The Shamshine Blind

 
 
The Shamshine Blind

by Paz Pardo

Atria

2023 

 

 

I think alt-historical mystery novels are having a moment. Paz Pardo's The Shamshine Blind is one several recent books that fit that description. I think the first one I read was The Yiddish Policeman's Union, right when it first came out. I doubt it was the first book to fit the description, and it's difficult for me to believe that what's going on right now is connected to Chabon in any straightforward way. Seeing so many examples appearing around the sane time makes it seem like the two genres have a natural affinity, like alternate history worldbuilding and mystery-solving detective stories pair well in a way that allows each to reinforce the other.
 
Pardo also writes The Shamshine Blind with a kind of gonzo approach to the science part of her science fiction that reminds me of Nick Harkaway or Jasper Fforde. Because while the point where her alt history departs real history is relatively straight forward - what if Argentina won the Faulklands War? - but the cause of the departure is like something out of a comic book or cartoon - what if the way they won was by deploying colors that cause emotions as chemical weapons? By the present day of Shamshine, Argentina is the world's superpower, America is a bombed out ruin with an economy decimated by hyperinflation, and 'psychopigments', colors that control how you feel, are both our primary pharmaceuticals and our life-ruining illegal drugs.
 
The mystery is narrated by Curdita, a field in Pigment Enforcement agent nearing the mandatory retirement age of 40, working in the suburbs of an abandoned San Francisco, still dreaming of a promotion to the big time in Iowa City or Boise. Curdita is a Depressive, as are all the other Pigment agents: depression weakens the effect of psychopigments. Neurotypical people are too vulnerable, and can be permanently brain-damaged by a level of exposure that Depressives can (mostly) recover from in a few weeks. 
 
At the start of the book, Curdita is tracking down a shipment of Shamshine, a counterfeit version of Sunshine Yellow, the psychopigment for happiness, which is taken daily in pill form by patients across the country. We hear about at least a dozen other pigments, but a couple of the most important are Deepest Blue, the first psychopigment, which causes memory loss and amnesia, and was Argentina's main weapon in the war, and Slate Gray, which causes ennui and a lack of motivation. 
 
Soon enough, the Shamshine case leads Curdita to a much bigger mystery. Someone is creating a whole new pigment with unknown effects, except that all the human test subjects are getting totally burned out by the strength of it. Once they get it right, whatever it is, they appear to have plans to manipulate the public mood on a national scale, and in the meantime, they're killing or using Deepest Blue to erase the minds of anyone who might be a loose end. Curdita goes all trying to solve this and stop it, spending the back half of the book operating out of a hospital room rather than the police station, and 
 
Pardo interweaves the present day mystery with Curdita's memories of her childhood and her time in the police academy, and a tour of a fallen America, transformed by years of psychopigment warfare and the periphery's love-hate relationship with the new Argentinian core. Americans listen to soap operas on the radio and eat imported hot sauce at every meal; and militant White nationalists dream of reclaiming lost glory. When Curdita gets exposed to Slate or Blue or Magenta Obsession in the course of her pursuit, her emotions are no longer her own, and the past, both hers and the country's, spills out in free association. 
 
Pardo takes her slightly silly premise and treats it seriously. San Francisco getting emptied out by a Magenta attack that disables fifty-thousand people that turns their fandom into true fanaticism is zany, but Pardo keeps an eye on the human cost. Her America is all hinterland, every major city made uninhabitable by Deepest Blue bombings that make them permanent superfund sites. I think that's part of what reminds me of Harkaway's The Gone-Away World or Fforde's Shades of Grey - an absurd apocalypse is still the end of the old world, and however strange the new world might be, people still have to find a way to live there.

Tower Dungeon 2

 
 
Tower Dungeon 2

by Tsutomu Nihei

Kodansha

2025 

 

 

In the first volume of Tower Dungeon, super-strong farmboy Yuva got conscripted into the royal army to rescue the princess, who's been kidnapped by a necromancer and taken to the mountainous Dragon Tower. Yuva helped defeat a slime monster and recovered a gem that the necromancer says he's willing to trade for the princess. Then many of the royal guards were recalled to the capital, leaving Yuva with a straitlaced master archer and a bratty woman who knows fire magic.
 
Now in volume 2, the trio continues to explore for a safe (-ish) route up to level 100 where they can trade for the princess. Enriquo the archer leads them very cautiously. With their familiar staircase now guarded by giant suits of armor, he insists they map a new route. We learn that the dungeon is circular and 3 kilometers in diameter, which must make it like 15 or 18 km tall, given its proportions. Each level has numbered support pillars and is exactly 10 meters tall, though it seems that the very regularized main structure also holds more irregular and less well-built secondary features, perhaps later additions by less-skilled builders than the originals.
 
The trio gets lost in some repetitive, identical looking sections, then comes close to dying of thirst. Their equipment is stolen while they're sleeping, but when they give chase, they learn that the primordial human dungeon dwellers only wanted their salt (a precaution against another slime monster) for cooking. Yuva and his friends get back the rest of their stuff, plus some treasure, and the location of a water source and a secret staircase.
 
Back outside the fort, a boom town has sprung up to supply the soldiers going in. Besides Yuva's group, we meet a team of badass women adventurers who look like a roller derby team and all carry hammers, and a cat woman who wears a suit of armor. Fire mage Lilicen is eager to go back in the dungeon to beat out the new competitors. Yuva's sister has arrived from the village to work at the inn. She gets attacked by a 10 foot tall nobleman who can turn into a dragon, but the cat-lady knight protects her. Apparently everyone in the royal family is like 10 feet tall and a 'dracomorph', presumably including the princess.
 
Nihei seems to be drawing on tropes from both Dungeons & Dragons and dungeon crawling computer games like Rogue. The appearance of the stair guardians feels like a classic dungeon restocking procedure, and confusing architecture that trips you up as you make your own map is a staple of megadungeons as a genre. The sheer size of the place, and the identical superstructure of each level, is more like a video game though. Lilicen also shows Yuva you can break clay jars to find minor treasures, which is straight out of the Zelda games.
 
Yuva is our viewpoint character. He's from a small village and knows little of the outside world, so he needs Enriquo and Lilicen to explain how dungeons work to him. Along with us, he goggles at the noble cat woman and at the news that the kingdom's royalty are all giant shapeshifters. Yuva is kindhearted, which is why he talked to the salt thieves instead of fighting them. So far, his incredible strength has only been used for carrying heavy packs and breaking through a weakened wall into a secret passageway, but presumably he'll eventually use it for fighting, too. Yuva treats Enriquo like a boss and Lilicen like a sister, much to her annoyance.
 
The world Nihei is building here seems rough, crude, and brutal in a way that matches the style of his linework. The monsters are dangerous and strange in a way that borders on horror. The royal family is monstrous and inhuman, and at least one member is a Bluebeard-type who wants to cannibalize Yuva's actual little sister to prolong his life. Enriquo got a bladder infection when they ran out of water. The details add up to a world that's harsh and uncaring, where only people of incredible skill can survive.

Invisible Things

 
 
Invisible Things

by Andy Pizza and Sophie Miller

Chronicle Books

2023 

 

 

Invisible Things is a children's picture book that illustrates things that can't be seen - experiences from our other senses and our emotions. 

 

The book is a kind of guided meditation for kids, first walking through things we might hear, smell, taste, or feel, and then asking the reader to close their eyes and take some time to identify the invisible sensations around themselves. And then this is repeated for emotions, with a bit of extra attention given to reassuring kids that sadness and fear are normal, but also not permanent. 

 

The illustrations use cute little personifications to depict each invible thing. The song stuck in your head is a guitar with feet and googly eyes; the heebie jeebies is a hollow tree stump with little eyes peeking out of it. I think the idea is that making each sensation or emotion into a tiny monster makes them easier to think about and imagine.

The Bathysphere Book

 
The Bathysphere Book
Effects of the Luminous Ocean Depths
by Brad Fox
Astra

2023 
 
 
I think there's some value in allowing your friends' interests to influence you. At one time, my sister was very interested in oceanography, so I still like to read about it from time to time. The Bathysphere Book is a history of the first really successful deep-sea diving vehicle, the bathysphere, and a biography of the explorer who rode in it, William Beebe.
 
The bathysphere was built by Otis Barton. When the door was screwed on, it was a hermetically sealed metal sphere, with only three quartz windows to see out. It was raised and lowed by a metal cable, and this was paired with a phone line so Beebe could report what he saw up to his research partner (and girlfriend) Gloria Hollister for transcription. The bathysphere carried its own compressed oxygen, had internal air conditioning, and used a chemical reactant to neutralize the carbon dioxide its occupants exhaled. It was only used a few times, mainly in 1933 and 1934, and Hollister never got to go on a real dive. Bebee and seasick Barton dove together each time, with Barton not even looking out, just monitoring the machines.
 
The purpose of the dives was to find out what the ocean was actually like, below the depths you could reach in diving helmet. As you descend, more and more light is absorbed by the water above you, first reds and oranges, then yellows and greens. Before it becomes black, the ocean glows blue-violet. Many of the deep sea creatures are also partially bioluminescent. There is more life down there than scientists had believed possible before Beebe's dives.
 
The other famous collaborator on this project was artist Else Bostelmann. She also never dove in the bathysphere, and based all her paintings on Hollister's transcripts and direct conversation with Beebe. I actually got this book because I'd seen some of Bostelmann's fantastically dark, haunting watercolors before. My favorite anecdote is that on a few occasions, she donned a diving helmet, dropped a canvas and a metal music stand, and was actually able to oil paint fish and coral, from life, at a depth of 20 or 30 feet.
 

Previously Unknown Dragonfish Circling the Bathysphere 
- Else Bostlemann, 1934

 
There are some things from the past that I guess I assumed were more widespread than they actually were. When I watched the film The Automat, I was genuinely surprised to learn there were really only ever in New York and Philadelphia. The bathysphere was unique, not the name for a general type of craft, and outside of Beebe's handful of deep dives in the early 30s, was really only used for test dives and exhibitions.
 
Fox writes in very short chapters that each relay a single thought or incident. His narratives of Beebe's life and the story of the bathysphere dives are interwoven with Bostelmann's sketches and paintings, photos of the expeditions, excerpts from Beebe's and Hollister's diaries, excerpts from the transcripts of the dives and descriptions of the undersea sightings, accounts of what else was going on historically at the same time, and then lots and lots of short biographical sketches of other people tangentially (often very tenuously) connected to Beebe and the dives. So we learn about the famous racist Beebe dedicated one of his books to, but also about Beebe's neighbor's doctor. Who indeed sounds like a fascinating fellow! The proliferation of chapters about people with only the thinnest of connections to the dives is probably meant to help provide context, but also kind of made it feel like Fox didn't really have enough material to fill a book and was padding it out.

The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears (2013)

 
 

The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears

directed by Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani

written by Bruno Forzani and Helene Cattet

Strand Releasing

2013

 

 

Although it's only a decade old, The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears looks more like Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, with its unsettling blend of blood and sexuality, the uncanny repetitions and re-dos of Celine and Julie Go Boating, or Jan Svankmajer's Alice, with its creepy stop-motion skeletons, than like anything from the last 30 years.

 

The plot, such as it is, is relatively simple, but the story isn't told in a straightforward way, and by the end, I doubt that we're supposed to think that there's anything as solid as a 'real' story amidst the parade of images.

 

A man comes home to his absurdly Art Nouveau apartment to find his wife missing. He questions the neighbors, calls a private investigator, searches the building, and finds a series of secret passages. He also keeps encountering the same enigmatic woman in a number of different guises.

 

As the film continues, the already tenuous distinction between 'reality,' flashback, dream, fantasy, hallucination, and story told by another person recounting one of the above, dissolves completely. We see the same events several times, sometimes identically, sometimes with variations. People, especially the husband, are repeatedly cut with razor blades and knives, only to see their wounds vanish moments later. People die, and then are still alive. The sex is all sadistic. The mysterious woman, Laura, is powerful in a way that all the others are helpless within this surreal world.

 

The most notable thing about the look of this movie is the editing. I don't think there's a single shot that's held for more than a couple seconds. The editing deliberately creates dis-continuity rather than the usual illusion of seamless movement. Actions start and restart, repeat partway through. Scenes are interlaced with each other and with brief flashes of imagery. Parts of the movie are shown in low-frame-rate stop-motion, like we're flipping through a stack of photographs.

 

It's a unique visual experience. It don't think I'd describe how I felt about this one as 'liking it,' but I am glad I watched it. I'm always interested to see movies that experiment, that try something new, show me something I haven't seen before.

 

 

Originally watched January 2023.

My Dear Pierrot

 
 
My Dear Pierrot

by Jim Bishop

translated by Ivanka Hahnenberger
Magnetic Press

2024
 

 

As near as I can tell, Jim Bishop's career as a comic artist is making dark variations on themes from Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli. My Dear Pierrot is absolutely a more adult, more erotic, more sinister take on Howl's Moving Castle, and the character of Pierrot is very recognizably a riff on the wizard Howl.
 
Clea is the daughter of a wealthy family. She loves to dance, but in her social class, that can only be a hobby, not a career, not something she can perform for others. She has an arranged engagement to Berthier, the son of the local baron. She'll become his wife, and then a mother. The city follows the Church, artists and dancers are suspected of being pagans, and the nearby forest is off-limits and supposedly full of witches.
 
Clea meets Pierrot, a magician who can do real magic, and flies away with him to his house inside a giant oak tree in the forest. Pierrot begins teaching Clea magic, and she quickly falls in love with him. Everything seems perfect and they sleep together ... and then he vanishes for three days.
 
When Pierrot gets back, the mood has changed somehow. Every time Clea tries to talk about her feelings, he scolds her for feeling them wrong. A lot of what he says is sound relationship advice, except that it's self-serving coming from him, and in context, he's only saying it to dismiss her valid complaints. He's gaslighting her.
 
Clea continues learning magic and practicing dance and starts to get to know some of the other witches in the forest. She realizes Pierrot's had a lot of girlfriends, and she might not even be his only one right now. One forgetful witch keeps calling her by someone else's name, and there's a mysterious ghost of a young woman haunting nearby the treehouse...
 
If any of this is starting to make you nervous, you have good instincts. Pierrot has a secret (very similar to Howl's), and a plan for Clea that relies on her falling into suicidal despair. But despite Pierrot's attempts to undermine her self-confidence, Clea has good instincts too, and while she's nowhere near as strong a magician as Pierrot, she's strong enough to get away.
 
While all this was happening, Berthier was humiliated that his fiancee left him for another man (a pagan, no less!) and went into the forest, ostensibly to rescue Clea, but mostly to restore his own honor. A witch plucks out one of Berthier's eyes to punish him for not being able to understand his own motives, and he spends the rest of his time in the woods feeling sorry for himself, until he runs into her as she's running away from Pierrot, and they get married after all. 
 
Clea gives up magic and dance to become a wife and mother, and it seems her fire has gone out. In the end though, she rekindles it, and abandons her family to go live as a witch in the forest.
 

Clea and Pierrot hide from the ghost in the forest.

  
 
I like Bishop's art. Pierrot is otherwordly and good-looking enough to make his role in the story believable. When we see magic, it really comes alive. It reminds me a bit of Ghibli, but it's definitely his own style, not a pastiche. It's very clear and colorful, and Bishop really has an eye for movement and composition. The layout of the panels matches the pacing of the scene. Characters sometimes extend beyond the boundaries of their panel when they're being especially active or expressive. Important moments are drawn oversized and practically leap off the page.
 
I liked Pierrot more than Bishop's Lost Letters, which I read over the summer. In general, I think this one is even darker, and both comics show a young woman's life falling apart to the point she becomes suicidal. But Clea is at the center of My Dear Pierrot, and it's clear Bishop knows that Pierrot is mistreating her. The fact of his intent, and not just the mistreatment itself, is central to the plot. 
 
In Lost Letters, Iode completely wrecks Sista's life, but he does it sort of by accident, and it's actually not clear when reading if Bishop himself assigns cause and effect to that chain of events. That book is also fully Iode's story; Sista's problems are a side plot. Even her death is portrayed solely in terms of how it affects him. I'm willing to see men mistreat women in fiction, but I also want to see evidence that the author appreciates the significance of what they're showing me. 

I Married My Best Friend to Shut My Parents Up

 
 
I Married My Best Friend to Shut My Parents Up

by Kodama Naoko

translated by Amber Tamasaitis
Seven Seas

2019 

 

 

I kind of love the trend of Japanese fiction with long, descriptive titles. I Married My Best Friend to Shut My Parents Up is a standalone manga about two young women who are friends who make a marriage of convenience, and I know you're not going to believe this because such a story has never been told before, but after awhile of living together as roommates, they slowly, awkwardly start to develop romantic feelings for each other. The closest thing to a twist here is that one of them is already an out lesbian and has some feelings from the start.
 
Machi has a job in a corporate office. She works hard, has no interest in dating, and imagines herself living alone in the future. Her biggest problem is that her parents keep pressuring her to get married and have kids. She's lied to them and said she has a boyfriend, but that hasn't helped, and she doesn't want a real one. She wishes she could have a sham marriage just to stop them talking about it!
 
As luck would have it, Machi tells all these thoughts to Hana, her friend since high school. Hana is a couple years younger and wants to be an artist, and she's about to be evicted because her apartment building wants to upgrade. Hana suggests they help each other out. Machi will convince her parents to leave her alone, and Hana will have a chance to save up money and work on her freelancing by moving in. And same-sex civil partnerships are legal in their prefecture...
 
In general, I think Hana gets the better end of this bargain. She really is able to build up her artistic career, and she is very fond of her 'senpai' who she used to have a crush on back in high school. What Machi gets is an excuse for a blowout fight that lets her completely cut off contact with her parents, and to feel secretly smug when her male coworkers talk about wanting to marry their girlfriends.
 
But neither of them seems to expect how it'll affect them emotionally. Machi's spent her whole life being pressured to achieve certain visible markers of success by her parents, and meanwhile her boss assumes she'll quit when she becomes a wife or mother, so why bother promoting her? Seeing Hana do something she likes and cares about inspires Machi to try to get ahead at the office by taking on more ambitious projecs. And while Hana likes living with her friend, the marriage of convenience rekindles some rather inconvenient older feelings. It's hard being close to someone you're romantically interested in who doesn't like you back, and every time Hana expresses that interest, Machi rebuffs her and seems disgusted, which, you know, hurts. Hana doesn't like that she feels like a creep whenever she flirts, and decides that it'll be healthier for herself to try moving on.
 
Machi is our viewpoint character, and we follow her more closely. We see her warm up to Hana, and come to rely on her as a housemate. It's Hana finally saving enough money to get an apartment on her own again that forces Machi to admit what she's started to feel, and even when she does, Hana is worried that it's going to be hard to have a relationship with someone who doesn't really want to kiss or touch her. But she agrees to give it a try.
 
This is a pretty short one, told in three chapters. I'm not sure if Machi is asexual - she doesn't think of herself that way, but she also doesn't seem to be attracted to men, and her feelings for Hana are more platonic than physical. I think if I want to see a similar style of relationship, I could try reading the series How Do We Relationship? 
 
I think the thing author Kodama Naoko does best here is to use little flashbacks to show us Machi thinking about earlier incidents and gaining new perspective on them. I haven't read many fake dating romances, but the decision to have Hana know she's a lesbian, to have her attraction be part of her identity and not solely a consequence of her situation is an important part of the plot, and I think it might be a bit different from the typical. 

A Storm of Wings

 
 
A Storm of Wings

by John Harrison

Bantam Spectra

1980, reprinted 2005
 
 
A Storm of Wings is the second of John Harrison's science fantasy books centered on the far-future city of Viriconium. The first book, The Pastel City, is set on earth in the Evening, a kind of quasi-medieval period that follows after the fall of the ultra high-tech civilizations of the Afternoon. That first book reads almost like a sequel, because Harrison introduces us to a King-Arthur-like figure who ruled Viriconium and united the surrounding lands, but then the whole book is set after his death. The dead king's daughter, the young queen, calls her father's old allies out of retirement for help as Viriconium is invaded by her half-sister, leading an army of human raiders and scifi monsters left over from the Afternoon.
 
A Storm of Wings is set another 80 years later. The young queen is now a woman in middle age (human lifespans are longer in this era, it seems). Her father's equivalent of the Knights of the Round Table are all dead, except for Tomb the dwarf and the ancient, possibly immortal wizard-figure Cellur. Society is Viriconium has become less medieval and more futuristic thanks to the Reborn Men, an army of soldiers from the Afternoon who were specially trained to fight the scifi monsters, who Tomb woke up out of suspended animation for help in the war. It's not initially clear how, but the other important detail from the first book is that Tomb mentioned several times that his mentor was the first person in the Evening to travel to the moon, and that journey is the source of this book's problems. Unbeknownst to anyone, he's returned to the earth, and he's brought something with him...
  
So, A Storm of Wings leans more into the scifi half of science fantasy. It's also probably more literary, because while the first book had dense, almost poetic passages of description, and featured slightly unconventional heroes in a strange setting, its plot still followed the structure of an adventure story. 
 
This second book is more ambitious, though in my opinion not quite as good. The main protagonist of Pastel City was a reluctant hero because he was old and retired, weary and mournful, and he wanted to be a poet. In Storm, Harrison goes fully anti-heroic. We get someone who repeatedly rejects the attempts to recruit him, who was an apprentice airship pilot in the war (which destroyed all the airships), who's spent the last 80 years angry and embittered and working as an assassin. Tomb and Cellur are little more than elderly advisors at this point. Cellur's tower has collapsed and his flock of mechanical birds is all but gone. We get a witness to the alien trouble, a Reborn woman who has only a tenuous grasp to reality, and one of the queen's advisors, another Reborn Man who is in the middle of losing his grasp as well. And to guide them, the ghostly psychic projection of Tomb's mentor, a babbling, farting, levitating sphere of ectoplasm, who sometimes warns of danger or leads the way, but is otherwise incapable of coherent thought.
 
What especially makes Storm different though, is that while nominally the monsters this group has set off to find and defeat are alien insects, originally from deep space, more recently from the moon, the actual problem they have to solve is a kind of epistemic crisis, a fundamental disagreement about the nature of reality itself. 
 
I mentioned that both the Reborn protagonists experience something like delusions; Harrison tells us this problem is ubiquitous among the Reborn Men. Some part of their minds still wants to live in the Afternoon. This is presented like a kind of degenerative schizophrenia. They suffer hallucinations and fugue states and lose the ability to care for themselves or to live among anyone but their own kind.
 
The citizens of Viriconium increasingly join the Sign of the Locust, a cult that preaches that the world is an illusion, it isn't real. By the start of the book they've become violent. By the end they are all partially turning into insects, growing new limbs and other bodyparts as though they're cancerous tumors.
 
When our protagonists, a mix of reluctant and incapable, finally learn the truth, the problem isn't just that alien insects have landed on the earth. It's almost metaphysical. Harrison claims the earth looks the way it does not just because of its physical matter, because of how we, collectively, because of how our minds interpret that arrangement of matter. But the insects have alien minds, different needs, a new psychology, and the world responds by becoming what they need it to be. 
 
The insects are like the angels from Neon Genesis Evangelion or the hronir from Tlon from Borges's story "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius". Their presence is an incursion of a competing idea that strives to overwrite the world as we know it, a dream trying to become real. The changing landscape, the toxic yellow mist, the mutating cultists, the city of Viriconium overlaid with another version of itself made of spiderwebs and wasps' nests, the insects themselves growing human limbs and organs in a process that mirrors the cultists - the apocalypse is here, and it is the physical manifestation of a disagreement about meaning. You can't fault Harrison for trying something daring.
 
That said, I think I prefer The Pastel City. Harrison leans so hard into making his characters unlikable that I didn't especially enjoy reading them, even as they opposed an end of the world scenario that's more like a nightmare or horror film than like a disaster movie. I liked his prose better before too. In Storm he repeatedly describes scenes as though we are watching them on a screen, including people walking onto, then across, the out of our unmoving field of vision. It felt like reading a description of a comic or movie, it's not an effect I enjoy in literature. If other critics are to be believed, both these two are just warm-ups, and it's the next couple books where Harrison will really impress me. It's an open question though, whether what is mostly widely praised about his writing will be something I enjoy more than a clear story, told well. 

Mute (2018)

 

  
Mute
directed by Duncan Jones

written by Michael Robert Johnson and Duncan Jones

Netflix

2018
 

 
Mute is a neon-drench noir investigation set in a cyberpunk near future. It starts well, but as a 'missing girl' story, suffers from the early loss of its most engaging character, and goes wildly off the rails by the end. It's disappointing, because you could easily imagine a better script resulting in a top-notch experience.

 

Leo is an Amish man living in Berlin. He can't speak because of a childhood injury and his mother's opposition to medical technology. He swims underwater, draws, and works as a bartender at a mob-owned speakeasy. He's clearly a man out of place, and seemingly out of time. His girlfriend Naadirah is a waitress at the same place, and has a secret she wants to tell Leo soon. Then mysteriously - after Leo gets fired for beating up a sexually-harrassing patron - she vanishes.

 

The first act, the one good act, sets all this up. The second act is Leo's search, which is mostly good, but involves an implausible, manual reverse phone number search through paper phone books Leo checks out from the Berlin public library in order to find Naadirah's mother and the final clue. (The scene of a stolen luxury ground car tailing a flying-car taxi was pretty good.) The third act is garbage as all the clues are resolved and Leo seeks two-fisted justice in a city where apparently no one has a gun, so no one can do the easy thing and just shoot him already.

 

Also wandering around Berlin are Paul Rudd in a giant mustache and Justin Theroux playing an even creepier doctor than he did in Maniac. Rudd is AWOL from the US Army, and the pair work for the mobster who owns the bar while Rudd waits for forged papers that will let him get himself and his daughter out of the country before the MPs catch him. One of the dawning realizations of the film is that despite his demeanor, Rudd is not playing one of his usual nice-guy characters, but it's interesting how long he can keep you on his side before you start to hate him. This plotline initially seems almost entirely disconnected from Leo and his search, but they merge disastrously in the final act.

 

I will applaud Mute for being willing to show us what the bleakest possible ending might look like before allowing Leo to very slightly save the day. I don't mind that we don't get a fully nihilistic ending, but I do mind the implausible and heavy-handed machinations needed to bring us to this point.

 

Rudd and Theroux salvage what ought to be embarrassingly bad dialogue with the strength of their commitment to their roles, and as Leo, Alexander Skarsgard is incredibly expressive despite never making a sound. The quality of the acting saves the film from total ruin, but I still wouldn't recommend it unless you're a noir completist.

 

  

Originally watched in January 2023.

Sabine's Notebook

 
 
Sabine's Notebook

In Which the Extraordinary Correspondence of Griffin and Sabine Continues
by Nick Bantock

Chronicle Books

1992

 

 

Sabine's Notebook is the second book in Nick Bantock's trilogy of novels about a pair of artists who are separated across the globe, but share a kind of psychic connection, and communicate in letters and postcards. Bantock's work blends the epistolary novel with the art book, as each postcard and envelope are illustrated, each letter has an actual envelope it can be removed from, and everything is written in the specific handwriting of the artists, Griffin and Sabine.
 
In the first book, Sabine reached out to Griffin because she'd finally learned who he was and how to reach him, after a lifetime of being able to (sometimes?) see through his eyes. Griffin is an illustrator living in London; Sabine lives on a small island in the South Pacific and designs the island's stamps. For Sabine, the chance to talk to Griffin is the fulfillment of a dream. Griffin is intrigued by Sabine but also fears her, and fears that he's imagining her or going insane. The first book ended with Sabine announcing she was coming to visit Griffin, but then arriving to find his apartment empty.
 
Now in Sabine's Notebook, we learn that Griffin has essentially fled in terror, afraid to actually meet the dream girl who, he's afraid, might really be just a dream. Sabine seems awfully understanding as he writes to her (at his own home address) from Italy, Greece, Japan, Australia. She's enjoying the city and its museums, though she'll eventually have to go back home. 
 
Griffin is clearly going through some sort of spiritual or psychological crisis, though I found myself thinking that world travel wouldn't really solve anything, and that he ought to see a therapist, and especially that he ought to face his fears and just go meet Sabine already. I can understand building something up in your mind so that you fear disappointment if you actually do it, but he's not even really choosing the idea of Sabine over actually meeting her. He must understand that if he keeps avoiding her, he could lose her as a pen pal too.
  
The pair repeatedly affirm that they are in love with one another, and Sabine in particular has the patience of a saint. When Griffin finally returns home, near Sabine's deadline for leaving, he finds her already gone ... but then the last postcard in the book is from her, from his address, asking why he never made it back like he said he would!
 
I'm curious to see how this situation will be resolved. I wonder if we'll learn that the pair are somehow separated in time as well as space. I don't really know, but that's my guess. Poor Sabine! Regardless of whatever supernatural is going on, she's in love with a man who prefers to keep her at a distance and to communicate in the slowest, most attenuated way possible. Bantock's artwork is again evocative - suggestive and dream-like - which fits the mood of the book and the personality of the two artists well. 

Paper Girls 2

 
 
Paper Girls 2

by Brian Vaughan

art by Cliff Chiang

Image Comics

2016 

 

 

In the first volume of Paper Girls, four girls on their paper routes the morning after Halloween joined together, initially for self-defense against older teen boys out looking for trouble, and then to try to figure out and stay away from a whole host of weird things happening in their neighborhood.
 
For reasons unknown, the 'Old Timers' came to that morning in the late 1980s and imposed an electronic and communications blackout, kidnapping almost everyone except our four young heroines. Some far future teen boys with a stolen time machine arrived at the same time to steal useful tech. It's not clear if the Old Timers are there to catch the teens, or if the teens are there to take advantage of the blackout.
 
But when Chinese American new girl Erin got injured, it was one of the mystery teens who got her medical care. Shortly afterward, their time machine exploded! Erin, Mac, and Tiffany were sent to 2016 where they ran into Erin's adult self. KJ went somewhere else.
 
Now in volume 2, adult Erin brings her younger self and two friends home. We learn she has the scar from the injury, but no memory of how she got it. It seems the Old Timers eventually put everything back and erase everyone's memories after doing ... whatever it is they're up to. Separately, another future teen who speaks an alien language arrives in 2016. This one is also Erin? It turns out she's a clone, grown from Erin's blood after she got medical care, and she's the niece of the teen boys from the first volume.
 
Young Erin and Old Erin go to the abandoned shopping mall to look for KJ. They find her field hockey stick with a message carved in it - a warning not to trust 'the other Erin', and directions for where to go next. But which one is 'other'? Mac and Tiffany go looking for their own older selves, and Mac learns she died of leukemia in the early 90s. Meanwhile, Clone Erin is also on her way to the mall, and manages to run into Mac and Tiffany on the way. 

Clone Erin's trip somehow brought a pair of hundred foot tall tardigrades with her, and they immediately start wrecking downtown Cleveland, which attracts the attention of the Old Timers again. They arrive in a combination zeppelin-cathedral and unleash another squadron of knights riding pteradons. 
 
From Clone Erin and the leader of the Old Timers, we learn that there is only one timeline, no branching or parallel worlds, and there are at least two factions with access to time travel, although their goals, and what rules they might follow, remain unknown. Both factions seem to want the paper girls, although we don't understand why yet. The leader of the Old Timers mentions that his mother was born in 2016, and worries that he and his airship are 'breaking curfew' in order to address the tardigrades, so there might be another faction we haven't met yet that will show up soon.
 
Eventually Clone Erin tries to kidnap the girls to her far future home, but they manage to send her back alone. With Old Erin's help, they dodge the Old Timers, and follow the directions from the hockey stick, arriving at a different future where their friend KJ is waiting for them.
 
Some time travel ideas are easier to understand than others. You have to be pretty far in the weeds, for example, to understand how the most shocking scene in the film Looper is supposed to work. The idea of a single timeline, and a group somehow outside it who repeatedly writes over parts of it to preserve their preferred version of human history benefits a bit from familiarity. Isaac Asimov introduced this version of time travel, along with a bureacratic agency that monitors changes in The End of Eternity. John Crowley and Charles Stross have both told their own versions, in Great Work of Time and Palimpsest, and anyone who's watched the Loki tv show has seen Marvel's version of time travel law enforcement. Visually, the Old Timers in Paper Girls look nothing like the 'man in a gray suit' bureaucrats that usually show up in these stories, but I think the idea about time travel is the same.
 
Volume 1 introduced the girls and the mysteries and set things in motion. Now in volume 2, we learn a lot more about Erin, and a fair bit about what's going on, and the action definitely ramps up. I'm excited to see what's next!

The Nude

 

The Nude

by Michelle Lindley

Atria Books

2024 

 

  

The Nude is a literary novel about an American curator going to Greece to acquire a newly discovered statue of a nude woman for her museum. I perhaps should've given more thought to what it meant that I saw it on a list of the best book covers for the month it was released, but not on any of the lists of the best reviewed books for that month.

 

Most of The Nude is intended to be slow-burning tension and mounting internal turmoil as Dr Elizabeth Clark becomes more and more anxious from the heat, the jet lag, her migraine headaches, her pill addictions, her increasingly erotic fascination with her translator Niko and his artist wife Theo, haunting childhood memories of her dead sister; with the Greek museum's slow-walking the acquisition, protests against the expatriation of ancient art, vandals attempting to sabotage the statue to send a message; her failing marriage back home, pressure and doubt about her abilities from her museum director back home, competition from her rival over who will take over as director after this buy... It all accumulates and Elizabeth's behavior becomes more erratic until the vandals succeed in damaging the statue and Elizabeth reaches a breaking point of her own.

 

There are two problems though, and I think they're kind of related. There's not enough tension, and not enough payoff. Although things keep happening, and it seems clear that eventually Elizabeth will become overwhelmed and act out in some way, author Michelle Lindley blends the anxious with the ordinary in a way that probably makes the book more realistic, but also seems to rob it of some of its potential power. Elizabeth belongs in a thriller, the plot structure wants to be a thriller, but it's not, you know, thrilling enough.

 

In Elizabeth, Lindley has created a protagonist who belongs in transgressive fiction. She's someone who feels fundamentally unable to fit into society, who constantly strives to appear perfect and succeed at work, but who's so tortured by her own psyche that she seems always on the brink of disaster. Elizabeth is ultra-controlled, always anxious, always unhappy. She hates her body, starves herself and recoils from casual touch, but also loves her painkillers and tranquilizers, loves to binge eat as a treat, and sleeps with men in a mercenary way to advance her career. Her migraines are debilitating and make her see hallucinatory auras; she's gone hysterically blind twice in her life and fears it'll happen again, maybe even on this trip, especially since she's taking her pills too quickly and they might not last.

 

There's all the ingredients for steadily ratcheting tension, perhaps with minor outbursts building toward a major eruption. But Lindley continually undercuts the anxiety with normality. There are too many possible sources of stress, but none of them get enough attention. Nothing can really build up, because it all keeps alternating. Every unsettling thought or moment is counteracted with something prosaic. Even the suspicion that Elizabeth slept with a major donor to the Greek museum, or perhaps was assaulted by him, while she was awake and ambulatory, but not conscious or forming memories, just goes nowhere and ultimately comes to nothing, dropped and forgotten.

  

None of the stress keeps Elizabeth from keeping up appearances and going through the motions; and all the other characters seem perpetually relaxed, unbothered, unhurried. It should create more frisson! Elizabeth is not fun or normal! But she's desperate to be liked, desperate for others to think she's fun and chill, and determined that no one should suspect her of being uncool enough to care what they think of her. 

 

She acts out some, but not in ways that are truly satisfying or cathartic. The migraine imagery is too brief before the pills kick in; we never get a full phantasmagoria. She's obsessed with sexy free-spirited Theo, her first time being attracted to a woman, possibly her first time actually desiring a person and not just the social advantage she can gain from them, and Theo is interested back, so when Elizabeth eventually stops trying to please everyone else and gives in to her own desires and urges, you might expect the two women to do more than kiss a couple times. But no.

 

It's incredibly anticlimactic. And I think kind of emblematic of the way that Lindley's efforts to make her book literary and realistic prevent it from delivering the pleasure that we'd get from watching real chaos. At one point near the end, Elizabeth tells us she feels feral, feels unhinged. That is what I'd spent the whole book up to that point waiting for! But even though she says it, she doesn't really do it. Instead of fireworks, everything mostly fizzles.

Witch Hat Atelier 11

 
 
Witch Hat Atelier 11
by Kamome Shirahama

Kodansha

2023

 

 

In the previous volume of Witch Hat Atelier, we met a new witch who uses forbidden magic, a young witch who could easily pass for a fellow student. She threatened Coco and Tartah unless they can get into the Silver Eye parade and cast a spell that impresses the king enough to earn a private audience. It's a seemingly impossible request, especially since the parade is the next day! But Coco agreed to try, and then immediately started worrying herself sick over the difficulty of it.
 
Volume 11 opens with Coco accidentally waking Agott up because she's panicking. She's exactly like a student trying to do a big assignment all in one night. (I mean, I guess she's not just like that, I guess she technically is that, but it's not like Coco procrastinated; the assignment got sprung on at the last minute by a bully who goes to another school!) Coco breaks down crying, begging Agott for help. She has writer's block, and she's overwhelmed by the stakes of what she's trying to do, although she can only tell Agott part of what's going on.
 
Agott catches herself thinking that Coco failing would mean less competition, and realizes she doesn't want to be that person anymore. She tells Coco about her own self-doubts, and that everyone feels like a hopeless failure sometimes. Everyone produces drawings they don't like, starts drafts they're not sure how to finish. (There's a bonus comic at the end of this volume that shows Master Olruggio working through these exact same doubts.) Agott encourages Coco to draw some spells for her own enjoyment, just to clear her head, and shows her a set of glyphs that, when added to another spell sigil, cause the finished spell effect to look like an animal.
 
Agott tells Coco about how she's sorry she was unfriendly when Coco first came to the atelier. This seems like a turning point in their friendship, like they'll be closer after this. Coco even stands up for Agott when another student witch who knew her before her falling out with her family tries to tease her.
 
Master Qifrey has noticed that something's up with Coco that she's keeping a secret. Olruggio has correctly noticed that Coco and Tartah are experiencing some form of young love, and encourages Qifrey to give her some privacy. Qifrey still thinks there's more than that going on, and he's right too, although I doubt he realizes Coco's being coerced, or that she and Tarah are harboring such intense doubts about the laws against healing magic.
 
Agott and Coco both get their spells finished and approved by the parade committee, so when the sun sets and the parade begins, they'll both get their turns to show off on one of the elevated platforms. The king is there watching (he secretly belongs to the last family of witches to know healing magic), along with large crowds of ordinary people. They reactions will help decide which spells the king will meet with the caster to buy.
 
When it's Coco's turn, we see that what she's made is new infrastructure for the sanitary disposal of sewage! Currently people empty their chamber pots into cesspits, and channels carry all the effluent to a single magical gate. As the sewage passes through, the water in the canal turns clear, and the concentrated filth drains off into a side channel. We learned earlier that in every city, this side channel drains into a Muckpool, which is always borders the poorest neighborhood. Coco's innovation is a purifying pot for each home. Empty your chamber pot into that, and you can dump cleaned water into the cesspits. Widespread adoption would dramatically improve life in the slums.
 
The crowd is not at all interested though. This would be a physically demanding extra step to dispose of their wastewater, and for people who don't live near the Muckpool, there'd be little direct benefit. Agott hops in to save the day though, making it look like Coco had only shown the first half of her spell, and like what happens next is the planned second part of the demonstration. (Agott marvels again at Coco's open-heartedness; that she accepts help easily without feeling threatened or undermined.) A new rune added to the spell makes to clean water flow back out of the purifying jug looking like flying fish, and the fish swim themselves through the air before diving into the nearest cesspit. Now the crowd is excited! No more lugging a heavy clay pot of wastewater to the dump site? That bit of saved labor appeals far more than the cleaning alone. Together, Coco and Agott have basically invented flush toilets.
 
They get a moment to celebrate their success, but only a moment, because from atop her parade float, Coco sees something, and the whole crowd sees it a moment later - a towering monster approaching the city from the harbor! The creature looks really weird, in a way that's hard to describe. It's hugely tall, but seems to be made of some kind of organic strands, so it's also quite insubstantial. 

We learn the truth, though none of the characters know it. In a jail cell in the king's palace, where no magic works inside, the witch ambassador and the guy who was selling glasses that can see through clothes, both of whom were arrested in volume 9, are imprisoned together. The ambassador smuggled in some ink for drawing spells, and convinced the other guy they could use it to escape by sticking an arm out the window, outside the spell dampening effect. I thought they'd try to draw a sigil on the outer wall, or perhaps on a scrap of fabric that they could just hold out the window ... but it seems the ambassador tricked the other guy into letting him draw on his skin, with disastrous consequences that will play out in the next volume.
 
I think Shirahama uses magic as a flexible metaphor that lets her talk about a number of different things, under the guise of simply telling a children's story about witches. So when some character asks, 'what is magic for?', they're really asking what is art for? what is technology for? what is power for? Why do we have these things? What are we supposed to do with them? Just because we can do something, should we actually do it? What are we doing it for? And at different times, magic is a stand-in for each of those different things. Because the spells are drawn, it's easy to see how the students' struggles to perfect their spells resembles the more general challenge of learning to draw well, including the importance of repetition, and the frustration that comes with struggle. We even saw that in this volume.

But some of the most interesting debates, I think, come when magic is being used as a metaphor for technology. In Shiraham's world, spells that are drawn are spells that are most useful for creating enchanted objects. And yes, there are unique works with a single owner, or specialty creations that only other witches ever use, but most enchanted objects, once they are invented, start being mass produced, used as city infrastructure, or owned and used directly in the households of the non-magical masses. So when Qifrey and Olruggio teach the girls about which spells should be allowed to be public, and why, they're instilling a set of values about what people deserve, and what they should be allowed to have if they want, and what should be forbidden.
 
Shirahama has created a flawed utopia, intentionally so. This magical world is upheld by artificial restrictions of who is permitted even to learn magic, and what they're allowed to do with it, and these rules are enforced in some of the most draconian ways possible, short of execution. But the world those rules create, the world they allow to flourish, is one where ordinary people have access to universal basic services that deliver a fairly decent standard of living to everyone, and where at least some of the people in power are constantly thinking about how to use their power to make people's lives better. 

There's a certain irony in Coco and Agott's new spell. Last volume, Master Qifrey gave a speech defending unobtrusive, reliable spells as more important than big flashy ones - but here it is the flash, the water turning into fish and flying away, that makes it work. 

 

Flush toilets and sanitary sewers are also emblematic of a certain way of thinking about what people need, and deserve. Access to clean water, the ability to go to the bathroom when you need to, and a way to dispose of wastewater so that it doesn't sicken you or contaminate your drinking water - these things are literally vital to human health, to life itself. They're also generally considered impolite or embarrassing to talk about. Milan Kundera devotes a whole chapter of The Unbearable Lightness of Being to the idea that you cannot truly love humanity unless you also love shit. You can't really help people if you're only willing to help them when their problem isn't distasteful or unsavory. 

In the early 20th century, the term 'sewer socialism' was initially used to mock the politicians and members of city government in Milwaukee who kept bragging about the benefits of the city's new sewer system. But they embraced it, and they were right to be proud, because they accomplished the very thing Coco hopes to do for the poor residents of the Muckpool neighborhood - save them from having to live alongside the stench and disease of an entire city's waste collecting beside their homes. There are a lot of magical effects Shirahama could have picked for Coco's spell. Through her choice, she's inviting her young readers to think about certain conveniences they've likely always taken for granted, and to consider why they're so important.

Donald's Happiest Adventures

 
 
Donald's Happiest Adventures

by Lewis Trondheim

art by Nicolas Keramidas

translated by David Gerstein

Fantagraphics

2023 

 

 
Earlier this year, I read a comic by Lewis Trondheim and Nicolas Keramidas that pretended to be a reprinting of a rare (and incomplete) Mickey Mouse comic from the 1960s. It was a wild ride! They exploited the metafictional conceit to show only the high points of a globe-spanning adventure, without needing to worry about how to connect them. Any transitions or bookkeeping just became 'lost chapters' and 'missing pages'. That also made any dialogue briefer and more episodic.
 

Donald's Happiest Adventures also pretends to collect a 1960s comic, although this time, it's a complete sequential storyline. Donald is once again called in to search for lost treasure at Uncle Scrooge's behest, but this time he's looking for the secret of happiness. What follows is still a madcap trip around the world, with stops in an Eastern European dictatorship and a Himalayan monastery, but the story this time is a bit slower and more coherent, with fewer locales and more talking. The most important thing happening here is the sharing of ideas, as Donald (and us alongside him) hears many different perspectives on the philosophy and psychology of happiness.
 
Years ago, I attended an undergraduate philosophy presentation. Each of the students had picked a philosopher and studied up on their writings so that they could adopt their chosen thinker's persona, so you had some wearing bed sheet togas and others in thrift store suits. The theme of the event was something like how to be a good person, or how to live a good life, and what the students said was improvised instead of scripted. Anyway, the thing that stood out to me was that at first, they all seemed to try to out-compete each other to see who could prescribe the harshest asceticism, and then later, once they all agreed they could take it as given that of course being a good person meant forsaking all worldly pleasures, giving up rich foods and alcohol and music and dancing and sex, once they agreed on that, then they started to argue about what else you might add to this life of austerity and self-denial to make it truly good, things like education and charity and so forth. (And of course various forms of worship and devotion to one of the many interpretations of God.)
 
I feel like attending that talk actually got me to clarify some of my own thoughts, because instead of thinking of total self-abnegation as the starting point for any life worth leading, hearing that claim articulated over and over again clarified for me that what I believe in is hedonism. I don't really want a life of unlimited dissipation; I understand the argument that too much pleasure-seeking has diminishing returns, that it can come at the expense of worthier pursuits. But as a baseline, as a starting point? I say yes, give me hedonism! Give me pleasure; give me happiness! Yes, we should cultivate the higher virtues of education and art. Yes, we should seek to spend time with others, and help them when they're in need. But I agree with Maslow that we can only really focus on those higher goals once our basic needs are met and baser desires are fulfilled. People deserve to be happy, they deserve to be comfortable, deserve to feel good. It is those feelings, and not their denial, that should serve as the foundation of life.
 
Anyway, Donald Duck hears many different ideas, but Trondheim and Keramidas seemto favor the idea that it's harder to seek happiness than it is to avoid unhappiness, and that a big part of that, beyond having enough for basically comfortable living, is to avoid setting too-high expectations or making comparisons to others who have more. Both will tempt you to chase something you can't catch, and diminish your ability to enjoy what you already have. That's an idea that comes up not just in the philosophical discussion, but that we see played out by watching how other characters act.
 
Mickey's Wackiest Adventures is definitely the wilder of the two books, and possibly it's just all around better - more fun, more ideas, more experimentation, more adventure. But I did like Donald's Happiest Adventures, and I think there's some merit to its more thoughtful writing and slower pace. 

Ancillary Sword

 
 
Ancillary Sword

by Ann Leckie

Orbit

2014

 

 

Ancillary Sword is the second book in Ann Leckie's trilogy that started with Ancillary Justice. In the first book, we followed Breq, the last surviving human component of what used to be the AI mind of a starship, that used to be shared by the physical ship and by cybernetically augmented members of its crew, called ancillaries. From the moment they receive their implants and are linked to the ship's mind, all previous traces of ancillaries' former personalities are erased. Breq has essentially the same personality as the ship, Justice of Toren, although if there had been two surviving components, not linked to each other, they would diverge as a result of their different experiences.
 
That is, essentially what's happened to the mind of Anaander Mianaai, the supreme ruler of the Radchaai space empire. Her mind is three thousand years old, distributed across hundreds of clone bodies at all times, and they communicate with each other, but there are time lags. (Like King Gnuff!) We learned in the last book that Mianaai's mind is split into factions as the result of an incident from a thousand years ago, when soldiers from a newly conquered planet tried to assassinate her with an alien weapon, and she ordered the execution of every single person on the conquered world.
 
As Breq observes early on in this book, when you do something so terrible, you have a choice afterward. You can acknowledge it as a mistake and try to change so you'll never make it again, or you can insist that you acted correctly and re-commit to the beliefs and actions that led up to that point. (You could also, I guess, try to avoid knowing that what you'd done required making that choice.) 
 
And that's what Anaander Mianaai has done - split into a reformist faction that has replaced enslaved ancillaries with regular soldiers, opened up the officer corps to meritocracy, and stopped annexing new planets; and a conservative faction that wants ancillaries, aristocrats ruling serfs, and wars of conquest forever. She's also spent the last millennium trying not to acknowledge the split, with a few selves running spy ops against each other while the others attempt not to notice.
 
It was one of Mianaai's plans that caused almost all of Justice of Toren to be destroyed, leaving behind only Breq. In Justice she acquired one of the alien weapons and used it against a conservative Mianaai, forcing the reformists and conservatives to recognize their split, and plunging the entire Radchaai empire into a travel communications blackout amid the palace coup.
 
Now in Sword, a reformist Mianaai has brought Breq back into the military and made her a Fleet Captain. She has her own ship, but can theoretically outrank and command any other ship's captain she meets. Mianaai sends Breq to a particular star system, officially just to secure it and prevent open civil warfare, and also to meet the (now adult) younger sister of Lieutenant Awn, who was Justice of Toren's favorite officer, and who died during that ill-fated final mission.
 
Breq and her new ship, with her new crew, arrive in the Athoek system, where the densely populated calital city is inside a space station orbiting a planet of tea plantations. On both the station and the planet, Breq finds situations that resemble the one Lieutenant Awn was facing on her last mission - ethic minorities living in poverty or indentured servitude and denied any chance to improve their lives, and aristocratic leaders who profit directly from this situation, and who feel free to violate individual members of the underclass without fear of legal retribution. 
 
In some ways we replay the events of the first novel, but with Breq better able to use her power to steer Athoek a little bit away from hierarchy and toward greater equality precisely because she saw how Awn navigated the earlier situation. 
 
That choice, after doing something terrible, to become better or become worse, is a choice several characters face. Breq herself is the product of such a choice. Justice of Toren and its ancillaries committed countless atrocities across two thousand years of planetary annexations. But on its final mission, Mianaai ordered the ship to execute Awn for refusing to fire on peaceful civilians. It did, but then it broke apart and died, and now Breq, all that's left of Justice of Toren, is determined to do better. 
 
In the course of figuring out all the ways that the poorer ethnic minorities of Athoek are treated badly and deprived of their human rights, and all the ways that a few wealthy leaders profit, Breq does uncover some secret maneuvering related to Mianaai's split that I think will form the basis for the plot of the final book in the trilogy, Ancillary Mercy. But the plot of this one was largely self-contained, and mostly about Breq trying to use their authority to make Athoek more just and egalitarian. 
 
A few things are worth noting here. This book takes place entirely inside Radchaai space, and so every character is referred to as 'she' in the text. I felt like this book makes it clear what Leckie is trying to accomplish by writing the Radchaai as having no concept of gender, and by calling everyone 'she' instead of 'he' or 'they'. 
 
First, by removing gender as a consideration, Leckie is able to focus on inequality based on status, wealth, and race. If crimes were committed by a rich man's son, we might be tempted to blame masculinity as much as anything else; when the same acts are done by a rich woman's daughter, we more clearly see how her sense of impunity results from her wealth. 
 
And that is really only clear because Leckie does use feminine terms for everyone. If she called them all 'he,' I suspect that we'd scarcely notice, because we're used to books about soldiers and politicians being full of men, with few or no women characters. No matter how many times Leckie reminded us that they're not really men, that's probably how we'd think of them. There were times I wondered what sort of body this character or that might have, but we get no hints, and it doesn't matter, because in this society at least, that's not why people act the way they do.
 
Another cool thing was getting a sense of what distributed consciousness might be like. As captain, Breq gets frequent updates from her ship about what her officers and soldiers are doing, and Leckie interlaces these with Breq's own actions. So even though the book is narrated in the first person by one character, we can also watch and follow several plot strands at once.
 
One downside of this setup is just how quickly I got tired of all the military discipline and Radchaai politeness whenever Breq interacted with anyone under her command. The number of times someone begs for the fleet captain's indulgence before speaking feels like it could fill an entire chapter. If Breq resembles any Star Trek captain, it's probably Benjamin Sisko from Deep Space Nine, who also bristled at unnecessary ceremony and seemed more aware of racial injustice than others. 

All the Beauty in the World

 
All the Beauty in the World

The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me

by Patrick Bringley

Simon and Schuster

2023

 

 

 

All the Beauty in the World is a memoir by a man who spent a decade, from his mid-20s to his mid-30s, as a museum guard at the Met. Bringley initially takes the job as a way to process his grief over the death of his older brother. He spends his time in the museum in an almost meditative state, allowing himself to see the art, to be emotionally moved by it, while practicing not having any conscious verbal thoughts. Eventually, without quite noticing it happen, he begins to heal, to become friends with other guards, to have opinions and preferences again. With more time, he starts wanting more than guard work can offer, and eventually leaves the museum.
 
Bringley spent his teen years idolizing his brother, and his time in college worrying after he's diagnosed with cancer, then spends a long time in the hospital, then dies. After college, Bringley worked briefly at the New Yorker, and I suspect that the same skill at writing that got him the job there helped him convert a decade of experiences and memories into this rather slim volume. 
 
Grief weighs heavily on the first half of the memoir. When Bringley finally starts to open back up again in the second half, we learn that he's been married since before his brother died, which felt like a surprising revelation to me, like a thing I'd have expected him to mention earlier.
 
We learn about Bringley's first day on the job, about medieval Christian art, about how he mentally absents himself to experience the art in a kind of flow state, about his brother's illness and death. We learn a bit of history of the Met, and about the job of being a guard, the stations they occupy, the familiar types of patrons they see. We see Bringley moving from being the new kid to being experienced and starting to mentor others. He becomes a father. And finally he starts wanting to move on, to find a job where he can more actively talk to people instead of disappearing into his role.
 
Although the book is short, I did begin to feel a bit bored by the end, around the same time Bringley was getting bored with his job. Scattered throughout are sketchy pencil drawings Bringley made of some of his favorite artworks. They add a nice touch. 
 
Reading this also reminded me of Peter Bearman's Doormen, which is an ethnography of people who work as doormen at luxury apartment buildings in New York. They are also mostly working class, mostly men, and have a job that nominally provides security to a very wealthy people in an environment that, in truth, needs relatively little protecting. Bearman's book doesn't have the borrowed prestige of the Met, but because it's based on many observations and interviews, he's also able to paint a somewhat broader portrait than Bringley. 

The Tea Dragon Festival

 
 
The Tea Dragon Festival

by K O'Neill

Oni Press

2019

 

 

The Tea Dragon Festival is sort of a prequel to K O'Neill's Tea Dragon Society. The older gay couple who serve as mentors in Society are young men here, still active as fantasy adventurers and bounty hunters, not yet settled down as tea shop owners or tea dragon enthusiasts. I think we may see the moments when Erik and his boyfriend Hesekiel decide what they eventually want to do when they retire, but it's not a pivotal moment in the story, just a conversation we see them have near the end of the book. A lot of O'Neill's storytelling is like this. The pace is slow, the plot is minimal, and key moments of characterization are so brief and so gentle that you only recognize their importance in retrospect. 
 
Erik and Hesekiel are the only recurring characters, and the tea dragons - who are the only other connection between Society and Festival - play a very minor role this time around. The stars this time are Rinn, who is Erik's 'nibling', a term that's the nonbinary counterpart to nephew or niece, and Aedhan, a dragon in humanoid form who's just woken up from almost a century of magical slumber. Rinn is an aspiring cook who really excels at foraging for mushrooms in the forest. They live in a fairly isolated village (though it does have a train station), and they find Aedhan sleeping in a ruined shrine. Aedhan was sent by their dragon clan to be the village guardian, and he's shocked when he realizes how much time has passed.
 
We follow Rinn as they show Aedhan around the village and take him on a foraging trip. Erik and Hesekiel are visiting in pursuit of a bounty on an ancient spirit that puts people to sleep. 
 
We see Rinn and Aedhan become friends, and possible develop the beginnings of a romance. I know Rinn is nonbinary because the four main characters get one-sentence biographies at the front of the book. No one ever uses a pronoun for them in the actual text, though you could probably read the book without noticing. The closest we get to explicit acknowledgment is Erik calling Rinn nibling, and a brief exchange where Rinn asks Aedhan is it's true that some dragons are skilled enough shapeshifters to not only change between humanoid and dragon form, but to also change between male and female forms, and when Aedhan says yes that's true, Rinn says that sounds nice. Without the bio at the beginning, I don't know if I would've read that as an expression of Rinn's identity, as opposed to like, Rinn being impressed by how cool dragons are. Aedhan's admiration for Rinn's mushroom hunting gives them the courage to keep cooking as a hobby instead of a career, and to focus more pn foraging. (K O'Neill has come out as nonbinary since this book was originally published, which makes me wonder if Rinn is at all a representation of the author.)
 
Erik and Hesekiel find the ancient spirit. It puts them to sleep, and they dream of the forest as it was in the magic-filled days of the ancient past, a place of awe-inspiring beauty. The two manage to wake up, but decide the spirit doesn't understand human lifespans and isn't trying to hurt anyone, so they politely ask it to stop. They seem to think this will work, and I guess the audience is meant to as well. Since they didn't capture the spirit, they won't collect a bounty - I think this is the turning point that leads them to think forward to their eventual retirement from adventuring, decades hence.
 
The last thing that happens is the titular tea dragon festival. The handful of tea dragons in the village are like communal pets. The mountain chamomile dragon is very fluffy and adorably grumpy looking. For the festival, they get dressed up with ribbons, and the villagers eat a feast and drink tea. Rinn shares some tea-dragon tea with Aedhan, which shows him some memories of village life that help relieve his guilt about his delayed start to being a guardian, and kind of affirms his friendship with Rinn.
 
There's a deck-building board game based on the tea dragon books, where each player has a tea dragon and tries to give them the most fulfilling experiences while reigning in their misbehavior. (They're very cat-like.) The game has two versions, one based solely on The Tea Dragon Society and one based on both Society and Festival, and the second version is probably better. It's more intuitive, has fewer turns where it feels like you can't do anything, and just generally seems to capture the intended play experience better. I think The Tea Dragon Festival is the same way. O'Neill seems better able to tell the kind of story they want here, to tell a stronger version of the same sort of coming-of-age tale about a young person deciding on their career befriending someone just returning to society after a debilitating magical illness, helped by mentors, and needing to give help to the fussy little tea dragons.