Cameron's Book Round-Up, 2024, part 4
High summer is rolling in to Kansas City. The weather is hot, and I am again working day in, day out to water trees so that there will one day be enough shade around here. Can’t do anything about the humidity, though: we’re just going to have to live with it feeling like we’re nestled deep in Pantagruel’s armpit. Reading in a cool room, though, is just about the best thing in the world.
The world beyond keeps being terrible. As Edgar noted last week, “Gaza still needs esims and an end to the genocide being carried out on it by the Israeli government using American weapons and money” and Doctors Without Borders is always a good spot to drop some cash. If you’ve still got some money after all that, I might ask you to consider buying one of these books. You’ll have something to read and we’ll have a bit of money to save towards moving somewhere that doesn’t feel like the aforementioned armpit of a giant.
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The Jesus Incident by Frank Herbert and Bill Ransom.
The followup to Destination: Void, which I reviewed here. This was actually the first entry in the series I read, sometime around the year 2000. The first book isn’t really necessary to understand this one (it’s still a fine read, as I note, but you can start with The Jesus Incident.)
Allow me to describe it as I first encountered the story: a ship from Earth — distant, long-lost Earth — has arrived at an alien planet and attempts to start a colony. The ship, called simply Ship, is a conscious being and its passengers believe it to be God. Unfortunately, the planet is dominated by hostile life, chief among it the Electrokelp, which is, itself, a hive mind of sorts that has the same general kind of consciousness that Ship does.
In short, it’s a mortal-sized story of two supposed gods meeting and trying to determine if they have met.
It’s an interesting — and extremely weird — book. I recommend it more than others in this particular series, at least partly because it inspired Alpha Centauri by Sid Meier, which I have poured hundreds and hundreds of hours into over the years.
If you’ve only ever read Dune or its sequels, I’d recommend it. You can see, more clearly, what’s part of his style and what was picked to help make that particular story work. Herbert co-wrote it with a poet, Bill Ransom, and insisted that Ransom’s name get equal billing, which strikes me as a rather magnanimous move.
Honestly, anyone looking for something new in SF who isn’t reading Ada Palmer must simply be asleep.
Seven Surrenders (Terra Ignota, #2) by Ada Palmer
The sequel to Too Like the Lightning, which I reviewed here. This story continues the narrative of the first novel directly — the two books cover a period of about seven days. I cannot divulge plot details without spoiling the first novel as the two are of a piece.
However, what I will do is sing Palmer’s praises for doing something extremely difficult: setting up a secondary world (or far enough future to be essentially secondary world) political story and sail neatly between the Scylla and Charybdis of such a thing: Scylla, of course, the threat of the story being completely incomprehensible, and Charybdis is, obviously, the threat of the story coming across as deeply silly. The characters are well-drawn, their emotions feel real, and the stakes seem high.
In addition, it manages to portray a reasonably comprehensible world that is indebted to but does not simply retread what’s been done. The affinity that the society drawn in the stories has for the Enlightenment is strange, but feels like a canny bit of world-building — consider, for example, the affection that all the characters in the various Star Trek series have for twentieth-century Anglo-American Culture. I will probably tackle the third volume, The Will To Battle, at some point before the end of the year.
This, I think, is the first one he released under his own name, instead of “David Wong”. You can still find a lot of early editions with “David Wong” on them, though. I can only imagine the headache of abandoning an established pseudonym mid-career.
What The Hell Did I Just Read?: A Novel of Cosmic Horror (John Dies At The End, #3) by Jason Pargin.
The sequel to John Dies at the End (reviewed here), and This Book is Full of Spiders (reviewed here). It’s somewhere between the two of them in quality, and I generally like Pargin’s work. The story follows dysfunctional slacker David, his best friend John, and his girlfriend Amy as they live in the town of [Undisclosed]. The three of them live precarious lives, made more so by the fact that David and John are the only people who have thus far survived exposure to a hallucinogen that they call “soy sauce”, and now live forever with the after-effects: their perceptual filters have been stripped away and they can perceive the true nature of reality, or something like it.
The dark forces that they faced in the prior two books return, this time looking, specifically, for revenge on the two of them. Revealing more might spoil the story, so I’ll curtail the recap there. I thought the ending was quite good, though somewhat…bittersweet?…given David’s status as Pargin’s fictional alter-ego (which is what we call a self-insert when we like an author.)
This all might sound merely like a rural iteration of the sort of narrative that one finds in a book like The Dead Take the A-Train (reviewed here), or The Dresden Files — though I might stress that the genre in question began as a rural genre, with Manly Wade Wellman’s Silver John stories — but Pargin brings some special skills to the mix. As an alumnus of Cracked back when it was good, he has comic chops that give him an edge for horror writing in a way similar to how Jordan Peele’s time as a sketch comedian improves his films. In addition, while I don’t always agree with his conclusions, he seems to be a genuinely curious person and brings what he finds to not just the content of his stories but the form of them. I’m genuinely impressed with his skills.
The Weird and the Eerie by Mark Fisher.
Reread on a whim right after the semester ended, and previously discussed quite extensively on this blog. We’re big fans of Mark Fisher here, so it’s inevitable that there are going to be many re-reads of this. I used this book as a keystone for a class I taught this past semester: it’s what was closest to the top of the stack when I found out five days before the first day of classes that I would be teaching it. I grabbed an excerpt and used it to lead into a class that would wander between Algernon Blackwood’s The Willows, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker. I had, perhaps, too much fun teaching it and should have focused on making it more accessible for the class.
In my defense, I had five days to set a schedule and get materials assembled.
Teaching from an essay — I’m thinking here about the introduction — is different from reading that same essay for your own edification. It requires that you understand it in a more multi-dimensional fashion than you might otherwise. However, I — and I’m happy to say a number of my students — found applications for the aesthetic ideas put forward in the essay beyond merely the arts. We live in a world that grows more and more eerie as time goes on: a chatbot is both autonomous and anagential — beyond the blinking of the cursor there is no theory of mind, regardless of what the boosters say. It is an experience that is not simply alienating but eerie: something is absent that should be present.
I do not believe that Mark Fisher saw the future, by any stretch, but I do believe that he might have been more observant than most and noticed, over his time in academia and looking at the wider world, that it would only grow more haunted. He attempted to construct, but I do not believe he completed, a politics to confront this condition.
I’m probably going to try to tackle Post-Capitalist Desire again before the end of the year.
Check out that lettering on the first edition cover. They don’t make them like that anymore. For the record, they shouldn’t make them like that anymore, but it doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate it.
The Forge of God by Greg Bear.
This one isn’t exactly a reread, but I read its sequel — Anvil of Stars — back in the late 90s. Greg Bear loomed large in science fiction of the time: he wrote Blood Music, Hull Zero Three (which I think I enjoyed more than anyone else did), and a number of other works. It shows many features of nineties-era science fiction, with stringent adherence to science and relatively thin characters.
The incidents in question, though, are fairly interesting: in Death Valley, a group of three geologists discover a cinder cone — an apparently extinct volcano — that appears on no maps, and simply wasn’t there the last time anyone looked. On the other side of the world, a similar anomaly appears in Australia. In the middle of the book, it’s revealed that there’s a third on in Mongolia.
This isn’t the only thing that the geologists find — there’s also a strange, man-like, bird-like creature that tells them in fluent English that “I'm sorry, but there is bad news.”
The interesting thing is: when aliens emerge from the other objects, in Australia and Mongolia, they have completely different stories about what’s going on.
And here I’m going to take a different approach than previous: I will be spoiling this one, because I came into it with the ending spoiled (I had, after all, read the followup novel, where the children of humanity are empowered by a mysterious third party to enact “the Law” and kill the Earth’s murderers.) All three aliens are either lying or telling an incomplete story — and it doesn’t really matter, because it’s all a diversionary tactic while the aliens light the fuse on the Earth’s destruction. Their motivations are never really explored: there’s a bit of lip-service given to something like the “Dark Forest” theory put forward in Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem (reviewed here), which I don’t entirely buy as something that any intelligent creature would do.
However, the first third or so of the book is the excuse. The latter two thirds are the payoff. Bear takes this ensemble cast of characters and shows them going about their lives in a world that’s falling apart and fundamentally doomed. Many of them going to work and muddling through up until the very end. It all felt, vaguely, like the pandemic, which was fascinating because the book was written in the 1980s.
That’s the real trick with science fiction of that era, in my mind: the characters were thin, but the stuff around the edge of the frame, the background details, were all either pure 1970s holdovers that don’t make any sense or the most spot-on predictions you’ve ever seen.
Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein.
Previously reviewed by Edgar here. A…memoir? Book-length essay? That starts off with Naomi Klein exploring the experience of being regularly confused for Naomi Wolf (both women have a “Not to be confused with Naomi _____” at the top of their Wikipedia pages, I just noticed.) It then extends outward into exploring the way that conspiracism, in many ways, is a “mirrored” version of left-wing politics where the analytic and critical functions are underdeveloped. This results in legitimate problems being answered in an often nonsensical fashion.
There is a certain symmetry with The Weird and the Eerie, up above, in that Klein is using Sigmund Freud’s “The Uncanny” (another text I used in that class) not as an aesthetic theory but as a way of approaching lived experience. She brings in the theory of the doppelganger as a key metaphor, and then uses the broader concept of the unheimlich to discuss the experience of interacting with this “mirror world” of the media that her doppelganger inhabits.
Generally speaking, I think that Naomi Klein is an excellent writer and an excellent thinker. I do believe that she is, perhaps, taking diagonalist politics too seriously as an ongoing force: while the future is not necessarily doomed to repeat the past, historically diagonalist politics have been a tactic used by fascist movements — see the Strasserites in the original Nazi movement — not a long-term stable alliance. It does occasionally emerge on its own, but it tends to be an unstable and short term formation (see the various political projects of Georges Sorel and Georges Valois.) I think that, rather than acting like diagonalist rhetoric is something to pay attention to in and of itself, it should be treated as a ping on the Nuclear Detonation Detection System. Something is emerging, but this is a sign of it, not the thing itself.
Post-Scarcity Anarchism by Murray Bookchin.
You know, I grabbed this one because I appreciated The Ecology of Freedom — and even took notes, which I may turn into a stand-alone piece or series of pieces, as I did with that book — but it’s not quite as good. It’s more a collection of essays that Bookchin wrote between the mid 1960s and the early 1970s. I would argue that Bookchin’s vision expands as he gets older — I haven’t read anything written after The Ecology of Freedom, but this is definitely more constrained and less interesting than what followed it.
The book as a whole might be of use in tracing the development of Bookchin’s thought over the course of the mid-20th century. The most notable piece, though, is not the title essay, which was — in all honesty — more fixated on material plenty than my read of his conception of post-scarcity, written about previously in this blog, but his extended warning to Students for a Democratic Society, entitled “Listen, Marxist!”, which might be of interest if you’re a fan of leftist inside baseball.
Mostly, this work acts as the bit of grit that began to collect the layers and layers of mucus that would eventually make the pearl that was Ecology of Freedom, I think. This work charts his sharp divergence from (though not full abandonment of) Marxism, while later he would diverge from the Anarchists (Bob Black, notably, felt that Bookchin was a crypto-statist) and this would be the genesis of his philosophy of Social Ecology.
Sisyphean by Dempow Torashima, trans. Daniel Huddleston.
Previously reviewed by me here, and reading it after completing David R. Bunch’s Moderan (reviewed here) was enlightening. The book still strikes me as uncomfortably visceral and the language use is wildly inventive — I can only imagine how difficult it was to translate — but it feels a lot more coherent and connected the second time around.
There are four large narratives: one about a bioengineered office worker who is the only employee in a company that installs body parts in alien visitors who arrive as masses of slime; one is a slice-of-life story about a young boy living on a moon where reincarnation occurs via bodies carried in the body cavities of animals dropping from the sky and all people have strange mutations (one is just a head on a tripod of legs, if memory serves); the third is what I can only call Invertebrate Noir, following an insectile “dodgejobber” (read: private eye) who lives in a city contained in the shell of a massive mollusk; the fourth is a futuristic western that takes place in the aftermath of “the Great Dust Plague”, following a group of people who can force the nanites that have flooded their world to take various shapes through chanting and ritual tools.
Running through these stories are a number of recurring motifs — the “monmoji”, a kind of mammal/crustacean megafauna that are major components in the second and fourth stories; the “presidents” or “doomgods” (depending on narrator) which are giant creatures with gelatinous flesh that adopt a human-like shape due to their suits of woven muscle fibers; the “census-takers” which are horrifying shrimp-like creatures that collect the consciousness of anything that they encounter; and, finally, the magatama, a peculiarly Japanese aesthetic form, resembling comma-shaped jewels, which hold a person’s consciousness in this story, but have served one ritual purpose or another in Japanese animism for about three thousand years.
It’s a strange book and quite well-done. Japanese cultural artifacts are often treated as being surreal by their very nature: this is a very old form of orientalism, however, I believe that this book would be surreal in its original context. It’s quite enjoyable, and helped me normalize my understanding of more realistic Japanese fiction.
Nefando by Mónica Ojeda, trans. Sarah Booker.
Which brings us to Nefando. The shortest book I read this month, and definitely the heaviest. Ojeda also wrote Jawbone, which I reveiwed here. An unnamed detective — who is merely a cypher, really, having lines but no real characterization — investigates a mysterious video game which was available on the deep web only briefly. From the description, it sounds somewhat similar to the genre of “room escape” games, which was a quite popular variety of flash games from the late 90s to mid 10s, due to the fact that they were fairly simple to make. If you’re familiar with Myst, these games are distant descendants of it, being similar insofar as they’re presented without instruction and have a near-identical interface (I was always more of a point-and-click adventure game fan, in comparison.)
The content of the game, also called Nefando, is what’s at issue. The game doesn’t appear to be cursed in a supernatural fashion, but can easily make one feel cursed based on what the game indicates about the creator’s psychology.
The bulk of the story is the investigator interviewing people about the creators — the programmer of the game, who added none of the content, is among them. It emerged out of a strange housing situation: an apartment in Barcelona that contained six artists — two writers (Kiki — who is writing an erotic novel — and Iván — who is Going Through It), a demoscene programmer (El Cuco Martinez, the only Spaniard in the bunch and a pickpocket, who describes himself as a normal guy in a deranged society), and the Terán siblings, from Ecuador (Cecilia, Emilio, and Irene, who…are more than a little uncanny. The other housemates sometimes confuse them for one another, and the siblings encourage this.) It is these last three who are the motor behind Nefando, who conceive of it and gather the materials for it.
The title of the book doesn’t cleanly translate into English. The closest might be “unspeakable”, though “loathsome”, “shameful”, “execrable”, and “contemptible” all shade into the meaning. There is an air of moral pollution to the word, as well as the sense that the object of the word would be pitiable if it weren’t so deserving of disgust and hatred.
This is the second work of Ojeda’s that I’ve had the pleasure to read. On the surface, there are similarities between her work and that of Paul Tremblay, though Tremblay is often more buttoned-up when it comes to sexuality, which Ojeda doesn’t really shy away from. There is a similar unwillingness to come down on either side of the supernatural/natural divide, though I think that Ojeda takes it further, being somewhat ambivalent to the question — there’s nothing overtly supernatural about what is going on, just as nothing overtly supernatural appears to happen in Franz Kafka’s The Trial. It still isn’t realism and (frankly) I’m happy that it isn’t. A better way to think about it is that Ojeda is taking a kind of literary expressionism — which I’m using to mean the interplay of the psychological inside and the physical outside of the characters and viewpoint — and dialing it up as high as she can: sometimes the language that she’s using, even in translation, appears to fracture from the pressure of the narrative that she’s putting forward, breaking down here and there and becoming warped.
As a warning: the title of the book is an accurate description of the content, though the book dances around what this is for the first half, and I am making sure not to explore it in depth, myself. Ojeda does not use these things for simple shock value, she brings them up to interrogate actual questions that are potentially important to consider. She handles it, for the most part, with appropriate gravity, and where she doesn’t it is still fitting to the narrative that she is laying out.
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