Well, I managed to get all of my classes put together, and to get a few weeks planned out. It feels good to get the devil off your back, even if you had to work for it far too long. This round-up represents the tail end of my last semester and all of the things I’ve read in the meantime, both in preparation and for relaxation for the coming semester.

Echopraxia by Peter Watts.

The sequel to Blindsight. Much like the prior book, this one portrays a disenchanted world where humanity is no longer, properly, in the driver’s seat of existence – our transhuman children and successors are changing the world around us, and baseline humans are relegated to second-tier beings. Into this is added the looming possibility of first contact – portrayed in Blindsight.

Echopraxia, on the other hand, doesn’t concern the events of the star ship Theseus and its dealings with the terrifying unconscious superintelligence. Instead, it concerns events on Earth and the Icarus array, that harvests power from the sun. It offers a human-scale view of the conflict between transhuman power blocs, and the relative powerlessness of normal human beings.

The novel takes the perspective of Daniel Brüks, a biologist who is the most bog-standard of baselines: after an incident where an oversight of his caused a mass casualty event, he downgraded himself and went into exile. He is doing fieldwork in the Oregon desert when he gets caught in the crossfire between a vampire and her zombie lackeys — the vampire being a resurrected ancient species of preadatory hominid, the zombies being normal humans who have undergone something very much like a lobotomy to turn off their sense of self and make them more efficient killers — and a monastery run by something that is either or both of a tourretic hive mind or a transhuman religious order. Most of the people surrounding Brüks are very different kinds of human from him, and end up making his life much more complicated.

A solid book, but I’m not sure that it would be as interesting and engaging without having read Blindsight. Still, an enjoyable ride and one that I would recommend that people go on.

I’ll be honest, the audiobook cover is way better than the dead-tree version.

Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin the Cthulhucene by Donna J. Haraway.

An experimental work of theory from primatologist and philosopher Donna J. Haraway, whose Cyborg Manifesto was formative for me in the course of pursuing my MA. Concerns the changes that are necessary for us to survive the current era, which is either the Anthropocene or Capitalocene, depending on who you ask.

Haraway proposes, instead that it should be the “Cthulhucene”, less in homage to H.P. Lovecraft (who she is dismissive of) than in acknowledgment that we live in an era of the unthinkable and that a certain chthonic wisdom might be necessary to navigate it. Haraway is very interested in the interrelation between unlike things and the collaboration between human and inhuman elements of the world to make everything legible and navigable.

I think I approached this book at the wrong time, deep in my late-semester insomnia. I will have to try it again at some point, but I imagine that others may find this meaningful and useful, potentially in combination with her work with Laboria Cuboniks, notably The Xenofeminist Manifesto.

The Orange Eats Creeps by Grace Krilanovich.

Described to me as drawing from the same well as Twin Peaks, but I’m not quite so convinced. Imagine, for a second, Lolita from Dolores’s perspective, cut up and rewritten by William S. Burroughs, and then recast as a vampire novel. Frankly, that might make it sound more fascinating and attractive a read than it is, but it was still an interesting ride for all that.

The narrator is a young woman with drug-induced ESP, traveling through the Pacific Northwest along “the highway the eats people”. Homeless and recently cut loose from the foster home she lived in, she is traveling with a group of self-described vampires as she searches for her missing twin sister. Periodically, she also receives visions of Patty Reed, a young woman who was part of the Donner Party, and she sees missives from the serial killer “Dactyl” – a pastiche of the Green River Killer – in the newspaper.

If the book were longer, I’m not sure it would be worth the price of admission. The language use is fascinating and beautiful – if, somehow, extremely 1990s, despite being published in 2010. It wasn’t my favorite from this batch, but I’m going to be sitting with it for a while.

The Hollow Kind by Andy Davidson.

A horror story set in 1989, on a derelict turpentine plantation in Georgia. It follows Nellie Gardner, the granddaughter of the former owner, who died trying to burn it down, and her son Max. They are on the run from Nellie’s husband, an English professor who has turned abusive, and encouraged her to take her son and run for the plantation – Redfern Hill – of course, this leads to reconnecting with the history of her family and learning about the evil that runs through the Earth there, and a confrontation with her cousin, whose family lost claim to Redfern Hill and will do anything to recover the valuable real estate.

A solid little story; it’s got some shared DNA with Daryl Gregory’s Revelator, but without the ontological weirdness present in that book, but it’s similarly a homecoming story set in the rural south that dovetails with a cosmic horror story. The Hollow Kind wants, in some ways, to be more like The Shining by Stephen King, but it doesn’t quite stick the landing: the climax – which I will not describe here – seems to go on for a bit too long, and to ramp up the tension a bit too fast. A slower, more steady build might have served it better.

While it wasn’t my favorite thing that I read, I don’t believe by any stretch it was a bad book, and there’s a certain charm to the recent crop of cosmic horror/southern gothic stories that I can’t really say no to.

Cultish: The Language of Fanatacism by Amanda Montell

Reviewed by Edgar here.

I’m fascinated by grifts and cults and cult-like phenomena. In my composition classes, I use the Satanic Panic of the 1980s as the backdrop for a lesson that concerns the importance of critical thinking, and I tend to include the afterword to J. Michael Straczynski’s Midnight Nation as a reading, as well – a piece that concerns the post-cultist experience.

Montell’s book examines the linguistic maneuvers that make up the toolkit for cults, and points out that they are found elsewhere – not just in New Religious Movements, but in Multi-Level Marketing and in fitness. While it isn’t the deepest exploration of these things, she does an excellent job of making it accessible to readers and clear, and the bits of memoir tied in (Montell’s father was an escapee from Synanon, a drug-recovery cult that has a fascinating history drawn in a short series of Behind the Bastards Episodes that I would recommend tracking down.)

An excellent little piece of pop-sociology that I think is well worth the time.

Iron Window by Xiran Jay Zhao

Reviewed by Edgar here.

A book that I have conflicted feelings about. First off, Zhao’s internet presence is a delight, especially in the portions where she talks about the shift in the publishing industry and how it’s fundamentally unfair that writers have to be their own social media managers (something that she, as a pre-existing internet celebrity of some note, is well-positioned to handle), but I found the book Iron Widow to be somewhat uneven. The first quarter or so needed another editorial pass, which is very unfortunate, because the back half, especially, was quite good.

The story follows an 18-year-old girl, Zeitan, as she plans to become a concubine-pilot, a woman who serves as a copilot for one of the chrysalises (giant robots) that are used to defend humanity against the alien Hundun. This requires being paired with an ace pilot who will reap all the glory, but she is signing up for an early death: the mortality rate for concubine-pilots is exceptionally high, burned out by the overwhelming force of the piloting process.

Zeitan, a strong-willed young woman with bound feet, would never willingly sign up for this, save for one thing: her elder sister was murdered by an ace pilot, and she plans to assassinate him. Joining the military is the one shot she has to get closer to him. In the pursuit of this, she gains the moniker “Iron Widow”.

That covers the first quarter, which – as I’ve mentioned – I found somewhat uneven. I’m glad that I stuck through it, because Zhao handles the build and the reveal of key world details brilliantly, but another editorial pass would have done wonders for it. My recommendation is, if you read it, make sure to stick with it through at least the halfway point before deciding your thoughts on it.

How to Read a Poem by Terry Eagleton.

Eagleton, an English professor at the University of Manchester, wrote this incredible little volume that I wish I had read a long time ago back in 2007. Eagleton reads – somehow – a lot like David Graeber, both being leftist intellectuals that are experts on a particular field, whose expertise and politics are intertwined without their expertise becoming explicitly political.

Eagleton is a Marxist (I’m not, but I like certain amount of Marxist theory, and it makes sense to me), and so he treats poems as material phenomena. This doesn’t just mean the motion of air or the flexing of muscles in the throat as the sound is made; it also means the cultural phenomena that surround it. Oftentimes, in my own education, poetry is reduced to the object of feeling, and then we are asked to analyze it. Introducing me to the work of Russo-Estonian critic and theorist Juri (Eagleton writes it as “Yury”) Lotman was worth the price of admission – Lotman conceived of poems not as cohesive systems, but as meta-systems, systems composed of other systems, and sometimes these systems work in concert and sometimes they work at cross-purposes, and the intense effects of poems are almost as often due to the productive gaps produced by antagonistic systems as it is due to the collaboration between different systems (honestly, in some ways, I might bring that theory over into criticism of TTRPG design. That’s another piece for another time, though).

However, this isn’t just a book about Lotman, it’s about poetry – and Eagleton analyzes poems from every angle, looking at the more vibes-based issues of imagery and texture and implication as well as the up-front qualities of meter and rhyme scheme.

Now, I think this is a great book – especially if you want to enjoy and understand poetry more – but I must admit that there are some interesting contradictions within it. For example, he expresses skepticism at some points that a poem can suggest with the phonetic qualities of its language the slithering of a snake or similar, but also suggests that there’s something inherently and unavoidably melancholic about the ABBA rhyme scheme (leave your “Dancing Queen” jokes at the door, that’s how you indicate that the first and last lines of a four-line stanza rhyme with one another, while the middle two lines rhyme with each other.)

Still, I think that a bit of contradiction and strangeness is unavoidable with the study of poetry. Eagleton does an excellent job of making it lucid and accessible. If I had read it previously, I may have ordered it as a textbook for my literature class.

The Blade Between by Sam J. Miller.

The author of Blackfish City, previously reviewed by us here and here.

A combination hardboiled story of gentrification and horror story about ghosts – without the often-used shortcut of a ghost or wizard private investigator. The story centers around a small town in upstate New York called Hudson (presumably on the Hudson river) that had a role in the whale oil trade in the back half of the 19th century. It’s been gone to seed for most of a century, and now is being invaded by hipsters pushed out of Brooklyn by rising property values (the gentrifiers have, themselves, been gentrified out of where they were. It’s not given that much detail, but this sort of hydraulic process of gentrification is an interesting thing and I need to read up more about it).

Returning to this is Ronan Szepessy, a rising star in the photography world, lured back to his hometown after forsaking it – if being gay weren’t enough, he’s the son of a woman who committed suicide, something which broke his father – by an intriguing model that he encountered in New York and who seems to be just out of view for him quite often. He reconnects with his first boyfriend(ish), Dom, who has become the one black officer in the demonstrably corrupt Hudson police force, and Dom’s wife Attalah, who is heading up the anti-gentrification campaign in the small town. Given that Ronan’s father is the owner of the last property that needs to be bought for demolition before an incredibly profitable real-estate deal, and the fact that that same father is clearly beginning to suffer from dementia, a lot of people are invested in what Ronan does.

Of course, there are also dead bodies, hundreds of miles from the ocean, with the smell of sea water on their breath; there’s the ghostly appearance of businesses that closed down decades earlier; there’s the late-night DJ that always knows what to say, and who the narrative makes clear is saying different things to different people and playing different songs (that’s not a spoiler, it’s out of focus, but it happens in the first chapter or three of the book). Oh, and the ghostly whales swimming through the skies above the town that most people can’t see.

As a side note: this is a supernatural mystery story about an impoverished place full of abandoned people, into which an emotionally damaged but perceptive individual enters and sets things off like a powder keg – but in the end things seem, in some way, better. I could also be describing Night in the Woods, or Disco Elysium, or Pentiment. This is a story pattern that is recurring over and over in the current moment, and it is apparently catnip for me.

Miller does some things incredibly well: as we saw in Blackfish City, he draws urban spaces very well, and populates them with cosmopolitan characters. He gives attention to the wealthy and impoverished in equal measure and shows that they’re all people with motivations and ideas about the world. No one who is an actual human being is specifically good or bad, they just have things that they want and think are important and these end up at cross purposes.

I do wish he had leaned a little more into the weird. The whales-in-the-sky image is good, but I think it could have been better. I think he’s just got a thing for whales (which, I mean, I get, they’re majestic animals; however, this is the second whale-themed book I’ve read from this guy, and I get the sense that’s growing into a sort of motif within his work).

Still, while I haven’t read that many bad books lately, I think that this might be one of my favorites out of the lot here.

Honorable Mention: The Narrow Road To the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches by Matsuo Basho.

I only read the title story out of here, in preparation for my literature class, but I greatly enjoyed it – I’ve been trying to come to a greater understanding of Japanese literature in translation specifically as Japanese literature lately, and this was an unexpectedly rich vein. I’m mostly assigning it to discuss poetry with my students as a rhetorical and imagistic event, because the phonetic quality of a haiku (the genre that Basho is considered a master of) is lost to us, but unfortunately, I learned about kireji, which are fundamentally untranslatable, and now I’m just angry – when I was told about Haiku in school, it was explained to me first that it was a poem made up of lines in a 5-7-5 pattern to the syllables (only later learning that it wasn’t syllables but morae – that is, it’s based on timing and the number of individual sounds “up” has one mora, “strength” has four morae, both are one syllable); later on, I was told that it had to include a nature image (then a seasonal image, and the Japanese understanding of the year makes “new years” its own season).

Now, I’m aware of kireji, and it seems to me that the way that we’ve had haiku described to us is as inaccurate as if we had had sonnets described to us as “a poem consisting of fourteen lines of ten syllables.” Kireji are untranslatable particles – words that in Japanese function something like spoken punctuation, but can have tense and mood associated with them – that instill each haiku with a rhetorical effect leading to a certain contemplative mood, and this is a poetic effect that cannot be reliably and consistently produced in English.

Okay, so, this is all incidental to “The Narrow Road Into the Deep North,” which largely consists of Basho’s mixed prose/poetic journal of a walk he took around the northern end of Honshu, showing a roughly year-long period in which he and his traveling companion, Sora, visited shrines and observed the lives of priests, peasants, artisans, and others living in that portion of the country.

There’s a certain mood to it, a kind of misty-morning quality to the whole affair that instills a bit of serenity. Not all of the poems are the best, but seeing these experiences translated into a poetic form is fascinating and the juxtaposition of the matter-of-fact record with the poetic sketches is quite interesting.

To a certain extent, it’s what I imagine Jack Kerouac believed himself to be doing with his various writings. I enjoyed it, and I would recommend picking it up: reading through it is the work of an afternoon, and I would have read through the other travelogues he put to paper if I hadn’t had to get back to planning.

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Cameron's Book Round-Up: Opening up ‘23