Jack Womack's AMBIENT

My next read in Jack Womack's Dryco universe, Ambient leads off with a slightly alarming precis of how this world came to be, a series of events that we witnessed peripherally in other novels but is nicely encapsulated here. You'll see right away what made my eyebrows shoot into the stratosphere:

After the Long Island accident and the birth of Ambients; after the revelation of the Q documents in the loss of spirit thereof; after the economic emergency, the resulting currency devaluation, and what was called, by some, the unavoidable regrouping of structures, came the twelve months known by Ambients, and now by most, as the Goblin Year.

Our narrator, Seamus "Shameless" O'Malley, whom we met in Elvissey as the CEO of Dryco, then immediately shares that his mother died in a pro-life riot.

Ambient first saw print in 1987.

I have long maintained that evaluating science fiction on its prescience is the least interesting way to talk about it, and to that notion I still hold, but I couldn't let this bit just float by. What the hell kind of Q documents was Womack thinking about back in 1987?*

Anyway, Ambient. What is specifically meant by the term "Ambient" in this novel is another one of those slippery matters we're left to figure out through context for quite a while, like Elvissey's "regooding" or the still-mysterious-to-me "jabbernowling," but as for the novel bearing Ambient as its title, it is a prequel to Elvissey and but seems again like a sequel to Random Acts of Senseless Violence; an early scene likely even features a counterpart to the father of RAoSV's Lola**, here working a terrible, demaning job as a bookstore clerk in a world that has so devalued literacy that many (including O'Malley as he begins this novel) seem to regard it as an all but unattainable skill. 

In this scene, O'Malley, is a sort of body man to the current CEO of Dryco, Mister Dryden, a casually cruel man who takes pleasure in mistreatment of lesser beings for its own sake. In their encounter with the clerk who reminded me of Lola's father, Dryden throws the books he selects at the poor clerk, who is expected to catch them even as they come to number in the double digits while the clerk scrambles to follow him around the bookstore. When, inevitably, the poor clerk drops one, Dryden complains that it is now slightly scratched and demands that the store manager (whom Lola hates so for his own mistreatment of her father in RAoSV) get him a new and undamaged one, even though the damage is Dryden's fault if it's anyone's. To drive his point home, he smashes the scratched book over the manager's head until its binding splits, so it's truly unsalable. The store manager merely accepts the abuse as his due. We are spared what vengeance he takes on the poor clerk later on. 

O'Malley, like Dryden's sort-of mistress, sort-of hired gladiator, Avalon (who is written as a conventionally attractive, exaggeratedly cis bombshell but I kept imagining as a cute trans girl played by Charlie Jane Anders in the movie adaptation), merely watches as the scene unfolds. Just another shopping trip with the boss...

We know from the jacket copy of Ambient that this is more or less the story of how O'Malley comes to replace Dryden as the head honcho at Dryco, so I reckon it's important that we see that Dryden is a monster and O'Malley a decent guy... except the mature and empowered O'Malley we met in Elvissey wasn't too nice either, so it's hard, going into Ambient, to regard O'Malley as a sympathetic character whose point of view we will gladly share. I wonder how different this experience is for people who read Ambient before Elvissey.

We learn early in the book that there are more three fairly rigid castes in American society in the Dryco universe: owners and their servants (not slave owners as such, but rather what we would now consider oligarchs. What they own are the companies that own everything else), "boozhies" (the old bourgeois) and the Superfluous (what used to be both the working poor and the indigent, now lumped together in one big group "felt to deserve no shielding from the visscitudes of life). 

Womack, by the way, even anticipated the work from home trend, but Dryco at least has not only quashed it but found a way to make required office hours even more hellish than they are now:

A red light flashed over one of the cubicles. One of the office maintenants rolled over and unlocked the stocks that held the young woman's feet. It guided her across the room, toward the lav; her white cane helped her in tapping out the way. The system had flaws; some employees went insane -- they were fired -- and some grew blind -- the ones whose fingers slipped were given Braille keyboards, at cost.

Employees are literally chained to their desks and disabled employees are made to pay for their own accommodations. That last bit didn't surprise me all that much though; at my last job I had to buy my own vertical computer mice and split keyboard. To paraphrase Womack's buddy William Gibson, the dystopia is already here; it's just not evenly distributed yet. It's pretty funny, though, having O'Malley call attention to this detail, knowing as we do what kind of garbage he's going to allow/cause on his own watch in Elvissey. 

The Statue of Liberty's arm was blown off; there was a photo of the amputee, rather resembling an Ambient in her newmade loss.

Which brings us to Ambients, finally revealed as a subculture straight out of Gandahar/Light Years except they don't have blue skin. Originally the label -- which they are very proud to explain as referring to the fact that as disabled human beings in an urban environment, they are both everywhere and seemingly invisible (it just takes lots of effort not to see them, if you know what I mean) -- only referred to a small population of children who were born on Long Island after The Incident -- possibly a nuclear detonation -- there, but over time Ambient society has come to encompass not only anybody born with birth defects or disfigurements but also anybody who, like O'Malley's sister Enid***, have come so to identify with them that they have voluntarily had body parts amputated. The Ambients have developed a society partially encompassing the Ambient music genre (but not as in Brian Eno's airport music; as described it sounds a lot more like some kind of very energetic punk/thrash that just happens to be played by, e.g. one-armed bassists) and partly a characteristic increased agility forced by the need to function in a world that does not accommodate their lacks of arms or other disabilities. It's as hard not to think of Philip K. Dick's Hoppy Harrington as it is not to think of the Prester John-inspired blue mutants of Gandahar, though this novel's group lack those people's psionic abilities. You still don't want to mess with them, though. 

Interestingly, carrying on with a theme I first started really noticing in Elvissey, the Ambients are basically Manichaeans, or at least something close to Gnostics -- alt-universe Elvis from Elvissey was actually a pretty doctrinaire Valentinian Gnostic, which mean that upon learning that Dryco expected him to act as a god, Elvis got very, very upset and really didn't want to. In Valentinian Gnosticism and related doctrines, the creator god/Demiurge is actually evil, having captured countless souls and imprisoned them in the material universe to torture them and keep them ignorant of the real, radiant and beautiful nature of the actual universe beyond their capacities. We don't really get an idea of how widespread this faith might have been in the alt-universe, but it might explain the streak of nihilism that characterizes that nasty place.

I found Ambient interesting in its details but the least interesting in terms of plot an execution of the Dryco books so far. As far as its plotting, Ambient is basically a mob novel with noir flavoring as O'Malley gets drawn into his employer's long-fantasized plan to finally get rid of The Old Man - Dryden's ancient father, who founded Dryco on a drug-smuggling fortune with the help of a Latin American cartel or two, then seized on various opportunities posed by the disintegration of civil society as outlined in the precis with which I started this post. The kind of guy who can do all that (with the help of an equally ruthless and sociopathic wife who is long dead when Ambient gets going) is never a very good father, so nobody is surprised when Dryden drafts O'Malley for his final vengeance and dangles Avalon as bait/reward. There are double-crosses and plenty more random acts of violence and we do get to see more of what's become of New York but I'm running out of steam on these novels. I'm still going to read the rest of them, but I need a break from all of the explosions and gunfire and inhumanity. Woof.

*Actually, I know what kind of Q we're dealing with here, because like our Kipple King, Philip Kindred Dick, before him, Jack Womack seems to enjoy getting lost in the weeds of biblical apocrypha; in this case Q stands for Qumran. And Kipple we shall be if the other Q people latch on to this Q.

**I assumed this was indeed Lola's father while reading that passage, but what can only be Lola herself shows up in an insane scene later in the book, at an age and in a state that puts this story well past the time of her father's demise.

***Who is revealed to have attended the same tony private girls' school, Brearley, as RAoSV's Lola Hart and was likely one of her schoolmates. 

Marina & Sergey Dyachenko's VITA NOSTRA (Tr Julia Meitov Hersey, Narr Jessica Ball)

Book review sites, jacket copy and other official and unofficial arms of what passes for book promotion these days all seem to regard the remarkable Marina & Sergey Dyachenko's Vita Nostra as "dark academia" but the inestimable Popqueenie (to whom I owe a million more thanks for recommending this book to me) and I agree that where this book and its sequels really belong is in a category we've created, Beyond Yacht Rock-style, as The Magic of Language. To wit, it has more in common with books like Pontypool Changes Everything, The Flame Alphabet and Embassytown than it does with such wizarding school classics as the TERFing Classist Lady's books and Lev Grossman's The Magicians. Most of all, it is of a kind with R.F. Kuang's Babel, which overlaps these two made-up sub-genres in much the same way.

The school in Vita Nostra, the Torpa Institute of Special Technologies -- is a lot more rigorous than most literary magic schools, and I don't just say this because they use actual Latin on matriculation day. The curriculum is much more conceptual, bizzare, nearly incomprehensible, because in the Dyachenkos' magical system, the students first must undergo a lot of weird training designed to fundamentally alter, first their neurological makeups and, later, their very nature as physical beings on this earth, before they can ever even dream of exercising any abilities that defy or alter the laws of physics and other norms we consider as constituting realilty. Indeed; Vita Nostra feels to be fundamentally concerned with what the effect of supernatural-ish abilities would be on a human's nervous system than with depicting any jolly accidents with turning each other into critters or misfiring with a magic wand.

Our point of view character is a young woman, Sasha Samokhina, who catches the notice of a Torpa recruiter while on vacation with her mother. As Sasha's long-divorced Mum meets a wonderful new man and cautiously begins a relationship at a seaside resort, Sasha is stalked by an unsettling man in dark glasses and dark clothing that might at first seem like a Man in Black type but turns out to be much stranger and scarier; without ever spelling anything out or giving any overt demonstration of his power or how it works, he asserts a sudden and uncontestable power over Sasha. Within moments of his finally addressing her, she just knows that if she doesn't obey him, he has the power to destroy everything she loves or could love. Her Mum and Mum's new boyfriend, Valentin, are suddenly hostages to Sasha's good behavior.

Through a series of bizarre commands and requirements that begin with her being trapped in a time loop reliving the same single day of her vacation endlessly until she finally agrees to a bizarre sort of exercise program, and follow Sasha through her final year of high school, this man, Farit Kozhennikov, steers her right clear of her intended future -- a philology degree from her local university, which she will attend while continuing to live at home with her Mum, and someday a job as a professor -- and into enrollment at the mysterious Torpa Institute, where the professors are strange and the curriculum even stranger; their first year at school is largely spent poring over paragraph after paragraph of complete gibberish, which they must memorize and recite without ever being told what it's all for.

Of course what it is for is to begin transforming them from mere humans into, and here's where the Magic of Language stuff comes in -- parts of what is known as The Great Speech. And while most of the transformations are internal and not readily visible, some wild talents like Sasha's manifest early and unpredictably in the form of unstable metamorphoses that in some cases -- Sasha's and one of her stranger professors -- include the development of wings. Wings that actually let them fly about above the rooftops of Torpa late at night. 

Indeed, were it not for the fact that Vita Nostra -- the title coming from the Gaudeamus sung on the students' first day at the school -- contains no references to religion or spirituality beyond this title at all, I'd almost suspect that the school exists actually to turn humans into something very like angels, and yes of course once again I thought of my patron saint Jacopo Belbo (actually Umberto Eco, of course)'s quip that "God created the world by speaking; he didn't send a telegram" as Sasha's teachers carefully allow her only little drabs here and there of useful information about why she's at this school and being put through these courses of gibberish reading and, later, strenuous application of a peculiar form of mental geometry exercises.

Meanwhile, this is still at least in part a coming of age/school days novel, which means that yes, there is a soupçon of teen romance. The first fellow student Sasha meets upon arriving in the out-of-the-way town of Torpa, Kostya, becomes a bit more than her first friend, and she has another short but fairly intense relationship with a younger student in her second year at the school. These never overwhelm the overall plot or flavor of the story, though; they are all but inevitable experiences in a young person's life but they are very much not the point, which might frustrate readers who come into this expecting more dark academia but suited me just fine.

What I've found most remarkable about this book is how little anything gets spelled out for us but how perfectly we feel we understand what's at stake and what the consequences might be for Sasha if she fails, making the closing scenes of Vita Nostra a marvel of tension and anguish for all that what is actually going on is just the handing out of exam papers for the third year Placement Exam toward which they've all been working, the midway point of a Torpa education beyond which an impenetrable wall of mystery stands between first, second and third-year students and the final two years before graduate school.

Vita Nostra doesn't quite end on a cliffhanger as such, but does end on a note of possibility and ambiguity as Sasha experiences an even weirder Placement Exam than we've been led to expect. Having been given a general idea of the kind of part of the Great Speech she is going to manifest as and then Reverberate, she and we think maybe we know what's coming next, but boy do we not. So it was a good thing that a sequel, Assassin of Reality, has already been a) translated and b) released on audio; Jessica Ball's crisply British delivery was both enjoyable enough and unobtrusive enough for me to wish to continue this series on audio -- and I had a credit waiting to use to get that one, which I'm already devouring. And, well, there is a third book out in the world and it's already been translated, per Julia Meitov Hersey, but I don't know when it's going to be available and I'm getting pretty good at reading Russian and the Russian language ebook edition was just three bucks and so...

Jack Womack's ELVISSEY

I, too had been cut loose, bereft of work, of friendship, of love, allowed only to devote life and time to readying one in whom I didn't believe for one I couldn't believe to lull those who, against reason, did believe.

I'm going to noodle a lot about language and weird little questions this book inspired, but please don't think that because I do so means this book is not an exciting or eventful read. It is that and more. So much more!

I was last December years old when I realized that Jack Womack's amazing Random Acts of Senseless Violence was part of a series. Or at least a grouping of novels set in a shared Dryco Cinematic Universe. And that there are more than a handful of these Dryco books. Yippee!

The first-for-me* of these other books, Elvissey, is more or less a direct sequel to RAoSV, which I re-read at the beginning of this year. And, if possible, it packs some even bigger emotional wallops than its predecessor. As in buckle up. But also...

The characters in the Dryco universe speak an argot that is easy to understand if you don't try to do so, but gets more difficult to grasp the more you think about it. It's beyond how Lola Harte, the heroine of RAoSV, wrote in her diary that formed that novel, but not in the way I had figured it would be; the overlapping characters, Iz and Judy, are all grown up now but instead of speaking something more like the modern American English that we know, betokening the greater sophistication of adulthood in contrast to 12-year-old Lola's schoolgirl prose, Iz, Judy and all their colleagues sound like they come from Pohl and Kornbluth's Space Merchants world by way of Darmok's planet, with a lot of corporate jargon and buzzwords thrown in. Nouns are verbed, verbs are nouned, aphorisms are condensed (my favorite phrase: "You're mountaining this molehill" with "an exaltation of interpreters" a close second - in which "interpreters" is used in the sense of those who embody and act rather than render speech from one language into another, as a close second. The "exaltation" is one of Elvis impersonators!), all manner of portmanteaus and inherited malapropisms appear, and some terminology is so opaque as to constitute a mystery at least as compelling as any mechanisms of plot or character. "Regooding," for instance. How creepy and Orwellian is this neologism, really? It's baffling as the story starts, and we're left to soak up its meaning via context.**

This would be maddening and even a reason to DNF a novel if a lesser writer than Jack Womack were the author.

But so, what's Elvis got to do, got to do with it? I'll get to that, but first let's enjoy all the different things this title could mean. Perhaps it is an epic journey undertaken, not by Odysseus but by Elvis? Or maybe "Elvissey" denotes a thing or things associated with Elvis, as we might call, say, Graceland or a Las Vegas wedding chapel an Elvissey (like an abbey)? Though I at least would probably wind up sticking an "R" in there to make the stand-alone noun, as in an "Elvisry." Then again, maybe it's an adjective. Hey, that was Elvissey. How Elvissey? A little Elvissey? A lot Elvissey? The Elvisseyest thing ever? We eventually learn that it is none of these things but a completely legit other, proving that Womack thought about this even more than I did. 

See what you've done to my brain this time, Mr. Womack? I hope you happy. Happify?

"All Elvii bewail their lot... Digging oases of pain in deserts of comfort... Such jabbernowling frets and hinders," a character observes early in the story. This little speech is a perfect example of how this argot is both breezily simple and fiendishly complex. Leaving aside what the "Elvii" are for a moment, he's basically rephrasing our contemporary aphorism "some people'd bitch if their water's too wet" (or a yet more contemporary "now and then it's important to stop and bitch about the roses"), and we nod along because ain't that the truth, these Elvii have it great and they're still complaining but then what the hell is "jabbernowling" and is it something that frets, as in performs the act of fretting, or has the argot of Elvissey transformed the simple verb "fret," meaning something like "to fuss or worry about something" into a transitive verb, requiring an object, meaning something like "to cause someone to fuss or worry about something?"

I still haven't parsed what "jabbernowling" is, though I'm pretty sure it has something to do with pointless verbalizing, as in "jabber."

With all this extra musing on language waiting to pounce from every page, Elvissey is a very demanding book for its length and its pulpy plot. 

Because oh yeah, the plot. For there is indeed a plot taking place amid all the Fun With Language.

It's even easy to summarize: Iz, Lola's closest girlfriend from the harrowing second half of RAoSV, survived their teenage years as New York City fell apart and has married a wonderful but troubled man and the two of them have been "Regooded" by Dryco (the only corporate overlord you'll ever need, who have taken over most, if not all, of the functions of government, including the enormous project of rehabilitating New York City with an eye toward making it a utopian City of the Future... for a million inhabitants and no more) as a field team the company sends on vitally important but seemingly impossible missions, though ordinarily she is the administrative assistant to DryCo's second-in-command that being Judy) and her husband is a high-level security guard. 

In this case, Iz and husband John are to travel back in time/ visit a parallel universe and abduct one Elvis Aaron Presley from when he was at the height of his youth and beauty, and thus his value to Dryco... and bring him back to their post-collapse New New York to be the messiah for a cult that already exists (these are the Elvii mentioned above, so no, there are not multiple Elvises Presley running around. Or are there?).

This poses another interesting question, of course. This novel was originally published in 1993, when Elvis had only been dead for 16 years or so. I remember occasionally encountering people back then who staunchly believed that Elvis was still alive, had faked his death so he could be just another guy in the world who just had to deal with being made by his devotees every once in a while, but who had the whole publicity-industrial complex on his side to keep his secret. His fans who "knew better" were just harmless and amusing kooks, back then, decades before Q-Anon had people camping out at Dealy Plaza awaiting the second coming of JFK and JFK Jr. We didn't know how good we had it. 

But anyway, now in our own 2023, 30 years since the publication of Elvissey and some 45 years since Elvis died, with Elvis so long gone that even his only daughter has passed on, if Q-Anon had never happened, would there still be people running around who disbelieve in Elvis' death? Given that he would be 88 years old now and wasn't really looking too good at age 42, would his cult have persisted in our world? I would expect it to be much diminished at the very least, in a world without Q-Anon and all of its weird cultural baggage, but, would there be, or are there, many people in 2023 who are still fanatically devoted to the erstwhile King of Rock'n'Roll?

In Iz's contemporary universe of 2033, the answer to that question is enough to cause problems for John's and her employer, Dryco. Meaning its CEO, Mr. O'Malley is a god-king of a kind we found amusingly improbable back in 1993 but now, well, *gestures at universe*. I mean, people like to argue about whether we live in Huxley's dystopia or Orwell's, etc but a case sure could be made for it really being Womack's.

Anyway, O'Malley's fee-fees are hurt because so many Elvii worship the wrong god-king and thank Elvis for all the good (?) that O'Malley has done for them.

So obviously the solution is to kidnap alt-universe Elvis and let him deal with the Elvii -- but only after he agrees to promote O'Malley's aims and goals and ego. And tell them O'Malley has massive, manly hands, really. 

But then Iz and John cross over -- in a simply amazing car you're going to have to read the book to get to appreciate -- and find just how alternate this other universe is; the culture shock isn't merely that it's 1954. In this universe there was never a U.S. Civil War and slaves weren't freed until 1905, and while we think car culture is bad in our world, the interstate highway system in alt world has massive elevated 20-lane behemoths all over the place; even bigger swaths of the neighborhoods that were sacrificed to the Eisenhower system in our world were obliterated to the point of many of them just not existing anymore. And as for the culture off those highways, it's a gross QOP wet-dream of segregation, sexual harassment, revisionist historical interpretations even of stuff that it shares with Iz's universe, etc.

And so, its Elvis is nothing like what Iz and her people have expected to find. This Elvis is downtrodden and not at all famous (nobody in white supremacy Disneyland wants to listen to a kid who wants to sing blues instead of oom pa pa), more than a bit violent and entitled and wholly unready for what they're going to ask of him. He winds up complicating every aspect of the plot, from Dryco corporate dynamics to Iz's marriage to John, and sends it all spiraling off in unexpected but wholly satisfying directions. 

In other words, holy shit, this book is good!

*There doesn't seem to be a definitive order in which these books are to be read; they're cataloged like a series but without ordinal numbers. I thought of going in publication order but then I saw that this book tells of the adulthood of some characters from RAoSV so I chose this as my first deliberate read in the Dryco universe. 

**"Regooding" as a concept gets increasingly problematic as the Dryco world unfolds. At first it simply seems to mean something like "rescued from bad circumstances" or "rehabilitated" as a neighborhood might be gentrified or a person lifted out of poverty/ignorance/illness, but then a truly icky aspect kicks in: the existence of a drug called Melaway. The "mel" being the same prefix for darkness/blackness as appears in "melanin." As in this drug turns dark skin light, black hair blonde. Add in some blue contact lenses and Iz, a dark-skinned black girl from the meanest pre-Dryco streets, can pass as a white woman on her mission,  to the alternate universe which is, she is repeatedly told, way more racist than her own. But then, on the eve of her journey, she "concludes her bleach" and admires her naked self in the mirror: "Venus atremble at seaside, another regooded resident to best suit our eternal city." While some later language tries to imply that it is not a purely White ideal that is sought but rather a golden-toned racelessness but one is not sure whether that is the sincere aim and context of "regooding" or just lip-service to a less racist goal, you know?

Jack Womack is a brave writer. 

Andrus Kivirähk's THE MAN WHO SPOKE SNAKISH (Tr Christopher Moseley, Narr Aaron Landon)

I first learned about Andrus Kivirähk via the film adaptation of his novel November, which introduced the world to perhaps the greatest folk horror monster ever, the kratt, a wholly unique monster that starts out life as a pile of junk before animating it via a few drops of blood dedicated to, of course, the devil. Once animated, a kratt will help you with your farm chores and whatnot, but you have to keep it busy or else it will turn on you. In the movie, and so I presume, the novel, one kidnaps a calf and flies it through the air forming with it cinema's very first cowlicopter! Plus, there are werewolves! 

Alas, as of this writing, that novel of his does not appear to have been translated into English yet. But the film is occasionally streaming and was popular enough here that your local public library might have it on DVD, as mine did. So until the book is rendered in English (or you learn Estonian) this will have to do. But wait!

Another of Kivirähk's novels, The Man Who Spoke Snakish is so beloved in the author's home country of Estonia that it has been adapted into a board game there, and has been translated into many languages including English! And it's even available as an audio book, decently performed by new-to-me narrator Aaron Landon, who has a voice in the higher range that isn't the most delightful to hear in straight up narration but Landon did a wonderful job on the many characters' voices, many of whom aren't even human so I'm still pleased with and gladly recommend the audio edition.

Set in medieval Estonia right around the time that land is becoming Christian and adapting its culture along the lines of the rest of Europe, The Man Who Spoke Snakish is chiefly a novel of culture clashes. Our title character and narrator, Leemet, has been raised among a handful of hunter-gatherer forest people, where he fed on a diet of  roast venison, wolf's milk and owl's eggs and listened to stories of his mother and the bear that was her lover (prefiguring Leemet's sister Salma's own relationship with and eventual marriage to another bear) until accidentally killing Leemet's father the day daddy caught them in flagrante. The bear, Leemet learns, was a gentle soul and so regretted killing Leemet's father that it castrated itself and vowed never to see Leemet's mother again. 

And we're off!

We quickly learn that Leemet's people are unusual for much more interesting reasons than their diet or habit of, err, bear-loving; some are still staunchly clinging to a very strict and proscribing paganism centered around "sprites," which beings demand a lot of sacrifices at all times and have very short tempers; others have focused on maintaining a fascinating and useful tradition: the language called "Snakish." A reasonably fluent speaker of the language can, of course, befriend snakes, as Leemet quickly does, acquiring a charismatic and practically-minded adder named Ints for a best friend, but what most of Leemet's people seem to use it for nowadays is to command animals. They summon deer to lie down and allow themselves to be mercifully and humanely killed for meat and hides; they keep herds of wolves in barns like cows and tell them when to sleep and when to meekly allow themselves to be milked and when to allow humans to ride them like horses for their sylvan wars, though those wars are nearly as much a thing of the past as is the Frog of the North, a giant flying amphibian who protects the forest people but who can only be summoned by a large number of fluent Snakish speakers calling it down in unison. Nearly, but not completely; we do get a bit of wolf-riding in The Man Who Spoke Snakish, but it's only one swift element in one of the novel's most exciting and action-packed and anguished scenes.

Meanwhile, "progress" has happened to most of the rest of Estonia. Most of the region's people live in villages, have converted to Christianity (though maybe not as sincerely as the colonizing knights and monks might wish; most of them treat it more like a matter of fashion than of faith), and speak German. And they are very, very keen on proselytizing to the forest people and trying to shame them into moving out of the forest and into the villages, giving up their weird diets and freewheeling ways for lives sowing, tending and harvesting grain, making it into bread, and eating that instead of owl's eggs and wolves' milk. And of course, obeying the foreign monks and soldiers ("Iron Men" as the locals call them) who have subjugated everybody else.

While Leemet is still a boy learning his first Snakish words, he meets a village girl named Magdelena and through her comes into contact with her father, Johannes, the village elder, who barely lets the Lemeet and the boy he was exploring with get a word in edgewise before he's commanding them to go tell their parents that they must move into the village and be christened with new, biblical names and give up their culture altogether, really. Cowed, Leemet kind of agrees but doesn't wind up actually obeying; he'd much rather hang out with his uncle, the greatest still-living speaker of Snakish, who sees in Leemet perhaps the last person who will carry his people's traditions into the future -- even though, because Leemet's father once fell under the sway of village life and wanted to eat bread, Leemet was actually born in the village, and is thus shunned as a village person by about half of the dwindling population of the forest.

He soon comes to have more unusual companions, befriending a pair of local "primates" -- possibly some last remnants of the Neanderthals or Homo Erectus? -- who treasure other animals, especially lice, which they have carefully bred until they have one as big as a child. It loves to go for walks and to go swimming in a nearby lake, becoming a new source of friction among the forest people. 

The giant louse also loves Leemet's childhood tagalong, Hia, a plain and meek little girl whose parents are the most ardent remaining devotees of the sprite cult and force her to behave at all times as a paragon of forest virtue, toiling to exhaustion every day to butcher all the meat needed to feed the hundreds of wolves her family keeps in a gigantic barn, and being force-fed wolf milk even though she can't digest it. The scenes between this giant louse and Hia are some of the most charming in a book that is long on charm -- but also on violence. 

The violence in this book is mostly at least indirectly Leemet's fault; his fascination with the villagers brings his world into more direct conflict with theirs as he discovers to his horror that all the former forest people now living there have not only forgotten Snakish but regard snakes as servants of Satan and mostly refuse to believe that Leemet himself is not a werewolf preying on their pitiful flock of sheep. 

Leemet spends most of the story trapped between orthodoxies and struggling to be left in non-observant peace. The villagers (save one) harangue him to give up his wicked "pagan" ways while the hard core forest people maintain he'll never be good enough for them, either, no, not even when he emerges as the last living human who can speak Snakish. And just when he thinks he's found a way to settle down in happiness with a sweet wife and his snake friends, both orthodoxies attack, demonstrating that his choices will never be respected. 

How Leemet reacts to being doubly hemmed in and to gradually losing everything he cares about may shock some readers, who find themselves rooting for a pair (a long-lost ancestor shows up late in the book and quickly starts stealing every scene he's in!) of violent anti-zealots bent on avenging their losses on the whole rest of the world. It's a strange feeling to be cheering on a gory rampage with a high body count, but Kivirähk has fashioned his tale and portrayed his hero well; by the time the rampage begins we understand completely the feelings behind every blow struck, quixotic though they all are. 

If nothing else, we come away with one important lesson: don't fuck around with Estonians. You never know who might have a pair of venomous fangs concealed in their smile, ready to bite anyone who corners them. Have some respect. 

T. Kingfisher's A HOUSE WITH GOOD BONES

I come to the work of Ursula Vernon, aka T. Kingfisher, in somewhat backwards fashion. I knew her first as the "Wombat Test Subject" on her husband Kevin Sonney's podcast, Productivity Alchemy, on which show I've fallen way behind because I've pretty much given up on productivity but still occasionally enjoy, mostly for the stories of the couple's pets and livestock and Vernon's description of her writing and illustrating processes. She is a woman of considerable gifts and a singular speaking voice and is beloved of most of the people whose opinions on books matter to me, so got filed as "an author I know I'll like and I've got to try sometime" but that guarantee of quality somehow perversely reduces the urgency of sampling an author's work. See also Leonora Carrington, on whom I slept for years. 

Anyway then Vernon, writing here as Kingfisher, wrote a southern gothic novel A House with Good Bones, in which the heroine is not only an entomologist but an archaeological entomologist. Zoinks!

So of course I knew there'd be tension between the habits of skepticism and demanding evidence that are so deeply ingrained in most fictional (if not always in actual) scientists and whatever supernatural forces were supplying the horror; I was not ready for Kingfisher's very successful attempt to import the elements of gothic horror into a story set in a tract house built in the 1990s.

Our heroine, Sam, has had to leave her latest excavation while some human remains found there are investigated, so she decides to go visit her mother,  Edie, still living in the house Sam grew up in with Edie, Sam's older brother, Brad and, for a while, Edie's viciously unpleasant grandmother, whom Sam always called Grand Mae. Mae originally owned the house and ruled it with an iron hand and a shedful of garden tools for maniacally tending her flawless rose garden, demanding of her progeny an adherence to the impossible standards of 1950s TV family perfection that no actual humans ever achieved. After Mae's death, Edie made the house a bit more interesting and comfortable, with brightly colored paint on the walls and actually interesting art that didn't depict things like Confederate weddings hanging from them. 

So imagine Sam's surprise when she discovers her grandmother's nasty taste again dominating the house, and the kind of detail only someone like Sam would notice: a complete lack of invertebrate life in the rose garden.

Oh, and a local vulture -- as in the actual bird, not an epithet for a nasty neighbor, though there's one of them, too -- hanging out on top of the mailbox. Often more than one. 

The family secrets that emerge are straight out of the Women with Great Hair Escaping Castles playbook but don't feel forced into this very contemporary story; Kingfisher developed just the right background to explain the creepiness without having to resort to badly relocated Native American burial grounds or any of that foma, and in Sam and Edie gave us a delightful mother and daughter dynamic to enjoy while their world disintegrates around them. Even more delightfully, one of the vultures, named Hermes by his hedge-witchy keeper Gail, an older woman who worked in wildlife rehabilitation while she was Mae's much-disliked hippie neighbor but now lives the retired life of an herbalist with her last patient. Gail is pretty excellent, too, but Hermes' bizarre charisma always steals her thunder even before he earns his weird halo. Rounding out the duo is hunky, handy Phil, the grandson of the nasty neighbor who works as Edie's handyman and while there might be some romantic sparks between him and Sam, Kingfisher adds these with a light hand that never allows them to distract us from the thorny peril her characters are in.

So I'd recommend A House with Good Bones to anyone, but perhaps especially to the fans of John Bellairs; A House with Good Bones felt very much like a Lewis Barnavelt book for grown-ups -- though conversely, there's no reason, apart from occasional swearing, why a precocious kid fan of Bellairs wouldn't enjoy the hell out of this book. I could have used more insects, though. But we all know I'm rarely satisfied in that department. I'm glad that I got what I did, though, while on this wild ride of a story. Go get it!

Brian Catling's HOLLOW (Narr Jonathan Keeble)

I keenly regret our loss last year of Brian Catling, primarily a visual artist and sculptor -- he even contributed a monument to the displays at the Tower of London -- he also turned his hand to writing the kind of deeply strange, even expressionist, weird fiction that I like best in all the world. His Vorrh Trilogy, especially in audio form as narrated by Allan Corduner, is very likely my favorite series of the 21st century so far. He didn't write a whole lot more, though. I should just be grateful that he wrote at all; he might have been perfectly content to keep on making grotesque cyclops masks to model for photographs and called it good. At least he wrote one of his cyclops into print.

In his stand-alone novel Hollow his background in the visual arts is one again very much on display, but this time instead of an impression of Eden in Africa, he's chosen to invent a story for which the paintings of Pieter Breugel the Elder and Hieronymus Bosch might serve as illustrations - or, say, he's written back stories for the beings that populate those images. 

It's even cooler than it sounds. Which is mighty good, incidentally; narrator Jonathan Keeber is very much in the vein of Allan Corduner, or Simon Vance or John Lee, but doesn't quite hit their very high mark, mainly due to his tendency to make too many of the novel's inhuman or demihuman characters, and one monk with a sligt speech impediment, sound like Gollum with a bunch of juicy sweet fish in his mouth. I had to listen to those bits of dialogue multiple times to parse out what was being said, which is troublesome indeed when one such character is the very oracle whose utterings feel very much like the key to the story. Mercifully, there is not a lot of this in the book, and Keeber's reading of it is otherwise exceptional.

But so, what's Hollow all about then?

The action this time is set in Europe and concerns a motley D&D gang of murder hobos on a mission to deliver an Oracle to a weird monastery that may have been built on the ruins of the Tower of Babel.* Said Oracle is small and greyish in color, with atrophied limbs and unsettling aspect -- and, as the murder hobos discover to their cost, has an unsettling talent for ventriloquism, used to disturbing and deadly effect on a few occasions during their journey.

I could not help but imagine this Oracle and the one it's to replace as something like good old Dalek Caan from Doctor Who, also a weird and atrophied thing with weird prophetic powers and a creepy voice. Your mileage may vary.

Anyway, while the murder hobos escort this Oracle, two brothers from the monastery that is their destination embark on a journey of their own, to find out the source of some weird creatures that have been turning up in their neighborhood.

Interwoven with the tales of these journeys are some bizarre and creepy goings-on at the monastery, and also the account of how one of my favorite characters in western painting, Dulle Griet, aka Mad Meg, evolves from a humble and much-abused wife and mother, living in the village that supports the weird monastery, into the avenging proto-feminist virago that Bruegel immortalized as leading a band of women to attack Hell. In Catling's account of this evolution, she has a best friend who gets burned as a witch, a dumb failson, and a worthless and abusive husband, so it is with relied that we watch as she befriends all of the strange creatures who share the Bruegel canvas with her,  further endearing her to me. I loved Mad Meg long before I read this book, but this book made me love her even more.

As for the Oracle, as I said, it is an ill-defined creature (possibly related to the Erstwhile of the Vorrh?) whose natural habitat is a tightly enclosed place. The first of its kind (for there are more than one) that we meet has been walled up in the monastery, where a small community of monks devotedly study its weird and gnomic emanations until, under suspicious circumstances, it disappears and dies. Or does it?  At any rate, another is sent for, hence the escort mission, but meanwhile the original may be haunting the place, sort of? Anyway, weird things start happening but they don't seem quite as weird as they are against the backdrop of this monastery, which contains a walled-off battlefield of some five square miles in which the zombie-ish dead and the tormented living engage in perpetual warfare against one another.

Meg, on the other hand, has mostly mundane problems to deal with, until suddenly she, too, encounters the "Woebegot" aka "Filthlings" - bizarre little creatures with human and animal characteristics turning up all over the place and annoying those they don't just outright frighten. They are, of course, figures from Bruegel and Bosch, and when they start talking to Meg in their confused polyglot way it is impossible not to imagine them as Monty Python-esque animations. Eventually they become, as I said, something like friends to Meg and become along with her my favorite figures in the story, at times intensely comic (such as the account of how three of them came to be named Bleagh, Garrett and Eueuw, whom Meg accidentally "summons" when an unrelated incident causes her to make these noises!), at others uncanny and disturbing. What do they even want? What can they even do?

We're mostly supposed to care about the escort mission, though,  and it is also bizarrely entertaining as the mercenaries are picked off one by one (one of them is killed off right at the beginning of the first chapter by the party's leader for reasons that seem arbitrary and disproportionate for a long time until they're sort of explained) and encounter strange things like a menacing but ultimately helpful giant in their travels with their strange dependant. Whom they must feed every night. By taking turns confessing their worst sins into a bag of bones. So that their confessions enrich the marrow. Which is then fed by spoonfuls, like so much baby food, to the Oracle.

I love Brian Catling.

So much.

The mechanism by which the murder hobos must feed the Oracle gives us a chance to get to know them at a satisfying and deep level as they dredge up their most horrific personal anecdotes, like one man who was used by a bunch of nuns as angel bait and later winds up eating said angel (he can't compare it to chicken nuggets though, since those are hundreds of years in the future).

All of these narrative threads come together in the end just in time for Fat Tuesday, celebrated in proper batshit fashion in Meg's village, in bizarre and bloody fashion, with some highly entertaining violence, some grotesque comeuppance, and the entry of at least one character into perhaps the worst kind of eternity that doesn't actually involve devils and pitchforks and lakes of fire. The ending chapters especially reward close attention, as characters keep appearing from weird perspectives as their storylines intersect and the Woebegots finally fulfill what I guess is their purpose? But maybe it's just a side benefit of fulfilling their true purpose?

I'm going to have to read this one again sometime soon. What hardship!

*Which, that tower sure has been turning up in a lot of my reading lately. 

Kathleen McLaughlin's BLOOD MONEY: THE STORY OF LIFE, DEATH AND PROFIT INSIDE AMERICA'S BLOOD INDUSTRY

"We've built an entire segment of global medicine upon the certainty that a certain number of Americans simply can't live on a regular income alone." - Kathleen McLaughlin in Blood Money

I've had just enough good fortune in my life to have been the kind of person who could hear a phrase like "plasma economy" and think it was some of that charming combination of actual scientific terminology and gobbledygook that we call "technobabble" or more specifically "Treknobabble" - in which the meaning of "plasma" concerns a superheated state of matter used to make things go pew-pew-pew on a starship. Had I gone to a public university instead of the groovy private college that gave me a huge scholarship because it wanted more geographic diversity in its student body, I might have found out about the exchange of human plasma -- as in that straw colored fluid that separates out from red and white blood cells when blood goes through a centrifuge -- for money a lot sooner than I did. And, to be honest, coming from a vastly different socioeconomic background from my classmates at my swanky private college as I did, I might have been tempted into that industry back then too. Concert tickets, beer money, spontaneous train rides into The City to go shopping or clubbing or to the opera -- the cost of these things meant nothing to most of my peers but I had to think long and hard before saying yes to opportunities. Had my college been located in a less privileged area, where a plasma "donation" center might actually be located, well, I might have said yes a lot more often than I did, and never mind that I might have been too fatigued to properly enjoy it.

I've donated buckets of whole blood over the years, hitting the one gallon club too long ago to remember, and I was a regular platelet donor, too, once a random test of my donated whole blood revealed that I had never been exposed to a common virus that is very dangerous to premature babies and cancer patients, meaning my platelets were safe to give such patients in a way that most other people's weren't. I kept on donating platelets until I had to go on a medication that meant I couldn't donate anymore and felt horrible about it. But, only dimly aware via, of all things, a college guide by Lisa "Preppy Handbook" Birnbach that some folks out in the world sold their plasma for beer money, I never thought of selling my plasma.*

Like I said, I was fortunate. And really dumb with a credit card, but it could have been worse. But anyway, I only learned what the true, real-world meaning of the "plasma economy" was this year, when Kathleen McLaughlin made the political podcast rounds promoting her latest book.

As I learned when I read Blood Money: The Story of Life, Death and Profit Inside America's Blood Industry, the plasma economy was only really becoming a thing over in China while I was learning Chinese at my private college in the late 80s and early 90s. China built plasma donation centers all over its poorest regions like the province of Henan, and persuaded its poorest citizens that it was safe and altruistic and patriotic and slightly profitable to roll up a sleeve and let an already-big-but-not-yet-quite-global industry treat them like lodes of metal in a gold mine (plasma gets described as "liquid gold" a lot in this book). Only it wasn't quite as safe as advertised; cutting corners to meet demand and save costs led to unsanitary practices like reusing needles and tubing or not sterilizing phoresis machines... just in time for the HIV/AIDS crisis (which China ignored about as assiduously as the U.S.A. did for as long as possible/until some heroic women whom McLaughlin profiles called out the problem and were exiled for their pains) to kill or permanently impair countless citizens for (shortened) life and ruin China's blood supply for years and years to come.

Fortunately for the global trade in human plasma, which is made into a whole host of long-known and newly-developed pharmaceutical products that are pretty much all insanely expensive by the time they're administered to patients whose mobility, functionality, even lives depend on them, the same ghoul who retarded the U.S.A.'s response -- even acknowledgement -- of the HIV/AIDS crisis had also so accelerated our country's descent into gross economic inequality that conditions were perfect to start up a bigger, better, badder version of the plasma economy right here.

The trick, the industry had learned by the time a building boom of plasma centers started in earnest here, was not to rely on the seriously destitute/homeless, who among other things are less likely to be healthy enough to provide the staggering volumes of body parts the industry needs to satisfy global demand for the stuff (because only a tiny handful of countries allow this trade). But the people who are just a paycheck or a family crisis away from being that undesirably desperate can and have been incentivized not only into selling their plasma on the regular but also selling it as often as they possibly can, by paying them enough to supplement the kind of shitty jobs that in addition to not paying a living wage also tend not to allow workers to hit that magic 40 hours a week that would  qualify them to receive shitty health insurance and helpless 401k exposure to the stock market they offer instead of pensions -- but not paying plasma sellers enough for the supplementary income they get to actually help them beyond a tank of gas or sack of groceries or Christmas gifts for the kids.

And speaking of how most countries have prohibited this trade, you won't believe where another huge pool of donors comes from. Hint: that flow stopped abruptly when COVID-19 closed our land borders for a while, and still hasn't really recovered since a follow-up debacle in which Homeland Security suddenly decided that crossing into the U.S. to sell body parts counted as labor and violated the terms under which most plasma sellers were permitted to come in for a day. 

And speaking of COVID-19, I couldn't stop wondering as I read: given that the people whose veins are tapped the most to meet the global demand for plasma are the same people who were hardest hit and mostly likely to have died from the virus before they even had the chance for cynical and manipulative blowhards to persuade them not to get the vaccine, to the tune of some 800,000+ souls lost forever, how many plasma sellers did we lose to COVID-19? And did their habits of selling their valuable plasma for pittances twice a week increase their susceptibility to dying of COVID-19 if they caught it? We might never know, because even before the pandemic, nobody seemed interested in studying the long-term effects on plasma sellers of the practice. There's too much money at stake for gigantic multinational corporations and too little concern for the human motherlode they mine, very few of whose members are treating Senators or Supreme Court Justices to lavish yachting vacations if you know what I mean.

Adding to the inherent (and aggravating) interest of her subject is McLaughlin's own connection to the plasma economy: she suffers from a rare autoimmune condition that leaves her dependent on regular infusions of an insanely expensive medication made from human plasma. Several times a year, the combined plasma of dozens, if not hundreds or maybe even thousands (it's kind of hard to know because the industry isn't exactly bragging about this in prime time) of people is slowly infused into her body over the course of five boring hours at a high but fluctuating cost to her medical insurance provider and to McLaughlin herself. A journalist with a history of covering things like what HIV/AIDS did to China (and herself living in China on and off over many years), it was surely inevitable that she would come to write a book like this, and from a compelling personal perspective. 

It also gave her a conversational inroads with the many plasma sellers she interviewed in places like Rexberg, ID, Flint, MI and El Paso, TX that few journalists could match. Her combination of gratitude and ever increasing discomfort with the whole subject color every line. 

And, as we demand more and more from nosy journalists who call attention to problems we've been happy to go on ignoring, McLaughlin has given considerable thought to what we might, as a civilization and as a nation, do to make this system less exploitative and safer. Compensate plasma sellers fairly and on a consistent basis. Do basic research on how frequent extraction of this fundamental body part affects the short- and long-term health of the extractees. And, of course, restore the social safety net so people don't get trapped in this system in the first place. 

Blood Money is a captivating and infuriating read, despite its tendency to repeat points and even whole sentences - like pretty much every other major non-fiction book in this age of publishing consolidation, this text could have used a bit more attention from an editor or two, but of course that would cut into the bottom line and, who knows, the poor overworked editor now having to do the equivalent of five people's jobs might also have been a little weak and exhausted from a lunch hour passed in a crappy recliner with a fat needle stuck in the crook of her arm, sucking out her blood and forcing an anticoagulant into her vein. 

I learned a lot and was made to think a lot about a system I've only been dimly aware of, out of what seems more and more like plain old luck. I might yet find myself in the position of the people McLaughlin interviewed, though given my own personal constellation of obnoxious health issues, if our society ever reaches the point where it's depending on the plasma of people like me, we're pretty much screwed all the way.

Here's hoping...

*There have been times when I was in desperate enough financial straits to have done it, but such times have only ever come upon me when I lived and worked (on a salary basis for pay that I learned years later would have qualified me for food stamps and Medicaid even though I had the words "executive" and "director" in my job title) in regions too isolated and remote to participate in the plasma economy; any money I'd have been paid would have just burned up in the gas tank of my shitty car driving some 300+ miles round trip to be tapped.

Becky Chambers' A PSALM FOR THE WILD-BUILT

Ok, this is probably a sad thing to admit, a commentary on the books I've chosen over the years, as much as it is on the quality of the book at hand, but I don't think I've been as charmed by a novel since I first discovered Nathan Lowell's Solar Clipper series or the work of Walter Moers. Becky Chambers' first Robot and Monk book, A Psalm for the Wild-Built, is a delightful portrait of the kind of future I want and with its dual main characters and the gently hopeful plot they enact, an endlessly engaging read. 

It's just so short, though!

Leave 'em wanting more, the adage goes. And I do want more!

There's something almost cruel, though, in the experience of reading books like this; they show us how perfectly reasonable is the near-utopia they depict, show us all the nice things we could have if enough of us would just do a little bit of work towards trying to make our  world less shitty for more people, but every interruption or sound on the street or twinge in our bodies reminds us of all of the ridiculous and ridiculously powerful forces are pulling in the opposite direction, trying to make the world more shitty for more people all because their imaginary sky daddy or philosophy-that's-more-important-than-actual-people or just shitty personalities (or all three, in the case of who I now insist we have to stop calling The Former Guy and instead refer to as The Indicted Guy. Plus, the abbreviation, TIG rhymes with a word that also describes him) insist that change for the better is Bad and will lead to Oppression of the Minority that has been Oppressing all the Other Minorities for Centuries. Which would apparently be Unjust in a way that all the other oppression has not been?

Anyway. Psalm for the Wild-Built shows us a terraformed (or possibly already life-supporting?) moon orbiting a gas giant, originally settled by human beings who brought advanced robot technology with them when they came but whose robots achieved self awareness -- and the humans who settled this moon were humane humans who understood it was wrong to enslave thinking and feeling beings even if they're ones we created, and gave the robots their liberty. The robots then withdrew completely from human society and went off into the wilderness to explore and witness and enjoy without harming. Meanwhile the humans the robots left behind adapted their culture into a solarpunk utopia, but it's not just the energy and technology they developed and continue to employ that are utopian, but they've developed an easy-going polytheistic religion that doesn't proscribe or prescribe but just functions as a way of understanding the experience of being alive and appreciating the world and each other.

Our point of view character, a non-binary human named Dex, has served in a monastic order within this religion (purely by choice; no economic or social pressures affected their choice, either!) in the capacity of a novice but has, as our story opens, chosen to become only the most delightful religious vocation that has been thought of in the history of ever, a Tea Monk. Whose vocation is to travel the moon by means of a heavy-duty bicycle and camper-trailer combo, stopping at each human settlement and setting up a shrine, not at which to pay or offer sacrifice or take instruction, but at which to set down in a pretty setting among a few choice nice things that have some devotional significance but aren't especially valuable -- they're there to be nice things, not to inspire awe or envy -- and have a cup of tea, provided by the Tea Monk, after he/she/they have greeted you, determined your general physical/emotional state, and decided what blend of botanicals to infuse into a brew that will taste good to you and help you feel better. Once served with a nice cup of tea, you can then relax and enjoy it in silence, make idle chitchat, or pour your heart out to the Tea Monk as you see fit.

A good Tea Monk -- and Dex grows to become one of the best if not the best -- travels on a nearly completely self-sufficient basis thanks to the wonder of modern water filtration/food preservation/hygiene/life-support/comfort technology embodied in the trailer/bicycle rig, but is often offered a nice hot meal or a soak in a devotee's big bathtub or local hot springs or a roll in the hay, etc as thanks for how well he/she/they apply their vocation. Dex has enjoyed this life for a long time, but feels that something is missing and develops a yen to travel off the beaten path a while, into the untouched wilderness that exists off the actual beaten paths between settlements Dex has traveled these years.

Within a patch of actually wild nature, Dex encounters a being no one has in centuries -- a robot! And we learn that the robots, too, have developed a very easy-going and appreciative culture of their own. For instance, their naming convention has drifted far from the alpha-numeric designations of their forebears who wandered out of the Factories so long ago; now when a new robot comes to awareness, it takes its name from the first thing it observes. So this robot is named Splendid Speckled Mosscap, Mosscap for short, after the mushroom that it first saw the day it came to be. And boy, is Mosscap a wonderful character!

Mosscap has a unique mission for which it volunteered; to renew contact with humanity and find out "what humanity needs." Dex persuades Mosscap that it will need to consult someone besides Dex to answer this question; Mosscap in turn persuades Dex to let it accompany them on its travels, to help Dex along and keep them safe. And thus is formed a beautiful and delightfully weird friendship despite a certain degree of mutual unintelligibility.

You're an animal, Sibling Dex. And animals have no purpose. Nothing has a purpose. The world simply is. If you want to do things that are meaningful to others, fine! Good! So do it!... You keep asking why your work is not enough, and I don't know how to answer that, because it is enough to exist in the world and marvel at it. You don't need to justify that, or earn it. You are allowed to just live.

Mosscap's wisdom is the wisdom that built both the robots' and the humans' societies, only most individuals don't immediately seem to recognize it. Will Dex come truly to understand and embrace this, or will they continue to frustratedly wander the moon seeking this thing called "a purpose"? Or will Dex get eaten by a bear before Mosscap can rescue them?

I'm pretty freaking glad the sequel is already available. I just have to wait for a few dozen library patrons who requested it first to finish it. Meanwhile, it's just wonderful to know that books like this are (still) a thing, and I'll be checking out Becky Chambers' other series... as soon as I get my turn on those, too. The fact that in Wyoming, which to judge by our voting records is mostly full of the kind of people who claim not to want the kind of world that Solarpunk/Hopepunk exists to imagine, so many people are waiting to get a hit of what Chambers is slinging is as comforting as the books themselves.

Ahh!

Now, wait'll you get a load of the non-fiction I've been reading that this was a break from. 

Guido Morselli's DISSIPATIO H.G.: The Vanishing (Tr Fredericka Randall)

In the room I visited at the Mayr there was the usual supply of tranquilizers on the night table. I pocketed them. Not because I suffer from insomnia; I had another idea. I feel I have a duty to symbolically resow (yes, resow) the species, following Deucalion. He used stones that grew into human beings. With those meprobamate pills, I hope to propagate a calmer, less quarrelsome breed (compared to the extinct). I thought I might plant them on the Bellevue tennis courts where I watched the Davis Cup’s European zone matches. They ought to produce handsome people, like tennis champions, and like them, inclined toward fair play.

Guido Morselli's last and posthumously published novel, Dissipatio H.G.: The Vanishing is not your typical post-apocalyptic romp. We have no fights over resources, attacks by rival gangs, deadly games of hide-and-seek with the forces that destroyed human civilization. In Dissipatio H.G. (the "H.G." in the title refers, essentially, to the entire Homo genus in scientific nomenclature), the enemy has only ever been internal. Indeed, the story starts with a suicide attempt.

On the eve of his 40th birthday, an unnamed narrator I'm going to call Solo because I'm sick of writing "unnamed narrator" and permutations thereof, resolves to end his life by jumping into a cold underground Alpine lake to drown, but can't quite bring himself to do so and falls asleep on the shore. On the following morning, he wakes, a bit disgusted with himself, and heads back for his home in a tiny Alpine town, only to find that not only is nobody home at his house, but also anywhere in his neighborhood, his town, the neighboring city of Chrysopolis where he works at a newspaper, possibly the entire world, as he eventually and methodically determines by checking out the international airport to which flights no longer arrive and from which none depart. There aren't even the piles of clothing some Christian fundamentalists maintain will be the only traces of the righteous who will be Raptured up just before the End of the World.

But the world as a whole seems to be doing quite all right, except for the livestock, pets and houseplants languishing in otherwise empty human dwellings.

Solo being both a solipcist and a misanthrope -- the kind of guy who refers to Christmas cards as "the annual extortion of greetings" -- he feels fine, building a mocking memorial to the human race out of some abandoned cars and mannequins in downtown Chrysopolis, catching and milking the odd newly wild goat, raiding the well-stocked pantry and refrigerators of a grand hotel* but occasionally smashing a shop window to steal some fruit. "Anarchy and monarchy coexist, now and in me," Solo observes -- or maybe gloats? But he's not quite the gloating kind. "No one possesses me; I possess all."

Solo's last human interaction appears to have been when he passed by an old church's ossuary on his way to his not-suicide. He translated a sign painted over its gate for a tourist: "They were as you and you will be as they are." An interesting parting scene for Solo and the humanity he finds reprehensible for its polluting ways, its materialism, its dullness.

When he returns to the ossuary later, he finds that the human skulls it used to contain have all disappeared as well, which lead this reader to start wondering about cemeteries and columbariums and whatnot but Solo has no fucks to give on this topic so I was left wondering. I got used to it.

It's not through any will to learn, any efforts at playing detective, that Solo starts forming a notion of what occurred while he was up at the lake not ending it all. He just sort of notices things. No cars are clogging the streets or highways to indicate any effort at escape, for instance, and even the beds in the houses he explores still look almost like they're being slept in; the covers are disturbed but not pulled back as they would be by someone getting out of bed. People just disappeared, "vaporized" as Solo calls it, and that was that. 

He finds a journal entry though, penned by a cook in the hotel at almost exactly the stroke of midnight on the night of the disappearance, that suggests that at least some people knew this event was coming and were kind of looking forward to it. Solo being something of a (former) public intellectual type, he's more interested in musing about Freud and the death instinct and other matters philosophical than in the phenomenon the cook's note reveals, though, and soon he's back to his own personal pursuit: observing nature as it starts encroaching in and reclaiming the territory humanity thought was ours, starting with the mold in the cheese in the hotel restaurant and moving on to animals and birds starting to nest in abandoned houses in the city he has always hated. 

Mercifully this novel is quite short. I say mercifully not because the experience of reading it is in any way any more unpleasant than any other post-apocalyptic yarn, nor because Solo is a particularly unpleasant character, but more because it is, in its way, even bleaker than what most of us consider the bleakest entry in the genre, good old Cormac McCarthy's good old The Road.

I have one more book to finish from Radtezky March, though that month is over, and then I think I'm going to go back to free-range reading. The geographic theme was interesting for a while but I've gotten quite a few ARCs and whatnot that I want to get to that won't fit any such. It was a fun idea but I'll not run it into the ground, for all that I already had an Anatolian April half-planned. The Turkish novel I most want to read hasn't even been published in English yet, after all!

*The electricity and phones remain on for the whole story, as many theorists even back then -- the novel was written in 1973, not long before, incidentally, Morselli himself succeeded where Solo failed -- had posited it might, for a while.

Miha Mazzini's THE COLLECTOR OF NAMES (Tr Maja Visenjak-Limon)

After what I saw in the cellar I often thought about God. For some time, that was all I thought about. This is how it is, I think. The only time we’re in contact with him is when we sleep. And dreams are our defences, our earthiness, trying to lead us away from Him. If we fight them and break through them we come into contact with Him. That’s what we call a nightmare. The more horrible the nightmare, the closer to Him we are. And that’s why in our everyday life it doesn’t matter whether you believe in God or not: but when your life starts becoming a nightmare that belief is the only thing that can save you. There are no decisions when you’re in contact with God. There’s no free will. And that’s what makes the nightmare so horrible. Things happen to you. Horror is the prayer of our time.

What could be more idyllic than a few months' stay on a relatively unpopulated and undiscovered Mediterranean island in the summer between your school years and the start of your adult life? Plenty if you're a teenaged character in Miha Mazzini's cosmic chiller, The Collector of Names, which explores the experiences of a passel of teen boys who've been given the keys to a newly-acquired but still pretty much abandoned villa on one end of the island, and a girl who's come to have her first taste of independence while staying with her great uncle on the other end, where a quaint village braces for the influx of tourists that are about to start pouring in now that a campsite has been established in the island's interior and word has gotten out about it.

Ana's great uncle, Aco, grew up on the island and was the first to encounter its weird and terrifying secret, which manifested in his childhood only as a weird green glow coming from the cellar of the villa when it was newly built and the home of a diplomat's subcontinental Indian widow. Aco took a dare to go check it out as part of his initiation into a gang of older boys who were themselves too afraid of, in particular, the hue of green that shined out of the basement window. He emerged from his encounter with his hair turned completely white, but we don't get to find out what he saw until much later. 

Cut to decades later when Ana has come to visit, and four teenaged boys re-open the villa with the weird secret in its cellar: Max, the son of the villa's new owner and a self-imagined lady-killer and the first to strike up a conversation with Ana on the ferry to the island; strong and fit Sano; less assured farm kid Alfonz; and poor, skinny, clumsy Raf, who is really only along because Max felt he owed Raf a good time after copying off his schoolwork for years and years. They've come for a little while to get good and drunk, having brought rucksacks full of homemade schnapps and cleaned out the entire beer and brandy stock of the village's only store-cum-bar, but since the villa has no refrigerator and the ocean tides on the nearby beach are too strong to use seawater as a cooler, the boys decide to use the spooky cellar to keep their drinks cold -- only to discover a weird crate full of a plastic-like substance that is warm to the touch, and a bunch of tiny stalagtites of what turn out to be some kind of amber, each one containing the letters spelling out somebody's name. All kinds of names, from the commonplace to the exotic and foreign. And there are a LOT.

By the time one of the boys has a direct encounter with the... entity in the cellar, it's too late. 

Some truly gruesome scenes ensue, and some truly touching ones as well. The monster from the cellar affects everyone differently with its simple tactics, but as its victims meet or approach their ends, their unique emotional wounds are reopened as we experience their madness from the inside. The Collector of Names could have just been an entertaining gore-fest, but Mazzini isn't interested in writing a literary slasher film; he wants us to feel what everybody's feeling rather than just pointing and laughing at their deaths.

Livening things up still further is Aco's childhood gang, all of whom grew up to serve in the same military unit, with Aco emerging as the leader with the moral authority he gained when his hair went prematurely white. They have maintained a certain military discipline together over the years, for all that it looks like, to the teenagers arriving on the island, they just sit together on a bench every day and codge (that's what a codger does, right? Codges? Anyway, these guys codge). In other words, under Aco's direction, they've been planning for the day when whatever is in that cellar emerges. Were their preparations effective? Only one way to find out, friends. It's a tight, short read. Go and get it!