John Ware's I AM IN ESKEW

I love me some atmospheric audio drama to while away my painsomniac hours, the weirder the better, so after having seen it in my recommendations on my podcatcher (I use Podcast Addict), I subscribed to I am in Eskew. But it took a real live person organically recommending it to me to actually get me to listen in and get hooked almost immediately. 

I Am In Eskew tells the story of two people, David and Riyo, who find themselves in a city straight out of H.P. Lovecraft. Not that it's teeming with fish men or idol worshippers or newly risen from the sea or anything. No, it's constructed on the principles that geometry can be so warped and wrong that it can drive people slowly and subtly mad until their lives -- ordinary enough on the surface, with day jobs and apartments and soul-crushing commutes and dive bars -- basically become an MGMT video. 

And I'm not talking "Electric Feel" or "Time to Pretend," here. I'm talking "When You Die." If you've never watched that video, I've embedded it below, but I'm warning you it is Glorious Super Creepy PKD-Flavored Nightmare Fuel.

Anyway.

We start off with David, who has begun recording sound files detailing his bizarre experiences in this strange city, starting with meeting the architect of an art gallery that was poised to be the New Cool Thing in town until suddenly it wasn't and construction petered out and then halted. It is now the stuff of delicioiusly scary rumor -- so of course the architect invites David to tour the place but warns him to be careful because the building turns out to be the bastard child of the Zone from Stalker/Roadside Picnic and the Navidson house in House of Leaves. It's never quite clear how much danger they're really in, but David seems to believe it's a life or death matter to escape, with or without the architect, and finishes the episode grateful in Eskew's never-ending rain (and I do mean never-ending; it's a signature part of the show's sound design that a steady and misleadingly soothing track of constant rainfall underlies every moment of I Am in Eskew. And, friends, you need the soothing, because while only a handful of episodes begin with content warnings, potentially they all could. Body horror, gaslighting, suicidal ideation (externally imposed), child abandonment, bullying, bureaucratic nightmares, medical horror, it's all waiting for you in Eskew.

David's adventures are largely episodic with little connecting them aside from the setting, and it seems for a while like, in the manner of television of Old, consequences of his actions or what happens to him don't seem to carry over much. Monsters met in one place seem to triumph in terrible ways but are never mentioned again, for instance. And that's fine. Monster of the Week is a tried and true formula, and not everything has to be serialized to the hilt like The Wire.

But then some things do start carrying over. David gets a girlfriend, Allegra,who seems at first to be just another lost soul in Eskew (with one hell of a story of how she got there), but then she seems to be a little too plugged in to how things work, connected to what passes for movers and shakers there (always organizations, never individuals) and things get deliciously unsettling. 

It is under her auspices that my favorite single episode of I am in Eskew comes to pass. She gets David a job at Eskew's Royal Society. His tasks center around condensing long historical narratives into the kind of pithy summaries put on placards describing the background of artifacts in museum displays. Finally, he's going to get some real Intel on this crazy place -- or is he? He soon learns from his unfriendly coworker that in fact their job is to invent the history of Eskew. They are given ledgers with evocative titles that basically serve as fiction writing props: "Rituals of the Argent Basilica," "The Festival of the Weeping Duchess," etc. David and the passive-aggressive Platnik are to come up with flavor text, and if the Royal Society likes what they've written, artifacts to illustrate and prove their made-up narratives appear in the glass display cases, accompanied by exciting exhibit banners and whatnot, in the museum where they work. But nothing is, heh, written in stone. The unseen Society has the last word on how David's and Platnik's words get interpreted -- and their work can be augmented, rewritten, later declared hoaxes. And David and Platnik, delightfully, get competitive and quickly start playing dirty, with very amusing results -- until suddenly, they're not. Because Eskew.

Meanwhile, we slowly get to know the other narrator-figure, a young-sounding British-Somali woman named Riyo, whom David's mother has hired to find whatever became of him because he's been missing since he was a little boy. And realize that we never really did learn for sure how David came to be in Eskew. Riyo's adventures mostly take place in our humdrum world until she finally finds a way into Eskew, and then things really get wild.

The 30-episode series is beautifully narrated by both characters, but a word to those who like to listen to podcasts or audio dramas in bed: the combination of the endless rain sounds and both narrators' almost-too-soothing voices can make it easier than usual to doze -- only to awaken to some seriously disturbing imagery with a few minutes of missing context that one then has to rewind back to get, which can be frustrating. Atmospherically, it's perfect for that time of night, but, caveat auditor, as it were.

Isabel Allende's VIOLETA (tr by Francis Riddle)

It's not hard to make me cry these days -- one of the many reasons I've pretty much stopped watching television is that I bawl uncontrollably, even at commercials, so we won't even talk about sporting events or scripted dramas like Call the Midwife.* Or, say, The Expanse, which, we all know the last time a book made me cry; it wasn't that long ago, was it?

Sometimes our fates take turns that we don't notice in the moment they occur, but if you live as long as I have they become clear in hindsight. At each crossroads or fork we must decide which direction to take. These decisions may determine the course of the rest of our lives. That's what happened to me the day I recovered Torito's cross.

So it should come as no surprise that I've spent the last few days peering at my ebook reader through a film of tears, because I've been reading Isabel Allende, a writer whom I haven't read since I had to read her debut novel for a class in college, long before my cry-at-everything problem surfaced in my life, but yeah, I cried then, too. So I should have been prepared for Violeta.

The passage I quoted above occurs quite late in the novel and wasn't the first bit that elicited the waterworks, but it's the most important to the plot, so I'm going to talk about it and yeah, you guys don't pay attention to the tagline on this blog anymore so spoilers except, of course, this being historical fiction, history itself is the greatest spoiler of them all.

The title character, Violeta, is a member of the same clan readers first encountered in Allende's first novel House of the Spirits(which I read for a class in college when it was still pretty new), whose life spans an entire century in her native land (a never-named Chile but come on, it's obviously Chile) with excursions to the United States and to Europe over the course of an extraordinary life that begins in the Great Depression with her family's fall from upper class splendor to living off the charity of the kindly back-of-beyond family of Violete's governess' lover Teresa, continues through a tepid marriage to a German veterinarian that brings her within a whisker of getting involved in a fictionalized Colonia Dignidad, a scorching love affair with a dashing criminal pilot with ties to all of the right-wing evil that South America and the United States have to offer (and it is he who fathers her two children and madly complicates her life for decades while she is still technically married to the German), a nice one with the guy whom she originally meets when her criminal lover hires him to keep track of their wayward daughter in 1960s Las Vegas, and finally a delightful autumnal relationship with a Norwegian diplomat and bird watcher.

The love of her life, though, as we are told early on, is someone named Camilio, whose actual relationship to her is kept secret until quite late; two other men loom large and protective and helpful in her life in the form of her brother, Jose Antonio, and the Torito mentioned in the passage I quoted above. Her brother shares his business acumen with her early on in life, allowing her to develop a powerful skill set that lets her support herself as an independent woman in a time and place when that was a unicorn; Torito is a family retainer whom she has always known, something of a father figure, not conventionally intelligent or intellecutal and huge, so commonly thought of as developmentally disabled (the novel uses the R word), who comes through for her at a desperate time and pays the ultimate price for it.

I have defined Violeta so far through her relationships with men, but there are also incredible women in her life, starting with her Irish governess, who comes to her as a nanny dressed like a flapper in the 1920s, young and pretty but already damaged by a devastating past as an orphan girl in Ireland but determined not to let that stop her; her relationship with another woman, the aforementioned Teresa, not only governs the early course of Violeta's life as the source of her family's refuge after their fall in the Great Depression, but also involves them all in radical politics from the movement for women's suffrage through the election of Chile's first Socialist president and the sweeping reforms that were utimately his downfall.

In addition to the governess are two extraordinary maiden aunts, a pair of itinerant schoolteachers who train up Violeta to maybe someday join their ranks, a cook who becomes her family's link to the indigenous population in the south of the nation, and so many more. If a character gets a name, they get a full story, relayed in intimate, chatty detail by narrator Violeta, who is recounting the whole of her life  and her evolution from spoiled only daughter of a rich family to wayward wife of a German immigrant to conservative, self-supporting savvy businesswoman to radical founder of a social justice organization that looks poised to outlive her -- all for the benefit of her beloved Camilio.

All this means that, yes, Violeta lives through the brutal military dictatorship led by Pinochet. At first she doesn't think it's going to be so bad -- she has thriving businesses, plenty of money, and government contracts that look like they're going to be honored -- and her awakening to the actual nature of the right-wing dictatorship that takes over her country, the finding of a wooden cruxifix she carved as a little girl for her big, strange friend Torito, is sudden, shocking and emotionally wrenching -- and absolutely organic. Allende was great back in the 1980s and has only gotten better, so fluid and natural now that I don't even notice her, which I can also say for translator Francis Riddle.

I mean it as a tremendous compliment to observe that I didn't notice either of them as I was absorbed completely into the story. And crying.

*To name a show that all of the women in my life love passionately and honestly, I don't know how they do it. Every damned episode I've seen has left me sobbing uncontrollably for, like, days? And I have enough to cry about in real life? But there you go. God damn that show.

Rebecca Solnit's ORWELL'S ROSES

Thinking about Orwell's roses and where they led was a meandering process and perhaps a rhizomatic one, to deploy a word that describes plants such as strawberries that send out roots or runners to spread in many directions. The word was adopted by the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari to describe a decentralized or nonhierarchical model of knowledge. "Any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be," they declared. "This is very different from the tree or root which plots a point, fixes an order."

The above passage from Rebecca Solnit's Orwell's Roses could serve as a thesis statement for the book as a whole, for while I've seen this book described as a sort of biography of George Orwell, it's really only a tiny bit that, as I'll discuss below. 

Eric Blair, aka George Orwell, is a foundational writer for me, for all that the only fiction of his that I had ever read until unusually late in life for a lit major was Animal Farm*. For me, what I've always loved him for the most has been his essays, many of which I can quote almost word for word. I've enjoyed pseudo-biographies of him before, especially Emma Larkin's hyper-focused and fascinating Finding George Orwell in Burma, which does just what it says on the tin: locates important experiences and settings from Orwell's well-known years as a member of the British government's Indian Imperial Force as inspirations for a lot more of his work than just his first novel. Among its more interesting insights came from Larkin's conversation with a local on a visit to what is now Myanmar in which at first her conversation partner didn't know who she was talking about when she mentioned Orwell by either his pen or actual names, but then realized she was talking about "the prophet."

Orwell's name is on every tongue in this dumb century of ours, usually as a shorthand way of demonizing one's political opponents. Wearing masks to contain the spread of a killer virus is somehow Orwellian (though I really doubt he'd agree). Insisting that counterfactual insanity is still somehow true despite mountains of actual evidence that the crowd wasn't that big, and that your guy is in photographs with Jeff and Ghislaine, too, is Orwellian. Vaccine requirements are Orwellian? People wishing it was maybe a little harder for unhinged teenagers or mentally ill spouse-abusers to get access to automatic weapons is Orwellian? Insisting that you can't trust anything you hear in the press is pretty Orwellian. Orwellian, Orwellian, Orwellian.**

So while I still think everybody who uses his pen name in vain should have to read Larkin's book if not re-read Orwell directly***, it's a pretty interesting time for something like Orwell's Roses to make an appearance.

Right as I started reading it, I was brought back to one of my favorite reads from last year (you know, 2020 And Some Months), Dean King's Patrick O'Brian: A Life Revealed, a biography of another of my favorite writers of all time that focused quite a lot on O'Brian's cozy-sounding yet strenuously laborious domestic arrangements over the years. Here, too, quite a lot of attention is paid to its subject writer's housing, focusing on his house in Wallington, Hertfordshire, England, where he lived from 1936 to 1940 when he wasn't off at the Spanish Civil War, and where he planted the roses that first captured Solni'ts imagination.

Even more attention, though, is paid to what it means to plant roses in the first place, and Orwell's Roses turns into something much more interesting than another Orwell biography could be; Solnit has let her curiosity, her knowledge and her understanding of the writer's life, the life of the politically aware, and of what industrialization has done to all life on earth, lead her to all sorts of interesting ideas and connections between the man and his roses -- and each of us. The result is a book that makes me think of W.G. Sebald more than of anyone else, except Solnit isn't content to just show us fragments; she wants to pull them together into something, if not whole, at least whole enough for us to see how the fragments might fit together, and how there might be more than one way to fit them. This is pure black magic to me, making Orwell's Roses the best example of "the kind of book I wish I could write" that I've yet found.

Orwell's Roses take Solnit to some unexpected places, such as Bogota, Columbia, a city that is now surrounded by vast greenhouses and the infrastructure to process, package and ship their sole product: scentless, immature roses on an industrial scale, destined for supermarkets, airport booths and florist's shops in the United States. The roses we give one another for Valentine's Day and Mother's Day to celebrate love and beauty are grown by overworked, underpaid, exploited workers in their thousands, who are, Solnit discovers, made into walking billboards for Orwellian slogans by the text printed on their coveralls: "Effort and passion make us feel satisfied in our work", "The attitude depends on you. The rest we want you to learn here" are some choice examples, printed in Spanish on the actual garments, of course.

And, while she doesn't travel there, her musings also lead her to Russia and the Soviet Union under Stalin, and especially to the stories of Nikolai Vavilov and Trofim Lysenko, respectively the pioneering geneticist who strove to save the world from hunger through slow and careful plant breeding and seed saving, and the Lamarckian pseudoscientist who convinced Stalin that all that plodding around with the scientific method was a waste of time and they could fake it until they made it when it came to improving crops and crop yields, which lead to years of famine and death while Stalin bragged about how well his plans were working and even famously exported grain while the people growing it starved.

But it's not just to the grim in Orwell's world or ours that Solnit points us; the man, Eric Blair, had a great love for the simple beauty of the mundane, the close at hand, the homely, and especially the English -- the countryside, the junk shops, the soil in which so much could be grown that he and his first wife, Eileen, could often feed themselves from their garden, and Solnit celebrates this side of Orwell and of life right alongside his and her accounts of his experiences in miserable coal mines, on the battle fronts in the Spanish Civil War, and suffering in tuberculosis wards as his hard, active, risk-taking way of life caught up with him and took him young. 

The result is a book that I didn't expect but also didn't know I needed: a good beginning for what's sure to be another Orwellian year. 

*A first American edition of which is still one of my most cherished possessions, one of those things they'll have to pry from my cold dead fingers.

**Late in the book one of Solnit's companions in travel and exploration for the book wonderis "whether the word Orwellian should perhaps mean something other than ominous, corrupt, sinister, deceitful, a hypocrisy or dishonesty so destructive that it is an assault on truth and thought and rights" because Orwell, the actual man, was as concerned with beauty and pleasure (Solnit embarked on a re-reading of 1984 for this project and found, to her surprise that even in his totalitarian horror story there is beauty and pleasure throughout, for Winston's entire rebellion is an effort to hold on to these, and one can't depict something being clutched at without describing what is being clutched) as with brutality and deceit, but they ultimately conclude that Orwellian has become too useful a word, and too embedded in our culture, to try to change now.

***Except even back when Animal Farm first appeared, to say nothing of 1984, right-wingers were already misunderstanding the point so hard that Orwell felt he had to issue a declaration more or less from his deathbed that no, dummies, "My novel Nineteen Eighty-Four is notintended as an attack on socialism, or on the British Labour party, but as a show-up of the perversions to which a centralized economy is liable, and which have already been partly realized in Communism and fascism."

Samuel R. Delaney's BABEL-17

"Sometimes worlds exist under your eyes and you never see them." 

I sometimes sleep way too long on Science Fiction Grand Masters* and end up missing out on terrific stuff. It's a bit perverse. I know part of it is a matter of "I'll decide for myself whom I think the greatest SF authors are, thank you very much" and part of it is a matter of "OK, I'm pretty much guaranteed that this is going to be good* so I'll save it for getting out of a reading slump (even though those are pretty rare for me) or when I don't feel like taking a chance on something for some reason."

This is also why I haven't read all of Philip K Dick's novels yet. 

Then when I finally get around to one of them, I spend a while berating myself for having slept on him or her, as happened this month when the good old "included in your Audible subscription" bug bit and finally got me paying attention to Samuel R. Delaney and his astonishing, and astonishingly perfect for me, like so perfect for me (except for one thing in sure I'll have too much to say about a bit later) all that's missing is insects or fungi, Babel-17.

The book's title refers to the code name a multi-racial pan-galactic authority has bestowed on what it believes is an unbreakable cypher being used by its enemy, another multi-racial pan-galatic authority we only ever hear referred to as The Invaders. As our story begins, the military has hit an immovable wall as far as Babel-17 goes, but the need to finally crack it is urgent: every time it has been used, devastating acts of sabotage have occurred, and the sabotage is getting worse. 

Enter Rydra Wong, a young woman with a tragic and traumatic past, restored to functioning humanity as a child by society's greatest psychiatrist, former military cryptographer, natural polyglot and universally renowned poet (we learn later in the story, anecdotally, that her poetry is even admired by some Invaders), whom everybody figures is their last chance to crack it. I mean, if I knew someone like her (or, let's face it, could be her!) she's the one I'd want solving a problem like Babel-17.

This would be story enough for me, but Delaney seems to be a guy who doesn't want to stop with the wild ideas and over the top world building. The space-faring world of Babel-17 is one in which there are two ways to travel through space: the ordinary, plodding, mechanical/scientific way preferred by the staid and conservative Customs faction, who mostly stick to the original solar system as a result, and the artistic, intuitive-yet-counter-intuitive hyperdrive/FTL way preferred by the free-wheeling Transport faction, who visit other galaxies and go out and discover wild new things and generally muck about having a good time, mostly. Wong is, of course, a member of Transport, and on top of everything else is a qualified starship captain, which comes into play almost immediately after she gets hold of a transcription of all known samples of Babel-17 and proceeds to argue the general assigned to wrangle her into disclosing more than he'd meant to, allowing her to realize that it's not a code but a language, and lickety-split, she's figured out enough of it to have a pretty good idea as to where the next sabotage is going to take place!

Rydra then plunges into the weird and exciting world of recruitment, Transport-style, dragging the Customs guy assigned to help her acquire and crew a ship through a whole new side of the port city they've both been living in. She needs a whole lot of very peculiar people with some really unusual abilities to make a spaceship go where she needs to be in time to make a difference, and here is where audio book pro Stefan Rudnicki really gets a chance to show off a bit. I was already pleased with him for not doing the stupid "raised pitch and breathy" stereotypical "male narrators doing a female voice" for Rydra, but then he really took off depicting characters that, though human, have unusual physiognomies of various kinds --  and making me believe that's how they sound.

Next thing we know, they are off on their mission, with Rydra mostly sequestered to work on developing a dictionary and grammar of Babel-17 but occasionally dabbling in integrating her new crew, which includes two members of a former sexual and professional threesome whose third had recently died, only for Rydra to blithely pluck a recently dead (by suicide) woman with the requisite skills out of the morgue, reviving her, and declaring her their new partner, even though she doesn't speak the other two's language. Learning to communicate will be a bonding experience, she tells them a bit smugly, because of course she's right; she's Rydra Wong! But the new trio isn't even close to being the weirdest of her new crewmates. The pilot, Brass, is an extreme chimeric straight out of Alastair Reynolds' Ultranauts and was surely an inspiration for same; and then there's the Eye, the Ear, and the Nose. These are three "non-corporeals," sort of technologically enhanced ghosts who have developed just one sense for perceiving the world and who can only communicate via gadgetry, or, with Rydra only, via very intimate non-contact that is kind of like telepathy, only even that way any contact with them immediately evaporates from memory until Rydra develops a trick of quickly mentally translating what they tell her into the Basque language, which she is then able to recall.

Yeah.

Rydra is a bit Mary-Sue-ish, but what she's doing and has yet to do is so interesting and daunting that I didn't care until after this hyperspeed-paced story was over and done, and the omnicompetence of the heroine proved to be necessary for the story to work at all and the story was so good that, fine, she can do everything. Fine. Totally worth it

Except...

Alas, in the middle of the book my unmitigated delight in it was rudely interrupted and threatened to be ruined by a stark reminder that, though most of this book is so fresh and unique and fascinating it could have been written today, it was, in fact, written in the 1960s. Samuel R. Delaney was ahead of his time in every way imaginable -- handles bisexuality with aplomb, no sexism, etc. -- but wrote a minor character in the most fatphobic terms imaginable, and Rudnicki found a way to make her even worse. I was so heartbroken and dismayed by this that I came really really close to just dropping the whole thing. I'm not 100% on this and I have no desire at this point to go back and check but I believe the character, the wife of the Baron in charge of the whole society's weapon development and production facilities, was even referred to as a cow. But even if that word isn't actually in the text, it might as well have been. 

But, if POC and also Irish and Italians can get through H.P. Lovecraft, I can get through this, I finally decided after a day or so. And I was rewarded.

A new and mysterious character soon joins the narrative, a member of a space pirate crew, 6'6 and strapping, with peculiar speech patterns and no memory of his life before committing some over-the-top crimes and serving time for them. And once Rydra figures out the root of his odd speech patterns -- that his first language was one with no first or second personal pronouns -- the two of them have one of the most intricately challenging, emotionally raw and fascinating conversations I've ever read as she tries to teach him what a self is, and what it means that every other human being has one. 

Making that conversation even weirder is that early on, this character, known only as The Butcher by the way, gets the words for "I" and "you" switched around and Rydra just decides to roll with it, so the reader/listener gets the unique experience of having to switch back all of the "I" and "you" statements in an ontological conversation about what those words even mean. 

And I thought Gene Wolfe made me work for it.

This effort to understand each other, as poetically lovely as it is confusing AF, blows the whole story open until we eventually learn the whole point of Babel-17's existence and its incredible implications. And that's pretty much it. This is a short novel (not even seven hours' listen at normal speed as an audio book), not a saga, and it's about the code/language, not the ultimate fate of the co-belligerents struggling to control the novel's universe. Girl meets code/language, girl learns code/language, girl gets her brain put through an emotional/psychological ringer and solves a bunch of mysteries along the way. That's all Delaney wanted to tell us.

But it's plenty.

Now, excuse me, Rydra gave me a bit of a complex, even though I just finished the entire Duolingo Russian course at the Legendary level the same night I finished this novel. I still have streaks to maintain and I'm not going to be much of a Duolingo polyglot if I don't take on a new course, soon.

After wrestling with the implications of Babel-17 and Babel-17, even Welsh or Hungarian sound like fun romps. If I can just finally pick one!

*Though I've been badly bitten by one or two of them. *Cough* Robert Silverberg *Cough*

David M. Perry's and Matthew Gabriele's THE BRIGHT AGES: A NEW HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE

"It's always the historian's job to say 'it's more complicated than that.'

Lots of pixels are already being spilled on behalf of and about this book by people better acquainted with its subject matter than I, so I'm just going to focus on the sheer enjoyment and the new thoughts that The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe gave me during my brief turn with our public library's copy -- brief not only because I was enjoying it and so tore through it with my usual voraciousness, but also because I knew a lot of other people were waiting for it (shakes fist at Libby app). I hope it gets very widely read after I'm done. 

Like Dan Carlin likes to say, I'm a fan of history rather than a student of it, and I'm such a wretched fan that I didn't know that my previous favorite history book about the period covered by David M. Perry and Matthew Gabriele was not in favor until I looked at some reviews of it prior to writing this post. I don't even recall how I got my hands on William Manchester's A World Lit Only By Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance, but once I did, I didn't let it go for years.* I read it so many times that lines or sometimes whole passages from it intruded on my thoughts when I was reading historical fiction. William Manchester lived rent-free in my head as I first read the great Dorothy Dunnett, for instance.

I think he was maybe squatting a bit in Perry's and Gabriele's heads, too, though; I didn't think of his book at all while reading this until a sly little reference to its title showed up in The Bright Ages. It comes about halfway through, in the midst of a discussion of gothic church architecture and how its system of buttresses and other tricks allowed for walls composed as much of beautiful stained glass as of stone:

In a world made of wood, stone impressed; but for a world before electricity, more important was light. This wasn't a world lit only by fire, but more important, one illuminated by the sun. Allowing that sunlight inside, allowing an interior to gleam, was to capture something of the divine. So heavy stone walls were replaced by translucent and radiant colored glass.**

Underlining mine; italics theirs.

Really, that passage is a thesis statement for this whole book. The period between the canonical Fall of the Roman Empire (but Philip K. Dick taught me that The Empire Never Ended...) and the start of the Renaissance is still most commonly described by the loaded phrase "The Dark Ages" but culturally, intellectually, politically, materially, that period of time was no darker than our own in a lot of key respects. In the literal terms the quoted passage begs us to consider, for example, the sun shone for the same number of hours per day as it does now (and through much cleaner air); it was only at nighttime or deep indoors in windowless rooms that the visible world shrank down to what could be lit by a flame.

And if one zooms back camera (and yes, I'm totally thinking of Alejandro Jodorowsky's last line in The Holy Mountain, here) and takes in all of the then-known world, civilization and all of the ideas and traits we associate with it wasn't suddenly extinguished when Alaric sacked the city of Rome; rather, like a balloon a bunch of kids take turns batting around a room to keep it from touching the carpet, its light was passed from place to place via trade and the travels of scholars and pilgrims and on the backs of war horses and yes, even in the minds of "ignorant" tribesman types gawking at the aqueducts and roads left behind by the classical Roman empire.

And the idea of Rome didn't die, either; people like Galla Placidia, daughter of one Roman Emperor, wife of another (and before that of a Visigothic king) and mother to yet another, never thought of herself as anything but Roman even though she had witnessed the famous sack and led a tumultuous existence that could make anyone agree with Gandhi that Western Civilization was something they should maybe try sometime. Following her the rulers of the Byzantine Empire called themselves Romans and still had chariot races (boy did they have chariot races) and adopted laws and customs from the classical empire even as they embraced this newfangled Christianity. And the idea persisted in some ways even until the Hapsburgs presided over something that by axiom was neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire, except they themselves might have disputed it when they weren't busy keeping their subject kingdoms from trying to destroy each other and engendering cultural conflicts that are still affecting us even in this stupid 21st century that convinces me more every day that a whole lot of people who desperately cling to the idea that the Dark Ages were totally a thing because it props up their dumb culture war talking points also seem to think that it would be great if we could Make the Age Dark Again.

Oh no, Kate's getting political again, but Perry and Gabriele went there before I did; their whole point in writing this book is to debunk and deconstruct the hundreds of years of post-Renaissance bad history and to point out how that bad history has been used to justify everything from the 17th-19th century return to slavery as a justifiable institution despite being pretty un-Christian, to the 21st century talking head hobby of blathering about "clashes of civilizations" to justify Antisemitism, Islamophobia, sexism and, of course, racism. History is written by the victors, sure, but the losers had a habit of finding ways to record their existences and leave traces for us to read as well, and we ignore those traces to our cost.

And this is where the duo really shines. For the most part, they're using the same sources as Edward Gibbons and his heirs always have, but look at them with an eye to why people like Procopius wrote what he did, rather than just taking what he did write as face value, ignoring the fact that his public and private writings frequently contradicted each other, and picking out the bits that agree with a predetermined thesis. Look at the circumstances under which the man worked and what he said and why he said it can make more sense, especially if its backed up by archeological evidence or other primary sources or just the lived experience of standing in the Hagia Sophia even after centuries of alterations... to say nothing of the fruits of hundreds of years of scientific research that has yielded all kinds of insights into the daily realities of The Little People.

The two really do zoom back, by the way, to take in, as I said, the entire known world, including the rise of Islam and the importance of its scholars to what would come to be Europe's Renaissance but also their presence as ordinary residents of the Iberian peninsula where they lived alongside Christians of many kinds (one thing I like is the emphasis in this book on the fact that right from the start there were always many Christianities, plural) and Jews, and the odd pagan hangover in varying degrees of peaceful coexistence -- though Perry and Gabriele are very careful not to fall into the trap of romanticizing this coexistence as This is the Past That Liberals Want.

The Mongols, too, get a turn in the spotlight as carriers of goods and ideas (and, most likely, according to modern archeological and genetic research, probably the Black Death) back and forth, just as the Vikings did. Remember that, famously, one in 200 men now living have some of Genghis Khan's DNA, and not all of them are in Asia.

Hard to share chromosomes without sharing a few other things.

The book ends with a return to Ravenna a thousand years after Galla Placidia built her mausoleum with its marvelous interior sky of lapis lazuli and gold-infused glass tesserae, to consider Dante Aligheri, exiled from Florence by political strife and writing The Divine Comedy's quest for divinity, imagined as light -- and then considers Petrarch, the first great populizer of the idea that the thousand or so years that preceded his personal awesomeness had been universally ignorant, violent and dark (or, as a later scholar would describe the whole of human existence, nasty, brutish and short!), inviting us first to ponder why he found it necessary so to characterize the times that spawned him, and whose interests it has served later historians to perpetuate and intensify Petrarch's errors. As the authors conclude near the end of The Bright Ages, they were "not simple or clean, but messy and human, and that's as close as we can come to the truth."

I hope someday the same kindness is employed in talking about us. 

Now excuse me; this would be a very interesting time to finally read The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller, which I've owned for 20+ years but never finished. 

*And while I absolutely see how Manchester's book merits criticism for perpetuating stereotypes about the period he covers, that book us how I first learned to see Henry VIII as more than a wife devouring monster (listen to the music he composed sometime!), to appreciate Magellan, and to empathize with Lucrezia Borgia. So I'll not abandon it wholly. 

**And of course, any discussion of French cathedrals and the like always brings me around to my beloved Orson Welles and my single favorite few minutes of cinema yet created, this bit from his wonderful F for Fake in which he is moved to unparalleled eloquence as he contemplates Chartres:

 

 Go on singing.

And speaking of singing, if you're a bi-sensuous reader like I am, who likes to listen to relevant music while reading a particular book, I bring you a few selections for your listening enjoyment. The first is some of the Byzantine Secular Classical music brought to us through time by composer and musicologist Christodoulos Halaris. I first found this stuff at a used record store in Central Square, Cambridge, MA when I was living in the area in the 90s and I still love it.

 

And here's some music composed by the six-wived Henry VIII that is good enough to make me sometimes feel like forgiving him a tiny bit for some of his bullshit:

 

People are complicated, and always have been!

Leonora Carrington's THE HEARING TRUMPET

Houses are really bodies. We connect ourselves with walls, roofs, and objects just as we hang on to our livers, skeletons, flesh and bloodstream. I am no beauty, no mirror is necessary to assure me of this absolute fact. Nevertheless I have a death grip on this haggard frame as if it were the limpid body of Venus herself.

Did you dig One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest but kind of wish you could read it gender-flipped? Did you adore the television series Waiting for God but wish you could actually observe all of Tom Ballard's tall tales but as directed by someone like Lindsay Anderson? Leonora Carrington, my new other favorite sculptor-turned novelist, whom I might end up loving even more than sculptor-turned-novelist B. Catling, has you covered and then some.

I do not invoke Ken Kesey's masterpiece, nor my very favorite Britcom* at all lightly, as we'll see.

The text at the beginning of this post is an early declaration from our heroine, Mrs. Marian Leatherby, who has lived some 15 years with her son, daughter-in-law, grandson, two cats and a red hen and spent her days swapping tall tales with her best friend, Carmella, and sucking violet-flavored lozenges on Carmella's porch -- until one day, the very day Carmella gives her the titular hearing trumpet as a gift, Marian learns via the eavesdropping superpowers it gives her that her family considers her not only a burden but as a disgusting one** and is plotting to send her to live in an institution.

In her beastly family's defense, Marian is given to flights of fancy, very vivid and detailed ones in which she hallucinates entire chapters of her old life that blend almost seamlessly, from her point of view, into present conflicts. She freely admits this herself, telling us early on that "Sleeping and waking are not quite as distinctive as they used to be, I often mix them up." This establishes right away that we're in unreliable narrator territory for what's to come. And oh, what's to come.

The Lightshome (at least that's what I think they called it; ahh, audiobooks!) Home for Senile Old Ladies is a very unusual institution, to say the least. Run by a husband and wife team very much in the Big Nurse role (though not as effective), and rejoicing in the surname of Gambit. Dr. Gambit. Mrs. Gambit. Bahahahaha!), the place has just eight residents when Marian comes to be the ninth. With two exceptions, each resident lives in her own "bungalow" but these quarters are not just cute little houses. No, they are cute little houses in very fanciful forms: a boot, meaning there is at least one Little Old Lady Who Lives in a Shoe, a birthday cake, a cuckoo clock, and Marian herself comes to live in what sounds at first like a lighthouse but might actually be a watchtower, the first floor of which is a masterpiece of trompe-l'œil, appearing to be chock full of useful furniture including a bookcase full of books, but only actually offering a single plain chair. This feels like foreshadowing about something or other that will happen later, but I guess it's just there for the sake of being weird, but that's okay, Leonora Carrington, last of the original Surrealists, can be just as weird as she wants, especially when...

Especially when her story is being narrated by the great Dame Jane Elizabeth Ailwên Phillips, aka Siân Phillips, aka Livia from I, Claudius and Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohaim in David Lynch's Dune, that Siân Phillips and of course I had no business being surprised she could be this flat-out funny but oh my goodness, is she flat-out funny, even if the best wit has a menacing undertone that might not have been what Carrington intended but then again, Siân Phillips saw something in there that made her think of menace and I sure as hell ain't gonna argue with a lady packing a gom jabbar, are you?

Anyway. Marian is quickly embroiled in all kinds of weird little intrigues as she gets to know her fellow residents and the weird regime under which they live. Lightshome is not an expensive place in which to warehouse your unwanted elderly, and part of why is that the residents must help out with the kitchen and gardening work to keep the place going, and must also subject themselves to a weird experiment in spiritual discipline in the form of what Dr. Gambit and his wife (whose permanent strenuous yet unfriendly smile has earned her the nickname of Rachel Rictus behind her back) refer to as The Work. We don't see a lot of this, except at meals, when the ladies are required to listen to one of Dr. Gambit's bizarre lectures about the need for self-regulation and continued effort towards one's moral betterment. For instance, Marian, Dr. Gambit quickly notes, eats way too much cauliflower and this gluttony -- for a vegetable most people have to make an effort to acquire a taste for -- is a great impediment to her spiritual development, as is her tendency not to take "The Movements"*** seriously.

Quickly, Marian finds an escape from Dr. Gambit's hectoring in the form of contemplating a strange image on the wall in the dining room, of a nun who is either blind in one eye or winking at the viewer. As the story unfolds, Marian creates a whole backstory for "The Winking Abbess" only to find that it's true, down to the sonorous and elaborate Spanish name Marian dreamed up for this person. We get a full minisode in the novel's middle that is devoted to this story, which involves witchcraft, impersonation, cross dressing, attempted robbery, Templars and the Holy Grail, all delightfully and breathlessly told via a chronicle a resident smuggles to Marian, which purports to quote directly from period sources of unimpeachable accuracy and is clearly the part that Phillips best enjoyed narrating to us because WOW.

And things get even weirder. Apocalyptically so. Murders occur. Hunger strikes, too. And suddenly there's a new Ice Age?

And I haven't even gotten around to Marian's friend Carmella, who keeps coming up with hare-brained schemes to break Marian out of Lightshome, which she and Marian convinced themselves would be indistinguishable from a penitentiary complete with vicious police dogs, barred windows and hard labor. First Carmella is going to land a helicopter (which she will win in a lottery) and whisk Marian away to safety; later in letters she appears to have decided that it is best to dig a tunnel from her home to the institution's grounds and sneak Marian out that way -- and apparently actually starts digging it, because how else explain how she [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] and can suddenly afford to [REDACTED] and hire a [REDACTED] to [REDACTED]?

Nor can I even begin to describe Marian's fellow residents, each of whom has her own set of quirks and pecadillos and petty grievances and delusions, all of which prove to be at least somewhat germaine to the novel's denouement which involves the Holy Grail again, with these residents being chosen not only to survive an environmental apocalypse that was predicted in a series of riddles they had to solve before getting to meet a secret extra resident but also to restore the Holy Grail to the original Mother Goddess whose earthly avatar is none other than The Winking Abbess.

All this in not quite seven hours of listening (or about 200 pages), which felt far too short; as I mentioned a few times on Twitter, this is a book I very much wanted to savor slowly but compulsively could not stop listening to and it's going to be hard to top for my favorite read of this silly second year of 2020 And Some Months and yes, I know it's only January, but really, I'm not sure that this isn't my favorite read of this stupid decade, maybe even this excreble century. Yeah. It's that great.

*Yes, I love it even more than Blackadder. Because Graham Crowden. And also Stephanie Cole.

**Not that we're shown any evidence that she is in any way disgusting, apart from sporting a bit of a little grey beard because she's stopped plucking her Old Lady Whiskers; still sound of body, of clean and regular habits, not given to outbursts or intrusions. She is given to elaborate flights of fancy involving vivid and improbable memories of her past, but her primary sin appears to be that she is old, doesn't like the television her grandson has introduced to the home, and doesn't like her daughter-in-law very much.

***These, as described, made me wonder hard whether Brit Marling or another of her co-creators of The OA is a fan of this novel. Which means yes, I kept waiting for the Movements to turn out to be intended to open some kind of portal and, honestly, given the strange way this novel ends, they could have had that effect? Or maybe something else did it? Who knows?

Michael Shea's MR CANNYHARME: A NOVEL OF LOVECRAFTIAN TERROR

"If he's sinking to hell, it's definitely to a poet's inferno."

I first encountered the weird fiction stylings of Michael Shea in an anthology, which included his short story "Fat Face" - but that tale is probably my least favorite entry in Cthulhu 2000 and my least favorite Michael Shea as well. While it contains most of the elements of Shea's oeuvre that people love -- seedy downtown life, inexplicable horrors, bizarre monsters and lots of moisture -- there was something about it that just made me say "eh," and move on.

Enter the venerable, the wonderful H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast, in which Chad Fifer and Chris Lackey have been conducting their "Strange Studies of Strange Stories" for over a decade (and it took them most of it to come up with that tagline, bless them), one of the few shows out there of which I never skip an episode, teamed up with Patton Oswalt to evangelize the hell out of Michael Shea's explicitly Cthulhu Mythos fiction, collected now in a terrific volume called Demiurge: The Complete Mythos Tales of Michael Shea and I became a believer!

And yeah, "Fat Face" is not a good example of this stuff. 

With Mr. Cannyharme, we get to see if the combination of Michael Shea and the Cthulhu Mythos can sustain a whole novel. Spoiler: it totally, totally can.

The novel is written as an homage to one of Lovecraft's own stories, "The Hound." You know the one. The one in which the characters are terrified to discover that "the apparently disembodied chatter was in the Dutch language" (Italics very much HPL's). Mr. Cannyharme isn't just "The Hound but 1960s San Francisco," though. He employs "The Hound" as inspiration, as a springboard rather than a model to slavishly copy.

If anything, Mr. Cannyharme makes me think more of Fritz Leiber* than of Lovecraft, specifically Leiber's Our Lady of Darkness, which pits a moderately successful but down-on-his-luck writer of novelizations of TV shows against a dead wizard whose magic was woven from the very geography of the city of San Francisco. 

Mr. Cannyharme takes place in that same city, several social classes down from the beautiful art deco apartment building of Leiber's tale. Shea's characters inhabit an old-fashioned transient hotel. Most of them are closer to death than they are to life with a few dazzling exceptions -- a pimp, Razz and especially his employee DeeAnn, who considers sex work to be the best work and has a good "tight five" of witticisms about it to break the ice and change the mind of anyone who thinks otherwise, are particularly fun to read about -- and none more so than the title character, a little old man bent almost double who shuffles around the city during the day handing out weird little tracts to people of his choosing, but otherwise keeps to himself. Or does he?

Pitted against the horrors, along with Razz and DeeAnn, are Jack, the hotel's graveyard shift desk clerk who is pounding out a novel on an old Olympic typewriter and pining for his ex-wife between calls to buzz in the hotel's residents after hours and to supply them with illegal drugs; a very haunted and lost young woman named Brittany who trades sexual favors for her rent (but only with Jack) and is in turn one of Jack's best customers for her comforting "blankie" of drugs that let her hide for a little while from the horrors of her abused childhood and her growing awareness that something really, really isn't right about their building; and a few side characters, such as the barely teenaged daughter of the hotel's perpetually bickering husband and wife managers, the Patels, who run the place on behalf of some richer Patels and turn a blind eye to the rest of the goings-on in the building.

Shea loved San Francisco, lovee especially its seedy underbelly, and it shows on every page. Street scenes full of hustlers and junkies and every other kind of low-life bring out the lyric poet in him for paragraph after paragraph of rhapsodies that are as intoxicating as the contents of Jack's little baggies.

But the drugs Jack is slinging these days are mostly uppers, so even when we're just enjoying the scenery, it's energetic and invigorating:

Down in the street outside the Hyperion, Jack just stands there a moment, taking in the early evening. The candy- colored neons are coming on, the signals blaze, all the tail-lights and headlights river and roar, and above it all a first shy star or two gleams in the purple sky. The sidewalks throng, the working stiffs -- many Latins and Easterners -- threading through the low-lifes... He's right where he should be.

But this is no Visit Beautiful San Francisco tourist copy. Zoom in on individuals and it's even more, ah, vivid:

Below the man's gaping mouth a second bloody mouth gapes still more widely. Sliced meat its lips, and gore its pendant spittle, hanging in crusty drapes down both the man's shoulders.

I mean, yuck, but I've also got to admire the craft, here. And it's this craft that is at the heart of the novel; Cannyharme first ensnares his victim-accomplices by means of poetry, possibly tailored to each reader, and some of those he so ensnares, if they've artistic pretensions already, themselves reach new heights of expression. And Shea doesn't just settle for telling us that their output has improved; he shows us exactly what they've written, indulging in even crazier word-lust and imagery in whole passages of demented verse that would be the best thing about this novel of everything else weren't so good.

And yes, I cried happy little tears for the little world of resistance the novel's handful of survivors build for themselves in the last chapter. Their victory is hard-won and temporary, but as in the denouement of almost all of Shea's Mythos stories, they know they have a fighting chance if they stick together. And keep an eye out for a being in a wildly patterned Hawaiian shirt. Oops, that last bit didn't age super duper well, but c'est la guerre. 

So yeah, Shea gives good novel. And my resolve is redoubled to keep seeking him out. I hear good things about this fella Nifft, for instance.

*But,  of course, Leiber was inspired by Lovecraft. He just hated the world a lot less than cranky, prejudiced misanthrope Howard did.

Neal Stephenson's SEVENEVES

Neal Stephenson has never disappointed me, but he sure has tried my patience, and that has never been more true than with his 2015 time sink, Seveneves, which novel I have had on Mount TBR since it was published but always kept misreading the title of. Lots and lots of sexy things distracted me from a big ol' chunk of text called Seveneyes.

I finally got around to it this winter, in audio book form, narrated in part by one Mary Robinette Kowal and while I know she wasn't chairing giant international genre conventions back then, I still wonder how in the world she found the time to record all of this audio, to say nothing of rehearsing it, figuring out how she was going to handle character voices* and mastering more technobabble (albeit probably 100% scientifically accurate, because this is Neal Stephenson) than Stephenson has thrown at us to date** all while writing, rewriting, editing, promoting and narrating her own books. I mean, wow.

At bottom, Seveneves, the first third or so anyway, is a generation ship story, with a twist, in that the ship doesn't go very far away from its point of origin. 

Disaster has struck and is going to keep on striking for thousands of years and the good old blue marble of Earth will be uninhabitable long before those thousands of years are up. Humanity has been caught napping, in that it doesn't have any other stores of DNA in the solar system yet, as in nope, no colonies on the Moon (heh), not Mars, nobody in the asteroid belt, nothing but the good old International Space Station and a bunch of satellites and whatnot in orbit around the good old blue marble that's soon gonna be a good old red marble and look a bit bigger, but there was a very small window of time between the original disaster and the level of recurring disaster that means the end of the world as we know it, so humanity realized it had two options for survival: burrow deep underground and hope to survive as a subterranean population, or expand our presence in orbit. As things progress, some half-assed individual effort is done off-page about trying for the first, but Seveneves is about the second: expanding our presence in orbit, by expanding the International Space Station itself and also building a distributed swarm of little space-arks, holding like four or five people each, set up with basic life support and some possible capacity for growing algae for food and oxygen and whatnot. The "Arklets," as they come to be known, are thus not meant as individual arks but as parts of a scattered whole held together by the power of computation and based around the ISS, which is nicknamed Izzy. It's a cool and highly plausible scenario that I've not seen a lot of yet, so this is more than enough to grab and hold my interest, but...

Of necessity, when something is scientifically plausible, and being imagined by a writer like Neal Stephenson, there's going to be more passages explaining more math and science than most people are ever expected to page through in normal life. But we are Science Fiction Fans and normal standards do not apply, am I right?

But still, for every line of dialogue or description of actual things happening, there's about a paragraph of background information to put the dialogue or happenings in context, and I cannot advocate for its exclusion or reduction but, golly.

As you might expect, most of the characters are scientists, and they are unquestionably heroic as they get problem after problem thrown at them: how much can the ISS be modified and how can it be accomplished; how much raw material is needed to build how many Arklets and how fast can we get them made; who gets to fly on those Arklets; who gets to live on the ISS after all the Arklets are up and the Earth has gone from blue marble to red fireball; how can we keep everybody breathing and eating and pooping and not getting cancer from cosmic rays; how are we gonna keep everybody from going crazy; how are we going to keep everybody safe from micrometeorites and other space hazards; what are we going to do when all the propellant is used up... which of these problems need to be solved first; how many of them can be postponed until later; how can we make sure there is a later in which to solve them; what kind of stuff do we need to focus on making on earth to enhance the Ark Swarm's chances...

All of that is drama enough for a whole novel right there, but that's just one-third of Seveneves. Like my favorite Stephen Baxter novel that I will never read again (Evolution; it's an amazing book but I Just Can't), Seveneves is more interested in what can go wrong *after* the Anthropocene world we know is gone, and wants to extend that after way farther than most books do.

Anyway, as you might expect, all of this doesn't leave a lot of room for us to get to know characters beyond what their scientific or sociological specialty is, but Stephenson does at least try. Unusually for him, this time his greatest success at this is with his villain figure, and man, oh, man, in this villain figure and her effects he kind of perfectly prefigured our big socio-political dilemmas in the 2020s because his villain figure (in the first third of the novel) is the abruptly former President of the United States, a woman named Julia Bliss Flaherty (referred to as "JBF" most of the time), and it's a pity she's a cishet woman because she really needed a mustache to twirl. At first she just seems like the kind of tough but charismatic figure we wish we could have voted for in 2016 instead of the the choices we got, and she seems to handle the disaster on her hands with admirable clarity and honor, pushing for an international accord that includes in some of its finer print a very firm declaration that World Leaders Are Not Allowed On The Ark but hoo dogies, look at that: the very first major hazard post-red marble is an unexpected hunk of metal sort of lurching around in the middle of the ark swarm, causing near collisions and scrambling the algorithms that govern the swarm almost to the point of not being able to govern the swarm and who do you think is inside that hunk of metal? Armed with a gun, aka the single worst thing to have in an outer space scenario? 

Yeah.

And JBF still thinks she's in charge of everything, despite not understanding anything except how to convince people she is in charge. And when she finds out she isn't in charge anymore, instead of accepting things as they are and just being grateful there was a Swarm for her to illegally escape to and looking for a way to maybe actually be useful in the Roslin mode***, she almost immediately starts stirring up shit and honestly, I was bracing myself for her to start convincing people that spacesuits aren't necessary, that's just a lie told by Big Spacesuit to keep us all dependent on them, man. But what she does is almost as bad.

Mary Robinette Kowal, by the way, had *way* too much fun delivering JBF's lines, which without exception made me want to reach through my soundbar and knock out some teeth or something.

JBF's presence in the Swarm puts the reader in an interesting and uncomfortable position. While she is shit-stirring, the person whom the governing bodies of the Earth actually did put in charge, a German scientist, has had to declare what amounts to martial law in the days immediately following the complete destruction of everything left on Earth, because in the early days of a disaster cooperation is more important than feelings even when the conditions are not as extreme as they are when there's just a few millimeters of metal between the people with feelings and hard vaccuum and the feelings are every human left alive (amounting to just over a thousand; almost exactly the size of my little hometown) mourning the billions of dead left behind. The realities of physics and biology give compelling reasons to demand the kind of control that is established in these early days (as all the former goverments and the scientific community of Old Earth understood and codified in the Swarm's constitution) and the reader's rooting interest is thus pulled toward the side of the tightly-controlled soft martial law society the German and the rest of the scientists aboard the ISS have established, at least temporarily.  Which, look, it feels really, really weird in January of 2022, just a few days after the first anniversary of the biggest coup attempt in American history, which aimed to establish a right-wing authoritarian government in place of the pluralism we've always strived for, to be rooting for the authoritarians and against the people who are opposing it and claiming that the majority of the population is not getting its fair say in decision making, OK?

Dammit, Neal!

But all of this is just build-up, really, to the big question that Stephenson wants to pose to us. Uh, big spoilers ahead for this seven year old book, Seveneves (whoa).

All that prologue just explains how a genetic bottleneck comes to be. And it's a hell of a bottleneck. Break the book's title into two words: Seven Eves. That's right, the human race gets narrowed down to just seven fertile women, heiresses to the failures of every attempt to establish genetic diversity in whatever version of the human race survives to recolonize a future Earth.**** Fortunately they still have the equipment and the know-how to use it to create children via parthenogenesis. But wait, there's more. Because the know-how and equipment also come with the ability to screen for the kind of genetic disorders that become such a big problem when a population gets inbred, screen for and correct it. Like, way beyond CRISPR, or at least CRISPR plus a lot more specific knowledge about the human genome and how it's expressed in bodies than we have now.

But so then, what do we want to screen for and eliminate from the future human race, ladies? What heritable medical conditions count as diseases and what are just traits? What about mental illnesses? What about the autism spectrum? What about hairiness? And what genetic babies are we willing to throw out with the genetic bathwater, given how little we still understand about what genes code for what traits -- but we do know that it's not a simple one gene to one trait ratio there, and what if it turns out a gene for an undesirable thing is also linked to a desirable thing or carries the potential to develop a favorable trait in a future environment that we just haven't imagined yet?

These questions matter a lot to me as I continue to cope with one of those disorders that has both a genetic and an environmental component but may also be related to exposure to viruses. It's left me semi-crippled and, due to a whole passel of medication allergies, unable to do much about it and so virtually unemployable. The Nazis would definitely have euthanized me. I'm sure a lot of my neighbors in a blood red state will be eager to do so if certain scenarios they dream about come to pass and that sort of thing becomes possible and acceptable again (which, it kind of already is, as any casual look at what horror stories the disabled community routinely share online about dealing with the U.S. healthcare system, insurance companies, physicians who are trained to blame patients for all of their problems especially if they're fat, etc.). But the genetic component is actually a very common one in the Northern European gene pool and has persisted for so many generations. It must have some survival value, not to have been eliminated long ago by Natural Selection, right? Yet here I sit, reaching for my cane to go back to bed to try to get some sleep after having been wakened in the middle of the night like I always am when the one weak-ass pain medicine that doesn't make me projectile vomit or go straight into anaphylactic shock wears off and all the joints in my body take turns setting off the kind of alarm bells that are really kind of meant for only the dire injuries like a limb having been hacked off or crushed, but in my body just means "hey, we're still alive, I guess."

But I digress.

But so, you can see why that scene smack dab in the middle of the book where seven women have the power and responsibility of deciding what genes the future human race can and can't have but only the really bitchy psychotic cannibal (who just sort of appears in this part of the story but whose back story I really wish I could have gotten in at least as much detail as I got about the evolution of Every Kind of Robot) among them is really making any argument about how maybe some genes we think are bad because of how they're expressed now might not be bad in future scenarios and how it's the potential for new combinations that's the important thing we are going for in trying to assure genetic diversity in the first place and...?

Egads. I listen to a lot of audio books when my body won't let me sleep. Usually I catch myself drifting off, rewind about 15 minutes or so to reset the bookmark, and turn over to conk out for a while. But ending Part 2 of the audio book on that note, that scene, had me lying miserably awake the rest of the night just appalled and terrified and unable to get the scene out of my head.

That's a new achievement for Neal Stephenson, in my personal experience anyway. I mean, bee tee dubs, I had already been up way past my (gigglesnort) bedtime just listening because, you know, the book has lots of good stuff in it and I wanted to find out what was going to happen next and stuff.

Unfortunately, what I most wanted to see as far as what was going to happen next and stuff takes place off the pages. While I am no stranger to and sometimes a fan of books that stretch out over eons of time a la Olaf Stapledon's First and Last Men, a 5000-year-leap between the Meeting of the Seven Eves and the next section of the book robbed me of what I'd really been looking forward to: seeing how these seven women (actually eight, but one of the eight survivors of the Swarm was already past menopause) would rebuild a whole civilization from the products of their own wombs and the genetics lab. We get glimpses of this in the form of flashbacks, but not nearly enough and I spent a good part of the last third of the novel, one big undifferentiated mass (even moreso in audio book form, in which it's a 10+ hour slog of a "chapter" simply called "Five Thousand Years Later", narrated by drowsy-voiced Will Damron instead of Kowal), resenting that Stephenson had skipped the most interesting thing in the book.

But Stephenson was more interested in extrapolating what humanity would be like divided into seven "races" according to the heredities established for them by the Seven Eves, and, of course, Neal gotta Neal, in describing in minute detail all of the fancy futuristic technology these races develop for living and thriving in space and for slowly recolonizing the Earth.

But about these "races"... The descendants of JBF and a nasty piece of work who is the only other survivor of JBF's dumbest plan named Aida are basically in a cold war with all of the other kin-groups, 3 billion strong after 5000 years and living in Stephenson's version of Alastair Reynold's famous Glitter Band -- a ring of habitat satellites circling the Earth, waiting for it to become habitable again. The "Julians" and "Aidans" have dominion in about 1/4 to 1/3 of the habitats, conveniently contiguous, while the "Moirans" and "Teklans"**** and "Dinans" and "Kamalans" (or whatever her descendants are called; rotten thing about audio books is you don't see how names are spelled) and "Ivans" try to give them a wide berth but now that Earth is almost ready for resettlement, the question basically becomes just how much of humankind's worst ideas and tendencies are going to accompany it back down the gravity well.

But really? If I wanted to re-read Clans of the Alaphane Moon, I would just do that, am I right? 

At least there's some neato technology to enjoy, like gliders that are basically inflatable suits that ride the thermals up to "hangars" in the upper atmosphere that lift passengers up into orbit without burning any chemical or nuclear fuel, to say nothing of giant orbital habitats that can house, e.g. complete ecosystems including things like 800 year old fir trees. I mean, this is the future we want, kind of? Maybe? Except for all the dumb factionalism, which I thought is what the original Seven Eves really meant to do away with, didn't they? Or did they?

Oh, and there's kind of a plot to this last section, involving the assembling of a working group including one member of each race, to take on a mission that is kept secret from them and us for far too long; by the time the characters found out what they have been sent to earth to do (it involves problems that have arisen since bands of "Sooners" jumped the gun on resettling the earth and the discovery that some of the undergrounders survived and have their own ideas about who should get to do what with New Earth and zzzz) I really didn't care. I came very close to not finishing this one, my friends. I really liked the first two-thirds but this last part couldn't end fast enough for me. If had been anyone but Stephenson, I probably would have just marked this DNF. The sunk cost fallacy is losing its hold over me as I age, but it's Neal Stephenson, man! He's never let me down!

Except, he almost did. To the point where I kind of want to give the Battlestar Galactica advice to anyone considering reading this who hasn't yet. Stop when you hit "Five Thousand Years Later." Like with BSG, you'll feel this is a horrible thing to do and you'll be so curious about how all of this is going to end but just let your own imagination end it for you instead. Stop watching BSG after the first half of season three; stop reading Seveneves after the Council of the Seven Eves. Maybe even just before the Council. You'll have enjoyed two-third of a terrific story without losing your faith in the guy what made it.

*About which, sigh. While not quite as irritating as when male narrators put on a breathy falsetto for female characters and make them all sound like Bambi the Big Busted Brainless Blue-eyed Bimbo, the reverse strategy of Elizabeth Holmes-ing it up is pretty damned close, and sounds painful. I wish more narrators would just let the dialogue and its tags do the job -- and that their producers/directors/etc would let them. It would be fine, really. As long as the author did their job.

**I haven't read his new book yet, either, so I may be wrong.

***For those who don't click through and haven't seen Battlestar Galactica, Laura Roslin is a head of civilian government on a space fleet who, when a new planet is settled by its population, steps down and resumes her original work as a schoolteacher.

****And oh, get this: Moirans and Teclans are understood to share a special bond because the original Moira and the original Tecla were lovers. That's right. Five thousand years later, we're to understand that generations and generations of a couple's parthenogenic children are still mostly attracted to one another. Eyeroll.

****And holy mother of fuck, I wonder if Neal Stephenson is a Gene Wolfe fan because wouldn't this be a bang-up prequel to the Solar Cycle?

Un-Su Kim's THE CABINET (tr by Sean Lin Halbert)

The office worker hero, Mr. Kong, of Un-Su Kim's The Cabinet graduated from college just a few years after I did, with a liberal arts degree of uncertain occupational utility, as I did, but unlike me, when he couldn't find a job, he took all of the money he inherited from his mother (who died the same year he graduated) and spent it on 450 cases of beer and spent 178 days in his apartment drinking it, eating peanuts, and ignoring bill collectors on the phone. I nominate Mr. Kong for Most Generation X Literary Hero, Maybe Ever.

He doesn't share this Important and Popular Fact about himself until midway through the novel, by which time I had spent several hours envying him just a little, for not only did he eventually find a job, he found the Gen X dream job: one in which he is expected to do very, very little, under next to no supervision, one in which he is basically working for free and getting paid to wait around and do you know how many books you could read in a year with a job like that? I do. It's approximately 200. Ask me how I know.

Being male and not-me in lots of other ways, though, perhaps stereotypically but hey, including living in South Korea and having grown up in that system, Mr. Kong feels bad about his dream job, though, too bad to read or otherwise amuse himself, so he spends his work hours staring out the window at a lacklustre cityscape until one day, after trying to convince his nominal boss to please give him something useful to do (denied!) he wanders upstairs to discover the titular Cabinet.

This Cabinet, Cabinet 13, contains some 40 years of files on people all over the world who have exhibited bizarre abilities or whose bodies have gotten inexplicably and improbably strange. Like growing a lizard in place of your tongue strange. Like suddenly falling deeply asleep and staying that way for hundreds of days straight and waking up really refreshed and rarin' to go. Like suddenly growing a gingko tree out of his hand. He meets the professor who has been curating these files and becomes his assistant and starts taking phone calls from these people, most of whom are not just inconvenienced by their weird abilities and experiences but are seriously suffering from them, which is why they are referred to as "Symptomers."

The first half of the novel is mostly a catalog of these sufferers until Kong is moved to take a trip with one of them, not exactly a Symptomer but one who has been calling the Symptomer hotline for years because he is absolutely convinced that the only way his life could ever be worth living is if he can be transformed into a cat. The trip is to see a magician (because why not? After seven some years of reading about and talking to people whose prosthetic fingers have started merging into their flesh as though they were becoming real, would you be sure that a magician can't do what he claims he can?) who might be able to help Kong's poor companion realize his feline dream. It doesn't go that well, and Kong actually, finally gets in trouble. For trying to help. Because this is a Freak of the Week TV show as refracted through a Kafka novel.

I mean, the novel isn't named for the Symptomers. It's named for the Cabinet. And its central concern, if there is one, is with who will take over its management after the professor, who is quite elderly and goes into a terminal coma not long after we "meet" him, is no more. The professor hopes Kong will; another party, The Syndicate, hopes someone else, of their choosing, will.

Translator Sean Lin Halbert and narrator Jun Hwang combine to deliver the stories from the cabinet and Kong's own story in a flat and monotonous tone and style that perfectly drives home the bureacracy + bizarre formula that makes The Cabinet worth opening. Even when Hwang makes an awkward-sounding pause in the middle of the sentence that might be a product of his actual Korean accent, the effect of the pause conveys that unimpressed can't-be-bothered-to-emote-over-this-tedious-stuff tone one expects of a seasoned bureaucrat who's seen it all, even the little lizard eyes peeking out at him from a lady's mouth.

The effect is often quite funny in the way similar scenes in Terry Gilliam's Brazil are quite funny, but there's more than a little Juzo Itami funny to be had as well, as when Kong takes a young woman out to dinner and she binge eats sushi, gets drunk on sake, and then causes a minor scene in the restaurant when he pays the bill; she wants to pay it, she was the pig, she operatically shrieks! The whole thing would fit wonderfully as a scene in Tampopo.* This is quickly followed by the funniest kidnapping scene since Blackadder was kidnapped by the henchmen of Evil Prince Ludwig.**

It gets very difficult to keep track of The Cabinet's sparse plot, though, at least in audio form, as scenes from Kong's life drift into new narratives from the files and are frequently peppered with imagined conversations between Kong and the files' subjects. I suspect this is deliberate on both Kim's, Halbert's and Hwang's parts, creating a form of magical realism that blurs into enjoyable confusion. Just let the weirdness wash over you. It's a short novel. You can enjoy it again anytime you want, and I suspect it will be pretty different each time you do.

I look forward to finding out.

*And I'm not crossing cultures here; the restaurant serves both Korean and Japanese style sushi and the chef is a former sumo wrestler, and thus the scene could happen as readily in Tokyo as in Seoul. So there.

**There, I've moved forward in my references from 1985 to 1986.

Max Barry's JENNIFER GOVERNMENT

Reading like an updated Snow Crash from the point of view from the point of view of characters who actually live in our future instead of one with made-up names for corporations (and minus all the pseudo-Sumerian hive mind stuff), Max Barry's Jennifer Government is a good old-fashioned page-turner dressed up in an ultramodern (well, circa 2003, but its satire hits as hard now as it did then) "suit so cheap that it shines."

Our title character, Jennifer, wasn't always Jennifer Government. Once she was Jennifer Maher, when she worked for a marketing firm called Maher, because in this version of Next Sunday, AD, instead of corporations buying naming rights to years, they instead bestow their names on their employees in lieu of surnames. This extends even to little kids, who take on the name of the school they attend, which school is itself named for the corporation that owns and operates it; hence a character we meet even before we meet Jennifer is a school girl who rejoices in the name of Hayley McDonald's. Because of course she does. And Jennifer's own daughter (she is a single mom in addition to being a stupendous badass with a gun or judo moves) is Kate Mattel, because she goes to a Mattel school. They're really good schools, you guys. Just ask all the Barbie dolls. Which, we later learn, is one of Jennifer's nicknames, but that's not important right now.

If you can't guess already, I really kind of love Jennifer Government, you guys. She's deadly with any number of weapons or her own killer gams or fists, and her catch phrase is an all-purpose conversation stopper that works as well on her offspring as on the bad guys protesting their innocence as she hauls them in: "And yet."

And yet.

Jennifer lives in a world in which the Neoliberal dream came true beyond its dreamers' wildest desires. The United States itself has become a sort of supercorporation, and has franchised out its (heavily revised) Constitution and power structures to huge swathes of territory around the world, including, most recently, Australia (author Max Barry's own home), where most of the action of this novel takes place. There is still a cold war of sorts, but it's between competing customer loyalty clubs. Etc.

As the story begins, a hapless boob named Hack Nike (tah-wang! Bullseye), an unhappy Marketing Operative for the sneaker and sportswear giant who owns his last name, blunders into a conversation between some high powered sociopaths on another floor of Nike's Australia headquarters, and the sociopaths offer him an on the spot promotion if he'll take on a very special assignment for them. They've got a dynamite campaign to capitalize on the success of the company's Cartmanesque strategy of not letting anyone buy their newest sneaker line, then only letting a very few buy it, driving demand to a fever pitch. The company has chosen to next announce that each of its Niketown stores around the USA (which, remember, includes lots more territory than just the original 50 states) is getting four pairs of the new shoes to sell, but they're actually shipping many more. The plan is to just fool their deranged fans into paying too much for sneakers they still think are totally exclusive, but the two Johns Nike whom Hack has met want to go this one better. Actually, many more better. And instead of "better" they really mean "worse." As in, they want Hack to stake out the Sydney mall where their local Niketown is and shoot up to ten customers or would-be customers outside of the store. As in with an actual gun. Because remember how once upon a time people were killing each other in "the ghettos" for coveted shoes? That was such good buzz, man. That drove everybody crazy. Let's do that, but more!

But Hack deserves his first name, and cocks it all up, partly out of queasiness, partly out of naivete, and the ensuing bloodbath draws the attention of the legendary Jennifer Government, who, for reasons we don't learn until much later in the novel, already had her barcode-tattooed eye on the Johns Nike and was ready to pounce.

Caught in the crossfire of the Niketown Incident is the aforementioned Haley McDonald's, who was there at the store hoping to make an investment in these shoes to sell later for much more than she paid, except none of the ATMs at the mall are willing to loan her the cash to do it (because of course ATMs in this world can also issue loans; since they have offered cash "advances" on credit cards for yoinks in the real world, it's really not that weird, if you think about it*). "Lucky" for her, a young stockbroker Buy Mitsui, who's been down on his luck until a friend tempted him into some insider trading that saved his bacon, witnessed her distress and decided, what the hell, he's kind of celebrating, and just gives her the money outright.

Not long after, Buy is desperately administering first aid to a bleeding out Haley and Jennifer Government is in a gun battle with mercenaries from the NRA in the background. Because of course the National Rifle Association has become a mercenary corps.

The whole novel goes at this blistering pace as we also meet the hapless-but-really-good-with-guns Billy, who kind of by accident becomes Billy NRA and is quickly mistaken for another guy named Bill NRA and gets swept up into a series of NRA operations in the wake of the Niketown Incident; Hack Nike's girlfriend Violet No Last Name until she becomes Violet ExxonMobil when the petroleum giant agrees to purchase her bespoke intrusion software for three million dollars that she has trouble collecting on; and even get a bit of goodness from the point of the view of one of the Johns Nike. The one whom Jennifer Government knew back in the day when both of them shared a last name.

For all that its milieu echos that of Snow Crash, what Jennifer Government wound up feeling the most like was a Bruce Sterling novel. Jennifer is an action hero par excellance but Kate keeps her grounded and gives her a vulnerability that makes her a more interesting and well-rounded character. By the time she and Buy Mitsui get around to getting to know each other, well, what you want to happen, happens, in much the way Greta and Oscar come together in Sterling's greatest novel, Distraction** but almost before the reader realizes what is taking place, she is off, gun in hand, to hunt her quarries in London and Los Angeles while the aforementioned Loyalty Club Cold War starts heating up. There are gun battles and chases and bizarre confrontations and the John Nike that is still standing delivers a seriously whackadoo speech in Parliament (yeah, that Parliament) that writes more checks than 75 asses could cash, let alone his.

Can Jennifer Government and her fellow operatives save the day? Will she get a chance to give John Nike a piece of her mind and/or put some holes in his hide? Will Corporate American finally once and for all achieve the entirely unregulated marketplace of its dreams? Gotta read to find out.

It's almost obscene how much fun this book is, you guys.

*Lots about this book are going to make you need a shower. Many showers.

**Which, why is that still not available as an ebook, man? It's so good! I've worn out my original mass market paperback of it even though my hands can't freaking handle paper books anymore.