Witch Hat Atelier 9

 
 
Witch Hat Atelier 9

by Kamome Shirahama

Kodansha

2022 

 

 

It's been a minute since I've read any Witch Hat Atelier. In volume 8, Master Qifrey agreed that he and his students would help run a booth at the upcoming Silver Eve festival with the wandmaker and his grandson Tartah. Coco and Tartah are clearly developing feelings for each other, but neither seems to know how to say so out loud yet. Coco and Tartah are also both harboring doubts about some of the witch laws against magical healing, and they help Custas (the son of a traveling performer who was injured in a landslide) by making him a new mobility aid he can use instead of a walking chair - a cloak that allows him to levitate.
 
At the start of this volume, one of the Knights Moralis, the special order of witches who enforce their laws about magic (mostly by erasing the memory of anyone who breaks them), learns that Custas has returned his magical walking chair to the hospital, not because he recovered, but because he got other help and no longer needs it. This is unusual, and the knight finds it suspicious. I don't think Coco or Tartah broke any rules, but it's still not great that the witch police might suspect them.
 
Qifrey and the girls are taking a horse and wagon to the festival so they can perform acts of service along the way, something that's required of full-fledged witches as a kind of noblesse oblige. In this case, they're fixing worn out magic fenceposts that help keep wild animals from venturing into settled places. When they get to the festival, they'll be selling magical devices at their booth.
 
Tetia plans to sell walking sticks that let you make a tent anywhere by pulling up the surface of the ground like it's a tarp. Riceh made paired bracelets that will shine a light between them when you push a button, which causes two half-sigils inside the bracelet to line up and activate. She also made six rings for everyone in the atelier plus Tartah; I suspect will see this emergency locator beacon get some use in a future volume. Coco made more levitating cloaks, like the one she gave to Tartah - not enough to sell, but a few so festival goers can essentially put one on to experience the power of magical flight as a carnival ride. Surprisingly, Agott hasn't made a contraption, because she wants to perform a spell in the parade, which Qifrey and Olruggio seem reluctant to allow her to do.
  
When they arrive at the festival, the kids go explore for a bit before helping set up, and we get an interlude to check on a couple other things. Our first stop is inside the royal palace, which has been enchanted so that no magic will work inside, and no magic devices can even enter. The local kingdom is on a peninsula, and has five member states. Several of the state-leaders are hassling the new witch-ambassador to request that, in addition to helping with natural disaster, the witches start helping to protect people from bandit attacks. (In fact, we saw Custas and his dad get attacked by bandits at the very end of the last volume!) The king shows up and reaffirms his commitment to the witches' independence, but it seems clear that relations between the general public and the powerful, secretive, self-governing magicians in their midst are a bit tense.
 
The old witch-ambassador is very surprised to learn he's been replaced, and the Knights Moralis arrest him for accepting bribes to do personal favors for rich patrons that go beyond the scope of what the king and new ambassador just laid out.
 
Then, separately, we see one of the knights rush off to arrest someone for selling an illegal magical device, in this case, glasses that can see through clothing. He makes excuses, but she's having none of it, and arrests him. The case causes her to think back to when she was an apprentice and her teacher lent her to a rich patron who tried to abuse her. She got in trouble with her teacher when she complained. He even tried to get the Knights Moralis to erase her memory so she'd stop protesting. But the knight who handled the case believed her and stood up for her, which I suppose is why she became a knight herself.
 
It's interesting to me that twice in this volume, we've seen the Knights Moralis portrayed fairly positively. Up until now, their inflexible moral code and incorruptible resistance to any requests for mercy have basically made them, if not exactly antagonists, then at least a looming threat to Coco, but here we see some value in those traits. Because Coco has done what no one is supposed to do - become a witch by learning the secret of magic, which is that it's not innate in the caster, it's a skill that anyone can learn to use by drawing sigils. Coco also accidentally turned her mother to stone by copying a sigil from a book of forbidden magic, and she wants to learn how to undo the process. If they knew all that, the knights would probably erase Coco's memory all the way back to before she learned the secret, and also leave her mother as stone forever. But here, we see them doing necessary self-policing of witch misconduct.
 
Tartah and Coco walk around the festival together. Coco is sad because she remembers being like so many of the non-witch kids who are attending. She loved magic and wished she could become a witch. She's not allowed to tell anyone the truth, but she can't bear lying to them either, or seeing their dreams crushed. Tartah really wants to hold hands with Coco, but instead gives her the custom wand-pen he designed for her, with a grip like the chalk stone Coco used to use to mark fabric when she worked in her mom's tailor shop, before she learned magic. Tartah doesn't know about that, but he saw how Coco wrote with her old wands, and inferred the right shape for her.
 
And because you just know that things can't remain calm all the way to the end of the volume, Custas shocks Coco and Tartah when he shows up at the festival. He's walking now, thanks to some new magical wooden leg braces, given to him after the bandit attack by a witch who uses forbidden magic, and he now seems unhinged and angry with Coco and Tartah for not healing him. The leg braces can like, grow terrifying root-tentacles, which he uses to capture his former friends, and up close, his legs now look withered and dying, which I guess is a consequence of the spell. I kind of think his wild-eyed derangement is because of the spell too, but Coco and Tartah feel guilty regardless, because they both secretly want to break witch law to heal people, although they haven't done so yet. The witch who gave Tartah the braces shows up too, so the next volume is going to be exciting! 

Lost Letters

 
Lost Letters

by Jim Bishop

translated by Ivanka Hahnenberger

Magnetic Press

2024 

 

 

 I feel quite torn about Lost Letters, because I really liked almost the entire book ... and really didn't like way it ended. Lost Letters is a French graphic novel that feels like it was inspired by manga and anime, and while this comparison gets tossed around a lot lately, I think that creator Jim Bishop has created something that's so influenced by Studio Ghibli that you could pretty easily imagine them adapting it for the screen. The book is marketed as being for a YA audience, and that's probably generally fine, but the ending is so dark, so sad, and because it's the ending and nothing comes after it, so un-processed, that I wouldn't really feel comfortable handing it to a teen unless I really trusted them to seek out someone to talk to afterward if they needed it.
 

Lost Letters takes place on a picturesque island with a Mediterranean climate and a population that is predominantly talking fish-people, with only a few humans around. From the start, we're following Iode (short for Iodine), a boy of 11 or 12 who lives alone with his pet pelican, and who's waiting for a letter from his mother. Iode's mother is a pilot, she and her husband are no longer together, and Iode is convinced that she's looking for a new island for the two of them to go live on, and that when she finds it, she'll send him a letter telling him to come move back in with her. In fact, he's really, super convinced that she already sent this letter, and that the only reason he hasn't received it yet is because it's gotten lost in the mail.
 
So let me say that it's obvious from the outset that this is going to be a sad book. No matter how lighthearted its adventures might appear, the audience knows, we know, that whatever the situation with Iode's mother is, it's definitely not what he thinks it is, and it's definitely not that the letter he's hoping for is just stuck somewhere else in the island's mail system, simply waiting for him to find it. And we may suspect that, on some level, Iode knows this too, and he's in denial. So we know that parts of this book are going to be sad, especially when Iode learns and finally confronts the truth about his mom, but we may also hope that he'll maybe make a new friend or two, or maybe reconcile with his father, in a way that lets him reach a point of acceptance. And things sort of go like you'd expect, right up until they suddenly don't.
 

A sample of Jim Bishop's art.
From the left: Sista, the goldfish cop, and Iode.

 

 
Iode takes the family car and drives into town on another part of the island, so he can go to the post office. On the way, he meets Sista, an older teen girl who's hitchhiking to get to town. Sista is involved in a bunch of hijinks, and basically all the action and excitement in the book emerges from her plotline. Sista is a courier for the mob, headed into town to deliver a mysterious briefcase. The mob boss is an octopus. Sista is also an undercover agent for the royal guard, who's infiltrating the mob by working her way up through the ranks as an errand girl. The royal guard is Sista's found family, filling a void in her life since she was abandoned as a child. Her handler's codename is Mom.
 
Iode assumes Sista will help him at the post office, which already has an hours-long line when they reach town. She immediately sneaks off to continue her covert operation. Iode, apparently unable to conceive of any other reason she wouldn't hang out with him, jumps to the conclusion that she was kidnapped, and calls the police. 
 
An incompetent goldfish cop (he has a humanoid robot body, but his head is just a goldfish swimming in a glass bowl, wearing a police cap) briefly takes on the case, but he's much too busy chasing glory to bother with kid stuff. Unfortunately, he does mention all this to a corrupt fish cop, who immediately tells the mafia that their secret courier is attracting too much attention, and just like that, Sista is burned, both from the mob and from the royal guards. 
 
There's a lot of moving parts between cause and effect here - including that the mob wouldn't have wanted Sista to hitchhike, or take the cablecar across town, she was supposed to walk the whole way - but to be clear, Iode made a silly, childish assumption and then called the police about it, which is a roll of the dice every time, and that resulted in Sista getting fired. In fact, without some timely help from Iode at the aquarium, that phone call likely would've led to Sista being shot, or drowned. Neither Iode nor Sista seems to realize the connection, and it's unclear to me how much responsibility, if any, Bishop assigns to the phone call, but there it is.
  
Anyway, there's a shoot-out, an aquarium collapse, a last minute rescue. Iode and Sista do start to become friends, and the next day, she joins him at the post office, and rides with him when he borrows a seaplane to chase down a mail flight, which circuitously leads to a final confrontation with the mob. It's all very exciting, even fun. Bishop's art is excellent, just the right blend of realistic and cartoony. His poses are dynamic, his faces expressive. You practically feel like you're already watching animation when you read it.
 
When none of Iode's attempts to find the letter go anywhere, Sista goes with him to see his estranged father, who tells her the truth his son won't accept. Iode's mom left five years earlier, because she had terminal cancer and wanted to enjoy one last flight before she died. She wrote a letter to explain all this before she left, and Iode received the letter. Sista takes Iode back to the beach house, where she finds the letter, right next to the mailbox, where he read it then refused to accept it and blocked it out. Sista gets Iode to face the truth, and he instantly ages five years, suddenly appearing 16 or 17. It's a powerful visual metaphor of how he was stuck, and how he's now achieved catharsis. It's sad, but acceptance is better, right?
 
And then there's the epilogue. It's one year later. The incompetent goldfish cop is now a janitor, and actually good at it. Iode is becoming a young man. He looks awkward, but time is passing for him again. And what about Sista? We see her commit suicide by walking into the ocean and drowning. Then Iode receives her suicide note as a letter. She explains that she's never recovered from the loss of her found family in the royal guard, and sees no future for herself without that job. 
 
And that's that, that's the end. We explicitly see the other characters able to accept things and move on. But Sista does not, and the way Bishop chooses to present it sees especially cruel. Her death is presented as a thing that happens to Iode, as one last chapter in what remains fundamentally his story. And as I said earlier, there's no more context, no more explanation. It's shocking, and then it's over. Why did her friendship save him, but his friendship didn't save her? I know that can happen in life, but this is fiction. Bishop didn't have to write it this way; he chose to. And his decision really soured me on a book that I otherwise really enjoyed up to that point, and made it hard for me to recommend despite how much there is to like in it.

The Shadow of the Torturer

 

The Shadow of the Torturer

by Gene Wolfe

Orb

1980, reprinted 1994 

 

 

The Shadow of the Torturer is the first book of a quartet, known as The Book of the New Sun, which is considered to be Gene Wolfe's masterpiece. The series is a science fantasy story, set so far in the future that the sun is dying, or at least aging to become less and less hospitable to human life. One time marker, offered late in this book, put these events at least 30 thousand years in our future. 
 
The series is narrated by Severian, who is writing it down at the end of his life. At the time of he's writing this, Sevarian has become the Autarch of the whole planet, now known as Urth. At the time depicted in the book, he's a teenage boy on the cusp of manhood. An orphan, raised by and apprentice to the Torturer's Guild in the city of Nessus. If I understand correctly, his parents must've been among the Guild's victims. Nessus is an enormous city on a southern continent, built near the coast along a great river that runs north to south, and that's south of the world's greatest rainforest ... so possibly far-future Buenos Aires.
 
Severian claims to have a perfect memory, although there's some reason to not take him entirely at his word on that. At several points he fails to recognize someone he's seen before until after it's too late for the recognition to do him any good. Once, when he brings someone a food tray, and that person asks him what's for dinner, Severian can't answer, because he can't see the tray sitting behind her, and can't remember what's on it. He doesn't point this discrepancy out himself, but I noticed it, and it sort of made me wonder whether his memory has limits he's not aware of, or if it's something he somehow acquires later on in his life.
 
Wolfe does a few things that make this a challenging, but hopefully rewarding read. One is simply to not have any character point out certain features of the tale. No one says the old name of the city, for example. And based on its description, I'm pretty sure the tower the Torturer's Guild occupies is a space shuttle, but no one says anything to hint at that. Another is the pseudo-archaic diction of the book. Rather than invent a lot of neologisms, Wolfe draws on older words, or at least older word-stems, and invests them with new meaning. The diction of the narration is formal and strange too. Not stilted, exactly, but also not conversational. There are also a number of incidents in the text whose full meaning is unclear at the time, and whose true importance is revealed only later in the book. (And, I presume in some cases, later in the series.)
 
There are also a couple things Wolfe does to help the reader out. While some features of the future world pass unremarked, others are pointed out and explained. When young Severian sees a portrait that sounds like a photo of an astronaut on the moon, the curator cleaning the old image confirms this interpretation to the boy. When Severian is tricked the most badly, and fails to heed or understand a timely warning note, others help him to explicitly figure things out, though belatedly, after he's already barely survived. 
 
And in a couple situations with the most potential to be ambiguous or confusing, the most straightforward explanation is the correct one. At a lake where preserved dead bodies are sunk in mud, we meet an old man who's spent decades trying to find his wife's bog-mummy. When a mysterious, mud-covered young woman with amnesia swims to the surface later, we may not know how or why one of the dead bodies has come back to life, but yes, that is what's happened, and yes, it is that poor old guy's wife. When Severian sleeps next to a giant and dreams of even larger alien giants who now live in Urth's oceans, we may not know the mechanism by which this information is transferred, but yes, these aliens now do live here underwater; yes, that's why Severian saw a giant woman's face when he nearly drowned as a child; and yes, the giant Baldanders is a member of this same alien species, just young and small enough that he can still survive on land. These situations are strange, and there's not initially enough information to understand them fully, but Wolfe is careful not to mislead us, and to provide a few extra, supernatural guideposts.
 
I really do like Wolfe's writing. Here's Severian in chapter 1 espousing one of the central tenets of sociology, for example: "Certain mystes aver that the real world has been constructed by the human mind, since our ways are governed by the artificial categories into which we place essentially undifferentiated things, things far weaker than our words for them." There's not some profound aside like that on every page, probably not in every chapter, but amid the narrative, Wolfe manages to leave us with a few observations about life and human nature of the sort that book lovers occasionally get as tattoos.
 
Severian's story seems like a dark reflection of the classic hero's journey, where every step comes out wrong. (Or perhaps, each step is doubled, with one version inverted and the other more traditional?) Rather than reluctantly but voluntarily leaving home because he's called away by a problem in the broader world, Severian is thrown out of the Torturer's Guild in disgrace for showing someone mercy. His punishment is to become an executioner. Instead of meeting a wise mentor or a friendly sidekick, he's targeted, first by the suspicious-seeming impresario of a traveling show, and then by a femme fatale. He gets a special, named sword, but Terminus Est is a tool, an executioner's beheading blade.
 
Although he doesn't admit it, Sevarian is naive and repeatedly finds himself trapped in situations he doesn't understand, doesn't even recognize as being dangerous until it's almost too late to escape. Wolfe's high diction and learned prose hides a lost teenager, playing at adulthood too soon in a cruel society, without understanding the rules or the stakes, with his life hanging in the balance.
 

The Shadow of the Torturer contains a complete chapter in Severian's life, but it's clearly not a stand-alone novel. The book literally ends with him crossing through the gate out of the city of Nessus on his way to the hinterlands town where he's been assigned to work, and I know that the next book will start with him emerging from the gate into the world beyond the city. I'll be reading the next in the series later this year.

The Three Astronauts

 
 
The Three Astronauts

by Umberto Eco 

art by Eugenio Carmi

translated by William Weaver

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

1989

  

 Did you know that Umberto Eco write a children's book? Yes, the author of Foucault's Pendulum and The Name of the Rose and the famous essay describing the features of fascism, that Umberto Eco wrote a children's picture book near the end of the Cold War called The Three Astronauts, about representatives from America, Russia, and China traveling to Mars.
 
The three countries each want to be the first to put a person on Mars. Their three separate rockets launch around the same time, and land on Mars almost simultaneously. The astronauts discover a planet covered with canals, blue plants, and vibrant alien birds, perhaps inspired by Tweel from Stanley Weinbaum's classic story "A Martian Odyssey." Eco's depiction of the space programs is scifi of course, because we couldn't and didn't go to Mars in 1989, but it's fairly realistic. His depiction of Mars itself is more fanciful, the sort of thing that was common a half-century before, that fell out of favor as scifi authors sought to incorporate discoveries made by real-world space programs.
 
Eco's three astronauts, each speaking their own language, initially don't understand each other, and don't trust each other. Then night falls. The astronauts feel lonely, homesick, perhaps a bit frightened in this strange place. The American calls out "Mommy!" The Russian calls out "Mamouchka!" The Chinese astronaut calls out "Mama!" And even though they're still speaking different languages, they each recognize that the others are feeling the same way. (Thank you, proto-Indo-European language group, for retaining that bit of commonality!)
 
Next the astronauts see a Martian. It has green skin, six arms, a trunk and other strange features. At first the astronauts are all afraid. They think the Martian is a monster and want to destroy it. Then a baby bird falls from a tree and looks hurt. Each of the astronauts feels sad and sheds a tear. The Martian exhales blue smoke and goes to pick up the baby bird. The astronauts recognize the smoke as akin to a tear, and they see that the Martian cares about the bird. On the basis of this beginning of mutual understanding, they're able to become friends.
 
The art in The Three Astronauts is a mix of collage and watercolor. Eugenio Carmi depicts the Earth using a map of the globe, but Mars is a blue-grey watercolor circle. Each astronaut is depicted as a scrap of paper. The Chinese astronaut is a large character, and looks to me like a logo. The Russian is a scrap of a newsletter printed on red paper. The American is a Chiclets wrapper, which amuses me. The alien bird is an engraving, watercolored in pinks and purples. The Martian is assembled from several engravings. I suspect the six-armed torso came from an illustration of the sort of people Greek philosophers imagined living in other parts of the world, which is a nice touch if so.
 
I wish peace really were as simple as Eco makes it seem here, although I think his point that we need to recognize each other as sharing common emotions and experiences is sound. And I think it helps that, by caring for the injured bird, each is able to demonstrate their benign intent. While misunderstandings can happen, even among people who speak the same language, if you're approaching each other in a spirit of equality and cooperation, you're already halfway there. So much conflict comes from one person, or one group, trying to dominate another. The conflict is inherent in the approach; no amount of understanding will make it go away. What's required is for the aggressor to renounce their attempts at domination, and to seek peace through equality instead.

Too Like the Lightning

 
 
Too Like the Lightning

by Ada Palmer 

Tor

2016 

 

 

Too Like the Lightning is the first book of a planned duology that later expanded into a quartet. There are a few series I've restarted this year, where I read the first book some time ago, and liked it, but never went further. I'd felt burned by the sequel to Jeff Vandermeer's Annihilation, I think, and had decided to only enjoy first books as stand-alones for awhile. Anyway, several of the series I'm reading right now are ones where I'm rereading the first book, and then continuing on ahead. So it's possible that I'll eventually get in a similar mood again, and come back and decide to finish Ada Palmer's series, perhaps because curiosity someday gets the better of me, but I really didn't enjoy this first book, so I kind of doubt it.
 

Too Like the Lightning is set in the 25th century, in the 2450s, as far from our time as we are from the Early Modern era, and there are a few conceits at work here. First is that we're being told the story of a moment of revolutionary change, when the system of world governance that is already so different from our own is about to collapse and be replaced by whatever follows it. It is written as a document for that further future, explaining how their world came to be. The second conceit is that the narrator, the extremely chatty and not terribly reliable Mycroft, is intentionally writing in an archaic style, as though this book were the product on one of the philosophers of the Enlightenment, such as Voltaire.
 
One way that manifests is that Mycroft often includes asides of his imagined future audience members scolding him for the way he chooses to tell the story. Things like 'but Mycroft, thou'st were not present for this exchange, how can'st thou quote it so precisely.' This is a matter of personal preference, but I fucking hate that sort of thing; I really can't stand when columnists and bloggers do it, and I find it equally annoying here. 
 
Another manifestation is that Mycroft refers to everyone as 'he' and 'she,' as Enlightenment authors might (and as Palmer and her actual readers are accustomed to), but which most of Mycroft's 25th century peers would find akin to referring to everyone by a slur. In almost all spoken dialogue, everyone refers to everyone else as 'they,' and it's unclear to me if people actually have gendered identities that they never speak about, or if Mycroft is taking additional liberties by assigning genders and not only by announcing them. He seems to expect his future readers to recognize these pronouns and to assume they correspond to specific anatomical features, so for every, I don't know, tenth character or so, he explains why he's calling someone by one pronoun when you the reader might expect another. I found this annoying too. It's an impressive effort at making the familiar strange, but I would genuinely hate for someone describing me to point out which of my features might tempt them to call me a man, but then insist that I'll count as a woman in their narrative because I work in a library.
 
I will credit Palmer that she clearly put a lot of thought into her worldbuilding, and that she's willing to throw us into the deep end and trust us to eventually take it all in, even as we're trying to keep up with the plot. Palmer's world is maybe a bit like what the Earth of A Half-Built Garden might become after enough time. Both Palmer and Emrys are grappling with imagining how people might adjust to omnipresent internet, to changes in gender and other norms of politeness, to the transformation of the nation-state system into some other kind of political power. 
 
In Palmer's world, religion is effectively banned, with three or more people allowed to discuss belief only if a 'sensayer' is present. Households have been replaced by 'bashes', which are larger and mostly voluntary rather than hereditary, as though the most common living arrangement was something like a commune or a sorority house. Nations still exist, but their importance is nearly erased by omnipresent public transit in the form of flying cars that can get you anywhere on Earth in, at most, a couple hours. People identify with their ethnicity about as much as they do with their jobs (limited to 20 hours a week, except for workaholic 'vokers') and their many and varied hobbies. The seven world governments are called Hives, and you can only join one after you become an adult. You can also choose to remain Hiveless, and if you do, choose what level of obedience and protection you're willing to offer the law. Blacklaw Hiveless are basically anarchists who are allowed even to murder each other, though it would still be illegal for one to kill a Hive member, and I think a Hive citizen would still be breaking their own laws, which they voluntarily consented to be governed by, if they killed a Blacklaw.
 
Mycroft, our narrator, is a Servicer, a prisoner who is a kind of public slave. Servicers aren't incarcerated, but they also aren't allowed to have money or own property, and spend all day doing public service proects in exchange for their meals. Palmer apparently got this idea from an Enlightenment-era thought experiment. We don't find out what Mycroft's crime was until halfway through the book, we barely even get any hints, but once we learn, he talks about it frequently and matter-of-factly, which I think is emblematic of the way Palmer uses Mycroft to dole out key information. The book is a mystery, and it doesn't get solved in this volume, so maybe in book 2? But by the end I'm half prepared to think that Mycroft did it, and simply won't let on until some other character proves it. It's one thing for a narrator not to spoil the ending of their own story, quite another for them to withhold things they and the other characters all knew before the story even started. Based on Mycroft's obsession with gender and sexuality, I initially thought he might've committed some sort of sexual crime, perhaps voyeurism. When we eventually find out, it's so much worse than I expected. One character who learns the truth reacts like Mycroft is Jack the Ripper, and certainly, we discover only after this point in the book, he is equivalently infamous, and not someone you'd expect to be trusted to be a Servicer. The way this sort of information is withheld makes understanding the worldbuilding harder, because Mycroft will keep something secret from us for hundreds of pages only for it to later turn out to be common knowledge. (Although the fact that THIS Mycroft is THE Mycroft Canner is a secret. The public assumes that that criminal was executed, so people who meet him just think he has the same, previously relatively common, first name.)
 
As I said, the story here, which purports to show how one world order collapses and is replaced with a new one, is also a mystery. Every year, the world's most important newspapers publish their Seven-Ten lists of the most important people on the planet. The first seven are usually the Hive leaders, and the next three are other influential citizens. A few days before the lists are published, someone steals the list from the pan-Asian Mitsubishi Hive's paper, and sneaks it into the a Humanist bash, specifically, the bash of the extended, chosen family who operate the flying car network. It's not initially clear why anyone would do this, except that the investigation into who and why threatens to make all kinds of secrets public.
 
Among the secrets are the exact nature of the relationships among the world's ruling elite. Power is highly concentrated, and many of the Hives' leaders have public relationships - the Humanist President's sister is married to the Mitsubishi Chairman, for example. The Mitubishi Chair's many adopted children each have jobs close to the other leaders. JEDD Mason, the adopted son of the Masonic Emperor, has a high-level job in every Hive, and like Paul Atreides, is revered as some kind of chosen one by each, which looks a lot like forbidden religion. As with Mycroft's crimes, once you eventually learn the truth about all this, it's a lot more uncomfortable than you probably expected. Also, Mycroft is some sort of confidant to each leader, which is already unusual for a Servicer and would be a global scandal if the public found out.
 
Mycroft has one more secret that's threatened too, although this one we learn on the first page. In a secret room on the estate of the bash that operates the flying cars, with the help of one bash-member but without the knowledge of the others, Mycroft is raising an orphaned boy whom he found on the estate as a toddler. The boy, Bridger, has the supernatural power to turn any representation of a thing into the real thing, like turning a drawing of food into real edible food, or bringing his plastic army men to life. Bridger is a sweet kid, who seems to understand the risk of turning into the kid from that one episode of  Twilight Zone who sends people to the cornfield, and tries to use his miraculous powers responsibly. Mycroft claims that by the end of the story, we'll see that it's Bridger, even more than the intimately entangled Hive leaders, who will be responsible for transforming the world. Although that doesn't happen until book 2 or later, so I guess I may never find out how or why everything changes. 

The Pastel City

 
 

The Pastel City

by John Harrison

Bantam Spectra

1971, reprinted 2005 

 

 

The Pastel City is a science fantasy novel about a war between two factions of surviving humans in the ruins of a despoiled Earth, in the far future, after the fall of civilization. The war is made far, far worse by the use of super-science weapons left over from before the fall. The book is sad and elegiac, and stands out not only for the creativity of its setting, but for the overall high quality of M John Harrison's writing. By today's standards, it's practically a novella, but fantasy books tended to be shorter in the 70s. Within its compact length, Harrison fits in detailed descriptions of place, and a plot that manages to feel slow and funereal despite its brevity.
 
The book opens with a description of the world before, of the seventeen Afternoon Cultures, each of which lasted between one to ten thousand years, the last of which comprehensively ruined the Earth with overconsumption and pollution. In the millennium since then, civilization has finally returned. The two factions are the city of Viriconium, the Pastel City, and its surrounding villages; and the Northmen, who live beyond the Metal-Salt Marsh and the Great Brown Waste. Just summarizing this much gives you a taste of Harrison's worldbuilding. This is a story that takes place after the end, and after another ending beyond that. The war this story details threatens to be a final annihilation. But in the aftermath, there's also a start of something new.
 
Virconium is ruled by the young Queen Jane, still a teenager; the Northmen by her cousin Canna Moidart, who is older but was second in line to the throne. Jane is the daughter of Virconium's greatest king, who consolidated power in a series of military victories with his loyal circle of friends, the Methven. Canna is that king's niece, the daughter of his brother and the previous northern queen. The king's circle, his equivalent to the Knights of the Round Table, are all retired now, their adventuring days behind them. The one we follow most closely, tegeus-Cromis, wants nothing more than to live as a poet and a hermit and to never fight again. Tomb the Dwarf spends all his time digging up machines from the Waste. In their heyday, it seems the Methven had a storied career and adventures enough to fill an epic, but we don't meet them until they're older and exhausted.
 
If I were from Britain, I wonder if I'd recognize the retired heroes as some sort of archetypes, perhaps stand-ins for famous men from history or literature, or perhaps representatives of specific regional cultures. I'm sure in an American novel, I could recognize a Confederate, a Yankee, and a cowboy, and know where each came from and what values they represent, even if those names were never used for them. I suspect Harrison's doing something similar here, but I don't know that for sure.
 
Cromis is called out of retirement by the young queen and tasked to reassemble the other heroes of the Methven who rode beside her father, to meet the Viriconium army in the north, take over command from the peacetime general who leads it, and defeat the Northmen before they cross the Waste. Separately, a talking mechanical bird (perhaps a bit like Archimedes from The Sword and the Stone or Bubo from Clash of the Titans) repeatedly instructs him to abandon this quest and deal with a much bigger problem on the southern coast. Cromis ignores the bird and tries to obey they queen. He gathers all but one of his old allies and rushes north, getting to the Viriconium army before the big fight.
 
And it doesn't matter at all, because the Northmen have them completely outmatched. They outnumber the Viriconium soldiers, they have airship support, they manage to catch them completely by surprise. And worst of all, they have the support of 'geteit chemosit' - military automatons from the last Afternoon culture, giants who look like they're made of shadow, who are huge and strong and fight tirelessly and precisely, who are armed with lightsabers, and who steal the brains of every dead body on the battlefield.
 

The Pastel City was written a few years before Star Wars came out, but the energy swords that Harrison calls 'baan' are very, very similar to lightsabers. They hum and crackle, they make a terrifying display of light and sound when you strike two of them together, they can cut through anything, and they're potentially as deadly to the wielder as they are to an enemy. Discussing this with my friend Trey, I learned that there's a tradition of energy swords in scifi - called by many different names, dating back to the 1930s. Lightsabers are just the best known example.
 
The battlefield rout is about the halfway point of the novel, and a turning point for the story. The brain stealers are the very thing the talking mechanical bird had been warning Cromis about all this time. tegeus-Cromis, Queen Jane, and the surviving Methven abandon any attempt to stop the Northmen's march into Viriconium, and travel south to meet the bird's maker, Cellur, a figure a bit like Merlin or Gandalf - elderly, wise, extremely eccentric.
 
Cellur claims to be over a thousand years old, but to have memories that only go back two hundred. He knows how to stop the geteit chemosit, but can't make the treacherous journey on his own. He trains Tomb the Dwarf, and the remaining heroes set out to a lost city to try to turn the automatons off, no longer to save Viriconium, but humanity more generally. Canna Moidart dug up the chemosit and turned them on, but she doesn't control them. Once her army defeats Viriconium, they'll turn against her Northmen and the civilian population, war machines with the one-track minds of Mickey's brooms in 'The Sorcerer's Apprentice.'
 
The plot is interesting enough, and the worldbuilding paints a setting you could get lost in. Harrison is economical enough with his words to tell us a lot in a little space, but one of his strengths is implying that there's more - more past, more detail - lurking just outside the edge of what's written. The characters are all described in semi-mythical terms, often with repeated descriptors, like Homer's famous invocation of 'the wine-dark sea.' There are three more Viriconium books, the next two are novels written a decade after the first, which makes me think Harrison got a new idea later, rather than that he was planning a quartet all along, and the last is a collection of short stories.

Belle of the Ball

 
 
Belle of the Ball

by Mari Costa

First Second

2023

 

 

Belle of the Ball is a cute little YA graphic novel about high school romance. There's a lesbian love triangle, with all the inherent conflict and heartbreak, right at the center of the story, but Mari Costa writes it all very gently, very kindly. The result is much more of a light-hearted romcom than any kind of tale of teen angst. There are no mean girls here, just three young adults trying to follow their hearts, if only they can figure out what they really want first.
 
The cast is three high school senior girls - ambitious cheerleader Regina; her girlfriend, soccer champ Chloe; and shy, nerdy Hawkins. Regina is smart and popular, the head cheerleader who's dating the star player of the soccer team, a straight A student who's already been accepted to the local college but still has her eye set on Harvard, and a future doctor with her 10-year life plan already all mapped out. Chloe is much less ambitious. She likes soccer and is good at it, she gets good-enough grades in everything but English, but prefers video games to studying, and gets bored whenever Regina's talking to her other friends about their goals for the future. It more seems like she's along for the ride than like she genuinely wants the same 10-year plan for herself.
 
And then there's Hawkins. Shy, self-conscious and awkward, nerdy, and an accidental force of chaos, who inadvertently crashed headlong into the fault lines in Regina and Chloe's relationship. Hawkins is also the school's cat-headed mascot. At the start of the story, she asks Regina to the homecoming dance, because she's had a long-time crush on her from a distance, and she mistakenly thought Regina and Chloe had broken up.
 
When Regina realizes that Chloe's recent low grades in English are going to jeopardize her soccer eligibility and her conditional college acceptance (and thus, the 10-year plan), she comes up with a strategy to put things back on track. Regina uses Hawkins's crush to convince her to tutor Chloe in exchange for a chance to hang out with them at school. Hawkins, despite knowing this is a bad idea, really does want more friends, and friendship with Regina specifically, and follows her heart and agrees.
 
Chloe is understandably not impressed with the plan to be tutored by the person who was flirting with her girlfriend, and isn't really interested in being tutored at all. She also quickly becomes suspicious that Hawkins seems to know too much about her, until suddenly, she connects two dots in her mind, and realizes that 'B Hawkins' is the same person as 'Belle,' Chloe's kindergarten classmate and first crush, Belle, who wore a princess dress to school every day, who Chloe used to follow around the playground, wishing she could be her knight. (Separate from this, there's also a running gag that from Hawkins's perspective, she and Regina have hung out several times in group settings, but Regina literally never noticed her there until she asked her out.)
 
You might be able to see where this is going. Regina and Chloe have different visions for their futures, and care about those visions with very different levels of intensity. At the same time that they might be growing apart anyway, Chloe and Hawkins suddenly start spending a lot more time together, and any feelings of attraction either of them may start to develop have a certain sort of plausible deniability to them ... right up to the end, when the feelings become so strong they're undeniable.
 
And as I said, it's all handled in a way that's fairly emotionally mature, with a minimum of raised voices or tears. Early on, it might be easy to think that Regina is controlling or manipulative, Chloe a bully, or Hawkins a pushover, but they all quickly grow beyond that. Regina tends to dominate any scene she's in, but we spend most of the book with Chloe and Hawkins. They spend a lot of time at home studying, but a highlight - narratively, visually, and emotionally - comes when Chloe buys Hawkins a ticket to the Renaissance Fair and rents her a princess dress, the first time she's worn one in years...
 
Costa's art is friendly and accessible. Aside from the black outlines and white negative space, all the tones are shades of pink. It's not just an accent color, this is a very pink book, and all the shades are different saturations of fuchsia pink (or what you might call 'Barbie pink'). Costa gives us a diverse cast, both ethnically and in terms of body types. The general absence of mean-spirited intent makes this a light read, and the art style complements that.

Ancillary Justice

 
 
Ancillary Justice

by Ann Leckie

Orbit

2013 

 

 

 Ancillary Justice is a space opera about someone who once served an empire seeking revenge against it for the war crimes she was ordered to commit. It's a book that's very clearly responding to some earlier works, and that was obviously influential enough that several more recent books are responding to it. Crimes of military conquest and revenge for them drive the plot of Justice; the worldbuilding focuses on the many sources of status inequality related to ancestry, on the cultural power of empire, and on what it might look like to truly do without gender and gender-based sexuality in a context that is otherwise still very unequal.

 

Ancillary Justice is narrated in the first-person by Breq. In the novel's present day, Breq is a lone woman on a mission of revenge, but in the past, in the flashbacks that take up at least a third of the book, Breq was both the giant troop carrier ship Justice of Torren, and more specifically, the twenty-troop unit One Esk. Even more more specifically, Breq's body was One Esk Nineteen, though that doesn't matter, because the twenty-troop unit is the smallest subdivision of the spaceship's mind that has any degree of individuality whatsoever. 

 

Breq is a former ancillary soldier, one of the shock troops of the Radchaai empire. Ancillaries are AI minds in human bodies. The ship and all its ancillaries function as a single mind; Breq is separated now because the ship Justice of Torren was destroyed, and all the other bodies dead. Breq retains absolutely none of her memories or personality from before she was made an ancillary. Her mission of revenge is about the incident that destroyed her ship-body and her other ancillary soldier-bodies. Her mind and personality now are the same as the ship's were, just with less processing power.

 

Ancillaries are a bit like Borg drones from Star Trek, the troop carriers a bit like Borg cubes. They're not quite the same, Breq is no Seven of Nine, but for sure, the Borg are one of the earlier ideas Ann Leckie is engaging with. 

 

The two other most prominent touchpoints, I think, are Ursula LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness, and the Battlestar Galactica remake tv series, both of which attempt to explore war and empire in a context without gender inequality. LeGuin wrote Darkness about people who are genderless - and who indeed have no biological sex at all except when they're reproducing, and the same person can father one child and mother another. LeGuin used he/him pronouns to refer to all the characters in that book, and I suspect that some less-careful readers may have missed that they're not really supposed to be men. 

 

The Radchaai have the same range of biological sex characteristics that we do, but they have no concept for gender and make no gendered distinctions among themselves. Reversing LeGuin's choice, Leckie has Breq refer to everyone as she/her. It's a choice that makes Radchaai gender unmissable. It also dates the book, already, because I'm fairly sure that if Leckie were writing it for the first time today, she'd refer to the Radchaai using they/them. (Fairly sure, but not completely certain, because it's certainly a provocative and attention-getting artistic decision.) It's a reminder of both how recently and how successfully the current ideas of nonbinary gender and singular-they pronouns have gained mainstream recognition to describe ways of being that, even ten years ago, were harder to talk about. Not because no language for it existed, but because the words were less widely known, more specialized. For decades, some people called themselves genderqueer or used ze/hir or e/eir pronouns - some people still do! - but not as many as now call themselves nonbinary or use they. The new language is more accessible, maybe, or resonates with more people's sense of self, perhaps.

 

Anyway, Leckie writes the Radchaai not as lacking characteristics that we would think of as gender-markers, but as mixing and matching them according personal preference rather than societal norm, so that most of them would look queer to us, and to non-Radchaai people. Breq starts the present day portion of the book on a non-imperial winter planet, where the locals have binary gender, and she struggles to use that part of their language correctly. The flashbacks, to before Justice of Torren died, when Breq was still a starship and an army, take place on a recently annexed swamp world, where the locals are still reluctant to give up their own culture to become Radchaai, and are divided by a racial caste system.

 

I'm pretty sure that Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire is responding to Ancillary Justice. The Teixcalaanli empire seems to build on some ideas from the Radchaai empire, though Martine focuses even more on language than Leckie does. But a few times, Leckie comments on the way that in the Radchaai language, the same word means 'a citizen of the Radch' and 'a civilized person', that they have no way, in their native tongue, to conceptualize people who are civilized, but not part of their civilization. Martine builds on that, and shows us the empire from the perspective of an about-to-be-conquered person, not a regretful former-conqueror. Martha Wells's popular Murderbot novellas also strike me as possibly being about a character who's like Breq, but who is truly portrayed as genderless because Wells doesn't use 'she' instead of 'they' or 'it'.

 

In the present-day, on the winter planet, Breq finds a recently-revived participant in a planet-wide civilian massacre from a thousand years earlier. Breq drags her along on the errand that brought her to the planet - trying to find an alien weapon, a gun that can penetrate Radchaai forcefields. 

 

In the flashbacks that alternate every-other chapter, we watch as the ancillary bodies of One Esk serve a Radchaai lieutenant who is trying to prevent a local leader from fomenting a racist lynch mob of upper caste conquered peoples to attack members of the lower caste. The lieutenant succeeds, but then she and One Esk are ordered to massacre a hundred members of the upper caste, and later, just before Justice of Torren is destroyed, One Esk is ordered to execute the lieutenant.

 

In Leckie's telling, war crimes, the execution of innocents and civilians, are catalysts of social and political change. They are moments that shock of the conscience, even of experienced soldiers, moments that force them to decide if they are most loyal to their empire or to the ideals they think their empire represents, when the two suddenly come in conflict. Leckie's soldiers almost always follow their orders, but then regret it, and try to make amends, and make things different afterward. We learn of countless reforms to the Radch in the thousand years since the planetary genocide, and Breq is set on her path of revenge because she regrets and resents the final killings she committed before almost all of her was destroyed.

 

Once Breq has her alien gun, and we've fully learned why she wants to use it, the final third of the book takes us to a Radchaai space station, to confront the person who gave the orders, the Radchaai emperor, Anander Minanaai. Like the spaceships and ancillary soldiers, Minanaai is one mind in many bodies. Except that, just like Justice of Torren both is and is not quite the same as One Esk, Minanaai is not quite one unified mind. Parts of her support reform, parts oppose it, and every part with a secret agenda wants to keep her whole self from consciously acknowledging the split. She's even willing to kill an entire starship, or an entire space station, to keep that acknowledgment from spreading from one part of her to the rest. Guys will literally blow up a planet rather than go to therapy, amiright? Anander Minanaai has the same problem as King Gnuff, her mind is simply too physically large, the distances her thoughts have to travel too great, for her to maintain a fully unified, singular self.

 

Ancillary Justice is the first book of a trilogy. I read it when it first came out and loved it then, but at the time I never followed up with the two sequels, I think because of how busy my life was at the time. On my first read, I also think I failed to fully understand some things about Breq and Anander Minanaai that are more clear to me now. Back then, I didn't get that the whole of One Esk was a single mind, without any more granular individuality attached to any of the ancillary bodies. Also, the most conservative, revanchist part of Minanaai's mind accuses the most liberal, reformist part of being sabotaged by aliens. On my first read I thought this was true, but this time I think it's a lie, a self-delusion, and an excuse that justifies the killings she orders in her attempts to roll back the reforms. In the next book, I think that all of Minanaai will have learned the truth about the split within herself, and her internal conflict will probably erupt into a civil war across the Radch. 

The Yellow 'M'

 
The Yellow 'M'

Blake and Mortimer 6

by Edgar Jacobs

translated by Clarence Holland

Cinebook

1956, reprinted 2007

 

 

The Yellow 'M' is an early Franco-Belgian comic about a mysterious villain's crime spree in London. At first, the criminal just seems exceptionally competent, but he evades capture in ways that are truly superhuman, which suggests the involvement of a mad scientist in the whole scheme... The Yellow 'M' is the sixth book in Edgar Jacobs's collected Blake and Mortimer comics, although I gather it might be the most popular, and it was the first one of the series reprinted in English.
 
Probably the best known Franco-Belgian comics, for American audiences, are The Adventures of Tintin. The Blake and Mortimer comics are visually very similar to Tintin, with the same ligne claire art style, with fairly realistic drawings, thin outlines with no shading, and flat colors. (The best known FB comic characters are probably the Smurfs, but most Americans would known them from their cartoons, not their books, and they're stylistically very different.)
 
Captain Blake is in MI5, and Professor Mortimer is a physicist. They solve mysteries in London in the late 1940s and early 50s (which was present-day at the time they were written), and I gather that a lot of their adventures are like this one - initially fairly realistic, but increasingly science fictional as the uncover the fantastic methods employed to commit the crimes. In The Yellow 'M', for example, the pair eventually uncover that the mastermind behind the crime spree is using hypnosis, various psychic powers, and a machine that projects something like radio waves to remotely dominate people's minds!
 
At the start of the comic, 'the Yellow M' is the codename the London police have given to an unknown criminal who's been on a very successful burglary spree. He announces his crimes in advance, manages to commit them despite increased surveillance, and signs a yellow M in chalk at each scene. (In the earliest Batman comics, the Joker gets his start by announcing he will poison specific people and then succeeding. I wonder if this was a common villain plan back then?)
 
We witness the Yellow M's latest crime, the theft of the crown from the royal Crown Jewels, from the perspective of the beefeater guards. They're totally outmatched. Only one even sees the thief, and he's knocked unconscious, with no memory of the encounter.
 
Blake gets assigned to the case because the local crimes have become a matter of national importance, and he calls in Mortimer to consult. At this point, the Yellow M switches from stealing to kidnapping, abducting several gentlemen who belong to the same club as Blake and Mortimer, including a newspaper editor and a judge. It seems like the Yellow M is going after anyone who investigates him, but Mortimer intuits another connection between the victims, an old libel case from before WWII, involving a scientist who claimed to have discovered psychic powers...
 
Eventually Blake and Mortimer figure out who's responsible, and find their hideout, a facility constructed for official use during the Blitz and abandoned after the war. I hope it doesn't spoil too much to say that 'the Yellow M' is not just one man, working alone. It turns out that the investigators know one of the criminals better than his own partner does, and they use that one advantage as a wedge to drive them apart. (The villain they know is recurring from an earlier book in the series, so if you read them in order, you'd recognize him too.)
 
Because Blake wears a uniform and works directly for the British government, he's quite unlike Sherlock Holmes or James Bond. And while he's able to fight as well as a soldier, he's no superhero. He catches the super-powered thief with police work, not superior martial arts. Mortimer is the one with the most intuition, and the one who finds the vital clue, but mostly does that by researching court cases and newspaper scandals in the library. His status as a scientist maybe lets him understand how the Yellow M's machines work, but he doesn't have any genius insights or deductions. It's more like teamwork and proper procedure win the day, allowing competent but ordinary investigators to solve and stop an extraordinary crime.

Alphabetical Diaries

 
 
Alphabetical Diaries

by Sheila Heti

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

2024

 

 

The basis of Shelia Heti's Alphabetical Diaries is a real diary she kept for about a decade. But that original document was doubly transformed. First by a Dada-like game of putting every sentence in alphabetical, rather than chronological order. And then by curating and editing, until however long 10 years of diary entries is has been chopped down to a slim 200-page volume. It reads a bit like poetry. Both because it consists of only Heti's favorite sentences. And because it's so utterly unlike any traditional narrative, because the sentences arrive in a succession whose logic is utterly divorced from time order.
 
There's a book about writing I like, Artful Sentences by Virginia Tufte, where she picked out hundreds of well-written sentences from literature to use as examples. Heti's book is a little like that, too, except without any meta-commentary on her choices. Without any instructional purpose.
 
What emerges from Alphabetical Diaries is a very attenuated, highly asynchronous look at the life of Shelia Heti. I sort of presume that her selections hit the high points, and cover the most important events of her life during this time, and not just the ones that sound best. But I don't really know that for sure.
 
She writes a lot about two tumultuous, on-again off-again relationships she had with men, Lars and Pavel, both of whom she seems to have been unable to either make it work or decisively break up with. I don't know if those are pseudonyms. She also has a couple other boyfriends, and I think at least one girlfriend. Or maybe just fling with a woman. When she writes about sex, she's very frank. In a way I'd probably find embarrassing if I knew her, but that I find admirable in a writer. She talks about occasions that were very nice, and a few that seem to have troubled her. She repeatedly mentions one time (or more?) when she was tied up, which seems like it was both. In Stephen Moore's histories of the novel as an artform, in his summaries of various books, he always talks about the treatment of sex, as though that's one of the key markers of literary merit. I feel like I'm doing that here too. But it's obviously important to Heti (and to a lot of people, especially in their late 20s and early 30s) so it makes sense that it's an important part of the book.
 
Heti writes about her writing. About having trouble finishing a book, about the books she wants to write. She writes about what sort of author she wants to be. What kind of person. How she wants to live. She writes about a man named Lemons who is either her publisher or editor or agent. She writes declarative sentences. Instructions to herself. She writes about money troubles. She writes a lot of sentence fragments. A noun phrase. A different noun phrase. A particularly evocative or surprising noun phrase. That stand alone here with no context. And then she writes longer sentences, the kind I often like myself, that pile clause on top of clause, and that can hold a whole little narrative within it, with a setup and conclusion all there together, still in the same sentence, which is practically the only way you can get a complete anecdote in a book like this.
 
Chapter I is the longest, more than twice the length of any other. Which isn't surprising, really. It'd be longer, but Heti often forgoes the starting pronoun in sentences where she's the subject. So she'll say something like, 'went to the beach,' instead of 'I went to the beach.' Which is how a lot of people write their diaries, I think. A is second longest, I think, and the T chapter is probably third.
 
I really enjoyed this one. I know I'm kind of a sucker for a good gimmick. But this is a really good gimmick! A good idea, executed well. I also kept thinking, as I read it, how very normal Heti's life sounded from the outside. Even as she kept worrying that she was doing something wrong. I worry about that myself, all the time. And it made me wonder how my life looks from the outside. If it looks normal too?

 

 

A different noun phrase. A good idea, executed well. A is second longest, I think, and the T chapter is probably third. A noun phrase. A particularly evocative or surprising noun phrase. About having trouble finishing a book, about the books she wants to write. And because it's so utterly unlike any traditional narrative, because the sentences arrive in a succession whose logic is utterly divorced from time order. And it made me wonder how my life looks from the outside. And then by curating and editing, until however long 10 years of diary entries is has been chopped down to a slim 200-page volume. And then she writes longer sentences, the kind I often like myself, that pile clause on top of clause, and that can hold a whole little narrative within it, with a setup and conclusion all there together, still in the same sentence, which is practically the only way you can get a complete anecdote in a book like this.

 

Both because it consists of only Heti's favorite sentences. But I don't really know that for sure. But it's obviously important to Heti (and to a lot of people, especially in their late 20s and early 30s) so it makes sense that it's an important part of the book. But that original document was doubly transformed. But this is a really good gimmick!

 

Chapter I is the longest, more than twice the length of any other. 

 

Even as she kept worrying that she was doing something wrong. 

 

First by a Dada-like game of putting every sentence in alphabetical, rather than chronological order. 

 
Heti writes about her writing. Heti's book is a little like that, too, except without any meta-commentary on her choices. How she wants to live. 

 

I also kept thinking, as I read it, how very normal Heti's life sounded from the outside. I don't know if those are pseudonyms. I feel like I'm doing that here too. I know I'm kind of a sucker for a good gimmick. I really enjoyed this one. I sort of presume that her selections hit the high points, and cover the most important events of her life during this time, and not just the ones that sound best. I worry about that myself, all the time. If it looks normal too? In a way I'd probably find embarrassing if I knew her, but that I find admirable in a writer. In Stephen Moore's histories of the novel as an artform, in his summaries of various books, he always talks about the treatment of sex, as though that's one of the key markers of literary merit. Instructions to herself. It reads a bit like poetry. It'd be longer, but Heti often forgoes the starting pronoun in sentences where she's the subject. 

 

Or maybe just fling with a woman. 

 

She also has a couple other boyfriends, and I think at least one girlfriend. She repeatedly mentions one time (or more?) when she was tied up, which seems like it was both. She talks about occasions that were very nice, and a few that seem to have troubled her. She writes a lot about two tumultuous, on-again off-again relationships she had with men, Lars and Pavel, both of whom she seems to have been unable to either make it work or decisively break up with. She writes a lot of sentence fragments. She writes about a man named Lemons who is either her publisher or editor or agent. She writes about money troubles. She writes about what sort of author she wants to be. She writes declarative sentences. So she'll say something like, 'went to the beach,' instead of 'I went to the beach.'

 

That stand alone here with no context. The basis of Shelia Heti's Alphabetical Diaries is a real diary she kept for about a decade. There's a book about writing I like, Artful Sentences by Virginia Tufte, where she picked out hundreds of well-written sentences from literature to use as examples. 

What emerges from Alphabetical Diaries is a very attenuated, highly asynchronous look at the life of Shelia Heti. What kind of person. When she writes about sex, she's very frank. Which is how a lot of people write their diaries, I think. Which isn't surprising, really. Without any instructional purpose.

The Sun

 
The Sun

by Frans Masereel

The Frans Masereel Group

1919, reprinted 2020
 

 

The Sun is a wordless graphic novel, part of a tradition from the early 20th century of books made up entirely of woodblock prints. Lynd Ward is probably the most famous artist in this tradition, but instead, I'm starting with one of the works of Frans Maesreel. Unlike later sequential art, there are no panels here. Each page is a single black-and-white image, although they do clearly tell a linear story.
 

The Sun is framed as being a dream. It begins with a man asleep at his desk, then his avatar appears, goes on an adventure and returns, and then the man wakes up. The avatar looks maybe like a younger, fitter version of the man. His adventure shows him looking at, and repeatedly trying to reach out and grab, the sun. I understand Masereel to mean this metaphorically, rather than literally. The sun, I think, represents some kind of idea or ideal that the man wants to achieve, something that guides him, obsesses him, but also remains ever out of reach. Beyond just the setting, in Europe immediately after WWI, the spirit of The Sun reminds me of the film Metropolis, with its hope that if you could just find the right idea, that idea would solve class conflict.
 
The man climbs to the top of buildings several times, each one higher than before. He climbs a tree, he catches a flock of birds to carry him, he rides in an airplane, he is held aloft by a kite, he jumps really high. The sun is omnipresent in the sky. Each time, he loses his grip or footing while reaching out for the sun, or his support fails, or he gets too close and catches fire. The sun is on almost every page, except in some of the city scenes. The man points out the sun to others. Some try to join him, some seem to laugh, some offer him distraction or try to defeat him, but he's indefatigable. No matter how many times he falls, or how far, he continues. He looks behind library books, he looks behind the crucifix in a church, he looks at the lamplight on the wall of a brothel, but he's not fooled for long by other kinds of light. Eventually he leaves the city and continues his search out in nature. When the dream ends and he wakes up, he laughs at himself, but I don't think he's really given up.
 
Masereel's prints are dominated by black, with white providing the outlines and highlights. The black is really the negative space here, with white creating all the details. You really get a sense of being immersed in a city - the buildings, the monuments, the transportation, the crowds of onlookers. For all that the prints are iconic and simplified, you get a surprisingly detailed look at early 20th century life! 

 

Heavenly Bodies

 
Heavenly Bodies

Cult Treasures and Spectacular Saints from the Catacombs

by Paul Koudounaris

Thames & Hudson

2013

 

 

Heavenly Bodies is a nonfiction history of an all-but-forgotten Catholic tradition from the Counter Reformation, the exhuming, decorating, and displaying of 'catacomb saints' - skeletons from the Roman catacombs, elaborately decorated with precious metals and gemstones, housed as relics in churches and monasteries, primarily in Germany and Austria. Author and photographer Paul Koudounaris visited a number that once housed catacomb saints, and a few that still do, to learn their history, see them in their present condition, and document them with photographs. There are so many photos, this is practically an art book! The text too, could stand alone, but benefits greatly from being able to see the relics.
 
Catacomb saints are an invented tradition, an innovation by the Catholic Church in the late 1500s, a response to the Protestant Reformation generally, and more specifically, to the looting and destruction of relics from some Catholic churches that some Protestants carried out in the name of reform. If the early Protestants were iconoclasts, Catholic leaders hoped to win back lapsed believers and strengthen the resolve of their faithful by leaning into this contrast, and decorating their churches with impressive new icons. New catacomb saints were delivered to German churches mostly during the 1600s, but new deliveries continued into the 1800s, albeit at a slower pace.
 
Producing a mass supply of revered dead, all at once, a millennium and a half after the founding of their religion, confronted Catholic leaders with an interesting manufacturing problem. Plenty of new saints had been canonized over time, but they (and their remains) were all already accounted for. But the Roman catacombs might hold an untold number of early Christian corpses, and before the religion was legalized by Constantine in the early 300s, many of them might be martyrs. The catacombs would also contain the remains of Roman pagans and Jews, plus non-martyred Christians. So how could you tell which entombed remains were martyrs? And how could you be sure of finding enough martyrs to supply all the parishes in Germany that you wanted to decorate?
 
The answer of course is to use sloppy, ambiguous criteria that produce a lot of false positives, and to insist that every positive you produce is authentic and legitimate. You need both methods that lie, and to convince yourself that really, they're producing the truth. Sociologist Kai Erikson wrote about this in Wayward Puritans, how the early American religious communities kept counting more and more frivolous offenses as 'crimes' in order to continue punishing a consistent number of community members for misbehavior. But you see it wherever leaders set a quota and authorize those below them to meet it in whatever way they can justify. So you'll see it in police forces that use traffic tickets and civil asset forfeiture to collect revenue, in corporations that set profit targets that can't be met legally. You see it in the software Republican officials use to find voters to disenfranchise, in the guidelines Trump's immigration enforcers use to identify people with no criminal records as gang members who can be arrested and deported, in the AI software Netenyahu's army uses to label Palestinians as members of Hamas who can be targeted for execution by drone strike. You see it in the buggy equipment ghost hunters use to generate proof of hauntings, and the statistical tricks scientists can deploy to produce a significant but irreplicable finding. Anyway, with their process in place, Catholic relic-hunters in Rome found enough skeletons to meet the demand, and felt confident in labeling each of them as martyrs, calling them saints, assigning them names, even if the burial markers were unreadable. Insisting on better, more truthful criteria, even at the cost of not having enough, tends to be the domain of critics. In the case of the catacomb saints, the critics were easy to ignore at first, but were eventually persuasive enough to halt the practice.
 

 
Skeletons from Rome were 'articulated,' or wired into a posed whole, and decorated with embroidered cloth, beads and buttons, strings of pearls, mounted gemstones, and wires and settings of gold. They were shipped to the heart of Protestant country and seen as weapons for Catholicism. They're supposed to symbolize God's power and generosity, and the luxurious conditions that await all believers in heaven. To modern eyes, they look quite strange. They are at once macabre, morbid, shocking in the amount of wealth each one displays, and also almost unbelievably gaudy and tacky. This is the Catholic faith at its most glamorous, it's most goth. It's not surprising worshipers felt awed by them. There is one contemporary motif I'm aware of that resembles catacomb saints though - the flower bedecked skull illustrations associated with the Mexican Day of the Dead. The idea of claiming dead people, who possibly belonged to other faiths, and recruiting them into present-day religious practice also reminds me a bit of the posthumous baptisms carried out by the Mormon Church.
 
Once decorated, the skeletons would be displayed in churches across Germany, usually very prominently, and it seems they were successful in invigorating worshipers, including attracting pilgrims and inspiring cash donations. Many congregations devoted a special day to their saint once a year, when the body in its protective glass case might even be removed from the church and sent on parade before returning to its place of honor.
 
Catholicism is rare among religions for displaying a revering relics. The Protestant criticisms (eventually taken up by Catholic leaders during the Enlightenment in the 1800s) were both religious and aesthetic. The religious complaint is that the public doesn't understand sophisticated theological arguments about how the visible relic is the symbol of a saint who intercedes between God and the congregation to amplify their prayers - the complaint is that people worship the bones directly, and attribute miracles to the physical object, not the soul of the saint, or to god. And indeed, each relic accumulated a growing list of supposed miracles over the years, most often injuries healed and illnesses cured. The aesthetic argument is that they're silly and ugly and old fashioned. And of course, the gold and jewels are attractive targets for both criminal theft and legal confiscation.
 
Very few churches that received catacomb saints still have them, and many that remain are hidden away in storage, in attics and closets. Most of the disposals took place during the Enlightenment, when secular German leaders and Catholic authorities alike decided to hide or dispose of what they'd come to see as an embarrassing legacy, often despite the wishes and objections of everyday churchgoers who still valued the relics. That was one thing that struck me, throughout Koudounaris's account of history - how often leaders of all kinds made unilateral decisions about how the people under them ought to believe and worship, and how often those decisions were premised on the idea that the common people were stupid and must be doing it wrong.

Paper Girls 1

 
 
Paper Girls 1

by Brian Vaughan
art by Cliff Chiang
Image Comics
2016

 

 

Paper Girls 1 collects the first few issues of a comic series in the 'kids on bikes' subgenre about teenagers in the 1980s discovering scifi weirdness in their suburban cul-de-sac, as popularized by Stranger Things. It's a style of story that relies on our nostalgic memory of the 80s, that somewhat resembles a subset of stories that were popular then, but that also relies on us today having enough distance to have formed a simplified, stylized consensus image of the decade. In the same way that no one would've actually made Grease or Happy Days or Bye Bye Birdie in the 1950s, 'kids on bikes' plots needed that 30 years of distance to become viable.
 
Anyway, our heroes here are four newspaper delivery girls, out on their usual morning routes at 5am the day after Halloween in 1988. Our viewpoint character is Erin, the new girl, who the others recruit for mutual protection against the older boys in Halloween costumes who think it's fun to harass preteen girls when there are no adults around. Erin is enamored with group leader Mac, the first girl in town to get a paper route, who made it okay for the others to get one too.
 
Erin is Chinese American and goes to Catholic school, Tiffany is Black and goes to a different private Christian school, KJ is Jewish, and Mac is White, goes to public school, and comes from the poorest family in the group. Mac uses anti-gay slurs against anyone who threaten the girls, which strikes me as pretty accurate for the time period, while the others appreciate her defending them but wish she'd use different words, which seems like a more contemporary touch.
 
It's fortunate they team up, because they quickly find themselves in danger from a lot more than rude kids. First, the power goes out, almost everyone else in the neighborhood vanishes, and the sky fills up with stars and constellations they've never seen before. The girls get accosted by some creepy-looking guys who speak an alien language dressed all in black. And a flock of pterandons descends on the neighborhood, some ridden by knights in white armor. Things are getting weird!
 
The girls are mostly trying to keep away from anything strange, especially after Erin gets injured, but they (and we, the audience) soon realize that the dinosaur riders are somehow responsible for all this, that the black-clad teens are mostly there to steal local tech while whatever's going on is happening, and that the girls themselves were supposed to have vanished along with everyone else. Also, all of this has something to do with some catastrophe in the future, something bad enough to justify sending people back to pilfer from the past. It helps that a translator device eventually helps the girls understand the future-teens.
 
Eventually, the girls get medical help for Erin, and ditch the knights in white armor, although the boys who helped them aren't so lucky. At the very end, the think they've found another ally ... an older, adult version of Erin!
 
This first volume is very heavy on mystery and set-up, light on explanation. It's probably the kind of introduction that repays you for rereading it once you understand more about how things work. The art is bold and graphic, with an emphasis on showing the emotions on people's faces, and a mix of pastel and neon colors to reflect the palette of the idealized 80s.
 
The 'alien language' spoken by the older boys is a simple substitution code, with a unique symbol taking the place of each letter. Other readers solved it and posted a key online, which I appreciate. We only see the symbols when the boys don't have access to a translator, but I think it enriches the story if you go back and see what they were actually saying the rest of the time after your initial readthrough.