Alexis Wright's PRAISEWORTHY

Yes, he felt he was the total winner about that, his identity war, and he was truly beating Aboriginal Sovereignty hands down by fetching up his so-called ninja powers for eliminating the endless threats going bang, bang, gangbusters, from preventing his dreams from coming true. It was always a total war, and the boy pushed ahead like he had jumped from the ditches, and was already flying Qantas like a piece of war machinery that was destroying the mediocre killer drama, and the whole sick and sorry trail of far-reaching consequences that were coming to a head, to prevent him from enduring the final moments of being in his ancestral world, before he would not be long gone forever from the scene.

I was expecting a lot of things from Alexis Wright's most recent offering, Praiseworthy, which absolutely deserves every bit of the hype it's gotten but is also a very difficult read in many ways, which I'll get to. I was not, however, expecting Praiseworthy to be the best depiction I've ever encountered of what our hyper-mediated and tech-accelerated and over-connected 21st century media environment is doing to the inner lives of the young children growing up steeped in it. After all, this is a novel about an Aboriginal community in the northwest of Australia, focused on a family that lives in a house they built themselves out of whatever scrap metal and other discarded materials they presumably found in the course of doing their bit to make their town, Praiseworthy, into an award-winningly Tidy Community. 

Not exactly Neuromancer, in other words. But as that novel's author famously observed, the future is here, it just hasn't been evenly distributed yet -- only he made that observation back in the 1980s. It's now, alas and alack, the 2020s, and some of it (arguably the worst of it) finally has been distributed relatively evenly. To wit, a chubby little eight-year-old resident of Praiseworthy is running around with a government-issued iPhone, iPad and Apple watch (which he has to sneak into other people's houses to charge because his parents won't even spring for electricity because "our people survived for thousands of years" without it) and he is thus every bit a part of what has become of the internet as the Tide Pod Eaters and the Booktok Influencers Who Only Read Dialogue and the diehard adherents to QAnon.

If anyone in the town of Praiseworthy was desperately trying to get his hands on horse paste during the early days of COVID-19, it was our boy Tommyhawk Steel, is what I'm saying.

Oh, Tommyhawk, a not-quite villain of his novel. Tommyhawk, his virtual nose pressed to the virtual glass to watch the 21st century passing him by as he is stuck in a podunk town full of native hicks who have resisted assimilation into White Australia, has as warped a perspective on life as a little kid could possibly have. Someday, he is certain, a wonderful blond white lady, the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, is going to arrive at the head of the Australian military to rescue Tommyhawk from Praiseworthy and its villainous, backward and 100% pedophilic population (the Australian government/media complex of the 2020s, with the willing help of Praiseworthy's mayor, is pumping out constant messaging that Aboriginal parents are uniformly incompetent bumpkins who don't really love their children and it's just a matter of time before every child they have access to gets molested, and Tommyhawk, whose media consumption (and, to a degree, his formal education ) is not being monitored by anybody who cares about him, Believes It All) and take him away to live with her in Canberra, in the glorious Parliament House, where he will be safe and loved and respected and recognized for his inherent Greatness.

Of course, Tommyhawk is wrong about everything, but the people around him, including his family, are all occupied with other matters and too busy to even notice (well, his father kind of noticed, dubbing Tommyhawk a fascist on the day the kid was born...) what a head full of wrong he's got, let alone make the effort to correct him, even about the fact that they actually do care about him.

Tommyhawk is, you see, only one of four very eccentric and passionate members of the Steel family, all of whom are very, very involved in their own shit (well, mostly donkey shit, but we'll get to that), mostly stemming from their circumstances as Aboriginal citizens of 21st century Australia.

For starters, the Steel family's house is built on a piece of land they have claimed as their share via Australia's Native Title system. Which would be pretty straightforward except the chunk of land in question happens to be Praiseworthy's long-established high tech cemetery. A cemetery equipped with live streaming cameras and other equipment so faraway relatives of the deceased can not only watch over the graves of their loved ones via the Internet but can also broadcast themselves to the cemetery and, e.g. sing to their departed ancestors at any hour of the day or night. And they do. And they can also send comments on the appearance and general condition of the grounds. And they do.

I don't participate in anything like Nextdoor but I feel like this system in Praiseworthy's cemetery is very much like a Nextdoor for a diaspora and the very thought of it gives me hives.

But it gets better. By which I mean worse. Because Tommyhawk's parents haven't just settled down to live, themselves, in the cemetery. They've also turned it into a giant sanctuary for feral donkeys. I told you we'd get to the donkeys. There's a psychedelic-looking donkey right there on the American edition's book cover. Why is there a psychedelic-looking donkey on the cover of Alexis Wright's novel, Praiseworthy?

Meet Tommyhawk's father, who goes by many names but most officially (I think) is known as Cause Man Steel. And his Cause is nothing less than the survival, nay, the thriving, of his people through the coming climate Jackpot (William Gibson again, yes), which he plans to manage from Praiseworthy by establishing a global transportation and shipping powerhouse completely independent of fossil fuels or manufactured machinery, i.e., 100% donkey powered.

Of course I'm thinking of the Underpants Gnomes. I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that Alexis Wright was thinking of the Underpants Gnomes. The United States' stupid pop culture has eaten the entire planet. 

But so, Cause Man Steel's plan to save the world and become, in the process, its first Aboriginal Billionaire, is: Phase One: Collect Donkeys. Phase Two: ... Phase Three: Profit (and save the world).

Except this is not in any way presented for laughs. Cause Man Steel is in absolute earnest and lives a life of anguished seeking, prompted by dreams sent by his land and his ancestors, to enact this plan and pursue its central and most crucial aim: find the God Donkey, a donkey of corporeal perfection so great that its fur is not just silvery grey, like the hundreds or even thousands of donkeys he has liberated from "neglectful" owners or just lassoed out in the desert (Australia's feral donkey problem puts the southern U.S.'s feral hog problem to shame) and brought home to Praiseworthy's cemetery, one by one, in his decrepit and sandblasted Ford Falcon but the exact hue and shininess of platinum.

You're probably already piecing this together. Tommyhawk's daddy is on a perpetual quest for the perfect donkey instead of being there to parent his son, and keeps using the barely running family car to bring failed God Donkey candidates home and turning them loose in the Internet-enabled cemetery and its environs (I mean, you don't expect feral donkeys to respect property boundaries, do you? Of course they're on the loose all over Praiseworthy, eating all the plants and pooping everywhere and kicking up clouds of dust which aren't even the only airborne hazards of life in Praiseworthy, as I'll get to.). And I mentioned that people all over the world can witness and comment on this, right? To whom are the commenters' helpful comments directed? 

Meet Tommyhawk's mother, Dance, wife of Cause Man Steel, who is sick to death of all her neighbors, actual and virtual, bitching at her about the donkeys. Her life would be nothing but being a receptacle for donkey bitching if she hadn't long ago checked out, mentally and emotionally, and cultivated a Nabokov-level obsession with moths and butterflies, an obsession that seems mutual because she is never presented in Praiseworthy without an absolute lepidopteran cloud orbiting her person. Occasionally, she notices her sons.

Oh, and she is convinced she is biracial: everybody tells her that, based on her appearance, she has at least one ancestor who was Chinese. So any issue of Native Title or anything touching on the eternally fraught question of Who Counts as Indigenous is extra complicated where she and her children are concerned. Which she doesn't think about much until circumstances in the novel force her to think about it all a whole lot.

Yes, sons, plural, because she and Cause Man also have a 17-year old, who rejoices in the name that is absolutely reflective of his father's priorities, but feels almost like it exists solely to provide the second two-thirds of the novel with a bitterly funny running joke, Aboriginal Sovereignty Steel. Ab.Sov to his friends and girlfriend, from whom he has recently been separated because she is a few years younger than he is, and by some reckonings, this makes poor Ab.Sov a pedophile. So, you know, Tommyhawk's big brother doesn't have much time for him either.

All of this is to say that, Tommyhawk Steel is a very, very unpleasant Eric Cartman of a kid, but, even more than Cartman, one who makes sense as a product of his environment and  is a tragically funny (until he's not) little asshole of a character, who is but one of the novel's two main antagonists. 

I feel like I've given away too much already so I'm not going to talk much about the other, the albino mayor of Praiseworthy, who is very much on board with the effort to force his people to Assimilate and in general get with the global economic exploitation program and seems to be spending most of his time trying and failing to put a stop to Operation Donkey God and maybe just put Cause Man in jail or something.

Nor have I much discussed the big problem literally hanging over the heads of every adult, child and donkey living in Praiseworthy, a mysterious and persistent atmospheric haze that yes, per the great Brian Wood*, is strongly reminiscent of Don DeLillio's Airborne Toxic Event except in that it's been there for years and is actually visible. The haze is introduced right at the novel's beginning as the likely ultimate source of the community's woes but its menace and effect are quickly overshadowed by those of the town's two most powerful internal enemies, Mayor Ice Pick (yes, that is his name) and Tommyhawk Steel.

The voluntary searchers who had never before wished to be elsewhere in their lives except being on country now felt their time immemorial beings jeopardized, by knowing this kind of little fascist was not dreaming ancient homeland dreams, and this made them feel as though their sanity was being stolen, and that they too had been placed in some jeopardy departure lounge of a busy international terminal, the subnormal monstrosity of unnaturalness that they had never before managed to imagine in their holy-place mind, and all this foreign mind transporting stuff happened just by watching the way the kid was prancing around like a caged animal in their aired zone airstrip cut through stripped land, where even they, who had never been to a city, were now impatiently pacing while channeling anyone for the sake of just saying hello, and checking for non-existent incoming and outgoing flights bundled in the blue sky, and expecting a call from somebody calling the scenario glistening in a sunray and oh! My god, it was not even the mother, Mother, or the White Mother calling.

The above is how this novel depicts a scene in its last third or so, in which an even more agitated and impatient Tommyhawk is pacing back and forth alongside Praiseworthy's makeshift airstrip, jabbering into his iPhone, while most of the rest of the town has been mobilized to search for Tommyhawk's missing older brother. And, given said brother's highly idiosyncratic name, Aboriginal Sovereignty, it's a big question, sentence by sentence, whether what's being discussed in phrases like "their missing Aboriginal Sovereignty" is the person or the concept. And is the mother being discussed currently Tommyhawk's actual mother, Dance Steel, or is it the faceless bureaucrat in charge of Aboriginal affairs for the Australian government? Etc.

All of this is to say that Alexis Wright does some wild things with English prose even allowing for the presence of Australian slang terms and the very, very broad and flexible range of meanings Aboriginal communities on Australia impart to seemingly ordinary and straightforward words like "country."

Wright's style also very effectively mimics a much older form of storytelling than a maximalist (did I mention that Praiseworthy is over 700 pages long? Well, it is) 21st century novel: a bedtime or campfire story, told in chunks over many nights, each time handing off the narrative duties to a new Oracle (which is often more than one being) and circling back to remind listeners/readers of where we last left all the characters physically, emotionally and spiritually before nudging the plot along a bit with something new. Furthermore, the narrative itself seems to be built around the idea that all of its reader/listeners witnessed the original events and are as much being reminded as told about them, so a lot of what we might call plot elements either happen offscreen or don't seem to actually happen at all. And sometimes the facts seem to differ, sometimes substantially; we are, after all, getting multiple perspectives on evernts. For example, suddenly the volunteer force looking for Ab.Sov has swollen from a handful of fishermen to a crowd of maybe thousands? But we aren't told when this happened or how. It's just suddenly so. You learn to roll with it. Or you don't. But it's better if you do. 

This has caused some readers to fuss that Praiseworthy is too long and bloated with all of that repetition and if all you ever read is tightly plotted genre fiction, you'll probably think so, too, unless you go into this with consciously different expectations. This isn't a soap opera or an action-packed adventure, not a social novel, nor, precisely, a character study. It's very much its own thing. And I'm not sure right now what to call that thing, but I like it.

*Chad Post and Brian Wood devoted an entire season of the consistently great Two Month Review podcast to Praiseworthy. Go listen to hear these insights and much more!

Otohiko Kaga's MARSHLAND (Tr Albert Novick)

Time is really like an army of cockroaches. I have to force my hands to keep moving; it is like making myself squash cockroaches, one at a time. By my calculations, it takes one hundred finished tags to squash one cockroach.

By the time the above passage hits and makes sense to the reader, she understands the character expressing it so thoroughly that she doesn't even notice how nonsensical these words seem unless she goes back and reads it again later. At the time, she just knows that she feels it deeply, knows exactly what the character means, has been there, too, counting cockroaches with luggage tags. We are in the hands of a master of his chosen form.

It's been a while since I've indulged my love of big, sprawling social novels that 19th century Europe and North America produced in plentitude. There are still many of them I haven't read yet. I've only scratched the surface of Balzac's Human Comedy, for instance, and there are still a few Henry James chonks I haven't read yet, and while I've made a pretty throrough study of the Big Russians, Anna Karenina is still somewhere in my TBR. But I'm a perverse chooser of what to read next, and very much on the sucker lists of Open Letter, Deep Vellum and the Dalkey Archive so of course when I got the urge to grab a mammoth again, I turned to... late 20th century Japan. 

First published in 1985, Marshland is set in the late 1960s and early 1970s and flashes back to even earlier. It is, as I've hinted, a very long and involved and in-depth look at Japanese society, mostly in its post-WWII years but also in earlier times in the life of its hero, Atsuo Yukimori, ex-convict, ex-soldier, and, as we first get to know him, soon-to-be universally vilified suspect in a shocking terrorist attack on Tokyo's train system. 

Atsuo is a very satisfying and meaty character to follow through a realist fictional life, introspective and honest, ashamed but never blaming anyone but himself for his many strayings from the straight and narrow path his poor family tried so hard to set him on. We meet him first as a middle aged bachelor living a very self-regulated, respectable but limited bachelor life in Tokyo, where he is the shop foreman for an auto repair business in the heart of the city. But, as we know from the very first, he has a checkered past, a deserter from this service in the Japanese army during World War II (and we'll get all of the details of his less than illustrious career in the Empire's service), a petty thief, something of a con man, a pickpocket... But we also know, before novel's end, that several of his stints in prison were pretty much entered into by his choice as the only way to stay alive, sheltered and fed through the devastating years of Japan's reconstruction, years that didn't have much use for him as a free man but did offer the chance for him to gain useful skills as an incarcerated one.

But I'm focusing too much on Atsuo, who is about as much the main character of Marshland as McNulty is of The Wire; he's the first one we get to know but is only one of many, all of whose stories matter to the overall narrative and scope of the book. There's Atsuo's vain and self-important employer, Mr. Fukawa and his devious secretary/mistress; Atsuo's nephew, also a worker at the shop and the dormitory "mother" who runs it's employee housing; there's the beautiful young student Wakako, who brings love and romance into Atsuo's life even as she draws him, inadvertently, into the world of student revolutionary politics and the police attention that brings; there are the hard-working, poor and honest members of Atsuo's family and the spoiled, immature but passionate student revolutionaries busy occupying buildings and trashing businesses and preaching doctrine at each other; and the police officers and prosecutors who have been watching them and whose baleful and possibly fatal attention comes to rest on Atsuo and Wakako after a train bombing... And the defense attorneys and private citizens who come together in the name of justice and hope and won't let Atsuo and his fellow defendants give up. All of them have lives and backgrounds and motivations and fears and desires that a good thousand pages or so allow us to explore in considerable depth and lets most of not all of them claim at least a little of our sympathy.

And, in Otohiko Kaga, we have a supremely confident novelist who misses no opportunity to put the emotional screws to us like a detective interrogating a prime suspect. Thus even the moments that should shine through with supreme happiness are tinged with tragedy and despair and bitterness, while those of desolation and enforced solitude still have hints of bitter humor and, sometimes, of possibility.

All of this is accomplished in a sound and unflashy style, so spare and simple that I honestly don't know how much is Kaga's and how much is translator Albert Novick's. Regardless, neither is trying to show off any dazzling chops or experimental elan. They've got a big, complicated, emotionally devastating story to tell and they're too committed to it to mess around with tricks of language or narrative beyond the occasional extended flashbacks.

Kaga has, also, a magnificent gift for nature writing. I have so many examples of this marked, but I think this is my favorite, from when Atsuo and Wakako are out in the Hokkaido wilderness, exploring scenes from Atsuo's childhood when he dreamed of becoming a hermit in the titular Marshland:

Those columns of ice really did take on individual forms as they grew over time, forms that were ever changing; forms that expressed - something. Some kind of will, the will that set nature in motion. That was the thing. This was not human will. There was too much variety there. It was beyond what people could make. In Tokyo the will that moves nature was in hiding. It was hidden by concrete and steel and cars and glass - the things made by people. But the stars showed the will of the creator of the natural world. So did the forest, the sea, the lake.

And yes, partaking in even earlier literary traditions, the state of the landscape is a beautiful stand-in for the emotional lives of the characters as well as the essential changelessness of the world beyond the socio-economic and political struggles of Tokyo and Osaka and Nemuro. Indeed, the final chapter for Marshland is a bravura example of linking the break-up of the ice atop frozen rivers and lakes to the freedom of new possibilities the characters are only just daring to consider as they fantasize about leaping onto an ice floe and letting it carry them out to sea. The beauty is all the greater for having been earned through hundreds and hundreds of pages of every kind of sight and sensation and emotion known to man crowding in on us and seeming like they'll never let us budge.

Anybody out there who's wondering what to put on a syllabus alongside, say, Crime and Punishment or The Portait of a Lady or Middlemarch could do worse than adding this; anybody who loves deeply involving modern-ish narratives like The Wire or just in the mood for the deepest possible exploration of the mid 20th century and how its various tensions and social currents affected real people should block out some time to spend in the Marshlands. This book is brilliant.

Margie Sarsfield's BETA VULGARIS

Elise fantasized about being the kind of adult she'd needed as a teenager, which felt a little pathetic, veering too close to "inner child" territory. Realistically, Elise could not be trusted with anyone's heart, not even her own.

Elise woke up with a thirst like she was a Russian doll and each of the selves inside her needed their own gallon of water to recover.

Elise had failed, miserably to learn every lesson, and she hated herself for it. She wanted to be the perfect person for everyone, and she'd never once gotten close. There were too many other fucked-up up versions of herself hanging out inside her, no room for the one true and flawless Elise to be born.

I don't think I've ever highlighted as many blocks of text in my ebook reader as I have in Margie Sarsfield's bizarre and brilliant novel, Beta Vulgaris, the chronicle of a young Millennial woman whose dreams of being able to support herself in a post-2008 United States mock her at every turn, and whose undergraduate education as a philosophy major and a lifetime of psycho-sexual anxiety and eating disorders have left her painfully and chronically self-aware, and whose current state of economic and social precarity has led her and live-in boyfriend Tom to the perfectly logical conclusion that their best move in the coming months is to leave their groovy Brooklyn life for a while, sublet their apartment to a friend/relative, and travel to faraway, exotic Minnesota and temporary employment as menial labor bringing in a massive and only sort-of industrialized sugar beet harvest. It pays really well, better than either of their current day jobs, and it should provide the kind of hipster credit and anecdote fodder beloved of their milieu, while also giving them a kind of rhetorical bludgeon to use on their elders, who just don't seem to understand just how dire their economic situation and prospects really are. And never mind that Tom is actually a trust fund baby who is getting ready to go to law school on his parents' dime. He's got his darned pride.

Elise, meanwhile, is generally struggling. The kind of struggling that she feels is unique to her age group but hey, I, too remember spending entire months walking six miles to and from work each day until my job decided to spring for monthly T passes for employees,and carefully rationing leaves off the head of lettuce that represented a week's groceries because I had stupidly splurged on a Ranma 1/2 VHS tape on pay day all those weeks ago, and having to pass up the really good temp jobs (before one of my temp jobs hired me as a permanent worker) because I couldn't afford the right clothes for the kind of office that would otherwise hire me based on my skills but not if I showed up in a fraying khaki skirt and a knit top that was beginning to pill because the dryers at my nearest coin-op laundry really sucked and [your own memory of twenty-something poverty here]. Elise's struggles have been my struggles, is what I'm saying, and if I'd had a groovy boyfriend with reliable cross-country transportation (aka a working car) when I was her age, I, too, might have chosen a season as a temporary agricultural worker of some kind. I might have made quite a few of the wacky choices (including, sometimes, choosing not to choose in the hope that a particular problem or two might just resolve itself or go away) she makes in the course of Beta Vulgaris. I might, too, have heard the sugar beets singing each to each, and thought that they were singing to me. Your mileage may vary.

Robert L. Forward's DRAGON'S EGG (Narr by Todd McLaren)

One of the extra and unintended joys of reading vintage/older science fiction (in the case of Dragon's Egg, physicist Robert L. Forward's fiction debut, dating to 1980) is, when one sees a particularly egregious forecasting error on the part of the only kind of author whom the reading public routinely expects to predict the future, imagining what would have to have happened, to have always been true, for one of a novel's more noticeable conceits to be plausible. 

In the case of Dragon's Egg, for instance, the Soviet Union and the Cold War are both still very much real and unignorable facts in its fictional 2020 -- but that's not the interesting thing to think about really, at all, at least as far as this novel is concerned: the Iron Curtain is treated as a throwaway bit of background noise in the idle thoughts of a character and that's pretty much that. 

But what is interesting to think about in terms of this novel and how it differs from our reality is its assumption that the early economic and, possibly, physical realities of how digital computing power is allocated, used and accounted for would have continued to very much resemble how such matters were understood and employed in the earliest days of electronic computing. 

In Forward's 2020, we can't be sure that computers haven't gotten much smaller than the enormous room fillers of the 1960s and 70s, but it is a fact integral to the earliest developments of Dragon's Egg's plot that computer time is expensive and thus must be rigidly controlled and accounted for, to the degree where, as we first come to meet our first point of view character, Jacqueline, the completion of her doctoral thesis research is suddenly threatened by the international currency markets! Her advisor is Russian and his work is funded by his government, his lab's computer time paid for in rubles. If the value of the ruble suddenly plummets, its purchasing power does, too, and so the amount of computer time budgeted for a given piece of research shrinks unless a fresh infusion of rubles is diverted toward that resource.

We can smile indulgently at this notion, of course, treat it as a quaint aspect of a novel written just before most of us had ever heard of Moore's Law, but is it really that goofy? We consider computing power to have gotten cheaper, but I suspect that most of us who think that don't consider much beyond the cost of the materials that make up the machines. As chips got smaller, they required less stuff to manufacture, so of course they got cheaper, but did they? How many rare earth elements went into the IBM behemoths from the punch cards days versus the nosy little snoop machine broadcasting all of your data from your pocket? And what are the environmental costs of acquiring the materials in such a manner as to keep them cheap? How many workers in the supply chain are barely making a living wage? To say nothing of the energy consumed in mining, manufacturing, shipping, marketing and then finally running your jeejahs?*

What if Forward's alternate 2020 is just as technologically sophisticated as ours but is more upfront and honest about the tech's actual cost and makes everybody involved actually pay their fair share to employ it? Then it's not so very inaccurate about the actual 21st century as we might have first assumed, eh? See, this is way more fun than just pointing and laughing at how William Gibson didn't anticipate cell phones or whatever.

But now I'm way out in the weeds as far as this novel is concerned, which is not about economics or social justice or the evolution of the tech sector, but about an exceptionally cool and fairly uncommon idea or set of ideas about what space aliens might actually be like!

Spoiler: they're really, really not like us, and they're really, really not that easy to think about. We're in Greg "Clockwork Rocket" Egan and Neal "Anathem" Stephenson and Peter "Blindsight" Watts territory, here. As in hard science fiction, but hard science fiction that is a lot more than "we're going to throw orbital mechanics or fuel calculations or subatomic particle physics at you for a few hundred pages so you don't notice that it's really just cowboys and injuns in spaaaaaace."

Not that there's anything wrong with that. 

Anyway, Jacqueline's work employs a space probe that is humanity's first to travel orthogonal to the elliptic of our solar system, meaning that, if we regard the sun and its planets and other rocks and clots of stuff as all on one flat plane, as we do, this is our first probe that has gone up "above" it to examine it from the new angles that position affords. The Sun presents a whole new face to us when viewed from there, for instance. 

While Jacqueline is looking, not so much at images as at the kind of massive streams of raw data that NASA and Co. use to generate those (simulated and cosmetically enhanced) images, she has found some weird distortions in the numbers. And, because she is brilliant (but also pretty, slim, young and French), she manages to commandeer the probe to take a closer look and maybe determine what's really going on up/out there. 

And before you can say Big Ben, Jacqueline and her new friend/admirer Donald have found that there's a pulsar plowing through our neighborhood!

But wait, there's more!

Honestly, I can understand where a lot of readers would be all but tapping their feet and checking their phones with increasing frequency through these early chapters, but I would have been perfectly happy with this stuff as the whole novel. I am a scientific washout as a person, having flamed out in grad school because I kept getting distracted by various opportunities to learn new languages (which should have been my course of study in graduate school, but was not), but I still absolutely love the kind of minutiae of discovery described here, the process of applying reason and precedent and new intuition to the interpretation of the massive dumps of indirect data that we use to make up for the vast inadequacies of our own evolved kluges we call our senses. Like, we can't see, for instance, X-rays, but we can cobble together machinery that measures them anyway and work from the numbers that generates to concoct an approximation of what it would be like if we could see them, and then monitor changes in that approximation and extrapolate from that more about the nature of other things we can't "see" and build up a considerable body of pretty good information about the rest of the world we can't directly perceive. And from that we can sometimes manipulate these unseen things into doing work for us or answering questions like "Is this lady's collarbone broken?" or "Does that star that is so far away from us that we're actually only seeing what it looked like thousands of years ago, have some planets orbiting it? Planets like ours?"

I mean, come on!

Interconnected between the chapters detailing the discovery of the pulsar and, as the novel's time frame races ahead, the arrival of a crewed spaceship in orbit around the pulsar waiting for robots to build the infrastructure that will allow the crew (including a son of Jacqueline's named Pierre) to explore its mysteries, are chapters that give us glimpses of another community. At first they seem very like us and to inhabit a world like ours, as a point of view character tries to catch a swift. It's only after we've enjoyed a few moments of failed swift-catching efforts that we discover that the swift is not a pretty little bird flying around, and that our new character has a body even less like ours than the swift's is like a specimen of  Apus apus! We're not in Kansas anymore; our guy has many more eyes than you or I do, and has a much more protean body. Oho!

As more chapters unfold, we watch this other population develop culturally through the discovery of things like agriculture, and mathematics and optics, and begin to cultivate a much more sophisticated understanding of their world and how it works, through processes of investigation and discovery that are as enjoyable to observe as Jacqueline's and Donald's have been. Forward shows here a talent for speculative biology, sociology and, yes, physics that I would compare to many better known writers.

Here I'm going to digress again, because while I'm never one to scream about spoilers and would remind my readers once again that this here blog carries a "ware spoilers" up there in its header, but man, this novel would have been even more fun if the jacket copy didn't give away the nature of this other community, so that I didn't know in advance how these two narratives actually fit together. I would love to have been surprised by the answer, so I'm not going to spoil it for you, either. And if this post has already made you think about grabbing a copy of this to enjoy, I'd urge you to do your best to avoid the blurbs and marketing copy so that you can enjoy the discovery the way that I think Forward actually intended you to. I mean, it's still great anyway, but file this story's secrets under "would have been more fun to uncover alongside the characters instead of just getting to watch them figure out what we already know." Le sigh.

And now, excuse me. There is a sequel to this called Starquake, but it appears to be out of print, or at least not yet published in digital form. But hey, I've been looking for an excuse to visit my local used paperback store again anyway!

*By the way, though, even this point about allocating scarce resources vis a vis scientific research isn't necessarily all that retro-anachronistic, because Jacqueline's work doesn't just require computational power but also employs one of six existing-in-her-universe X-Ray telescopes. I'm sure that, even in that age which Forward depicts as even less interested in astronomical observation and study than our actual 2020s are, there are probably lots of graduate student types and senior scientists, too, jockeying for telescope time, just as they are in our world. 

Stuff I Loved in 2024

My Internet friend Ben Werdmuller had a lovely idea for wrapping up what has honestly been a pretty wretched year for those of us who don't coat our faces with weird orange makeup every morning. I had originally been persuaded by my Own Dear Personal Mom to do a favorite books of 2024 post when Ben shared this post of his on Mastodon (aka the best alternative to the cesspool that once was our beloved bird site). What a fantastic idea! After all, even I occasionally do things besides reading.

But let's be honest: this is mostly going to be about reading. Because I've given up most other forms of recreation for various reasons, many of them medical but many because I realized a few years ago that I'm well past the likely midway point in my lifespan and likely do not have enough time left, even if I gave up sleeping (which I already do very little of), to read everything on my ever-growing To Be Read list.

But anyway, enough preamble. On with what I liked from this year. 

Television 

What? A big long paragraph about how all I want to do is read and I'm starting with TV? Something I resentfully sit through while still sneaking a page or two, just for the sake of spending "quality time" with my family? Yes. The Imp of the Perverse built a mansion on my shoulder and is very hard to coax out of it. Almost as if it has been sentenced to house arrest there or something! Which, you'll see what I did there in a moment. 

A Gentleman in Moscow 

Showtime's excellent adaptation of Amor Towles' wonderful novel was the only TV show I watched this year that I hadn't already seen before (the only other thing I watched, besides pretending to pay attention to some Buffalo Bills games with my mom and sister, was the BBC's 2000 adaptation of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy) and I just watched it over the holidays with my family and I loved it. Ewan McGregor was in no way who I imagined as Alexander Rostov when I originally listened to the excellent audio edition of the novel narrated by Nicholas Guy Smith; as is usually the case when I imagine a Russian male character, my mind casts Anatoly Solynitsin in the role. But McGregor was great, as was his gorgeous and intelligent wife Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Anna Urbanovna and the young women who played Nina and Sofia. This story of a Russian count who escapes the fate of most of his peers in the Russian Revolution via a misattributed poem that convinced the new regime he would be useful to them if kept prisoner in Moscow's famous Metropole Hotel could easily have been dominated by the production design but the show's creators wisely focused very tightly on Towles' amazing cast of characters and their stories. The show is worthy of the novel, and of all the hype it has received.

 

Music

I'm a middle aged fuddy duddy who has tried to keep myself open to new music, but I'm afraid this year was very much dominated for me by "legacy acts" releasing brand new albums that kept true to why I originally loved them but don't sound like they came through a time portal from the eras in which these acts first gained fame.

Richard Thompson - SHIP TO SHORE

I've loved Richard Thompson since my partner on our very amateurish college radio show first introduced me to Thompson's RUMOR & SIGH back in 1991. I kept up with his new output and happily explored his back catalog with Linda Thompson, Fairport Convention, etc and he's never once bored me. So color me not surprised that his 2024 output is still great. As the cover art conveys, the album has a very nautical feel. It never descends into just "Richard does sea shanties" though that would be fine. Thompson explores many themes that have little to do with the sea along with those that do, balancing the jaunty nautical stuff with his traditionally atmospheric guitar work and his unique and shiver-inducing voice.* My favorite track on here is "Singapore Sadie" but there isn't a skippable cut on here. 

John Cale - POPTICAL ILLUSION

John Cale is one of my favorite musicians of all time. The Velvet Underground without him feels incomplete; his solo work is spectacular and varied and he has impeccable taste in collaborators (his albums with Brian Eno, for example, are exceptional) as he demonstrated just last year with his album MERCY, which is how I discovered one of my new favorite singers, Weyes Blood. MERCY is so good that I took it as a capstone to an amazing career and was grateful to have it, but Cale isn't done yet. POPTICAL ILLUSION is loaded with absolute bangers that I can't stop listening to, especially "Shark-Shark" (which, check out this bonkers music video) and what I insist is a brand new classic, "How We See the Light." This. Is. Pop.

Laurie Anderson - AMELIA

Laurie Anderson's art is always an event in my world, and her 2024 concept album dedicated to the story of Amelia Earhart is an exceptional example of how affecting her work can be. Even if you set aside her incredible cast of collaborators, the atmosphere of mystery, wonder, adventure and tragedy she conjures out of ordinary instruments and her deep and meditative voice as she narrates her version of Earhart's experiences is absolutely riveting. I'm guilty a lot of the time of using music as a secondary experience -- I blast really complicated prog rock as pain relief, filling my mind with other signals to block the constant neural spam my chronic illnesses constantly harass me with, and I also read a lot while playing music for similar reasons -- but stuff like Amelia occupies me entirely. And it's educational, too!

The Cure - SONGS FOR A LOST WORLD

I mean, you knew this was going to be on here, right? I'm a white Gen Xer from the United States. The Cure was my everything for the 1980s and 1990s.** And as everybody knows, they came into 2024 with an album destined to own it. I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this. The entire Internet is raving about this album. For good reason. 

Winter's Blue and Radiant Children - NO MORE APOCALYPSE FATHER

I swear I'm not putting this here just to lay claim to a tiny sliver of hipness or prove that I actually do listen to music that comes from this century, but of course that's the message this really sends, isn't it? I only know of this album because Jordan Holmes, co-host of the Knowledge Fight podcast, mentioned this album as his "bright spot" on an episode -- which is how I've found a lot of "new to me" acts in recent years, including Godspeed! You Black Emperor and Helado Negro, to name two others.*** And yes, a member of G!YBE is in this ensemble. Anyway, this is just great, moody, atmospheric and noisy music that combines a wintry bleakness with environmental sounds, heavy distortion and a painful beauty that stays with me long after the last sounds of "White Phosphorus" fade out.

Books

Ok, I mostly write about books on this blog, and I only write about books that I really really love and that I either think haven't gotten enough attention from the general reading public or I'm obligated to write about in exchange for an advance copy (a habit I'm trying to break but having a hard time with), so really, if you want to know what books I loved in 2024 you could just read my 2024 entries and call it good, but I did read some other excellent books that I didn't write about on here either because I was too ill at the time or because I thought they were getting plenty of coverage elsewhere. So that's what I'm going to focus on here.

CAHOKIA JAZZ, by Francis Spufford

CAHOKIA JAZZ was on a few "most anticipated" and "best of early 2024" type lists but then sort of disappeared from discussions about what was an exceptional year for new books. I'd really hate to see this get lost in the shuffle because it is hands down my favorite book that was published this year. I like a good alternate history milieu and CAHOKIA JAZZ has a great one: It's the Roaring 20s in North America, but it's a North America in which the indigenous population largely survived the germ warfare imported by Europeans and went on to flourish, standing up to enough of the waves of settlement to establish urban centers like the city-state of Cahokia, and maintain a melange of Native culture while still adapting with the technological developments and other historical currents of the 20th century -- and welcoming other races and ethnicities. The world thus established is rich and convincing and a spectacular setting in which Francis Spufford enacts a classic crime noir plot that could hold its own against classics like Chinatown. Except instead of clueless white boy Jake Gittes, though, we get Joe Barrow, an accomplished Black jazz pianist who is also a detective on Cahokia's city police force. The grisly, possibly ritualized murder case he catches, in a city where an Aztec pyramid occasionally hosts human sacrifices, turns out to have huge implications for the city-state as a whole. I'd love to see this made into a prestige miniseries. It could be a season of Fargo. Don't skip this one.

Percival Everett - JAMES

Again, I'm one tiny voice in a global chorus of praise. It's a bestseller. It won the National Book Award for fiction. It should have won the Booker Prize. It retells a classic and makes it better and richer. You've probably already read it and loved it. So did I.

Alan Moore - THE GREAT WHEN

I've come to love Alan Moore's prose fiction as much as I do his graphic novels, comics and magazines (yes, I have a stack of early issues of Dodgem Logic and no, I'm not ready to share them with anybody yet), so I eagerly awaited this first novel in his new Long London series that is projected to be a quartet. His most expressly magical work since, say, Promethea, THE GREAT WHEN establishes a dual London slightly remeniscent of China Mieville's THE CITY AND THE CITY but Moore's other London that is contiguous-but-separate from the London we know is utterly bizarre and one hundred percent magical. Or rather, magickal, because this sphere owes more to the likes of Alastair Crowley and Austin Osman Spare than to Gandalf or Dumbledore.

Our hero is a lowly teen who rejoices in the utterly batshit name of Dennis Knuckeyard, who is only surviving post-WWII London through the grudging good graces of Coffin Ada, a second-hand bookshop owner who employs him and let's him live in a room in the flat above the store where she smokes, drinks and knows things. It's a mostly miserable life for Dennis and looks to be made only worse when a mysterious book that shouldn't exist turns up in some new inventory he's been sent to fetch. His adventures in both Londons are bizarre, creepy, fascinating and occasionally tug at the heart, if one still has one. And Coffin Ada is even more magnificent than she sounds.

Audio Dramas & Podcasts

Observable Radio

This "found audio" drama in which a  broadcaster, who just might be the last human alive on earth after a weird comet's disastrous fly-by, tries to reach out to his missing friend, is also a cool exploration of many alternate earths. Does that make it an anthology series? Kind of.

The comet, in addition to disrupting ordinary life on what I *think* is meant to be our good old ordinary planet Earth but might not be, also has somehow thinned the boundaries between different universes just enough for our broadcaster to receive bursts of radio signals from alternate Earths that all slowly seem to be succumbing to some kind of slow invasion. Our man has started recording these intercepted transmissions and shares curated segments of them as he tries to reach a friend? lover? mentor? relative? whom he believes might still be out there and listening and willing to help figure out what the hell is going on. 

Meanwhile we learn of the existence of worlds in which the entire world is an oligarchy still firmly in control of historic dynasties like the Hapsburgs, who routinely enact elaborate assassination plots against one another; in which Christmastime is known only as The Holiday and involves the military mobilization of a child army known as The Naughty to defend the U.S.' northern border from the annual incursion of an eldritch horror that says "ho ho ho"; and, my favorite episode, in which large language models have been allowed to take over entertainment, municipal and emergency services and pretty much everything else, with entertainingly horrible consequences. I'm still waiting for my Paper Street Psychics tour tee shirt.

The show has a large, diverse and ever growing cast of terrific voice actors and singers to play out the collection of snippets of news broadcasts, advertising and recorded proceedings of the government and corporate bodies that make all of these worlds the bizarre, tragic, fascinating and occasionally funny ones they are, while the frame narrative maintains the air of tension and mystery that makes all of this cohere. I've listened to every episode multiple times and I'm still discovering little details in this lovingly crafted weirdness.

Weird Little Guys

I have to really, really love a show to put up with I Heart Media's terrible, terrible advertising, so Molly Conger's fascinating little show had a huge strike against it from the start. And I still sometimes let the new episodes pile up on my podcatcher just because I can't face the awfulness, which, the subject matter is bad enough! But Conger is such a throrough researcher, a candid and self-reflective presenter, and a pleasant and thoughtful personality that Weird Little Guys has become can't-miss listening for me. It just sometimes takes me a few days to steel myself to listen.

Sort of a companion piece to the famous Behind the Bastards, Conger goes small where Robert Evans goes big. She's interested in the lesser known but often just as awful people without whom most of the big bads Evans covers would be much less damaging and dangerous. Conger digs deeply into the backgrounds of the kind of guys who haven't yet made headlines, or have only made very niche headlines for things like burning crosses on other people's property or building pipe bombs for terror projects or creating small but terrible media ecosystems that celebrate mass murderers and urge viewers and listeners to join their ranks and become terror "saints" by planning and executing their own attacks on the unsuspecting public. She's the kind of woman who knows her way around a courtroom and a court filing hundreds of agonizingly dull pages long, and has a true storyteller's instinct for the illustrative details and anecdotes that bring these weird little guys to life and remind us that they live among us and maybe, just maybe, we can prevent one or two of them from going postal on us with a little more kindness and empathy? Maybe? But probably not. By the time they're on Conger's radar, we probably need to duck and cover on sight. 

Fourth Reich Archaeology

Hosted by two "noided" lawyers podcasting under the pseudonyms of Dick (as in Cheney) and Don (as in Rumsfeld), this show is as weird and disturbing as its title suggests. The general premise of the show is that the much-imagined Fourth Reich (as in the successor to Hitler's Third) is not a thing of the future but of the past and present, and Dick and Don are here to dig out from under decades of propaganda and obfuscation as many clues as they can to prove that the Fourth Reich is an almost seamless continuation of the Third and is better known to us as the international corporate regime that is what really governs the so-called Free World. It's a notion that seems far-fetched and overly paranoid to many, even today, but this pair has a lot of information on their side and are both, as one might expect, very good not only at constructing complex arguments but at effectively communicating them as well.

So far, the gents are focusing on making their case through the lens of the life and career of our 38th President of the United States, Gerald R. Ford. You know, the one nobody outside of the state of Michigan ever got to cast a vote for until he was running for re-election as POTUS and got beat by the late, much lamented, Jimmy Carter. Ford had a much more interesting life than I had ever imagined, as did his wife Betty, who is much more than just a name on rehab chain. While Ford was the first president I was old enough to know my name (just barely!), I knew next to nothing about him except that he'd pardoned Nixon. I now know that this is one of the less interesting facts about the guy. 

The show -- which also boasts a killer playlist of interstitial music skillfully deployed to drive home various points -- is currently taking a bit of a detour into a deep, deep dive into the Warren Commission and the men who served on it, one of whom was one Gerald Ford. It gets a bit out there at times but it's never not interesting and, like I said, it's full of facts that I have encountered nowhere else except maybe in Gravity's Rainbow.

There's more, and doubtless stuff I'm forgetting, but it's already 15 days into 2025 and I'm tired. BUT, is there something you think I missed? Let me know over on Mastodon!

*The first song of his that I ever heard was "Psycho Street" and so I always feel echoes of that in his voice.

**I'm one of those weirdos who prefers KISS ME, KISS ME, KISS ME to DISINTEGRATION, by the way.

***Both of whom also released new albums this year, by the way. They're great, but I'm trying to keep this listing on the short side.

Alex Pheby's WATERBLACK (And the rest of CITIES OF THE WEFT)

Hey Kate, tell us about the weirdest trilogy you've found since Brian Catling's Vorrh series, why don't you. Pretty please? Is it Jeffrey Ford's Well Built City trilogy? What about Tade Thompson's Wormwood books? Or Vladimir Sorokin's Ice trilogy (wrong, I haven't read that yet. But stay tuned!)? Well, close, but no: it's Alex Pheby's Cities of the Weft, and yes, Mordew, Malarkoi and Waterblack (also the names of the cities in the series title) are weird as hell.

And yeah, just like happened with Jeff Noon and Steve Beard's Gogmagog/Ludluda diptych, I didn't post on here when I read the first two books last year, in glorious audio book form as narrated by the idiosyncratically excellent Kobna Holdbrook-Smith*, but again, not because I didn't love them. I just don't post about everything I read anymore because I don't have the stamina I used to and typing still really hurts. Anyway, once again, I saw the final book on Netgalley and didn't want to wait, so now I'm honor-bound once again to share my thoughts about it. Which I have to talk a little about the earlier books to do at all well. So.

A warning to start: Alex Pheby is not here to meet your expectations. He's not writing any kind of fantasy that your average Big Publishing House marketing team would have any idea what to do with (so let's hear it for the brave and tasteful souls at Galley Beggar Press!). He's not giving a master class on world building, not here to give fan service to people who have come to care a lot for the kid who seemed to be the series protagonist in the first book, Mordew, nor to lovers of his urchin pals who take over most of the action in the second, Malarkoi, nor even for the incredible magical dogs who steal the show in both of those books.

We start Waterblack full of questions about what's next for Nathan Treeves, Prissy, Gam, Anaximander and Sirius (well, we kind of feel like we know what happened to the Goddog but Pheby has taught us to maybe not take certain endings very seriously). Nathan's mother, Clarissa, seems to have achieved her ultimate end already and has nowhere to go but down; is that what we're going to watch here? Nathan's enemy, Sebastian, the Master of Mordew, is still kind of kicking around though he was pretty disappointed at the end of Malarkoi, what about him? What about Portia, the Mistress of Malarkoi, "goddess of gods," who gave little Prissy quite a gift last novel? 

Cue pitiless laughter from our author, who doesn't give a fig for our expectations, but who knows that he's got us hooked anyway because the kind of people who enjoyed the first two volumes of his Cities of the Weft trilogy want to know where the hell he's going with all of this weirdness way more than we're invested in any particular character. Although, them, too, somewhat. I mean, there's still an untold number of "Nathan flukes" loose and wreaking havoc in the topologically distorted ruins of Mordew, after all, and Clarissa, who's been powering all of her mighty spells in the single most ruthless manner I've ever seen a not-quite villain employ in a novel of any kind, ever, still has... something going on and hey, does she care about her son, like, at all? And speaking of offspring, there's still a puppy of the Goddog's running around somewhere.

There are some very weird and intriguing and mind-blowing plot threads that have yet to be properly woven into this here narrative textile, is what I'm saying.

However...

Waterblack starts off by posing an extended philosophical argument as to how a whole bunch of stuff we've just been taking for granted as "true" within the universe of the Cities of the Weft... is ontologically impossible. This undermines almost everything we've come to understand about the hundreds of pages and dozens of hours we've devoted to exploring his creation.

And then he launches into a deep exploration of the background of a minor antagonist who had maybe two scenes in Malarkoi and wasn't even mentioned in Mordew.

But, because Pheby is a hell of a gifted storyteller, we're immediately interested in this girl, Sharli and her defective firebird companion, Tinnimam, anyway. Even before it's hinted that her back story may allow us to learn, at long last, what the hell the Women's Vanguard of the Eighth Atheistic Crusade is all about. I mean, this isn't Philip Pullman, here; as the jacket copy on Mordew discloses before we've even read a page of this series, God has already been dead a long time, here. But there are definite echoes of Pullman's work in the Cities of the Weft; there's even a Subtle Knife, though the person who gets it puts it to very different use than sweet young Will does in the book named for it 

But wait, Pheby isn't done trying to talk you out of loving his trilogy. He still has many logical arguments to make as to why everything he's shared with us through hours of narration/hundreds of pages is really kind of bullshit, and he makes these arguments in exhausting detail (there's more than one reason why people refer to these books as the most Platonist since Susanna Clarke's Piranesi). And, as he starts warning us about halfway through the book, a lot of our pressing narrative questions will not be answered in the text of Waterblack proper; we'll have to wait for the appendices, which, Lord of the Rings-like, take up a good chunk of this last novel.

 

But that's really the only thing these books have in common with Tolkien, I assure you. 

What this ultimately comes to is the most fascinating yet frustrating read I've encountered in a long, long time. Waterblack does my favorite thing a series' final volume can do, which is make me want to go back and re-read the whole trilogy because it has fundamentally changed what the earlier books even mean. This is a particular achievement in this case, since I just re-read Mordew and Malarkoi last month in preparation for this! 

But so, despite Pheby's best and most perverse efforts to the contrary, I still love this series. I still love its characters, especially the magical dogs (and especially especially the new magical puppy introduced in Waterblack. I absolutely want a sequel devoted to the further adventures of Anaximines. I am also absolutely sure I'm never going to get one. But that's ok, I have this.); I still love its strange cities and its stranger creatures (especially the very cerebral and civilized Person-Headed Snakes). And I love most of all how it made me question pretty much everything I'd read before, both in and out of the fantasy genre. You might, too. Give the first book a try!

*Who commits pretty much every sin I hate most in an audio book narrator but makes it all work. Even his artificially high and breathy female character voices somehow work. But that doesn't mean I'll accept this from anybody else, you hear?