A Psalm for the Wild-Built is a short science fiction novel - really a novella. Specifically, it is a blend of two subgenres, solarpunk and cozy sf.
ItA Psalm for the Wild-Built is a short science fiction novel - really a novella. Specifically, it is a blend of two subgenres, solarpunk and cozy sf.
It takes place on another world, populated by humans and robots. The plot concerns a monk who suddenly changes his vocation to become a hybrid tea-server/therapist, then how a friendly robot helps him deal with some personal issues.
First, I'll describe how the book develops the solarpunk concept. Then I'll turn to my criticisms.
Becky Chambers uses all kinds of solarpunk tropes: solar power, low human population, lots of biology intertwined with human life (biophilic design), DIY production, fabbing, 3d printing, and the received memory of a bad industrial past (before "the Transition" away from "The Factory Age"). E O Wilson's half Earth idea is realized, albeit not for Earth per se (18). There's a mystic religion with which the book begins, which seems to nudge believers away from industrialism. Here's a glimpse of this world:
...Dex road their ox-bike to the worm farm or the seed library or wherever else the day took them. There was music... but also the electric whoosh of monorails, the swoop swoop of balcony wind turbines... (6-7)
Later, Chambers posits a contrast between the old age and the new through comparative architecture:
[an old ruin:] Hulking towers of boxes, bolts, and tubes. Brutal. Utilitarian. Visually at odds with thr thriving flora now laying claim to the rusted corpse. But corpse was not an apt word for this sort of building, because a corpse was a rich treasure - a bounty of nutrients ready to be divided and reclaimed. The buildings Dex was most used to fit this description. Decay was a built-in function of the City's towers, crafted from translucent casain and mycelium masonry. Those walls would, in time, begin to decompose, at which point they'd either be repeared by materials grown for that express purpose, or, if the building was no longer in use, be reabsorbed into the landscape that had hosted it for a time. But a Factory Age building, a metal building - that was of no benefit to anything... Its only legacy was to persist where it did not belong. (90)
Further, this solarpunk world is very caring. Most of the jobs are service ones, aimed at serving other people directly or indirectly. People try to be nice to each other. There isn't any competition or domination.
Now for criticism. I have to get this out of the way. Cozy science fiction just doesn't work for me. The story gives us plenty of cozy: lots of cushions, nice beds, comfortable chairs, cloth of all kinds, people being nice to each other, eating happy food, drinking lovely tea. And the dedication is an open invitation to relax and destress. Nobody works too hard or seems to suffer.
Why does this bug me so much? Right now I should need a dose of relaxation. I picked up this book when I was suffering from sustained overwork, the death of my father, and my wife enduring two (2!) heart attacks. Yet I keep finding myself asking inappropriate things of Chambers' story, and wanting it to be less damned *nice*.
I'm not sure if my allergy to nice powers my other criticisms, namely of the world and the main character's arc. For the former, the world is pleasant in a consuming way. We don't see a lot of making - Dex's amazing vehicle/house gets build off-stage. We don't learn how the new society evolved. Actually, I'd rather read about the people who made Panga's society, than these consumers of its success. I'm curious about how learning and information worked. There's something of an internet, albeit a slow one and accessed by old, long-maintained hardware. Dex learns their new job entirely by doing - does this society have mental health professional licensing? What about universities?
As to the latter... I didn't really get Dex. I lost sympathy with our tea monk as their life kept looking nicer and nicer, and they couldn't be bothered to Google or even ask people about the very thing they sought (crickets). Their crisis of... not faith, not midlife, but life? sjust didn't strike me as serious. In contrast, I wanted to know more about the people who ventured into the wild and never came back.
Perhaps this is an example of the very old problem of how to make a story work in utopia. Dystopias are great for narrative, but if everyone's happy, it's difficult to have the conflict stories need. There are solutions to this, like playing along the utopia's margins (cf Iain Banks' Culture series). Perhaps in later books Dex will rebel against the niceness. Or maybe that's my punk self hoping against hope.
It's weird how reviewers respond to the book. They often seem to find ideas here for the first time, like the half Earth concept, or the "people do what they want" jobs model from William Morris. People also view the book as fantasy, whereas it really looks like science fiction: alien world, robots, engineering problems, alien life.
There are some clear signs of contemporary progressive politics, as per the other Chambers I've read. Gender gets set aside completely, as we have a nonbinary protagonist and a machine who prefers to be called "it." I did run into one issue with this at a lexical level. During the book's second half "they" and "them" refer to either Dex or Dex and Mosscap together, and it's not always clear which one is in play. Another progressive sign is the focus on therapy. For the book's first half Dex does a light form of talk therapy for their tea customers, and in the second Mosscap does the same for Dex. These conversations are central to the book, especially carrying its emotional heft.
Summing up, this is a very useful example of solarpunk. As a story, I found it too cozy and light....more
I'm still trying to figure out what the purpose of Birnham Wood is.
The novel concerns a guerrilla gardening project in New Zealand. The titular BirnhaI'm still trying to figure out what the purpose of Birnham Wood is.
The novel concerns a guerrilla gardening project in New Zealand. The titular Birnham Wood collective is anti-capitalist, fairly anarchist, and aims to nurture good produce by their sneaky practice. An American billionaire offers to support them in an expansion into a new plot of land, and from there things spiral into tragedy.
Catton spends the first 2/3rds of the novel carefully setting up characters. This is stage setting, putting the plot's mechanism together before finally throwing the switch. These profiles are detailed, with a Jane Austen wry eye towards foibles and hypocrisy. The billionaire is a smart sociopath. Birnham Wood members are idealistic yet flawed in various ways. Ultimately this is a rich cast of characters, and that richness makes the tragedy poignant.
And yet.
I found myself losing interest as we met person after person. Very long paragraphs delved into backstories and mores, without much sense of urgency to tug us along. As an anarchist and amateur gardener I was prepared to relish the book, yet found the whole thing somewhat woolen or padded.
I'm still not sure what the purpose of the novel was. Some recommended it to me for climate literature purposes, and I'm not sure it really fits that purpose. Climate change barely appears except as a cause for essentially one character, and that's a man so mocked that his standard is the novel's. The story's inciting incident is a natural disaster (although it's barely depicted at all), and we could infer this as the kind of thing more likely to occur as the globe heats up. I suppose Birnham Wood gives us a realistic portrait of an ecologically-focused group and its fragility.
The villain offers a good example of a modern progressive trope: the bad, rich, white techbro. I've been seeing this in movies and television, so it's unsurprising to find here.
So much of the plot depends on lying, scheming, and especially misunderstanding that perhaps it's a plea for greater transparency or at least human decency.
To be fair, I don't live in New Zealand. I don't know enough about its present-day culture and politics to have a sense of that the novel means in that context. I may well have missed key details.
I'm still not sure what to make of the book. I don't know if I misspent hours reading it....more
Pirate Enlightenment is an odd book. It's a work of history, exploring an unusual population in Madagascar, a group including the descendants of piratPirate Enlightenment is an odd book. It's a work of history, exploring an unusual population in Madagascar, a group including the descendants of pirates. Which is a great topic and an ideal writer for it.
But it's also a posthumous work, produced from Graeber's papers. It's also based on his dissertation, so it is a kind of revisiting and expansion. It also appears later in the author's career, post-Occupy, and also when he worked with David Wingrove on The Dawn of Everything, with its emphasis on politics as something like communal improv. The book was supposed to be a book chapter, but grew too long for that, yet not long enough for a book on its own, for a while. So Pirate Enlightenment feels very, well, not quite autobiographical so much as an odd node in a textual network.
The book does a good job of showing how this community developed a kind of anti-authoritarian, anti-hierarchical organization. It follows Graeber and others in finding non-European sources for some Enlightenment political thought. In conversation with friends on a podcast I was reminded of Scott's libertarian, anti-state history and also of The Wire's "Hamsterdam" storyline.
It's a tricky subject to develop because of the paucity of sources and layers of propaganda and bias, but Graeber does it well. He also shows his later puckish, even wry style, which is a pleasure. I don't know anything about the posthumous publication process, especially on who edited it and how.
I first picked up Asprin Age in high school, when I was falling in love with history, and my favorite teacher recommended it. I remember enjoying someI first picked up Asprin Age in high school, when I was falling in love with history, and my favorite teacher recommended it. I remember enjoying some of the articles and not really getting the others. It gave me a taste of social history.
Over the years I've dipped into it and appreciated some of the articles more. This year I was struck by a great quote (see below) and wanted to source it. That led me to one of these chapters and then to savor the whole book.
Asprin Age is a collection of essays about American history from 1918 to 1941. Each one addresses a different topic, and the topics range all over the place: America's role in the Versailles treaty, Prohibition, Huey Long, two bad presidents, a labor strike, radio, Lindberg's isolationism, and a shipwreck, among others. Nearly all are well written, albeit in different styles: cool, enraged, humorous, mordant, forensic, celebratory, intimate, distant. The editor assigns each a year.
The political analyses stood out for me this time, mostly character studies of leaders generally making mistakes. One in praise of Wendell Wilkie (!) impressed me for its sheer adoration of someone I keep forgetting. Others impressed me for other reasons: "The Noble Experiment of Izzie and Moe" takes a somewhat pro-Prohibition stance, and does so not from puritanism, but comedy. "The Timely Death of President Harding" reads more sympathetically than I recalled, although it remains an indictment. "Konklave in Kokomo" is a chilly portrait of that era's KKK. Surprisingly for many readers in the year 2022, its focus is not on race but religion. "The Radio Priest and His Flock" charts the rise and fall of Father Coughlin. Wallace Stegner (I think better known as a novelist today) sees him racing into fascism. "The Mysterious Death of Star Faithfull" is a true crime mystery, unsolved to this day. "The Peculiare Fate of the Morro Castle" dissects a shipwreck, combining engineering with psychology. "Huey Long: American Dictator" is an early take on the Kingfish. I'd forgotten the author was an anti-Long newspaperman. And this is the first time reading the essay since I lived in Louisiana. "An Occurrence at Republic Steel" reads today like a dispatch from an alien world, as private sector labor unions are so scarce. But perhaps a glimpse of a future. "The Man on the Ledge" is mostly a feel-good kind of police procedural... until the end.
Other pieces cover topics I try to avoid in the present day. A bit on boxing was mildly interesting, if weirdly detached and technical. The inevitable celebrity gossip, I shun. An enthusiastically inane piece on quintuplets nicely anticipates some of today's stupid "news" reporting.
Some have dated poorly. For example, "The Night the Martians Came" is fun, but now succeeded by better research. "The Crash - and What It Meant" is an early entry in Great Depression studies; my sense is that a library's worth of studies have appeared since.
That quote I was hunting? It's from a brutal piece on president Calvin Coolidge, and runs like so:
The Washington Monument pierces five hundred and fifty-five feet into the sky to symbolize the greatness of George Washington's contribution to his country; Calvin Coolidge's monument could be a hole dug straight down into the ground to commemorate all the things he failed to do for his country; a railing should be built around this monument to protect the beholder from vertigo. (131)
That should give you a sense of the book's style, or at least some of it. There are echoes of the late nineteenth century with long sentences and some elaborate word choice. But there are also styles echoing contemporary film noir, hard bitten and fast.
Do find a copy and dive in. Asprin Age is a treat.
Against the Grain sees James Scott take his anarchist analysis to new terrain: the earliest governments on record, mostly in the Near East.
Readers of Against the Grain sees James Scott take his anarchist analysis to new terrain: the earliest governments on record, mostly in the Near East.
Readers of Scott's earlier work will recognize some common themes: teasing out the many ways populations evade states, identifying many awful things states do, and complicating the usual view that human history means the triumph of ever more sophisticated governments. One way this plays out is by showing how early historical humans had many ways to live outside of city walls, how doing so was often healthier, and that some populations shifted in and out of state control.
Throughout Scott manages some very impressive writing. He digests a tremendous amount of scholarship and also offers wry turns of phrase. (I listened to this one narrated by Eric Jason Martin who seemed to positively grin at times.)
The Actual Star is an ambitious, exciting, and demanding book, one of the best science fiction novels of the decade.
The plot takes place along three The Actual Star is an ambitious, exciting, and demanding book, one of the best science fiction novels of the decade.
The plot takes place along three timelines. In 1012 royal children plan to ascend to rule their Mayan kingdom. In 2012 a Minnesotan woman travels to Belize, mesmerized by the culture. In 3012, two people lead religious-political reform movements in a post-apocalyptic anarchist society. This triptych structure connects each plot thematically, as well as with some supernatural elements. Thus The Actual Star works in multiple genres: historical fiction, science fiction, and fantasy.
On the one hand, this is an easy book to review. The novel is enormously energetic and ambitious. Beyond the genre mixing, it produces two very elaborate worlds, past and future. Those worlds, plus the reality of the present-day timeline, appear in flurries of language, from multiple languages in play (English, Spanish, a Belizean Kriol) to huge swathes of historical and futuristic vocabulary (note to first-time readers: use the glossary at the end). The novel uses all of these devices to tangle with a wide range of issues and themes: sexuality, gender, tourism, political power, sibling love, animals and their relationship to humanity, myth, religion, the nature of reality.
At the same time, I found the story - well, stories - gripping. I initially disliked the Mayan royalty plot because I despise royals and aristocrats, yet the children were fascinating and their ascent, with all of its challenges, engaging. The present-day tourist story was much more interesting than it sounds, as Leah leaps across the world and into a new culture, rapidly develops as a human being, and enters a religious state. The future story was most compelling of all, as each character struggled with others and the world. Byrne flips between the three quickly enough to impress, divert, and engage.
As a reviewer, The Actual Star is also fun to write about because it seems that many reviewers missed key details! For example, that the novel is explicitly, thoughtfully, and at length a discussion of anarchism is often absent from reviews. It is also about climate change, from its first line through the second timeline's crisis and especially the future world. This strikes me especially hard, given my current research into the topic. Byrne lays out a millennium of chaos and transformation, on the other side of which is a deeply shrunken human race (8 million people!), all of whom are part of an anarchist, high tech, nomadic, religious world order. Everyone is hermaphroditic as well, and gendered female for religious reasons.
That worldbuilding reminds me of how much The Actual Star is a creation of its time. All art is, but this novel is especially connected with progressive politics. Gender fluidity, antiracism, body positivity, anticapitalist, genocentrist: it's a kind of index of what the American progressive movement looks like today.
On the other hand, so much of the book depends on its finale that I can't say much more without spoilers. So here we go:
1. (view spoiler)[I think the novel ends in an indeterminate position about the reality of its religion. It doesn't firmly establish that the visions characters see as they pass through the cave are of the actual world, or are either delusions or figments spun out by dying brains. The truth of cortada is left open ended. Did Leah start a series of human exits or translations to Xibalba, or did she perish - badly - in a cave sump? All is conditional. (hide spoiler)] 2. I'm very curious by one question about bodies and sex. (view spoiler)[The novel portrays a great deal of sex, yet only once do we hear of reproduction. In the second timeline Leah has sex, but never (that I found) through vaginal intercourse. She never has a child. In the future people are enthusiastic love-makers, usually without issue. The one act of reproduction we learn of is deeply fraught and much of the parenting tabu or illegal. In the past timeline our royal couple enjoys incest, but never produces a child through that union or with others; their demise ends their line. I'm not sure if this is a political argument against overpopulation, as with Donna Haraway's call for us to "make kin, not babies!" Or is this a sign that the multiple plotlines are ultimately sterile? (hide spoiler)] 3. One big gap: (view spoiler)[it's not clear how Leah's religion got started. I think Javier and Leah disappear in the cave, then Xander leaves, gradually developing a philosophy which grows into a religion. Does 3012's world depend on a friend and lover's betrayal? What exactly did Xander do to set this up? What kind of Peter and Paul was he to Leah's Jesus? (hide spoiler)]
Infinite Detail is a novel about technological culture and dystopia, but those two topics aren't paired in quite the way readers might expect.
It takesInfinite Detail is a novel about technological culture and dystopia, but those two topics aren't paired in quite the way readers might expect.
It takes place along two timelines, something very close to our present ("Before") and a time about fifteen years hence ("After"). During the former we follow characters involved in a technological-separatist community carved out of the British city of Bristol; during the latter, we follow people in the same area after an apocalyptic event. The central trauma of the novel is that the internet is suddenly destroyed, plunging civilization into collapse. Infinite Detail tacks back and forth between these two periods, taking us up to the event, then tracing its impact.
Both of these are described in a naturalist style. Most of the British characters are poor or working class, and the life "After" is horrendous. The class divides between Mary, who can see the dead, and her allies, versus some of her clients, are stark and quite British. Race and racism also structure both epochs.
Maughan eschews lyricism, except when trying to evoke music, which becomes a major aspect of the story, or the novel's framing romance. Humanity has suffered an extraordinary, cataclysmic die off, followed by a fall back to late medieval living standards. Many practical details make this world vivid, like the Croft's hard-won business in growing spices, largely driven by child labor.
Some readers may recognize the life-after-internet dystopia through other stories. Post-EMP fiction has become a subgenre now, with titles like William R. Forstchen's One Second After or the tv series Jericho. S. M. Stirling's Dies the Fire posits a sudden fall of technology; I can't remember if we learn the cause. Infinite Detail offers a particular take on this, showing only the destruction of the internet through a kind of cascading, internet-of-things based denial of service attack. This doesn't only take down computer games and cat videos, but guts all of civilization, from self-driving cars to utilities.
Yet I'm not sure where the novel ends up. It's clear from the start that modern technology is problematic for the text, and also that a sudden return to feudalism is even worse. I'm still wondering about where this takes us. To explain, I have to raise spoiler shields. It's not a suspense novel with twists and turns, but still: (view spoiler)[We begin with a strong sense of technological criticism. Rush is our present day guide, a cyberactivist whose arguments are quite convincing in a 2019 where we increasingly dread Google, Facebook, and smartphones. His solution, a grass roots, non-global network sounds intriguing. Then the world collapses, and Rush's plan seems useless until the very end. Most of the book, in fact, digs into the catastrophe. On balance the novel feels like a slam at those who wish to unplug: for being foolish at best, and deadly dangerous at worst.
Other plotlines leave me unsettled. One character returns to Bristol to revisit her role in the collapse, then leaves... to pursue a bloody, desperate civil war in Wales. Is this a tragic or heroic outcome? We don't see enough of that conflict to determine. Mary's visions of the dead are revealed to be technological artifacts. This development does not destroy her, but seems to leave her in a positive state. Is this a progressive parable of mysticism debunked by the products of reason, or a sad tale of folklore quashed by tech? In America a Movement appears, systematically and violently wiping out internet-age data, deeming it oppression and slavery (357). Is this just another working out of the apocalypse, or the sign of a positive polity in that situation? Rush ends the novel ready to find his lost love, and also to rebuild the Croft's hyperlocal mesh network. This *feels* triumphant, a positive result after so much horror. Perhaps that's where Maughan wants us to end up, using digital technology, but only at the local, grass roots level. I'm not sure. So much of the post-apocalypse is isolated and terribly lonely (one theme: everyone's looking for someone). Is this a call for a Schumacher-like small is beautiful world, or for the hyper-local holons in Daniel Suarez' FreedomTM (2010)? This feels unsettled to me, perhaps because the determination is supposed to be left up to the reader. (hide spoiler)]
Infinite Detail feels like it's in dialogue with Cory Doctorow's Walkaway (2017) (which we read in our book club last year; the author was then a fine guest on the Future Trends Forum). Doctorow also posited a utopian space, based on a radically different take on technology. He also described a social divide between these two worlds, one which became increasingly violent. Maughan offers a different twist, having the mainstream world utterly wrecked, and the utopian world unable to help. Instead, the Croft is a gangster's domain, powered by child labor and kept in check by public hangings. It's based on a different sense of technological activism, giving us an edge case of destruction, rather than Walkaway's positive, constructive hackers.
A few last notes: I'm impressed by the AR/MR "spex" that people use in "Before" (our near future) to access the digital world. One of the most convincing versions of that I've seen.
One passage stood out to me, one I can't shake, and I'm not sure I agree with it:
[T]heir community wasn't... obvious... It wasn't the people that mattered, she told him, but the spaces in between. The hidden spaces, the communal secrecy, the unwatched places. The spaces that belonged to them. (192)
Overall, one of the more interesting and thought-provoking works of modern sf. Recommended....more
This is such a strange and moving book, a novel about ideas that largely avoids plot, an argument for a retro utopia build in science fiction.
News froThis is such a strange and moving book, a novel about ideas that largely avoids plot, an argument for a retro utopia build in science fiction.
News from Nowhere is a utopian novel. It imagines a future almost two centuries off, wherein the market economy is gone, governments are done with, and cities have been reduced to small towns and a returning countryside. The novel offers an anarchist vision, but doesn't use that word more than once, and then only in the preface.
The novel also rejects contemporary (Victorian) technology and civilization. While some Americans today flock to an imagined nineteenth century for steampunk delights, Morris hauls us back to the late middle ages. Time and again he shows us people dressed in medieval costume, living in medieval houses, working at premodern tasks (rowing, carving, hay mowing). The narrator compares what he sees to the fourteenth century at least five times. But gone is the ancient regime's theocracy; instead people do what they want, trying not to hurt anyone else. There are a couple of hints about technology as work, like this tantalizing note: "All work which would be irksome to do by hand is done by immensely improved machinery" (Kindle Locations 1322-1324). But we never see signs of that. Overall the novel's world is a bit like a cross between arts and crafts, Mr. Rogers, and punk.
Morris strives to make this work, partly through nice descriptions of happy people in a lovely countryside, but also through arguments, which constitute most of the novel. Our point of view character falls asleep in his time and wakes up sometimes in the 21st century, then wanders around talking with people. Each utopian denizen tries to convince "William Guest" that their way of life is superior. The novel's center is a long Socratic dialogue with a local elder who lives in the more or less abandoned British Museum, and who harangues the narrator about how awful his time was, then sketches out parts of the revolution which led to utopia.
I'm a reader who enjoys conversational texts. I also like philosophical novels. But I recognize how dull this can be. Morris runs smack into the problems of utopia - without unhappiness there isn't much room for plot. We get some discussions about scheduling and delicate steps around the possibility of offending characters, and that's about it. One solution to the narrative problem of utopia is to focus on its edges, where it meets other worlds. That's Iain Banks' frequent approach in his Culture stories. Morris' nowhere doesn't really have a boundary, and we're given to understand the world has been globally transformed into versions of his London. There are hints that love can upend society, as it often does in dystopias, but apart from one cautionary tale of ax murder (!) there isn't much sign of that actually occurring.
It is easy to poke holes in News from Nowhere's ideas. Its dispute-handling mechanisms would break down under determined opposition. Hoarding could easily upend a locality. A group of determined, organized, and violent people could have a delightful time trashing the place. And there isn't much room for psychologies other than that of Mr. Rogers. The landscape and general happiness has to do a lot of work to cheer people up. I would also cast a skeptical eye on the happiness of people without modern dentistry, or antibiotics, or anesthetics, and so on.
Ultimately this reminds me of the Marxist idea of reformatting human psychology by altering material conditions. The Soviets aimed to create a "new Soviet man" in the 20th century, someone who grew up in socialism, not capitalism, and would therefore have a different mix of desires. That didn't work out, and gave ammunition to anticommunists who insist on an immutable human nature. Morris is with Moscow here, as his utopians argue that removing the state and money would generate a different kind of human being.
What might interest today's reader the most is the novel's argument that people don't really want to be idle. While we discuss the potential of universal basic income, News from Nowhere offers a kind of version of UBI. People do take time off to enjoy watching the sky, but they also love work, because it's work they find meaningful. Morris' conceit is that the capitalist marketplace drives people to work at jobs they despise. Without that framework we'd turn our hands to make things and perform services that we delight in. Those goods and services should be better constructed and make their consumers happier than if they purchased mass-produced schlock fabricated by unhappy wage slaves. This is why everyone in News is so much happier. (Sam Harris and Andrew Yang recently made a related argument about IBU).
Another point of interest is Morris' feminist and semi-Freudian ideas about sex and violence. The elder informs Guest that they don't have much violence because they have far more sexual freedom. "[M]any violent acts came from the artificial perversion of the sexual passions, which caused overweening jealousy and the like miseries." What does he see as the cause of that perversion, religion or science? No:
Now, when you look carefully into these, you will find that what lay at the bottom of them was mostly the idea (a law-made idea) of the woman being the property of the man, whether he were husband, father, brother, or what not. That idea has of course vanished with private property, as well as certain follies about the ‘ruin’ of women for following their natural desires in an illegal way, which of course was a convention caused by the laws of private property.(Kindle Locations 1098-1102)
This latter sentiment might connect well with today's readers.
As I approached the end of the novel my enjoyment had sunk as I kept poking holes in the world. The lack of narrative tension gradually wearied me. But the finale had quite the sting in store. Guest starts to attend a party, but then -ah, spoilers: (view spoiler)[a Twilight Zone event occurs. Guest stares at people and they don't see him. They walk past him. He has become a ghost or nonperson. The party is in a church, but Guest is being barred from its new communion. Thus we know he is starting to disassociate from the utopia.
Then we know he's back in his time because he meets a Victorian person. The contrast is shocking:
as I turned round the corner which led to the remains of the village cross, I came upon a figure strangely contrasting with the joyous, beautiful people I had left behind in the church. It was a man who looked old, but whom I knew from habit, now half forgotten, was really not much more than fifty. His face was rugged, and grimed rather than dirty; his eyes dull and bleared; his body bent, his calves thin and spindly, his feet dragging and limping. His clothing was a mixture of dirt and rags long over-familiar to me. As I passed him he touched his hat with some real goodwill and courtesy, and much servility.(Kindle Locations 2913-2917)
On the SFF Audio podcast Jesse Willis drew our attention to that last line, that combination of hierarchy reinstalled (servility) and its deep embrace ("some real goodwill and courtesy"). What an effective way of showing the fall from anarchy into the world of law and states. (hide spoiler)] So I recommend this to you. Read it with some energy. Be ready to argue....more
Inventing the Future offers a vision for a new radical politics. It begins with a critique of current left-wing thought and practice, then launches inInventing the Future offers a vision for a new radical politics. It begins with a critique of current left-wing thought and practice, then launches into a call for new thinking that accounts for likely future developments, especially automation.
I should really begin this review with some throat-clearing. I came to Inventing the Future with an uneven background. In some ways, I'm well prepared; in one, I'm not.
Since 1980 or so I've read widely and, occasionally, deeply in the left wing political tradition. Marx, Marxists, anarchism, Situationism, etc. have all passed before my eyes. I've been in some reading groups, several unions that struck, and also taught a bit of this world. So that's useful for making sense of this book.
Unfortunately, I haven't read much of the accelerationist field. This seems to be a school of thought calling for politics to be based on, well, accelerating social and political change. Some years ago I looked into a little of early Nick Land, who represents the right wing accelerationists; I haven't read The Accelerate Manifesto (2013), which is the leading left document. Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek wrote that manifesto, and perhaps one should read that before tackling Inventing the Future. Some friends of mine recommend this, so maybe I'm going about things backward.
All right, on to the book.
The first half criticizes contemporary left-wing politics from a series of angle. A key target is what Williams and Srnicek dub "folk politics" (9), which covers small scale projects and movements, from slow food and eating local to occupations and democratic experiments disconnected from larger initiatives. The left is also cowed by the triumph of neoliberalism. Williams and Srnicek are fascinated by that movement's rise to planetary hegemony, repeatedly referring to the Mont Pelerin Society as the model of a patient, far-seeing, and ambitious project that the left should emulate. There's also a sense that left wing and liberal people fail to look ahead to a possible future.
In its second half Inventing the Future proposes new ideas and movements in a very ambitious way. These chapter propose "to break us out of neoliberalism, and to establish a new equilibrium of political, economic, and social forces... an open-ended escape from the present" (108).
To begin with, Srnicek and Williams propose to reduce work by automating it. Along with this revolutionary development they call for a form of universal basic income (118). Through these two movements work would be "delinked" from income (178).These developments should free up social space for a more just way of living, along with social experiments in new ways of organizing life. For example, UBI could free women from unpaid household and caring labor (122).
In addition, building social movements required for achieving such goals would lead to a gigantic mega-movement, a counter-hegemonic strategy capable of acting at a global scale and truly building a world beyond capitalism (131).
This freedom finds many different modes of expression, including economic and political ones, experiments with sexuality and reproductive structures, and the creation of new desires, expanded aesthetic capabilities, new forms of thought and reasoning, and ultimately entirely new modes of being human. (180-1)
To get there a strategy should embrace technology for its liberatory possibilities, while at the same time picking up utopian dreams in order to free up a futuring imaginary. This new form of Gramscian organization would have to grapple with a wide range of social and political areas, from education (142) to state power (168) to media, as well as forming some organizations like think tanks (164-5). There's that Mont Pelerin inspiration.
I'm impressed by the book's vision and enthusiasm for a new future. It ends on a lyrical note:
We must expand our collective imagination beyond what capitalism allows. Rather than settling for marginal improvements in battery life and computer power, the left should mobilise dreams of decarbonising the economy, space travel, robot economies - all the traditional touchstones of science fiction - on order to prepare for a day beyond capitalism. (183)
Unfortunately, the book misses some key steps. On a small level, I was surprised to not see any evocation of the American anarchist Bob Black, who was notorious/famous for calling for and end to work back in the 1980s. At a more important level I agree with Michael Chance's review when he criticizes Srnicek and Williams for focusing on the developed world (and really just a slice of it), underplaying the global context. Chance also sees the book as largely failing to address environmental issues, notably climate change.
Yet I still admire the book for its willingness to imagine a radical future. In a 2017 saturated with dread and reaction, Inventing the Future recalls us to daring visions, as well as ambitious planning. What a shot in the arm!
A passionate, engaging, thoughtful, and very informative graphic novel.
Red Rosa offers a rich biography of Rosa Luxemburg, smoothly combining her perA passionate, engaging, thoughtful, and very informative graphic novel.
Red Rosa offers a rich biography of Rosa Luxemburg, smoothly combining her personal life with her political career as activist, Marxist theorist, journalist, and revolutionary. Kate Evans ambitiously includes a generous amount of dialectical thinking - indeed, this book could serve nicely in a course on leftist political theory. Yet the novel is also emotionally powerful.
The art is very good, emphasizing the physicality of bodies and historical specificity, with expressionist touches and inventive page layout.
Teewinot is a gorgeous book, one to savor. It reminds the reader of how to better perceive the natural world. Jack Turner is an American mountain hermTeewinot is a gorgeous book, one to savor. It reminds the reader of how to better perceive the natural world. Jack Turner is an American mountain hermit in the classical Chinese style.
The book is structured to follow the author through most of a year in the Grand Tetons. This narrative describes what Jack Turner sees and does there, while arcing back into his memories and also exploring the natural history of the area.
What Turner sees and does involves lots of moving around the mountains. Teewinot is filled with climbing, hiking, paddling, a little driving, and a lot more climbing. This vigorous activity balances the author's practice of meditating, along with reflections on wilderness policies and the philosophy of nature. This might sound cumbersome, but works brilliantly. Each strand leads nicely to the next, often by association. The meditative aspects complement the athletics neatly.
What Turner remembers is his life in the mountains, especially concerning the fellow guides and Teton-lovers he's spent time with. So we read a mix of autobiography and group history. We see his childhood interest in these then-mysterious mountains become a lifelong passion. We learn of his fellow climbers, their personalities and fates.
Teewinot is a pleasure to read, partly because of Turner's voice. He offers miniature portraits of fellow mountaineers:
When he died, Willi was fifty-three years old, a white-haired professor of philosophy, and for some people, a prophet. He had earned his wisdom. Willi's daughter, Nanda Devi, died on the mountain he named her after. He had no toes; he limped. He was in constant pain. And still he wandered the mountains, seeking. (130)
Turner's prose is both muscular and celebrates physical prowess:
Toby and Lane [have] lived most of their lives in Jackson Hole and are happy to be in the mountains. They're both fit as SEALs. I once watched Toby hang by his knees from a rope ladder set at forty-five degrees and do sit-ups for so long, I got bored watching. (178-9)
Turner finds slapstick comedy in the Tetons:
On several occasions I have found moose sleeping on my porch. Once I got up in the night to pee off my porch. As I walked out the door stark naked, a figure rose up, snorting. I ran - straight into the doorjamb. Bleeding from the nose, I stumbled into the cabin, found my headlamp, and shined it into the night. A cow moose stood a dozen yards away, her eyes glowing, her head down, vapors purling from her nose - formidable and every bit as upset as I was. I defiantly peed off the porch in her direction and went back to bed. She slept somewhere else. (28-9)
He can also write gorgeous descriptions of landscapes:
Seven thousand feet below us, bluish lines of squalls dumped rain across the valleys. The layer level with us was chaotic with disturbance, a maw of whirling vapors and faintly greenish light. Above us, mature cumulonimbus bulged like muscles; higher yet, ribbons of cirrostratus disintegrated like spiraled nebula. The world became lurid, apocalyptic - the mise-en-scène of opera. Visibility dropped to fifty feet. My climbing gear hummed in tune with minute halos of fuzzy sparks covering every metal surface. The rock buzzed in varying frequencies, like alarms. (107)
I love that combination of specialized language (meteorology, aesthetics) with physically imminent words (bulged, maw, dumped).
This is a deeply masculine book in all kinds of ways. I've already mentioned its love of physical prowess. Turner depicts people, including himself, who push themselves to heights (literal and metaphorical) of bodily ability. Most of the book's characters people are men. Turner loves his isolation, never addressing romantic or sexual relations. It's the antithesis of Eat, Pray, Love, flung out from an exaltation of testosterone.
It's also an anarchist book. Turner writes as an anarchist, self-reliant, connected to a small, local group, and deeply suspicious of governments. "Rules are not about order; they are about obedience." (153) He celebrates Thoreau both for Walden and for "Civil Disobedience."
This is the first Turner I've read, and I want more. I read this during a Vermont November, up in the comparatively tiny Green Mountains, while snow came and went and temperatures dropped to zero F. Teewinot made me pay more attention to the way western winds pushed around leafless birch trees, and made me look more closely for bear sign. It brought my home back to me - what a striking achievement.
And I really want to visit the Teton park. Of course....more
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