, etc. As a collection, it's not very coherent. There are nine stories - three set in something like the present, the rest at varying points in the future. And while the book itself was published in 1980, six of the stories are from the 50s, two from the 60s, and only one from the 70s. There are nine because gluttony gets two (ha ha) and avarice and covetousness are counted separately.
 
It kind of feels like some of the stories got picked because Asimov had a publishing intern run a search for ones that literally include the name of the vice somewhere in the text. A couple seem to include a character who actually has the vice, a couple others perhaps seem like ironic commentary on the vice, and in the other cases, the connection is more tenuous. To the extent the stories have anything in common, it's that most of them would make okay Twilight Zone episodes.
 

Jack Vance's "Sail 25" gets sloth. It's about a student crew taking a solar sail spaceship to Mars and back. Their hardass, House-like instructor spends the whole flight in his captain's quarters, telling them they'll live or die on their own merits, and berating for not living up to his standards. He's probably also sabotaging the ship to really put them through their paces. One nice detail - when we first meet the instructor, his appearance suggests he was badly burned; half the story later, his one helpful suggestion is that he once saw a student set on fire by the reflection from the sail. In retrospect, he himself must've been that student.
 
Judith Merril's "Peeping Tom," the lust selection, is about a guy who learns psychic powers from a village elder during the Vietnam War and uses them to have sex with a lot of women. This story and the next one probably fit the supposed theme of the book best; they were also the two I enjoyed least.
 
For envy, we get "The Invisible Man Murder Case" by Henry Slesar. An aging locked-room mystery writer who hates the new pulp and noir crime novels uses an invisibility device to commit seemingly impossible murders and drive up sales of his own books. This story was at least twice as long as it needed to be, making everything belabored and obvious.
 

Asimov chose one of his own stories for pride - "Galley Slave," which is about a robot company that leases a university a new robot that's supposed to free up faculty time for research by performing 'intellectual drudgery' like copy-editing the galley proofs of books before they're published ... or grading student papers! I was disappointed that Asimov didn't seem to consider the possible downsides of this robot - in light of all the downsides we're experiencing from generative AI right now - but in fairness, the invention of Spell Check, for example, probably did in fact mostly enable people to do more of the good parts of writing.
 
The story takes place at a trial after something has gone wrong. It turns out the ignorant, prejudiced sociology professor tricked the poor robot into sabotaging his forthcoming book, then ordered it to lie about this. Then he sued the manufacturer for the robot ruining his professional reputation. Fortunately, the heroic robot psychologist deduces what happened, and tricks the sociologist into revealing what he did at trial.
 
Asimov seems pretty triumphalist about all this, as though this was the one and only possible way someone could misuse the robot. I feel like if someone can get the robot to hurt themselves to embarrass the manufacturer, they can probably get the robot to hurt someone else for more comprehensible motives, a possibility Asimov doesn't really seem to consider. And in our world today, the people getting killed by self-driving cars, for example, aren't activists committing suicide, they're not even the victims of a hacker using the cars as weapons, they're simply people who put too much trust in a device and a manufacturer that doesn't deserve it.
 
For anger, we get "Divine Madness" by Roger Zelazny, a good and very short story that doesn't at all belong in this collection, about a man grieving his girlfriend who recently died in a car crash. He then lives several days backward in time, then resumes going forward at just the right moment to fix what he regrets and stop her from driving off and getting in a wreck after they argued. The descriptions of time moving backward were quite well-done.
 
For gluttony, we get two by Frederick Pohl. First, the best story in here, "The Midas Plague." In a future where all manufacturing is automated, the robots who make everything make way too much of it. Allowing any of this stuff to be 'wasted' by storing it, destroying it, recycling it, is unthinkable. And so, it is every citizen's patriotic duty to consume, use, and use up all this bounty. Everyone has ration cards to track their required consumption, with the poor required to live in overstuffed mansions while the rich get to enjoy minimalism.

 
Pohl's not trying to establish a rigorously plausible future economy here, he's writing satire. And at one go, his upside-down world manages capture the hardship of going hungry and doing without on WWII-era rations, and the shocking reversal of burgeoning post-war consumer economy, and the way that new forms of credit could lead to debt traps. It's kind of brilliant that he speak to both experiences at once!
 
And I think he manages to speak to our current situation, when people are using LLMs and generative AI to pump an endless streams of 'content' into an already oversaturated internet, where everyone wants likes and clicks and subscribes, our money sure, but especially our attention and our time. Pohl's world reminds me of how online ads are just riots of bright colors, autoplaying videos, annoying sounds, while so many people who are able are creating quiet minimalist spaces instead.
 
Pohl's story tells us nothing about gluttony, though it does force us to think about what counts as 'waste.' I say this as someone who only even read this book because I was trying to pare down my bookshelves, but somehow it felt like 'a waste' to get rid of it without reading it first - an impossible standard to follow in every case, but a trap that caught me this time nonetheless.
 

The Internet Archive has a copy of the story as it originally appeared in Galaxy magazine, and an audio play version produced by the BBC.

Pohl's "The Man Who Ate the World" takes place a bit in the future, when mandatory over-consumption has been replaced by Star Trek-like post-scarcity. Except for one man, who grew up during the bad old days, and is making a problem by using too much because he's trying to be a virtuous person. It's fine, but not as interesting as the original.
 
Averice is Poul Anderson's "Margin of Profit," which kind of reads like a math word problem padded out to a story. Space pirates are kidnapping and enslaving crews in one region of space. The crew union is threatening a strike rather than keep flying through that region. What's an interstellar shipping magnate to do? Anderson's guy heroically does the math, and discovers that as long as he remains sociopathically indifferent to crew safety, he can arm a fraction of his ships and eventually outlast the pirates in a war of attrition. And since the pirates are also perfectly rational profit maximizers, they surrender to his superior logic once he explains it.
 
The last story is the one from the 70s, "The Hook, the Eye, and the Whip" by Michael Conley, which is cast as covetousness. This was pretty good, but also awfully bleak in its view of human nature. The plot revolves around people getting ready for, and then competing in, a higher speed, more dangerous version of parasail racing. In this future, criminals can get sentence reductions by becoming the personal slave, and on-call organ donor, for a specific free person. There's a women's antislavery club, but Conely writes them as essentially insincere. They don't care about anyone's well-being; they just want an excuse to have club functions and occasionally yell at someone.
 
One of the racers has a slave, and people have been maimed and killed in previous races, but don't worry, even when things go wrong, he manages to not get hurt, and actually his slave was never in any real danger, since his prison sentence ended a few days before the race, so wouldn't have been forced to donate an organ regardless. So, that ending is far too convenient, and despite how dismal the world was, Conely seemed waaay too sympathetic to the men who used enslaved labor. I also found most of his descriptions of the boat race, or even the boats themselves, difficult to translate into a mental picture. But I liked that his characters were basically ordinary people without the power to simply change the world by personal fiat.

The Planet in a Pickle Jar

 

The Planet in a Pickle Jar

by Martin Stanev

Flying Eye Books

2022

 

 

The Planet in a Pickle Jar is a children's picture book about a couple kids staying with their grandmother. Initially they're bored, but then warm up to her. The book is playful about the space between what the words say and what the pictures show. And while the title image is obviously a metaphor, it's not one with a straightforward interpretation.
 
The text in this book adopts the kids' perspective; the art, I think, shows their grandmother's. So we're told that her house is boring, her stories are too long, and she spends all her time sewing and making pickles. What we see is a tableau that rewards a closer look.
 
The house is full of interesting-looking knickknacks and tchotchkes. The word-bubble showing the grandmother's story appears to illustrate the big bang and formation of the solar system. And her pickle jars aren't full of pickles, but of tiny images representing sights and memories from her travels. Kids who like to stop and spot all the details on the page will have a lot to look at here.
 
The grandmother tells another story, (again shown as an illustrated word bubble,) about how we are wrecking the environment and it won't still be there to enjoy if we do. Then, in the night, the kids wake up and discover she's missing. They search the whole house, then find a secret passage that leads to a tunnel that leads to a secret second basement where the grandmother keeps all her pickle jars, lots more than we saw earlier. She'd gotten tangled up in her own knitting, so the kids 'rescue' her pretty easily. But they are awestruck by the sight, and decide to get off their phones, touch grass, and join her in filling pickle jars.
 
I feel like I would've liked this book as a kid. Even today, I dream all the time of a giant version of my childhood home, with extra high ceilings, bookshelves like libraries, an attic like an airplane hanger, a basement like a dungeon, and everywhere cardboard boxes of interesting stuff, and tunnels or secret staircases connecting it all. It's part of why I like the film Inception, and playing D&D. And while the art isn't Where's Waldo or Find Freddie level detailed, there's still a lot going on that, when I was younger especially, I'd have liked poring over, admiring, and noticing new things.
 
As an adult, the one thing I find confusing is the grandmother's story about pollution and deforestation. Because the pickle jars seem like they represent photos or memories. One has a tiny sun in it, another a tree, another a leopard. So is her advice basically 'gather ye rosebuds while ye may?' Like, get out there and enjoy this stuff now, kids, cause it won't still be here when you're older? That seems a little bleak!
 
Or is this intended as an environmentalist message? But if so, 'saving' the memory of something is very different than saving the thing itself. Whatever essence of leopard you're preserving in whatever thing the glass jar is a metaphor for won't do anything to help the real live leopard itself. So while I know my kid self would've liked this, my adult brain kind of gets hung up on the logic of it.

Mystik U

 
 

Mystik U 

by Alisa Kwitney

art by Mike Norton

DC Comics

2018

 

 

Mystik U collects a 3-issue miniseries from DC comics that tries to cash in on the popularity of magical boarding schools. Teenage Zatanna gets recruited to a secret college run by Rose Psychic and a bunch of other older-generation DC occult characters, who are trying to prevent the future emergence of some world-ending catastrophe called The Malevolence.
 
Mystik U came out in 2018, a couple years before JK Rowling came out as a raging transphobe. It kind of mashes up a Harry Potter setting with CW-style teen superhero drama with a kind of whodunit mystery, since the teachers are trying to figure out which of their students is destined to transform into The Malevolence in a few years.
 
I was not especially impressed with this one. To me, it kind of feels like a cheap knockoff, or an attempt to cash in on the popularity of HP and JKR without investing much effort into making something with any appeal of its own, beyond just reminding you of the other thing. I sort of wished I could've read a better comic with the same characters, like the excellent miniseries that started DC's The Books of Magic in the 90s.
 
Zatanna is pretty famous for her showgirl costume and the way she uses magic by talking backwards. Her personality here is pretty much just feeling inferior to the other students and frustrated that she can't control her magic yet. We also get underdeveloped teen versions of June Moon / Enchantress and Sargon the Sorcerer, plus a son of supervillain Felix Faust, and healer Pia Morales, who I think is a new character. Mostly they just argue and get crushes on each other - it hardly matters which characters got used in these generic teen drama roles. You could pretty much swap in anyone else and it wouldn't matter.
 
At one point, the Faust boy accidentally kills Zatanna, but she's resurrected, and literally everyone involved treats this as a totally unremarkable incident, which for me was sort of a breaking point in my ability to take this story at all seriously or invest any concern for the outcome in it. If no one making it cares, why should I?
 
I had initially hoped for a showcase for the character Rose Psychic, but that got dashed too. She's an older character - she and Dr Richard Occult somehow share one body in the physical world, with the one who's not present appearing as a reflection in the mirror. Usually Dr Occult is the dominant personality, but he can trade places with Rose when needed. (So Dr Occult is not trans, but does kind of feel like a magical analogy for it.) Aside from Rose and Richard squabbling about whether to nurture the kids to be good or kill them all preemptively, neither actually gets much time on-page, and again, they seemed pretty generic. I might be better off trying to track down some of their original comics.
 
Anyway, if you're really insatiable for magic schools or supernatural teen dramas, you might like this, but otherwise, I don't think it has much to offer.

Sasha Masha

 
 

Sasha Masha

by Agnes Borinsky

Farrar, Straus & Giroux

2020

 

 

Sasha Masha is a short YA, possibly even middle-grade novel about a teenager who appears to be on the cusp of a transgender identity. Alex is a high school junior, the same age I was when I started having the feelings that I initially understood as 'wanting to be a girl,' and eventually, later as actually being a girl, as being transgender. I think Sasha Masha is meant to be accessible to, and perhaps helpful to, other young people who feel similarly.
 

Throughout the book, Alex thinks of himself as a boy, but at the end you can see that perhaps he is about to start thinking differently. (He's asked his pronouns twice, in situations where it would be safe to answer differently, and says he/him both times.) Alex's specific flavors of social anxiety and identity confusion look a lot like mine did at that age. I don't think there's any one universal 'transgender experience,' but what author Agnes Borinsky has written here felt like a very accurate representation of my own path, and if Alex is at all autobiographical, then I guess Borinsky and I must have felt very similarly when we were first starting to understand ourselves.
 
Alex starts his junior year of high school in Baltimore missing his lesbian best friend Mabel, whose family moved for a new job, and kind of getting set up to date a girl in his class who thinks he's cute by a few of their mutual friends. Going on dates, having a girlfriend, those are nice, and briefly help Alex think he can overcome his feelings of always putting on an act to please others, of being somehow not-real in a way that other people seem to be effortlessly real. But instead, he keeps thinking of a time he and Mabel dressed up in thrifted clothes and made up new names as a game, and he wore a dress and called himself Sasha Masha.
 
Alex's girlfriend notices his distance, and when he tries to explain, she thinks he's mocking her. He briefly tries to tell his parents, but they think it's a joke. And Alex can't stop thinking about Sasha Masha and what it would be like if that were his name. He goes back to a LGBT center he used to visit with Mabel, and makes friends with Andre, who introduces him to an other friends and takes him to a teen dance night. Alex would kind of like Andre to be a boyfriend, but he's more like a mentor.
 
It's sort of astonishing, by the end of the book, all of Alex's relationships are in shambles, with his parents, with friends new and old, everything is a mess. But Alex can finally see a new possibility, even if he's not completely sure if he wants it, of stopping being Alex, and starting to be Sasha Masha. On paper, it doesn't seem like it should feel like a satisfactory resolution, but somehow it does.
 
Compared to other queer coming-of-age stories, there's virtually no misbehaving here - no drinking or drugs, no sex. The only real rulebreaking is Alex staying out past curfew a couple times, and not telling his parents who he's hanging out with. The prose is initially very simple, with short, direct sentences, but as Alex opens up, his narration also becomes more fluid and expressive.
 

In one autumn, Alex sort of speedruns a process that took me from spring of my junior year in high school to the fall of my sophomore year of college. I spent most of my life feeling different from other people without understanding how. When I was a kid, my classmates teased me by calling me a girl, until we became tweens, when they switched to calling me gay. I might've agreed with them, except I knew all my celebrity crushes were on women, none were on men.
 
In high school, one day, I complimented a girl's hair bow, and she said if I liked it, I should wear one, then laughed, and said she shouldn't say that to me because I probably would. I don't really know why she said that, but I also kind of took it as a dare, and wore one, as a 'joke,' on April Fool's Day. I got stared at, bullied; I spent the whole day feeling miserable, but also like there was some new possibility for me, a future where I wasn't just trying and failing to be a guy. I don't feel like the slang of 'cracking your egg' describes how I felt particularly accurately, but that one stupid offhand comment, and all the time I spent thinking about it, and that first day I tried it - for me, that was when everything changed.
 
I tried crossdressing some more my senior year, mostly without telling anyone what it meant. I told my high school girlfriend; I felt like it wrecked our relationship, and I was afraid that would keep happening. So I stopped all of it, and went all the way back in the closet during my first year of college (except for winning a Halloween costume contest as in a dress.) After that year, I realized trying to live like that was making me miserable. I couldn't imagine, and didn't want, a lifetime of feeling like that. My sophomore year I started attending the LGBT club on campus, and slowly stated coming out.
 
For the longest time throughout this process, I felt totally alone. At first I thought I might be the only person in the world to want to change genders. I became aware of the existence if other trans people, of the word 'transsexual,' only gradually. I found the memoir of someone who was institutionalized for being trans, a couple novels that treated it as a life-destroying tragedy, and learned about the psychiatric diagnosis of 'gender identity disorder.' I went from thinking I was alone to thinking I had something I absolutely had to keep secret. A lifetime of gender-based bullying seemed to confirm it.
 
Obviously, so much is different for queer teens today, but I think it would've been nice, when I was desperately, furtively searching for information to make sense of the unfathomable emotions I was feeling, if I'd found a hopeful, empathetic, teen-appropriate book like Sasha Masha. Borinksy doesn't prescribe any answers; what she does is tell the kids asking these questions about themselves, you're not alone. Someone else understands how you feel well enough to write about it. This doesn't have to be a secret, or something you feel but never act on. If you want it to be, this can be your life.

The Five Lives of Hilma af Klint

 

 

The Five Lives of Hilma af Klint

by Philipp Deines

translated by Renata Stein and Ruth Bittorf

adapted from the biography by Julia Voss

David Zwirner Books

2022

 

 

I think it's fair to say that Hilma af Klint is having a moment. She was Swedish, a spiritualist, a painter, and possibly a lesbian, whose life and work spanned the late 1800s and early 1900s. She was one of the first abstract painters, predating several much better known names, and she was arguably underappreciated by other artists during her life.
 
af Klint was featured in a few European galleries in the 2010s, notably the 2013 Venice Biennale, and then she was given a solo exhibition in the Guggenheim in 2019, which had record-setting attendance. In addition to an exhibit book Paintings for the Future, there's also a recent biography by Julia Voss, a biopic called Hilma, and a novel, Sofia Lundberg's Friday Night Club.

The Five Lives of Hilma af Klint, which is what I just read, is a graphic nonfiction biography of af Klint by Philipp Deines, who is Julia Voss's husband. If I understand correctly, this is a kind of simplified companion to or adaptation of his wife's book.
 

Deines tells af Klint's life story in five chapters, hence the title, and definitely hits all the high points. Hilma af Klint lost a beloved younger sister just as she herself was becoming an adult, and felt haunted by her sister's ghostly presence for the rest of her life. She was in a spiritualist club that did seances and  automatic writing and drawing, which might be where she first developed certain abstract symbols and motifs. She studied painting and initially produced portraits and landscapes in a more-or-less traditional style. She was the very close friend, and maybe lover, of another woman artist. She got work as a medical illustrator for a veterinary college.
 
Guided by her spiritualist beliefs and visions, af Klint developed an abstract style, trying to depict spiritual concepts in like, instructional diagrams. She exhibited more often to other spiritualists than to other artists, but felt unappreciated by both. A significant portion of her works were never shown during her life, and she included a stipulation in her will that they not be shown for at least 20 years after her death.
 
Deines's art style is kind of cartoony, but I appreciate that his goal seems to have been to show as many of af Klint's potential influences as he could. We see what the af Klint family estate looked like, we see Stockholm, we see af Klint's early realist art and the paintings of her contemporaries, and of course, we see examples of her groundbreaking abstract works. Taken together, all this gives you something valuable that text alone wouldn't be able to.
 
My one complaint about this book is that all the text is typed instead of being hand-lettered. And the font is like, Calibri, and it usually seems too small for the word bubbles its filling. The mechanical and low-effort look of the text was a jarring contrast with Deines's fluid and very human linework.

Titanium Noir

 
 

Titanium Noir

by Nick Harkaway

Knopf

2023

 

 

Titanium Noir is probably Nick Harkaway's most accessible book to date. At under 250 pages, it's less than half as long his others; compared to the rest of his output, it's practically a novella. It still has Harkaway's usual blend of genres, this time mixing dystopian scifi with a noir detective mystery.
 
The future tech that drives this one is the T7 injection, a miracle drug that biologically de-ages a person's cells to pre-pubescent, then rapidly reruns a decade of puberty in a month. The result is that any injuries are healed (even lost limbs and cancer,) the patient is perhaps 20% taller and heavier, with denser bones and another 60-80 years of natural life to look forward to. They have become a titan. After one dose, someone who started very short or thin might pass as a very tall unaltered human - though few would want to.
 
Titans are the elite. The first dose is unthinkably expensive, but the reward, beyond near immortality, is the kind celebrity and license to misbehave that today we associate with rock stars, football players, royalty. The future world is one or two hundred years past our own, yet in many ways scarcely changed from our own. Our society's uppermost class has been supplanted by the titans, the oldest of whom would be alive today. The city where the book takes place has a sparkling neighborhood of skyscrapers that accommodate the titans' homes and offices that must've taken decades to build. But aside from things like that, it feels more like the world of 2050 than 2250, because the titans can be conservative to a degree our own elites, many of whom are old, but not like 'born before the Civil War' old, cannot possibly match.
 
It's maybe not a mysterious why Harkaway was thinking about near-magical medical technology. In the acknowledgments at the end, Harkaway thanks a hospital employee who was very understanding on a particular date in December 2020. Harkaway's father was John le Carre, who died then, of complications from a fall, only a few days apart from my own father, of covid. Out of a terrible couple years, that December still managed to be one of a handful of notably awful months. A lot of people lost someone then.
 

I don't know, but I do wonder if that's part of why this book lacks some of Harkaway's usual manic exuberance. I missed his signature style of abundance and excess, of digressions and diversions and flashbacks and philosophy. Compared to his other offerings, this one seems trim and streamlined. There are minor characters who I thought we'd see more of, who could've gotten whole unnecessary chapters just because he liked them, who show up just once, or get mentioned again only in passing. We don't learn the history of the city, or find out much about our narrator's life before this particular case.
 

And a couple plot threads seem ill-proportioned to the shorter length. There's a red herring clue about the Marx Brothers that carries on far too long and has almost no payoff; encounters with a titan crime boss and repeated listenings to multiple versions of the same rumor likewise feel too big for the book they're in. In a 500-pager they'd fit in fine alongside the other extravagances. Here they're like a man too big for his suit coat, tearing stitches from all the seams. Maybe that structure is intended to remind us of how the titans take up too much room compared to the normal humans around them? Or maybe Harkaway was sad and his heart wasn't quite in it.
 

The protagonist this time around, Cal Sounder, is the sort of fellow who maybe Humphrey Bogart would've played in the film version if the timing had worked out right. He's a consulting detective, but I think he's also Harkaway's thought experiment about what good police would look like. Cal is kind, deeply empathetic, smart, and he fights dirty enough to win even when he's physically outmatched. Cal cares about humanity, and he tries to help the little people when he can. I liked his cadence, especially his way of recounting what a witness said in response, without needing to state his own questions.
 

Cal is kind of a fixer in titan-related cases. Sometimes, I think, he helps clean up their mess and protects them from bad press. This time, he's investigating a dead, possibly murdered titan, and he's there to protect the cops from retaliation if someone upstairs doesn't like the answers they come up with. Cal's ex-girlfriend is now a titan, and the daughter of the man who invented the injections. She was dosed after she was badly injured, which makes Cal kind of a friend of the family. I badly wanted to know more about her, and about their life together before her injury.
 

Like Memento, the solution here hinges on something forgotten due to the terrible pain and trauma of growing a foot and aging a decade in a month. I was very glad that Harkaway didn't make Cal a secret titan who'd forgotten the truth about himself! But I think the point of the book is the tour through the dystopia that is very rich people having too much power, moreso than it is the solution to the mystery itself.

Lent

 
 
Lent

A Novel of Many Returns

by Jo Walton

Tor

2019

 

 

The first time I watched the movie Life is Beautiful, I thought it was simply an Italian rom-com. When my partner - who recommended Jo Walton's Lent to me - first read the book, she only knew that it was about Italian monks during the Renaissance, and that based on the author's reputation, it probably had some kind of speculative component. I took a little more convincing than that, and so I went into it knowing something that caught her totally by surprise. If you keep reading, you'll know it too, because I hardly know how to talk about Lent, let alone recommend it, without saying what it's really about.

I haven't read that many historical fantasies, but I have read at least two set during the Renaissance - Umberto Eco's Baudolino and Catherynne Valente's Habitation of the Blessed, both of which feature blymmes and skiapods and other humanoids the ancient Greeks believed lived in foreign lands. For the first half, Lent is essentially straight historical fiction, a retelling of the last 6 years in the life of Girolamo Savonarola, an ascetic monk who lived in Florence, preached a strict Christianity, organized a bonfire of the vanities, and was himself hanged and burned in 1498 for opposing both the Medicis and the pope.

Girolamo can see demons and banish them (Walton describes them like the monsters that show up in the margins of illuminated manuscripts,) and he believes he receives prophetic knowledge from God. This is only barely fantastic though, since mysticism was common enough at the time, and the events in Florence are basically a this-worldly contest between factions in an early democracy to determine whether Florence will be a city of commerce and splendor, as the merchants want, or a New Jerusalem that is ruled by God's laws as much as it is secular authority. Walton uses plain language that makes these debates feel contemporary, and the spread of ideas via sermons and other public speeches reminds me a bit of social media. She even makes Girolamo's opposition to the power of wealth sympathetic to a reader like me, someone who the real Savonarola would have likely condemned.

What makes this book science fiction is what happens halfway through, when Girolamo dies and then relives his same life, the story resetting to the events of 1492. At this point, we're in the realm of alt history, as Girolamo tries to get a different outcome, even as he remains committed to preaching the gospel and saving men's souls. The first half of the book is fine, but this is where Walton puts her foot on the accelerator and the plot really starts racing. Because Girolamo isn't just reincarnated once, but several times, with each life getting about half the pages of the one before. I guess this is technically a time-loop story, but those usually just repeat a day or so, while Girolamo is operating on the scale of years, and because he's a Great Man, operating at a crux of history, both he and Florence travel some wildly different trajectories across the iterations.

Each life is still portrayed realistically. Walton is thoughtful about how history might change - and stubbornly, might not - based on the actions of one very charismatic man living in one city at a time of unrest across Europe. The structure reminds me less of other time-loop stories, and more of something like Rachel Swirsky's "The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers from Beneath the Queen's Window" or Walter John Williams' "Daddy's World" - stories that start out in one genre, but become increasingly philosophical and science fictional simply because they refuse to end where we expect them to, and keep going and getting stranger due to the long passage of time.

It's Lonely at the Centre of the Earth

 
 

It's Lonely at the Centre of the Earth

An Auto-Bio-Graphical Novel

by Zoe Thorogood

Image Comics

2022

 

 

It's Lonely at the Centre of the Earth is a graphic memoir documenting half a year in 2021. Thorogood is a young cartoonist, and her first book came out near the start of the covid pandemic. It was well-received, but the normal promotional process was disrupted before it could start. Thorogood also has severe, uncontrolled depression, which is the single dominating focus of It's Lonely.

I haven't made a secret of own depression, which was quite bad when I was younger, but which is now mostly mild and well-managed, even if it's never truly gone away. If my depression is like an old cut that has never fully healed, but at least is clean and has a scab, Thorogood's, by comparison, is like a ghastly open wound that weeps blood and lymph and stinks of sepsis and gangrene. It is shocking how much she hates herself and how much pain she feels. It feels indecent to witness it. I hope, sincerely, for her to manage to get older, and to succeed at taming and tempering her depression some as she does.

There are two things about my depression that can make it hard for me to read about someone else's though. The first is that it's always there in the background of my emotions, usually far back, like a figure who shows up in the crowd in every photograph. But because it's never gone, there's always a chance it come forward again. The second is that, because both the pain and the memory-of-the-pain of depression come from the same place, they feel the same. The muted echo of pain you hear when you think about a bad memory sounds exactly the same as the quiet early notes of orchestra warming up to play a full new symphony. And so I don't know if it's really true, but it feels like thinking too much about my own depression will cause it to come all the way back. So I try to be careful not to think too much about it. It's Lonely kind of ambushed me because I only knew that it was a critically-acclaimed graphic memoir.

Thorogood makes the decision to start her memoir after a particularly bad day when she feels suicidal. She keeps it for another six months or so. During that time, she also works on illustrating a comic series that someone else wrote. She plans a trip to America to attend a comics convention, but the trip gets canceled due to covid. She visits her parents. She attends a convention near home in England. She makes a new plan to visit another artist in America, hoping to hook up and maybe fall in love with him. She does visit, but it's disappointing. She decides to stop the memoir and start her next project.

I will say this for Thorogood. She's a very good artist. She clearly has mastery over a range of styles and is able to blend them freely, in a way that reminds me of collage. She has like 4 different avatars for herself in different cartoon styles, plus the looming black-cloaked, monstrous avatar of her depression. She interchanges which one is 'really her' from panel to panel. Her compositions are dynamic and interesting. Most pages are riots of emotion and information, even when her avatar is simply sitting still.

The closest visual (and I guess topical) comparison I can think of is the Eternity Girl comic book by Magdalene Visaggio and Sonny Liew, which uses a variety of art styles from the Golden and Silver ages of comics up to the present day to show its depressed, suicidal-but-immortal heroine grappling with a life whose purpose has already ended.

Thorogood's surreal techniques also remind me of one trend in women's writing, both fiction and non, that prizes this kind of kaleidoscopic viewpoint over straightforward or consistent narration. It's a style that feels, I suppose, like browsing the internet, jumping from voice to voice and thought to thought. It's like if the film Everything Everywhere All At Once was a style guide. Writing on Literary Hub, Dayla Benor describes it this way:

"Writers like Gertrude Stein, Susan Sontag and Maggie Nelson have all experimented with the use of fragmented, free-flowing text. But underneath the seeming disorganization, their books have strong organizing principles - the fragments have an accumulative effect for the reader, so that by the end, the parts amount to a whole. These books, part non-fiction, part memoir, part criticism, stop and start like a sputtering engine. They require a certain dedication to see them through, requiring the reader to maintain focus when the narrator prefers not to."

"It's a style of writing that seems to be gaining traction, if less for the content and more for the 'idea' of what it represents - an aesthetic of artisticism, intellectual superiority, and a refusal to abide by the rules. In the beginning, fragmentation found its home in feminist literature as a way to reject patriarchal order. Historically, the style is a form of protest. But now, a rebranding of 'stream of consciousness' writing has the next generation in a chokehold."

I don't recommend this book to anyone else with depression. In fact, I'd like to warn you away from it. I sort of wish I hadn't heard of this book or read it. Not because it rings false, but because it's too true - too raw, too unprocessed, too accurate, too real. Reading it hurts - and in a way, and a time, that I had no real need to subject myself to.

Witch Hat Atelier 5

 
 
Witch Hat Atelier 5

by Kamome Shirahama

Kodansha

2020

 

 

In the previous volume of Witch Hat Atelier, student witches Agott and Richeh went to take the test that would let them use magic in public, where they can't allow anyone to see how spells are cast. The test involved wearing magic disguises and ushering the annual migration of adorable little penguin griffins though a cursed maze. They were joined by Euini, a student witch from another atelier who has series self-esteem problems. The test was interrupted by the witches who use forbidden magic (identifiable by their brimmed caps, in contrast to the brimless conical hats everyone else wears.) The test proctor was injured, and Euini got tattooed with a sigil that turned him into a wolf creature!
 
In volume 5, we start out with almost everyone separated. Richeh is completing the test because witch-kind owes it to the penguins to help with their migration, since witches are the ones who put a giant cursed maze in the path of their migration route. Richeh seems to complete her emotional revelation from last time, and figures out a way to reconcile her longstanding desire to be true to herself with the reality that she needs to learn more spells if she wants to be successful.
 
Coco, Tetia, and their teacher, master witch Qifrey and up in a cavern full of what remains of the society that built the maze. Specifically, what remains is all the people who were turned to gold as punishment for being old, disabled, immigrants, or just opposed to their community's policy of magical punishment. Ironically, they're all that's left, because they're effectively immortal. They want to kill all witches, and manage to injure Qifrey before Coco and Tetia convince them to stop. 

 

The gold people ask the girls a riddle, regarding the one thing they don't have down here in the cavern. I'm pretty sure the answer is 'death,' but Coco guesses comfort, because she is heavily invested in the idea that people who've been transformed by magic (like her mom) can be saved. She offers them a simple warming spell as a form of comfort, but the people who've been turned to gold find a way to use her spell that's more in line with my thought about the riddle.
 
Agott tries to avoid getting killed by the brimmed-cap witch who is just a cloak and hat, and manages to get herself and the injured test proctor back to Coco, Tetia, and Qifrey. Agott spied the cloak witch talking to the masked witch who's caused so many problems so far, and learns that they consider Coco to be their best ambassador for reintroducing forbidden magic to witch-kind. Qifrey fights the cloak-and-hat witch, and manages to learn his secret. He also poses an interesting question - do you know a brimmed-cap witch who looks just like me? The cloaked witch says no. My guess is that it's the masked witch. Whether they are twins or clones or what is my next question!
 
While Qifrey is distracted, the masked witch and Euini in his wolf form arrive at the girls' location. Coco tries drawing a reversing sigil onto Euini's skin atop the tattoo that transformed him. The girls are all a little worried this skirts the line of being forbidden, but normal sigils are usually beneficial and can be disrupted by breaking the surface of the drawing - there's no rule about this reversal technique because no one's needed it before, and thus no one else has thought of it. Coco is an inventor! So there's no rule - yet - against using her invented technique. 

 

Unfortunately, although this restores Euini's human consciousness, it leaves his body unaffected. The masked witch taunts them with a necklace that will reverse the spell if only Coco will agree to come learn more forbidden magic. The girls manage to steal the necklace, and the test proctor saves the day by offering to adopt and hide Euini so that he won't have his mind erased (or worse!) by the Knights Moralis now that he's a living forbidden spell.
 
The two brimmed hat witches decide to escape while they have the chance. Euini and the test proctor sneak away to begin a new life in hiding. Qifrey and his students emerge from the cursed maze to find the leader of the Knights Moralis waiting for them. He knows that the brimmed hat witches were there, and he wants Qifrey's whole atelier to accompany him to the witches' central government building now. This is dangerous for everyone, especially Coco, since if the Knights knew the truth, they'd rather erase her memory and send her back to being a tailor than allow her to continue learning magic to try to save her mom.

Witch Hat Atelier is obviously a a very adventurous, plot-driven narrative, but I remain impressed by two aspects of Shirahama's storytelling. First, this is comic intended to be accessible to kids and teenagers, and in the foreground, both the art, and the life-philosophies espoused by the main characters tend to be optimistic and, for lack of a better word, 'cozy.' But at the same time, Shirahama doesn't shy away from depicting real emotions of fear and sadness. Coco's optimism is a conscious choice about how to respond to trauma, not the naive expression of a young life that's been free from trouble. 

 

Second, while the broad strokes of the plot follow traditional schoolyard tropes - studying and tests, trips to town, troubles with poor mentors or self-doubt - but each character's actions reflect both her own approach to life, and her journey to becoming a better, more mature person. Agott is proud of her skill, but slowly learns to appreciate others' abilities; Richeh wants to create everything anew, but realizes she has to understand tradition before she can build on it. The characters are dynamic, and their actions are specific to themselves, not generic to the needs of the plot, which I really appreciate.

Black Sea

 

Black Sea

Dispatches and Recipes Through Darkness and Light

by Caroline Eden

photographs by Ola Smit and Theodore Kaye
Quadrille

2018

 

 

Black Sea is a book that seems to deliberately defy classification. First and foremost, it's travel writing, cataloging author Caroline Eden's trip around the Black Sea coast, starting in Odessa, Ukraine, passing through Romania and Bulgaria, then crossing Turkey, from Istanbul in the west to Trabzon in the east.

Admittedly, travel writing is always an eclectic genre, mixing narration of the author's voyage with tidbits of local history and current events, and it's often combined with food writing, as in this case, where Eden seemingly describes every meal as she travels the coast. But Eden's emphasis on food goes beyond a secondary focus - you could also think of this as food writing that happens to describe travel. She even includes recipes between each stop, usually 2-4 from each place she visits, adding up to dozens over the course of the book. So this is also kind of a cook book.

It's also also kind of a photo book. There aren't images on every page, and the book itself is novel-sized, not coffee table, but there are a lot of photos, usually getting a full page or two-page spread each. In a lot of travel books you get none, or else a few pages of color plates in the center. I don't usually talk about the physical qualities of the book I'm reading, but Black Sea is gorgeous. The hardcover has silver foil and an embossed surface making the wave pattern. The pages are edged in ink so that the closed book is a solid block of black. The paper is heavy, and the photography crisp and attractive.

And the thing is, this genre hybrid, this eclectic mix, it works. Eden marches on her stomach, and you follow along, eating your way from Odessa to Trabzon. There are local variations, but the recipes often involve garlic, rice pilaf or bulgar wheat, yogurt or cheese, honey, leafy greens, hazelnuts or chestnuts, and lots of fish, especially sardines and anchovies, which are beloved across the region. She buses between cities and has local guides and drivers in each one, eating at a mix of restaurants and hospitable family homes. Like me, she's curious about the famous 'mad honey' made from rhododendron pollen, said to be intoxicating in small doses, toxic in large, but she doesn't manage to try any.

Besides food, Eden's other big interest is immigrant communities. She writes about the Jewish and Italian communities in Odessa, Swiss farmers in Romania, Russians loyal to the tsar fleeing Lenin in Istanbul, and Turks who came back to Trabzon after generations in Russia. She's arguably more interested in these smaller communities, their culture and food, than she is with the majority population anywhere she goes. Eden gives special attention to writers, mostly but not only Russian authors exiled by the Soviets, so it would be easy to compile a reading list from books she mentions along the way.

Eden is not, for the most part, interested making any overt comments about politics. There's an obvious reason her journey doesn't start in Crimea or make it out of Turkey into Georgia or Russia - but she never mentions it. Ceausescu only comes up to explain why so few Anglophone travel writers have visited Romania. The Russian seizure of Crimea and territories in East Ukraine, the attempted Turkish coup and Erdogan's authoritarian crackdown afterward - Eden mentions them only in passing, and only when absolutely necessary.

I say this not to cast judgment, just as a description of what she wrote. There's a new edition of the book coming out this year with some supplemental writing about Putin's full invasion of Ukraine. It's hard for me to imagine this won't feel tacked on and dissonant with what's already there. Another writer, or perhaps even Eden herself, could write all about the historical and present-day conflicts and injustices in the countries surrounding the Black Sea, but I feel like that would belong to a different book, a different way of experiencing the region than what we get here.

One Hundred Aspects of the Moon

 
 

One Hundred Aspects of the Moon

art by Yoshitoshi

edited by Bas Verberk

Walther Konig

1885-1895, reprinted 2022

 

 

The two most famous Japanese woodcut artists, Hokusai and Hiroshige lived during the Edo period - roughly coinciding with the early modern period in Europe. They made prints depicting contemporary city life. In fact, the Japanese name for these images, ukiyo-e, isn't based on the medium, but the content. The -e suffix means 'pictures of' and ukiyo is 'the Floating World,' the name for the demimonde, the urban lifestyle of art, leisure, theater, and legal prostitution that arose in Tokyo and other cities at that time. So ukiyo-e are literally 'pictures of the Floating World,' but they're also all woodblock prints.

 

Yoshitoshi lived at the end of Edo and the start of the Meiji period - around the same time as the Industrial Revolution. He is apparently considered the third master of ukiyo-e after Hiroshige and Hokusai. Rather than representing the world he lived in though, Yoshitoshi's prints mostly depict Japanese history, legends, and folktales. One Hundred Views of the Moon is Yoshitoshi's most famous series of prints. The specific collection of that series I read was collected by the Museum of East Asian Art in Cologne, Germany, and edited by their curator of Japanese art, Bas Verberk. The quality of the photos the book is based on (and the quality of the book itself I guess) is high enough that you can actually see the wood grain of the printing block in many of the prints, whenever there's a wide enough expanse of a single color. Alongside each print is a page-length museum label where Verberk explains what the image depicts.

 

The Meiji period was a time when Japan was forcibly re-opened to commerce and diplomacy with Europe after something like 200 years of isolation. I don't know exactly what Yoshitoshi's intellectual or artistic agenda was, but I think it's fairly common in periods of great change and disruption for people to hearken back to stories from the past to try to reconstruct a new way forward. On a much smaller and less significant scale, I think you see the same thing in American superhero comics in the 2000s. Lots of independent creators have series that self-consciously recreate the style of the Silver Age comics of the 1960s, like Black Hammer and Astro City, as their creators try to figure out how to get from 'there' to 'here,' where here is hopefully a new way of writing superheroes that makes sense for the 21st century. Anyway, as I said, I don't know if that was Yoshitoshi's goal, and Verberk doesn't say either, but I imagine that the reason he picked such a wide array of old stories as his subject matter was that he was trying to figure out a new vision for Japanese culture, maybe even a new way to still be Japanese, while navigating a newly expanded world of European interference.

 

A lot of Yoshitoshi's prints, possibly even a majority in this collection, depict samurai and generals and other figures from the long Warring States period between the peace of the Heien and Edo, when there was no one central government, and the leaders of the regional governments competed for territory and control. As the title of the series suggests, the moon is present in nearly every image, and the few where you can't see it are understood to be taking place under the moonlight. Other pictures show scenes from the Buddhist tradition, characters from the Tale of Genji and especially the Tale of Heike, folktales and legends about people who traveled to the moon, animals with supernatural powers associated with the moon, and scenes from noh theater, which predates Edo-era kabuki. Yoshitoshi had several different name stamps for signing his work, and seems to have kind of used different stamped signatures for different themes within the series.

 

My favorite was 'Mount Yoshino Midnight Moon,' which shows a woman meeting a supernatural creature beneath either a new moon or lunar eclipse. I think if I seek out more ukiyo-e art, I might try to find someone who depicted the changes Japan was going through during the Meiji period. Or perhaps I might go backward myself, and actually look through a complete series of Hokusai or Hiroshige's prints, because I think I've only seen a few of their images, out of order and out of context. 

 

'Mount Yoshino Midnight Moon'
image source

 

I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew

 

I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew

by Dr Seuss

Random House

1965

 

 

When I read The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, it reminded me vaguely of Dr Seuss's I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew, which was one of my favorites of his as a kid, so I decided to reread it. I have no idea if Suess ever read Lovecraft, but even if he did, I doubt this was any sort of direct homage or inspiration. There are similarities because both tell stories about journeys, and both contain a few common elements - a distant city, cats, a vast underground - but Solla Sollew is its own story, not a retlling of Kadath.
 
The unnamed narrator of Solla Sollew is a young man who feels beset by troubles. He makes rules for himself, to try to prevent the same things happening again, but there's always something new. And so, he is tempted when a traveler promises to take him along to a golden city where he'll be troubled no more.
 
But along the way, he meets other people who have troubles of their own that they're running away from. The traveler hooks the boy with his promise, then makes him do all the work. An old man moves from home to escape the rain. A general conscripts the boy into his army, then runs off and leaves him alone at the first sign of danger.
 
When he gets to the fabled city, they have problems too, and the first person he meets wants to run off to a new city that'll surely be better. So at last the boy stops to consider, and goes home, and instead of trying to avoid every possible form of trouble, plans to confront and overcome them.
 
Parts of this remind me of very old style D&D. First the boy trips on a rock, so then he always looks down as he walks. Then he gets bitten by a bird from behind, so he teaches himself to be wall-eyed. Then he gets attacked from above and below... It's just like descriptions of the oldest D&D games, where the players developed elaborate lists of routine instructions for each time their characters entered a new room, trying to avoid every single bad thing that'd ever befallen them from surprising them again, and the Dungeon Master constantly innovating new and more obscure punishments for failing to say the magic words "...and I also look at X." There's even a tiny monster who lives in a keyhole and pushes your key out of the lock!
 
Most of my favorite Seuss books were like children's bestiaries - If I Ran the Circus, If I Ran the Zoo, On Beyond Zebra, McElligot's Pool. Several of those are out of print now, because the conceit of each relied on fantastic exoticism that sometimes incorporated real-world orientalism and racism. A little boy dream of greatness, because he alone will go out and come home with animals from other parts of the world, imaginary animals from imaginary places, that he's able to believe might be real partly just because he's young, and partly because these places are in parts of the world he knows little about, so the imaginary spots seem no more unreal than what's actually there. It's no coincidence he dreams of animals from made-up parts of Asia and Africa, not a fantastic unmapped bit of the American Midwest.
 
Solla Sollew and another one I liked, The Butter Battle Book, are different, because they're ultimately warnings about the dangers of choosing fantasy over reality, of imagining that you can be rid of your problems without solving them, just one town over or one new toy away. Both are, in a way, more mature works, because they still star a dreamer, but they show that his dreams don't work out simply because he hopes they will, and who ultimately decides to stop dreaming and take action, to do something real. That's one last similarity to Dream-Quest, I suppose, because in that Randolph Carter finally chooses to wake up and to live, rather than dying in his sleep trying to capture a dream.

The Carpet Makers

 
 

The Carpet Makers

by Andreas Eschbach

translated by Doryl Jensen

Tor

1995, reprinted 2005

 

 

The Carpet Makers is a German scifi novel from the 1990s that was translated into English a decade later. The structure of the book, and Eschbach's way of slowly expanding out and building up his narrative is unlike anything else I've read. It's kind of a masterpiece.
 

The title characters, the carpet makers, are artisans who create 'hair carpets,' an art form that is both central to the story and acts as a kind of metaphor or synecdoche for the power of the emperor.
 

A hair carpet is an elaborately patterned textile, about as long as a person is tall, and half as wide as it is long, intricately knotted, made entirely of human hair. It represents so much human labor that each maker weaves only a single carpet in his lifetime, starting when he is young, finishing when he is old, using solely the hair of his wives and daughters. He weaves for the glory of the emperor, who lives on another world. At the end of his life, he will sell the carpet for a large sum of money, so much that it will last his son his entire life, so that he can devote himself to the same work. Makers have many wives and daughters, and only one son who is permitted to survive infancy. This has been the tradition for longer than anyone can remember.

 

You learn this much in the first chapter, and if you're like me, you're already thinking about what kind of society is so stable that this practice can become a tradition for many generations, with prices that change so little that a single payment can reliably be spent over a lifetime. You're wondering about the power of an emperor who can compel this labor as an act of religious devotion. You're perhaps thinking that hair carpets seem both grotesque but also beautiful, and wondering about what it would mean to spend your entire life working meticulously on a single task. You're thinking about the technological inequality between the people who perform traditional handicrafts, and the emperor who rules multiple planets. Eschbach will spend the rest of the book slowly revealing the answers.

 
Each chapter is like a short story. They're all told in close third person, each following a new viewpoint character. Events or people from one story sometimes are heard about or have some influence on a later one. There is sort of an overarching plot, but also, the characters in each story are mostly concerned with their own lives and own problems. The bigger picture emerges at the margins.

 
There is a logic to the order of the stories, although it's more obvious in retrospect. We follow the route that hair carpets take, from the house of the makers, to being bought by a trader, transported overland to the port city, to being shipped off-world. At the same time, we follow the progress of a rumor, that the emperor has abdicated, that the empire is dissolved, that there's no one to make hair carpets for anymore. Tradition on this world is harsh, and strictly enforced. To disobey, even to doubt, means death. And so we also follow a trail of ruined dreams, human sacrifices to a draconian social order. The price of empire is payed in lives.
 

Once off-world, we eventually learn the origin of the hair carpet tradition, and what the carpets are ultimately used for by the immortal emperor. I don't want to say too much here. Learning more and more, and repeatedly revising what you think you know, is one of the pleasures of this book. Eschbach has crafted a tale that grows by the accumulation of clues and references. This is a thoughtfully told tale, and it inspires you to think as you read it, to work through the implications of everything you learn, and especially to attend to the human costs.
 

This is one of the most masterful and most unusual science fiction novels I've read. There's almost no action. The characters are all ordinary people, trying to live the best lives they can in a system that would grind them to dust for any act of heresy or defiance. But the scale and the scope of it all is nonetheless humbling. I'd recommend it to anyone who likes sociological science fiction.

The New Champion of Shazam!

 

The New Champion of Shazam!

by Josie Campbell

art by Doc Shaner
DC Comics

2023

 

 

The New Champion of Shazam! collects a 4-issue miniseries of comics that reintroduces the character of Mary Marvel as (briefly) the sole wielder of the power of Shazam. This might've made a good start to a new ongoing series, but instead, the 5th comic in here, a single issue from another DC crossover event (Planet Lazarus) undoes the premise by bringing back Billy Batson as the original and primary Shazam.

For awhile, I tried keeping up with DC Comics' main continuity, but I've stopped checking in as much, and basically lost track over the past couple years. In some ways that makes New Champion ideal for someone like me, since it's a fresh start for a character who apparently has been out of circulation for awhile. On the other hand, the set-up to get the series started presumes events I had no knowledge of. Billy Batson is vanished and missing, his foster siblings are no longer able to transform into superheroes, and this state of affairs has prevailed for long enough that they've all moved on creating new civilian lives.

Mary has gotten into Vassar, and wants to figure out who she is now - not as a superhero or sister, but as an independent young woman. She gets very little time to find out, unfortunately, since on move-in day, her roommate's pet rabbit reveals that he's a messenger from the absent Billy, and he bestows her with the magic of Shazam. (In fact, since no one else is sharing it, she's many times more powerful than usual, although since I'm not really clear on her previous strength, that's not a particularly useful distinction!)

Mary defeats the Disaster Master, then returns to her dorm to find police waiting. Her foster parents never made it home from dropping her off at the bus station, so as the only adult foster sibling, she has to leave Vassar, return to Philadelphia, and take over as de facto parent. Understandably, she's both worried and resentful. She enrolls at the local community college, meets a sympathetic teacher, gets in a bunch of arguments with her siblings, then fights a giant flying crocodile and three mysterious jet black figures.

She also slightly embarrasses herself when she's approached by a news crew right after barely surviving the crocodile, getting stagefright, and flying away. Jokes and memes about her blow up on social media, setting up the best fight of the series, with another magic villain named Babel who psychically assaults her with her own negative self-messages, which at the moment are mostly made up of all the hurtful online comments.

The whole online infamy angle is one of the two really good bits of social commentary in here. The other is the fun the comic pokes at the ridiculously self-aggrandizing community college president, who keeps trying to oversell the quality of the school.

Anyway, eventually Mary figures out who's been creating the magical monsters, and kidnapping people (including her foster parents!,) and she's able to save the day all around. Mary embraces being Shazam, her family is reunited and no longer all arguing with each other, the press begins stops making fun of her, presumably she can restart college next semester on better footing, etc.

I sort of wish the volume stopped there, because the miniseries tells a complete story, and you could imagine Mary going off to have other adventures, in the style of Ms Marvel or Squirrel Girl, who also balance superheroics, attending school, and managing relationships. My favorite version of Mary Marvel is the one from DC Bombshells, where she's reimagined as a pious Jewish girl who draws strength from famous biblical women (still spelling out Shazam in acrostic, of course,) and stands alone without a male counterpart. As I mentioned at the beginning, the last issue collected here is from a crossover event, and brings back Billy Batson as the primary hero, thus replacing Mary and undermining what the miniseries had tried to build up.

The Undressed Art

 

The Undressed Art

Why We Draw

by Peter Steinhart

Knopf

2005 

 

 

The Undressed Art is both a defense and a description of the process of drawing figures from life, written at a time (the early 2000s) when Steinhart believed that traditional drawing skills were being devalued both in art schools and the art world more generally, in favor of photography, conceptual art and installations, and using computer graphics in commercial design. Steinhart argues that we should value drawing as a process and a practice, rather than for the product it produces.

 
Steinhart lays out his case in miniature in the first chapter, then works back through it over the course of the book, though in a way that's patient and conversational, rather than regimented or forceful. He starts with a discussion of children's drawings, and how so many of us stop drawing (and thus stop improving) around 9 or 10. He talks about sketching and learning to draw from observation. He talks about drawing nude models and about the experience of modeling. He discusses factors, like the rise of abstract expressionism, that have led drawing to fall out of favor in art schools. And he talks about producing finished works, and distributing them.

 
At a number of points he incorporates findings from neuroscience, to talk about what happens inside our brains when we look at a person, when we draw, when we look at a drawing. In brief, other people are the most interesting things in the world to us, their faces are the key to understanding them, reciprocal looking is the basis for connection and rapport, and drawing from life captures some fraction of those emotions and preserves them on paper.

 
'Drawing is seeing,' Steinhart says over and over again, by which he means that the act of drawing from nature, from observation, is a way of looking closely and carefully at something, and trying to recreate it. In the same way that you can't explain an idea to someone else unless you understand it yourself, you can't draw something well unless you've really seen it. He argues that this is an innate human faculty, like language or music. Most of the time, we don't draw to make art. We draw to draw; we draw to see.

 
Steinhart views drawing as perhaps the most humble form of artistry. He doesn't try to aggrandize it, only to ennoble it. He's writing for an audience of fellow enthusiastic amateurs. Even among people who make art professionally, it's a minority who can make a living, even fewer who'll be famous. So his defense of drawing doesn't rest on the idea that it's a pathway to fame. Only that it's worth doing, worth practicing, worth trying to do well, even if your only audience is just yourself. If drawing is a profoundly human activity, then we draw to feel connected with our common humanity, and the great number of other drawers throughout history, whose works are not seen, whose names are not known.

 
Drawing from live nude models has always been controversial, sometimes scandalous. There are always people who think it's improper, others who find it unnecessary. And there are always people who believe in it so much that they'll meet regularly and pay fees to hire models to draw. In cities with enough artists, some people can make a living as models, but it's physically strenuous work, and precarious. I modeled once for an art class in grad school - because I was curious, because I wanted to feel a connection to the art world, because I wanted the students to learn to draw a transgender body. But the opportunity's never come up again. Steinhart says there's always a moment of desire and embarrassment when the model disrobes, before the drawing starts. But the work of observation and recreation crowds out any sexual meaning and replaces it with discipline, and art.

 

There are illustrations throughout the book, drawings of life models by some of the artists Steinhart talks to. Among other things, these drawings help contextualize what he's talking about when he describes the differences between sketching and finished work, or how artistic poses differ from the way we're used to seeing nudity in pornography or advertising.

 
Steinhart's observations about kids' art matches what Georges-Henri Luquet says in Children's Drawings, and though he talks to far fewer art models than sociologist Sarah Phillips, but he makes some of the same points she does in her book Modeling Life. Between reading this and watching so much Portrait Artist of the Year lately, I feel a bit tempted to try to start up drawing again, which I haven't done seriously since high school. It does take a lot of time to do well. There's also a certain irony to Steinhart's motivation, from my perspective. Figurative art and the skill of drawing may be out of favor at our most elite art schools, but I read so many comics, so many books with illustrations, and it's all drawing (whether on paper or a digital tablet) that produces the type of art I see and seek out most.

The Wolf's Secret

 
 

The Wolf's Secret

by Myriam Dahman and Nicolas Digard

art by Julia Sarda

Orchard Books

2020

 

 

The Wolf's Secret is another children's picture book I picked up for the chance to see Julia Sarda's art. Once again, authors Myriam Dahman and Nicolas Digard remix elements of folk lore and fable to tell a new story that feels like it could be from long ago.

In the woods lives the biggest wolf. Every day he hunts, and every other creature in the forest fears him. The wolf likes to go to the edge of a clearing and listen to a human woman sing. She lives in a cabin in the clearing, and sings for her father, who is sick.

One day the singing stops. The wolf keeps returning to the clearing, but the woman doesn't start up again. He doesn't know what to do. Then, the wolf catches a rabbit, who promises to do him a favor if he'll let it go. He does, and the rabbit turns into a wizard. He sets the wolf on a path that will lead him back to the woman.

The wolf follows the path, and ends up with a magic bell he can wear around his neck. It allows him to speak the human language. He goes back to the cabin in the clearing and speaks to the woman while standing behind her. She says she can't sing because she's sad since her father died. The wolf offers to be her companion and keep her company, if she'll sing for him, and if she'll promise to never turn around to see him...

You might guess what happened, but Dahman and Digard find a way to give us a happy ending. The rabbit who becomes a wizard reminds me of one of Aesop's fables. The larger structure of the book resembles Japanese and European legends about shapeshifting animal and fairy spouses, what we might call 'selkie stories,' (following Sophia Samatar,) even when they're not about seal-women specifically. But in those stories, the price of curiosity is abandonment. This tale is much gentler.

This is an earlier example of Sarda's art than I've seen before. Her style is perfectly consistent, but I think in some of the later books, her compositions are livelier, and she finds more opportunities for embellishment. Here the pictures themselves are a bit simpler, even if each figure or background is no less detailed. The wizard with his beard of autumn leaves is a standout, and the other forest creatures reacting with surprise when the wolf puts on the bell is excellent.

The Tragedy of Heterosexuality

 
 
The Tragedy of Heterosexuality

by Jane Ward

NYU Press

2020

 

 

The straights are not okay. Or at least, so says Jane Ward, only half in jest, in The Tragedy of Heterosexuality. Ward's writing mixes academic prolixity, Jezebelian snark, and Twitter-style hot takes in an unstable blend to diagnose the paradoxes of straight culture, empathize in feminist solidarity with straight women, and give heterosexuality a taste of the same medicine queerness is so often served in the form of deliberately patronizing hand-wringing and concern-trolling.
 
How well all that works depends on whether you think those goals are compatible or at odds. I'm not straight, so I didn't feel defensive or personally attacked by any part of this book - but my guess is that if you did get your hackles up in response to some of what Ward says, you'd be less receptive to any of the rest of it. If what seems to me like gentle teasing strikes you as an existential threat, or even just mean-spirited, then you're going to see this book very differently than I did, and like it an awful lot less.
 
In brief, Ward diagnoses the key problem with heterosexuality today as what she calls the 'misogyny paradox' - that straight men desire women's bodies and services, but collectively don't seem to respect or even particularly like women. Some heterosexual couples have good relationships on an individual basis, but dissatisfaction is widespread. It's also asymmetric. In the public square, straight women lament that men mistreat them, neglect them, leave the too much of what should be shared work, sometimes abuse and rape them, and generally fail to acknowledge their full personhood. Straight men's public grievances are that women complain too much and don't offer condition-free sex-on-demand as often or as easily as they'd like.
 
I myself have noticed how often straight women will say something to the effect of 'I wish I could be a lesbian,' a sentiment I've literally never heard reciprocated. There are essentially no straight men who wish they were gay, as far as I can tell. That imbalance in dissatisfaction is at the heart of Ward's critique. The problem with heterosexuality is that it's much worse for women than for men; the problem with heterosexuality is a problem with masculinity, a problem with straight men.
 
Ward presents us with three social scientific projects - two sound bits of research, and one methodologically suspect poll of her internet friends.

 
First she content analyzes texts from what she calls the 'heterosexual repair industry,' ranging from eugenics texts at the start of the 20th century to self-help books today. Modern straightness emerges, at least among White Americans, as an alternative to the previous system where fathers and husbands essentially owned 'their' women. The challenge these books address is that straight men and women mostly socialize with same-gender peers, and end up with few interests in common with their potential spouses. The solution is usually for straight women to change (men are almost never the target audience here) - to be more empathetic and accommodating, to try harder to bridge the gap, and be more willing to accept overwork and neglect as the price of remaining in a relationship.

Reading this chapter, I thought of the latest batch of pro-marriage scolds, who started their current round of hectoring after Ward finished her book, and who seem weirdly uninterested in even trying to make heterosexual marriage sound pleasurable, only profitable. Just get married, the latest sales pitch argues, so you can have more money to raise your children. Never mind whether you like it, do it anyway, make the sacrifice, society demands it. (The modern scolds may not be explicit eugenicists, but their fear of White population decline and minority electoral power within a democratic system seem to me to be only barely, and poorly, concealed.)

For the next chapter, Ward attended pick-up artist classes for sexually frustrated men. Some are lonely and genuinely romantically unsuccessful; others are uninterested in the sort of women who want to sleep with them, and want to learn how to 'upgrade' to their ideal - young, White, blonde, thin. In Ward's view, these courses are the masculine counterpart to the women's self-help books. One thing the classes teach is simply a different repertoire of pick-up lines and techniques than whatever the conventional wisdom is at the time, thus setting these men apart simply by making them different from most of their peers in the bars and nightclubs. But the other thing they teach is how men can make themselves attractive to women simply by not acting like misogynists, to empathize with straight women's viewpoint and perspective, or at least convincingly fake it.

Next, Ward solicits anonymous responses to her own thesis from her friends on social media, then analyses these qualitative data points to extract themes. I don't know if I can take this part seriously as research; it feels more like eavesdropping on a trash-talking session at an entertaining queer dinner party. Besides calling out straight culture as boring, Ward's respondents most often report a kind of sadness at seeing so many of the straight women they know get treated so badly by their boyfriends and husbands.

Finally, Ward offers her suggestion for a solution. She contrasts herself to other feminist scholars who've encouraged straight people to try becoming queer, or to give up on long-term romantic relationships and rely on the camaraderie and support of same-gender friendships to help raise one's children and otherwise help carry one through the difficulties of life. Instead, Ward proposes a kind of leaning in to heterosexuality. She calls on straight men to 'like women so much that they actually like women,' and to desire women's full personhood, not only their (idealized) bodies and the benefits of their unpaid labor.