By the post-Rona years, the obtrusive process of living — changing jobs, moving cities, divvying time between muggle work and social functions — had left me with several years’ worth of unfinished series on the shelf. Apart from occasionally checking to see if Gurm’s football blogs had any buried references to The Winds of Winter, the big debuts and marquee titles flowed past me. I was writing stories here and there, polishing pilots and availing myself of inane online writing contests, but I was out of the scene and off the road, shacked up in another cottage town, my travel cart parked and filled with potted plants. You never see them coming, the somnambulant diversions — the seductive islands of Circe, the soporific streams of Mirkwood, the poppy fields of the Emerald City. One day you’re about your noble quest, the next you’re disarmed, dispelled, domesticated. A lesser dork might call it growing up. Who can keep up with endless fantasy series when the porch needs replacing, or a family member is sick, or the mice keep getting in? So, you park your cart, sit for a spell, admire the flowers, try the wine. Next thing you know, there’s Aunt Em and Uncle Henry hovering over your bed, and your noble quest and strange friends and the little orange dudes start to fade away, and the yellow brick road slips from your mind like a trail of sand.
​
On the fantasy map of life — and I’ll be honest, I hadn’t seen that thing in a while. Stashed away in a treasure chest? Plundered by a goblin? Eventually I found it, rolled up in a poster tube. I unfurled it and blew off the dust. Yep, I was lost. I knew my general location, somewhere to the north of the Mire of Responsibility, but I had no inkling through which stony pass I’d come or in which direction I was going. Couldn’t have told you which duke or lord ruled the fiefdom. Did the endless stream of fantasy releases flow around me, or had I been swept away?

​Thankfully I caught a handhold, a rough stone called The Broken Earth trilogy. Winner of three consecutive Hugos, the crown of every book shop’s staff rec display — some tidings reach even the remotest peasants’ ears.

I read the first book, and it stirred the runes in my warlock brain. It was, in fact, the temblor that drove me back to my moldering tomes. I devoured The Fifth Season like I had a quiz to procrastinate for, but what about Dust of Dreams and The Crippled God, there on the shelf above them? Surely I hadn’t left Malazan forever? And those Sanderson Wheels up there on the top shelf? It was then that I began to trace the path from Jemison back to Tolkien, and to understand how entwined each was with my journey, and how those old roads led to my present. Not just because The Broken Earth is great fantasy, but because it’s so clearly drawn from the miles of Jemison’s own journey. It’s a raw and personal story of ancestral pain and lonely otherness, set in a bitter world of hard conditions and stratified societies. There are stark echoes of segregation and slavery, hard truths from our past and future incarnated in a fantasy vessel. It’s easy to imagine how inheriting those truths shaped the author who shaped the story. She walked her roads and found something to give. No doubt needed to get those ravaging truths out of her soul, to strike them into a million paperback flames for others to carry.

It made me consider the miles behind me and the things I’d picked up along the way. The solitudes of adolescence, the disappointments of high school, the deliriums of college — and all the stories that burned in me as I made my way through. The variegated grinds of life, mnemonically linked to allegories of dark towers and noble quests. The troughs and tragedies of adulthood, salved by the wisdom and humor of travelers who’d gone before.

Could those experiences, gathered up and lined with newspaper, give a bit of light of their own? My dark roads weren’t beset by physical danger or hunger or injustice. The only discrimination I’ve faced is as a Dave Matthews Band fan. But I am a millennial. I know the kids who get left behind. I felt my friends’ anxiety when it was time to go home. I saw how neglect and abuse dim the light in people’s eyes. I watched classmates give up their education and disappear on the other side of the chainlink fence. My generation watched the towers fall and the oligarchs whip our country into a blood frenzy to plunder the Middle East. I’ve grieved and lost and seen death and madness up close. Who hasn’t? That’s living.

And as the wheels of living turned, I had stories that turned with me. Always there was a door to step through, a parallel path that helped make the main quest make sense. For each drudgery, a world; for each doom, a lesson; for each disillusionment, a new dream. Is that not the point of epic narratives? What culture didn’t grow up swaddled in mythology? Homer, Dante, Gilgamesh, the Ramayana and the Vedas — stories are the foundation of civilizations. To the individual nerd, epic works are less an escape than a way to process life, less a distraction than a companion. They’re a refuge for the vulnerable or ruminative mind, and a cipher of physical and emotional memories made as we navigate our roads.

“Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape? The moneylenders, the knownothings, the authoritarians have us all in prison; if we value the freedom of the mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can.” – Ursula K. Le Guin

“While thoughts exist, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.” ― Cyril Connolly

And so here I am, countless fantasy series later, a dagger on a map made of stories, with a lifetime of weird winding roads behind and parts unknown ahead. My shelves are lined with the chronicles of my journey, companions caked in the muck of the mires they drew me through. Still they call to me, encouraging me to continue our travels, and to remember the dreams of that young warlock with unlimited orb-gazing time. Reminding me to covet every minute I can scrape from my day, to grind eternally and make a point of this story. They inflicted on me a need to write things down, to tell people where I’ve been and what I learned and where to find the best falafel. A need to produce, if not the great American fantasy novel, at least some stories that illuminate dark places. And they helped me understand why people who create are compelled to do so, why they set themselves assignments and deadlines and agonies on top of their muggle work and responsibilities.

It’s because it’s all real. There are dark lords and hoarding dragons, and cults of delusion and servants of evil. Always have been. But as those demons are real, so are there brave and noble ordinary folk, who use their talents to put out the eyes of tyrants or carry their friends up burning mountains or just tell the ringwraiths to fuck off their mushroom farm. There are fellowships of valor and networks of resistance. And there are creators whose work helps us understand this world of heroes and monsters. They do it to help themselves feel better, and maybe even help someone else along their dark roads. 

Jemison’s Stillness is a supercontinent governed by rigorous, if mysterious, geologic mechanics. Its lore is deep, its history fathomless. The prose and fantasy vernacular score the world with terse, rugged textures. The nonlinear structure and shifting viewpoints immerse you in mystery and invite critical speculation — and Jemisin trusts you’ll find your way without needless exposition. The magic, the rules, the culture are revealed in subtle hints and glimpses, just peripheral details that serve a very character-driven story with a molten-hot social impetus.
​
The first book left me with wounds that needed dressing. Back, then, to the stone eaters and the roggas and the obelisks, and the grim humorless people scratching out an existence on Father Earth. Back to Essun, Nassun, and Alabaster, characters whose own wounds shake civilizations and move mountains.

The Obelisk Gate broadens our relationship with each viewpoint character, particularly Essun. Essun the woman, Essun the mother, Essun the outcast. Her epic quest isn’t to defeat a dark lord or dispose of a cursed artifact, but to survive in a world of ineffable hostility, in a culture that vilifies her very existence. To live and protect the few things she finds worth living for. In this middle book, we get to see some of that living — Essun at moments unpursued, belonging, even loved — reprieves that raise the emotional stakes and give new weight to the corn-brained wickedness and cosmic horrors that dog her existence throughout the series. There is some healing, and there is some resolution, followed naturally by new pain and mystery and epic convergence. It’s a rough ride, uncomfortably familiar, a Butleresque grimdark fantasy to unscab our own grimdark history. Colonial-style caste system, backward-thinking muggles, a world defined by eternally recurring apocalypses…

The tropes are well worn, but the series feels like a fresh take, way outside the gravity of Tolkien, Gurm, Maas. The narrative layers and experimental structure create depth and mystery without feeling gimmicky or sacrificing intimacy. You’re working the whole time, figuring things out. Maybe the 2010s and 2020s are full of other bangers that slid past me, but I think the unprecedented Hugo threepeat is well deserved. The writing hits on every level, and what is written is important — an unflinching interrogation of our own broken societies, broken hearts, and broken Earth. 

And so, fired from my pizza job and disqualified from my college program, I plummeted into another crevasse. It could have easily been the last. I expected the crack to close above me and the fires of the earth to consume me. It was a bleak summer, to be sure, but after the first weeks of freefall, I hit dirt. Turns out I didn’t have that far to fall. For one thing, I hadn’t climbed very high. For another, I had the safety net of privilege. It wasn’t lost on me that, for someone else who didn’t have a family home to go back to, who didn’t have a hand-me-down car and a clean record, losing your job and getting kicked out of college would probably be the end of the story. That and other shames helped galvanize me with new purpose – you can only get dragged down so many crevasses before you gain some wisdom.
​
I fought the balrog and respawned at my junior college, returned to the beginning to retread a familiar road. I still wanted to write, but instead of enduring academia, I committed to clawing my way into the weird worlds of entertainment. What followed were mostly good, busy years. I built up a portfolio and returned to CSUN — this time in the screenwriting program. I got a degree, worked as a writer at an animation studio, hustled with friends, moved around the Valley, got married, and ate mediterranean food. But somewhere in that process, I lost the time to read fantasy. Maybe I didn’t have the same need to. I wasn’t enduring long stretches of tedium or penance, and my teatimes of the soul were mostly brief and well-lit.

Mostly. The good news was, I was writing for a living. The bad news was, I was writing for a living. Even with three or four roommates, I barely scraped by. I spent long hours in Valley traffic. I participated in my society of my housemates. At night I tried to read and scratch out some words, but free time after work was hard-won. On the fantasy map of life, I was waylaid in a nameless cottage town whose smallfolk spent their days working, commuting, buying groceries, cooking them, and cleaning up the dishes. My epic series collected dust on the shelf. I added the later volumes as they came out, but never got around to reading them. Still, they weighed on my mind. When I looked at my bookcase on a quiet night, Foundations of Stone played in my head. The stories were there, and the road was waiting. If I couldn’t make time for reading and writing, was my own story over? The thought was chilling. Propelled by creative guilt, I endeavored to at least read some of the slimmer genre staples that I’d overlooked during my fiendish years.

These helped crystalize my intention that whatever I ended up doing, it should be funny, and it should help people. I was writing for a few different animated series for teens at the time, projects themed around mental health and trauma and recovery, and it felt like I was on to something. The fantasy roads I’d traveled, and even the lonely bogs and slogs, were amounting to a point of view. Maybe even helping people.
​
Then in 2021, the Earth cracked and a chasm I’d never anticipated swallowed the road entirely. That was the year my wife’s mother unexpectedly passed away. It was a sudden, tragic, shattering experience for a close family of siblings, children, grandchildren, parents, cousins and friends. I suppose everyone touches that kind of grief in time, but it was far beyond anything I’d imagined, a dimension of the human experience that lies behind the veil until you’re deigned to pass through it. The world became separated into people who have felt it, and people who haven’t, and we crossed over. 

It turned out to be my own regimen of story therapy. The Sandman is about many things, but most of its stories are meditations on life and death, and the myths, cultures, and cosmologies that examine the veil between them. It’s filled with pain and loss, but also joy and love. Through Dream we’re reminded of the value of the ephemeral. It helped me better understand fantasy as a language to share and process grief, not just in The Sandman but all fiction. I could see thestrals. There’s a later Death story that Gaiman wrote after he’d lost a friend. In his preface, he said that he wrote it to help himself feel better. That line resonated. LeGuinn, Pratchett, Gaiman, each used the tropes of fantasy in their own way to help make sense of the world and leave a little light on the paths they walked. Stories can’t fix a broken heart or a broken world, but they can help us feel better.

Le Guin keeps the stranger, who of course is Ged, Sparrowhawk, our former protagonist, at arm’s length from Tenar and from us. For much of the book we glimpse him only through cracks and vents in the inescapable labyrinth. He’s aged and traveled since Earthsea. No longer the boy we watched struggle and grow into his power, he’s now a wise and patient mage whose passing flame ignites Tener’s own awakening. Her fascination with Ged compels her to keep him alive but captive, a secret source of light in the darkness of her world. From his words, she begins to question her faith in the Nameless Ones and the implacable traditions that have consigned her life to them, the incoherence of her society and the confines of her role in it. She allows herself to question the path that was chosen for her at birth, a path that leads forever deeper into the dark and lonely Tombs.

Le Guin was a revolutionary of the 60’s and 70’s, known for subverting sword and sorcery tropes with the ethos and aesthetics of feminism and eastern philosophy. Case in point, following up her adventurous wizard story with a dark, contemplative sequel centered on the spiritual and intellectual awakening of a female protagonist. Though gloriously fantasy, the Earthsea novels (and all of Le Guinn’s work that I’ve read) are stages of imagined worlds and cultures that Le Guin used to examine our own social, political, and spiritual sicknesses. They’re more introspection than adventure, literary in the way of fantasists like Madeleine L’Engle, Lois Lowry, Mervyn Peake, Herman Hesse, Gene Wolfe.

Returning to Earthsea wasn’t quite like picking up with the fellowship or starting a new year at wizard school, but it was a return to something familiar and beautiful. If there’s a unifying quest, it’s within the reader — a yearning toward Daoist harmony that moves between the lines, carried by writing that flows like water with dark and hidden depths.

“He laid his hands on her head, pushing back the hood. He began to speak. His voice was soft, and the words were in no tongue she had ever heard. The sound of them came into her heart like rain falling. She grew still to listen.”

In this case I returned to the Lipwig saga. Making Money is the sequel to Going Postal and the second book following the misadventures of scoundrel-turned-civil-servant Moist Von Lipwig. Going Postal was the one that pulled me forever into Discworld’s gravity, and Money is a perfect rejoinder to Moist’s previous Post Office enterprise. Despite his best efforts to keep his head down and make an honest living, fate (and Lord Vetinari) seem bent on elevating him to stations beyond his comfort zone, now as head of the Ankh-Morpork Royal Bank and Mint. Moist tends to rise to the occasion, though, creating social revolutions out of sensible ideas like stamps and paper currency. His other duties include assuring the good health of the chairman of the bank (a small dog), avoiding death from the Assassin’s Guild, and preventing an apocalyptic golem war.
​
If you’re nostalgic for wizardly British humor but keep your Harry Potter memories preserved in a vial to protect them from she-who-must-not-be-named, take the next portkey to Discworld. 

Sexton scribes for us his pointless story, the last thing he’ll ever write, enumerating the cold facts of his loveless life as he flees an apartment full of bad memories and broken dreams. He prefers to haunt the gutters and trash heaps of New York, immersing himself in the desolation that he feels inside. Alone at the dump, standing on a pinnacle of garbage, contemplating the end of all things, he slips, falls, and is nearly buried. He happens to be saved by Didi, a young girl whose dark aura belies her bright personality. Sexton finds himself caught in Didi’s gravity, taken briefly away from the world he wants to leave to see the wonders and horrors of life at the fringes. They go on an adventure, and like Didi, this odd girl who resembles Death, Sexton experiences all the precious fleeting madness of mortality, how easy it is to lose it and how irrevocable it is once lost.

The story examines teen suicidalism in a way that doesn’t come off as preachy. It feels more like a note to the author’s younger self, a conversation that acknowledges the darkness of the past from the vantage of the future. There are other wonders still ahead, people who need what only you can do and the experience that only you have.

I’m reminded of a Ram Dass quote: “You took this work because you have work to do that involves suffering and the kinds of situations you find yourself in. This is your curriculum for this birth. Where you are now with all your neuroses and is just the right place. This is it, and it’s perfect.”

It’s a nice short story for people touched by the specter of hopelessness. In my case, getting on after white-hot pain of grief had faded. You’ve lost an arm, but you learn to get by with the other. There’s a void in your soul, but your soul grows larger around it. There’s still a lot of precious crazy life to live, and only you can live it.

The whole collection has a nostalgic late 80’s/early 90’s Troubled Youth aesthetic, brought to gritty life by Chris Bacholo’s exquisite artwork. There’s even a PSA mini-comic where Death advises the reader on safe sex during the AIDS epidemic. It’s a cute time capsule, capturing, I’d like to think, an era when kids broadened their minds and explored their identities in bookstores and record shops, and found hope and wisdom in comic books.

Note: I’ve procrastinated on this essay for so long that the Gaiman scandal broke as I was revising. Yes, it is an immense disappointment, a grief of its own. A renowned and inspiring author has been lost to devilry of his own making. He’s certainly not the first. As with Harry Potter, the stories remain, as do the paths they accompanied me on. That’s one thing about our maps — we can return and linger and backtrack, but we can’t erase the roads we’ve traveled, much as we may wish we could. 

My first year of junior college took place in the dark. I walked by streetlight to my classes at night, then walked home to sit in the blue glow of my computer until dawn. I was 18, no car, no job, vague direction. I spent the long nights reading The Dark Tower, playing video games, and trying to maneuver my way into girls’ top 8s. And writing. Naturally, my steady diet of fantasy series had turned me into an English major with notions of wanting to write for a living. I took all the literature classes and fiction workshops my school offered. In my warlock’s hours I built fantasy worlds of my own, crafting outlines, drawing maps, spinning lore, breathing a miasma of dragon’s blood incense while my hair grew long and my skin grew pale. Hey ladies.

I was doing my best to behave academically, but the more I saw of academia, the less I liked it. It seemed like English careers comprised the same kind of tedium that made my brain fall out in high school. I learned more from the personal lives of the faculty at school than I did from the material — they were middle aged, out of energy, spending their careers stirring the ashes of literature for the handful of undergrads that did the reading. The great excitements in their professional lives were literary conferences, where academics convened and debated the minutiae of grammar over long weekends. Then they came back and described these thrills to us in class. And this was the likely fate of an English major. The idea terrified me, but I hadn’t exactly given myself many alternatives. I’d managed to find a path, but the way was dark and desolate, and I had no social reinforcers, which, with hindsight, are absolutely key to success. I don’t think I made a single friend in my department. Even in the writing workshops, most of the other kids in class were just doing the minimum to get their GE credits. It was high school with less structure and more cigarettes.

So I walked home, read books, and vicariously followed the journey I did want to be on. The fantasy scene was having its blogosphere renaissance. A Feast for Crows was hitting shelves, the Ice and Fire HBO show was on the way, and Gurm was in the mainsteam. I read Ice and Fire religiously, of course, but it wasn’t something I sought to emulate. Like Tolkien, Gurm was in a league of his own, untouchable. Somewhere, though, the Gurm mentioned in retrospect that the most inspiring book is the one you feel you could have written better. Surely if that author can get published, he reasoned, you could too. And while I didn’t find many of those, I did follow the various prodigies that were rising to fill the space between ASOIAF releases, and kept up with their blogs and big-hype debut novels.

​In 2006, the Lies of Locke Lamora was the heir to the throne. It kicked off the Gentleman Bastards Sequence and launched the career of Scott Lynch, who was famously advanced 7 figures for the 7-book series. Lynch was in his 20’s, so obviously I was jelly, but that also made him relatable — he was human, mortal, alive and blogging. If I could just figure out what he was doing, maybe I could do it too. To me, Lies was a whole masterclass in style. Lynch had crafted a sharp cinematic narrative that staked its claim well outside the shadow of Ice and Fire. Like Gurm, though, Lynch suffered from series malaise. Two books in and it seemed like the rest would never come. Lynch addressed the delays online, speaking openly about his struggles with mental health. This personal perspective was also revelatory. I read these long series in the lonely low points of life; maybe they were written in lonely low points as well.

As though to confirm this, Patrick Rothfuss’ celebrated debut The Name of the Wind was also followed by delays and candid bouts of gloom. The books may not have been booking, but Rothfuss stayed active with personal check-ins and behind-the-scenes industry posts, opening a window to the world I really sought. I was learning how the stew was made, and I was learning what life was like for the 0.1% of authors who found a modicum of financial success. It was kinda bleak, tbh. Even the top authors in the scene were hitting walls and enduring public failure. They were imprisoned in their writing rooms for 14 hours a day, pounding their heads against their desks until words fell out. It seemed like the best a writer could hope for was a cult following that might support a modest lifestyle and inspire some yaoi fanfiction. And maybe attending the equivalent of literary conferences, in costume. Which sounds absolutely dope to me now, let me tell you, but back then the whole business sounded like yet another Sisyphean doom of isolation and tedium. It seemed like my road was leading me into a wasteland.

Nonetheless, I was carried by inertia to the English department at Cal State Northridge, where for the first time I was out on my own, living independently, working to pay my way, and rolling the boulder up the hill.

The ten-volume Malazan Book of the Fallen is the Ph.D. of fantasy series, an ultra-developed DnD campaign taking place across multiple continents and thousands of years, with pantheons of tormented gods, derelict military legions, arcane systems of magic, and hundreds of characters, mostly having a bad time, animated by professorial anthropology and philosophy and the least forgiving narrative style I’ve ever read. It’s a brutal, challenging, addictive slog, and it fit the mood of my first year of college.
​
I lived in a dorm with three chronically absent roommates. My friends were on the other side of the misty mountains. I was treading water in English while looking in the window of the impacted Film & Television program. At that point, the film industry seemed more exciting than English, with less dusty academia and more avenues for employment. I’d decided that I wanted to live life instead of just reading about it. Hunter S. Thompson’s Rum Diaries had something to do with that. In fact, I took a lot of inspiration from Thompson around this time. Probably too much. Despite living on campus, I kept my part-time pizza job and commuted back to my hometown four times a week. I worked nights and weekends, went to strange parties on the moons of LA, explored the universe, crashed in my dorm for naps, and sat in class a zombie, reading Malazan and trying to scratch together the coursework that would get me into the film program.

But frustration and FOMO weren’t my only demons. At the same time, my brother took a serious health turn. He’d had chronic seizures much of his life, and a scan had recently found a brain tumor. Soon the time came when it would have to be removed, and the procedure wasn’t without risk. And so the creeping dread that follows family peril joined the party, and my neglected coursework was just another swirling vapor of subconscious guilt. It seems like I spent most of that semester on the freeway between home, work, and school, speeding from my responsibilities at every end.

By the end of the year, I found myself returned to the old waking nightmare — watching classmates hand in assignments I hadn’t done, taking tests I hadn’t studied for, realizing I’d been sleepwalking into another chasm. My GPA dropped so low that I was kicked out of school before I even put a film portfolio together.

A few months later, back home and wondering what was left, what opportunities I hadn’t squandered, I was fired from my pizza job and fell into the earth. But, in the maw of that long bleak dumb Odyssean year, those Malazan books really hit.

Even in novella form, Westeros is incomparably developed. Though the world and its stories are massive, and its plots and politics complex, it all unfolds and interlaces as naturally as the true history from which it’s drawn. Gurm’s prose is lyrical, and his fantasy argot actually works. The descriptions of food make the most disgusting meals sound like exquisite feasts. The depths of the folklore make you want to light a candle to the Seven. You want to live there, even though Westeros is probably the least appealing fantasy world ever written.

Like the other Ice & Fire novellas, The Mystery Knight is a self-contained prequel to the main series. Dunk and Egg are among the most traditionally “moral” characters in the series, just an awkward underdog hedge knight and his squire, exploring familiar locations and getting in over their heads amid a cast of historical Starks and Peakes and Blackfyres. It’s a fast yarn full of easter eggs and butterfly-wing beats that stir the main story 300 years on. It’s also got all the scheming, action, and intrigue that made Ice & Fire a phenomenon, to the point that I think Dunk & Egg’s imminent MAX-ification has the potential to outclass the contorted Game of Thrones.

Gurm remains the modern GOAT. But you already knew that. 

His primary preoccupation, though, is impressing Sabbetha, the gang’s MVP bad girl thief, while their group maintains a con as an itinerant theatre troupe. The action, intrigue, and humor are still strong, but the teenage angst and digs at politics and theatre life are the real fun. The stories and tensions intertwine and weave a deft Netflix-ready narrative. Where is this adaptation?

 The Name of the Wind had the prosaic sincerity and unhurried ramble we didn’t know we needed. All that is here in The Narrow Road, which follows Bast on a faerie’s day of bargaining, liaising, and fae magic. Rothfuss’ unique fairy tale prose textures a story that’s surprisingly heavy, conscientiously examining themes like sexuality and child abuse.
​
In the course of Bast’s busy day Rothfuss proves he can spin a tight, polished narrative that’s just as absorbing as his meandering doorstoppers. I choose to believe he's currently applying that craft to the imminent final book; I only have so many lifetime halves remaining. Kingkiller is the third piece of the Triforce of Anticipation, bound forever to Ice & Fire and Bastards in the fraternity of A-list fantasy series whose final books are lost to the whims of the muses. It’s not the final book, but Narrow Road is a great little check-in for those of us who have been sitting around the innkeeper’s hearth these many years. 

 Fans know to read each chapter’s concluding page twice to catch subtle portents and implications. There’s work involved, yielding rewards for the scrupulous reader. But I’d been out so long that I had to keep the wiki open and do a review after every chapter, and I know there are plenty of details that went over my head.
​
But I got what I came for. The labyrinthian complexity. The immensity of scale. The familiar rhythm of build and convergence. Deep in the 600s, it really starts to pick up. Faces from the early books return, and you remember the magic, the characters. and the conflicts that made those books so good. Then the resolution, an epic convergence the size of a regular novel. The vibrant, explosive ending, like the most vivid anime. Reality-shaking battles. Pillars of jade fire, cosmic conflagrations, the clashing of gods and men and beings beyond imagining.

Is Malazan worth the commitment? It was for me, but it’s not for everyone. The world and story are delineations of the author’s D&D campaigns, and if it seems like some of the story events were the result of dice throws, they probably were. You also get side characters that come off like Elder Scrolls NPCs, who rhapsodize world-weary philosophy at every opportunity. People criticize The Wheel of Time for its pedantic descriptions, but at least the Wheel is comfortable. In Malazan, there is no relaxing, no homeliness, little humor, nothing Tolkienesque or wonderful. All on purpose, of course. This is work, baby, we’re not here to lay around Rivendell and eat elf bread. We’ve got a thousand characters, dozens of races and factions, numerous systems of magic, and interweaving timelines to keep track of. It can feel like you’re fumbling with a mess of tangled wires of different sizes and colors, trying to put them together in a way that makes something happen, and Gods help you if you think Erikson leaves any instructions. But that’s the fun, if you’re up for it. 

​Every epic fantasy novel begins with a map. This is the baroque visual reference authors use to keep readers oriented in their imagined world. It’s also the drawing board where the author turns to sketch and daydream and procrastinate, envisioning the sprawling landscapes their characters will travel, the nebulous destinations they’ll seek, and the treacherous bogs, cliffs, and caves that will beset their journey along the way.

In the late 1900s, the Dawn of the Millenials, the idyllic time before the war, I was about ten years old and sketching the roads of my own life’s map. Ten, of course, was the age when all millennial children began to choose from the paths of life, gaining autonomy and ambition, expecting to explore strange worlds and do great things and fight evil. At ten we collected our starter Pokemon, awaited our Hogwarts letters, and double-checked closets and wardrobes for hidden portals. My own inciting incident was a little more mundane — my parents split up, my mom re-married, and she, my stepdad, my brother and I moved through a series of low-income apartments around town. While I waited for those other magical inevitabilities to manifest, I spent the meantime exploring strange neighborhoods, meeting odd characters, and tapping out Goosebumps knockoffs on my electric typewriter.
​
I was also getting to know my stepdad. He’d moved to town from Seattle, and before that, the east coast. He’d been many places, lived many lives, and collected many things. One of these things he brought to me one day, noticing, I’m sure, how much time I spent in my room reading. It was a wooden box full of cassette tapes. On the top, engraved as though crafted by elf hands, was “The Hobbit.” I didn’t know much about fantasy, but I knew the Hobbit was a classic, ageless and revered. Sealed in such a treasure box, how could it be anything less? This was deep lore, a chest of secrets, an artifact of the illuminated.

And so, one night, closed up in my room, I laid on the floor and put the first tape in my stereo. Over hiss and grain the narrator intoned like a wizened minstrel. Hobbiton took form in my mind, a pastoral setting that moved much more slowly than the stories I was used to. In fact, Bilbo and Gandalf’s “good morning” banter struck me as tedious and annoying. As the dwarves arrived and Bilbo puttered and fussed, I struggled to find anything to latch on to. Bilbo wasn’t ten. Bilbo was like, 45. Dudes were singing songs about dishes. It all felt old and antiquated, like one of those crumbling cart rides with the forgotten IPs at Disneyland. I don’t think I made it past the first tape. I wasn’t ready for Tolkien, but the allure of his books endured. It was a traveled and orphic mind what pondered these orbs, and I wanted to ponder them also. Without knowing it, a road had chosen me.

And now I step back from my orb. I’m 35 and reading the Silmarillion for the first time. The road goes ever on. I hadn’t thought about that Hobbit box set, or my moody, unmoored preteen years for several ages of men, but returning to Tolkien brought it all back. Picking up a new book in a series always sends me back in time, to the early books, and the time and place I read them. They’re the dorky history that explains one’s dorky present. Movies and games, too, but we generally spend a lot more time in books. They’re parallel worlds we travel in as we write our own stories, travelogues of who we were and where we were going. On the fantasy map of life, I can trace the roads they paved from there to here.

In the years that followed I churned through the major fantasy releases, chasing the dragon from one series to the next. Some I finished; others I lost time for along the way. Often I’ve wondered how I ever had time to read them at all. It struck me that doorstopper fantasy series are probably most often read in long stretches of solitude. They’re a weeks- or months-long preoccupation, an alternate reality that the reader steps into when they need a break from all this. To read eight to ten brick-sized tomes in a row probably means you have a lot of time you’d prefer to spend alone, or circumstances you want to escape; stretches of introspection and loneliness and low points.

Looking at the books on my shelf, recalling my solitudes as though they were blazoned on the spines, I decided it was time to resume the old quest: to revisit those old worlds and those old selves, and finish the dozen or so fantasy series I’d left languishing over the years. Do they hold up? Is the magic still there? And what cringe-soaked chapters of my own life would I find recorded inside? Where was I going, what was I feeling, and what responsibilities was I ignoring while I holed up in their pages? Was fantasy a salve for the wounds of adolescence? Inspiration for a meaningful career? Or just a meandering, isolating distraction? Would I have been better off picking up a football?

Looking at the books on my shelf, recalling my solitudes as though they were blazoned on the spines, I wondered what cringe-soaked chapters of my own life might I find recorded inside. Where was I going, what was I feeling, and what responsibilities was I ignoring while I holed up in their pages? Was fantasy a salve for the wounds of adolescence? Inspiration for a meaningful career? Or just a meandering, isolating distraction? Would I have been better off picking up a football?

A memory stirs across the surface of the orb... 

Flash forward to the turn of the Millenium, when I brought home from my middle school library a thick, single-volume copy of The Lord of the Rings. Yes, I’m still on about Tolkien. By now The Hobbit on tape was just a glint in the riverbed of my memory, but the allure remained.

It was the first book I’d picked up in months, maybe a year. My adolescent home life had been full of seismic shifts, and it was hard to read in such conditions. Sometime after my parents divorced, my dad met a woman on Christian Mingle and unknowingly welcomed a weird age of chaos to our lives. My dad, brother and I made room as a truly alien stepfamily crashed down in our house, deposited by a tornado from the Midwest — a malefic blonde woman, two acrid teenagers, a cat, and a ball python. Our three-bedroom house was much too small for this kind of deranged Bradybunching. The girl, probably 17, claimed my bedroom by eminent domain, plastered it with Green Day posters, and locked the door for the duration of our parents’ marriage. Meanwhile my brother, stepbrother, and I crammed into the other bedroom and alternated who got to sleep on the full-size bottom bunk, who slept between the tiny top bunk and the stucco ceiling, and who nested in a fort in the living room.
​
Accommodations aside, there were Problems from the start. Boy and girl seemed to be on a mission to act as ornery, obstinate, and depraved as possible. Hints of their past behavior soon curled the wallpaper of our Christian house. It was whispered that the girl had once drowned her hamster in a bottle of nail polish. The week they arrived, I took my stepbrother for a night walk through the park around the corner, and he took a dump on the Dumbo slide. As a repressed 13-year-old, I found this new energy perversely inspiring, and I stepped up my game in kind. In school, my stepbrother and I quickly became each other’s worst influences, and locked into a two-body spiral of profound delinquency and academic hara-kiri. One day I’ll write a novel about this bizarre nine-month slice of my life, but for now, just picture a less funny season of Malcolm in the Middle.

I wouldn’t understand until much later how much of my erstwhile siblings’ behavior was driven by the abuse of a derelict father in a faraway land. I just saw two bony kids who took every opportunity to demonstrate their antipathy and lash out at authority figures. But that kind of trauma seeps from the pores. It wasn’t just acting out — during those months, there was a simmering background radiation of negativity in our house that darkened each day. It thickened the air and warped our DNA. I didn’t know why, couldn’t understand the dark emanations of these kids’ unacknowledged past, but it started to choke us as it choked them. The incidents, the tensions, the seething, dead-eyed defiance, became an inescapable part of life. How much worse it must have been for them, I sensed without sensing, knew without knowing, this curse that followed them all the way from their hometown to the western shore.

​This time it got me. I fell in love with The Journey — the immense story, the infinite world, the classical language. I could cocoon into it, comfortable in languid Middle-Earth and a bedroom that didn’t have a stranger in it. It was a revelation — Anytime I wanted I could throw on a cloak and grab a walking stick and follow the wizard away from whatever mundane Hobbit business was imposing on my attention. It stoked a passion for escapism that had been smoldering since Harry Potter, then buried by proverbial dung. After months in a miasma of darkness, I had a new road to follow and an open world to explore. It reminded me of the cozy comforts of Potter and Goosebumps that I used to dream of emulating, and I thought again how fine a thing it would be to create worlds of my own for people to escape into. Because now I knew what it was like to need somewhere to go. 

I’m sure there’s little I can say about the Silmarillion that hasn’t been said before. It’s a beautiful, scholarly history of Middle Earth, written like a biblical canon of Tolkien myth and lore, an Old Testament of the elder races and the gods of Middle Earth. It’s essential reading if Bilbo and Frodo weren’t enough for you, but it’s not for everyone. I can fully understand why even some fantasy heads don’t get drawn into Tolkien’s ornate, philological style, but it’s gospel for those that do.

​For me, it’d been a long time coming. Once the Ring had my ear I reread the trilogy every few years, but somehow I never got around to cracking the grand diegesis. I don’t think I had the wisdom for it until after college, anyway. Now an accomplished nerd, I reveled in the foundational tales of Morgoth, Númenor, the Silmarils. I finally connected histories from the movies and shows to their runic lore, and caught passages that I now realize were lifted directly into the lyrics of Blind Guardian’s Nightfall in Middle-Earth, the album that sealed my fate as an epic nerd of music as well as everything else. Though very different from The Hobbit and The Rings, it still felt like coming home for the holidays, looking at old photos of great grandsires and sitting with elders to hear how the dollar store used to be a Prancing Pony and why mortal Beren wasn’t good enough for Elf maiden Lúthien, and how everything was better back in the second age. You’ve got to know your history. 

The long summer between middle and high school was a Bradbury-esque snapshot of free-wheeling adolescence — late mornings playing Wind Waker, afternoons running amok with friends, long nights in Hogwarts and Middle Earth. Ideal conditions for incubating the fantasy disease. But all idyllic childhood chapters must come to an end. High school came knocking like the king’s conscriptor, and books went on the shelf again as I found myself stranded in reality.

The bit of clout and confidence I’d leveled up in middle school didn’t seem to carry over to the new campaign. I aspired to join my new school’s famed robotics team, but didn’t make the cut. I signed up for a computer animation program, but it turned out to be a tedious photoshop tutorial. I joined the film production club, but mostly held up reflectors and took naps. It seemed all those fantastic Millenial expectations would remain the stuff of fiction.

Disappointed, disillusioned, I felt an urge for escape within me grow. Academic work was easy, and consequently I struggled to pay attention to it. I goofed off with the other free spirits but didn’t make many close friends. When I got bored, I retreated into my headphones or the margins of my papers. Eventually, I just walked out the door. Literally out the front door of the school. Once I realized I could get away with it, I did this a lot. Sometimes I’d get an ‘excused absence’ through the nurse, just to mix things up. I went home to play video games and sort Yu-Gi-Oh cards while my parents were at work. This, of course, was not a prosperous academic trajectory. The trough of a long, dark fissure was opening up. You know those nightmares where you’re in class and realize you have to take an important test, and you didn’t study or do any homework all semester? I lived it. Repeatedly. By the end of my sophomore year, I was being kicked out with innumerable absences, a record-setting low GPA, and pending disciplinary action for various misdemeanors.
​
Though dead, I was forced to linger like a ghost through the summer, making up credits in a remedial science class. The class was a zoo, a glorified detention, the last chance for the kids who couldn’t hack it during the semester to reflect on the foreboding of their choices. Most declined the opportunity, but I could sense a personal desolation encroaching, the dawning of a dark age. My instinct to escape strained at its leash, but escape is what had got me there. So, I did the work and endured the rabble. I put my head down. I disassociated. I doodled. Then one day, I found something on a classroom shelf — a crisp copy of Jurassic Park. I hadn’t read in ages, but that cool black paperback stirred a tiny ember that had been long burning beneath my mental dung. I started reading, mostly to transcend the tedious clown show going on around me — but them dinos got me back. I remembered books. I remembered disappearing into them. I had an exit again. The portal reopened. There are other worlds than these.

Of course, a few life science credits weren’t enough to save me from excommunication. I spent my junior year at a continuation school for delinquent students still clinging to the axles of the education system. The little campus was tucked inside a low-income neighborhood. The hours were something like 10-3, so I had to ride my bike a couple miles and hope it was still locked up at the end of the day. Instead of a robotics lab, there was a rusting truck that you learned to work on. Instead of sports, there was a small track you walked around, avoiding the far corner of the fence where the gangs in the school met with the gangs in the neighborhood to exchange recipes. Vicious fights between students and faculty were common, and the teachers had a dull-eyed weariness like battlefield surgeons. In class, the task was to complete work packets containing all the condensed curricula you were missing to earn credits. There were lectures, but I found I could go ahead at my own pace and ask the teachers for the next packets, so for two semesters I put my head down and my headphones in and mined credits.
​
This became The Grind. There was no escaping The Grind, but I did have one refuge to preserve my sanity. I found the library behind a door that looked like a janitor’s closet. There were five or six tall shelves of books, a few study nooks, and one inattentive librarian. I don’t recall ever seeing another student in there, but I do remember discovering the humble sci-fi section, with its small collection of Michael Crichtons. Next to him, naturally, was Arthur C Clarke, and above and below them, other hits from Asimov to Zahn. In that lonely closet I read them all, emerging only to crush packets and bike home. This became my self-directed education — silver age science fiction, de facto training in analytical thinking, problem solving, philosophy, sociology, politics. Lectures from long-dead luminaries about life and language and possibilities beyond the dull and desperate classrooms I found myself in. Reading Clarke and Crichton today bring me back to that tiny library, not just to their stories but to the feeling that I was pursuing my own quest, rather than filtering through a system. That’s not a knock at public education, but an observation of my own lack of engagement up to that point. Educators can provide the kindling, but every kid needs that spark to burn. These weren’t doorstopper fantasy series, but in that dark and lonely cave beneath the Misty Mountains, they were fire, and they lit the map enough that I could just make out a path to graduation. 

​After Eaters, Crichton spent the next ten years writing Congo, Sphere, and Jurassic Park, AKA my high school syllabus. I read them one after another while kids in class brawled or made beats with pencils or threw muffins at the teacher. From those novels I absorbed more intellectual curiosity and academic interest than any textbook, and I don’t think I’m alone. Crichton’s application of scientific ferment to whatever topic fascinated him helped mainstream half a dozen realms of learning and inspired the careers of a generation of archaeologists, anthropologists, biologists, and historians. To me, these books proved that anybody could contribute to whatever field interested them, without spending their life ascending the high tower of a PhD program. There are no rules or gatekeepers. Just do the reading. Become an expert of cryptozoology. Wear black leather and do math. Analyze an ancient manuscript and make it a story. Forget academia — just do things. Every scientific field has its cutting edge, and maybe even a few conspiracies and buried bodies. Even the most mundane science can run amok if you try hard enough.
​
Eaters doesn’t have the techno-pizazz of the 80’s and 90’s, but it gives Beowulf a modern shine. In Crichton’s oeuvre it’s a deep cut, specialized for history buffs and Viking lorists and people who spent high school reading pop science thrillers instead of doing their work. It’s not a new book in a series, but it was a nostalgic trip back to the spirited classrooms of my youth. I could almost feel a muffin fly past my ear. 

A few months later, I stood shivering in the pre-dawn cold at my original high school, waiting for the Senior Supplemental Instruction office to open. There I would spend the godless hours before first period every other morning, repairing my devastated GPA by completing the ritual penance of the public school system: fucking packets. It was a slog that made the boring classes I couldn’t hack in my sophomore year look like a day at Disneyland. But I was back at real school, filled with redemptive purpose and whatnot.

For the most part, my solitude stretched on. I came back and found I didn’t know nobody no more. All the hoodlums I used to goof off with were lost to dark fates. All my acquaintances had friend groups that I couldn’t quite find my way into. So I hung on the periphery, leaned against various walls, and grinded packets. I also spent time in the school library, which was the Library of Alexandria compared to the broom closet that I read the sci-fi masters in.

​
The next in line was obvious: The Wheel of Time. 11 bricks and still going. This was the grind that my sick mind now craved. Through my long hours of academic penance, I’d scraped together the credits I needed to graduate, but I’d become twisted by the process. I was so used to doing solitary work that I forgot how to do anything else. Grinding — packets, novels — became life. This isn’t unique to books — it’s the same disease that MMORPG players are pustulant with. I can’t even imagine how many hours I put into Elder Scrolls: Oblivion during this time. But maybe endless fantasy worlds are just the right refuge for quest-addled minds. Now vast book series rolled forever in parallel with my life, and The Wheel turned with me as I graduated high school and made my way into the overland.

​I went in raw without a wiki recap, 15 years estranged — but the Wheel wove me right in. The 50-page prologue set the familiar drawling pace. The early chapters unspooled with generous rehash. The politics and subterfuges remained mercifully straightforward, and the magic system grounded and intuitive. I may not have remembered quite where I left each character, but most of the major events and dramas came back when I reached their threads.

Sanderson did a great job emulating Jordan’s style and vision, and the same qualities and criticisms you hear about the rest of the series apply — well-defined characters, strong relationships, immersive world, but thickly wrought and largely plot-driven. It’s the same cadre that started the journey in 1990, and while they’ve certainly changed and grown, they’ve mostly evolved in a linear direction and rehashed similar conflicts and character points in every book. I don’t know if a chapter goes by in the whole series that one of the female characters doesn’t remark on how hard and grim Rand is becoming. But familiar is comfortable. I’m pretty sure Sanderson took care to honor even the hair-tugging foibles of Jordan’s work. He also elevated it, contributing some of the best action scenes of the series.

I wondered if it would feel different, all these years on, with the experience of the early books relegated to another time and another me. I’ve grown since our paths diverged, traveled far, been down many a winding road. Reading Storm, I found the story was always waiting at the next crossing. It doesn’t have the same adolescent wonder that the early books had — no more young friends leaving their shire, exploring the world, gaining powers, discovering macguffins — but we’re late in the game here. The map’s been filled, the goals are set, the threads are coming back together. Sure, tone-wise, it’s a little sanitized, maybe a little more YA than I was aware of back then. It’s got that weird Christian moralism where characters are more bothered by fake curse words and cleavage than by horrific acts of violence (mostly done off-screen, but good guys literally immolate human bad guys with fire spells and never think twice about it.) Even so, the aesthetics and ontology don’t feel like products of the bygone 90s or a Jordan era or a Sanderson era. In the way of myth, they still describe the gathering storms of our own age. A dark lord ascending, the foundations of wisdom crumbling, the world’s institutions and very reality unraveling, you say? And when was there not an Adventist death cult amassing in the shadows? How can epic fantasy miss when a majority of people are still anticipating their own Tarmon Gaiden? There are neither beginnings nor endings to the Wheel of Time.

But apart from the onslaught of personal and life changes that dominated 2022, which curtailed my reading hours and decimated my writing minutes, there were only a handful of books that really got my humors bubbling. In fact, I think this feels like a crisp and concise “Top 5” year.

Admittedly, some of Crichton’s later work got a little stale, rarely deviating from the cast of stuffy academics confronting science run amok. Avoiding that rut, Weir took a big tonal turn for his follow-up, apparently aiming Project Hail Mary at a younger audience than The Martian. Some of the humor is corny, and junior high teacher-turned-astronaut Ryland Grace has a big Ted Lasso vibe, but it all works to frame the hard science wizardry as something relatable and achievable by regular people who are in the habit of scientific thinking. If it becomes the Jurassic Park of gen alpha, the kids will be alright.

​​The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway

​Discworld novels mostly take place in an intricate, satirical, disc-shaped fantasy world balanced on the backs of four elephants standing atop the shell of a turtle – though it is functionally no different from our marble-shaped world. You will recognize the royals, the tyrants, the authoritarians, the people with power. You are much acquainted with the peasants, the scoundrels, the small folk doing their best and worst. There are also wizards, werewolves, vampires, zombies, golems, and Igors, though they mingle more publicly in Ankh-Morpork than they tend to do in most of our towns.

This one’s about a post office, the surprisingly mad world of letters and stamps, the simple small townies who write them, and the people who move them from place to place. There’s also magic, murder, and mayhem. Just grab this or pretty much any Discworld novel and jump in.
​

​Every story in the collection is a mindblower. Netflix thought so, too – at least one of the stories was adapted for Love, Death, and Robots, and the throughline story is the basis for the series Pantheon on AMC+.

Stories take place in a variety of epochs, planets, and modes of consciousness. That old Earth is broken and desolate or on its way there is par for the course, but the lives and livelihoods of its revenants are original and riveting. The heart of the collection is the relationship of parents and children, the things we inherit and the things we leave behind, and the connections we cherish through chasms of space and time.
​

​ I didn’t vibe with many books this year. Mostly I ruminated on writing styles and authorial habits that put me off. But from the first florid chapters, Gormenghast reminded me of the qualities of writing and of fantasy that used to pull me in for 10+ volume marathons. Peake’s creative substance seems drawn from the same dark well as Bradbury, but even more macabre. He just goes for it, unleashing salvos of simile and metaphor that modern authors wouldn’t dare submit to a creative writing class, spinning mad dendritic sentences that modern editors would shoot on sight. The page-long constructions are a high-wire act. There is a 6-page chapter that is nothing more than a group of professors walking through a doorway.

It’s an incredibly personal fantasy of dreary corridors and hidden passages, of lambent passion and oppressive ritual, of needful people and unavailable love. It is a house constructed around an author’s mind, or maybe the mind is the stone and mortar, filled with servants, retainers, and small folk, all revolving around one peculiar family and their foibles, baggage, and anemic relationships.  
The third book, Titus Alone, is a stark departure that casts a disquieting shadow on the previous two. It’s much shorter, almost a coda. Peake struggled with the ravages of Parkinson’s disease as he wrote it. Maybe knowing this colored my reading, but it seemed like Peake strove to show honestly how that grim intruder was corrupting his mental world, his Gormenghast. Characters seem to personify the antagonisms of the disease. Others seemed to represent his own diminishing faculties, pitched against a dark fate of nebulous injustices, pursued by obscure authorities. Familiar faces from the series become mocking apparitions. The style is almost dream-like, less concerned with narrative flow or pacing, full of impassioned Shakespearean dialogue and soliloquys. There is an abrupt animosity for ‘scientists’ - an off-screen cabal who arbitrarily conspire against Titus, the natural world, and all that is good. Where the early work is measured and meticulous, the later work is full of outrage and disarray.

Near the end, Titus is given a book – one copy of many that the author carries in a sack, unsold remainders of a forgotten opus. Titus asks the author what it’s about.

“Everything. Everything I know of life and death.”


Other books I loved but don’t feel the need to write in-depth about

I mentioned Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens and Homo Deus, and his 21 Lessons for the 21st Century is the same currency. Same story with Jared Diamon’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, the spiritual predecessor to Harari’s work. All are fascinating, enlightening; all the good -ings.

The list goes on:

• Neil Degrasse Tyson - Astrophysics for People in a Hurry
• Neil Gaiman - The Ocean at the End of the Lane
• Chinua Achebe - Things Fall Apart
• Various - World Treasury of Science Fiction
• James Joyce - The Dubliners
• Nalo Hopkinson - Skin Folk (I read this for a “book club” meet-up at Lightning in a Bottle. The organizer, a DJ, one or two people who I think were friends with the organizer, and Lizett and I sat around a rustic side-stage at noon and chatted about race and death, ad-libbed alternate endings, and moulded literary symbols out of play-dough.)
• Chuck Klostermann - The 90s
• Michael Crichton - The Great Train Robbery
• Neal Stephenson - Snow Crash
• Adrian Tchaikovsky - Elder Race

 
 And because I bothered to take the notes, 
some notes on the books that didn’t really do it for me.

Isaac Asimov - Foundation I

Underwhelming. It read like a series of stilted conversations. I do love the retrofuture décor.

Natalia Zina Walschots - Hench

I don’t really get into modern fiction that’s written like a screenplay - sequences of action and dialogue that clip along and project a cinematic, easily adaptable story sprinkled with cultural memes but little insight or subtext. It’s like a blueprint for a story that’s waiting to be filled with substance – if not by the author, then by a director, actors, cinematographer, etc.

Walter M Miller, Jr. - Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman

This turned out to be a pale riff on the original with nothing new to say. I had suspicions going in, considering A Canticle for Liebowitz is a celebrated classic and this is a little-known, little discussed appendage. Some of what I love about Canticle is present – the post-apocalyptic reframing of Christian orthodoxy, timeless human conflicts playing out in the ashes of the pre-deluge civilization, societies reforming and refracturing with varying levels of recovered technology, the stage of the American Midwest shattered and reimagined as a wasteland… but it’s all pretty boring here.

It’s a standard narrative, unlike the first one which was more experimental and discontinuous. Where Canticle is an awe-inspiring high concept tour of a post-apocalyptic world, this one is a tedious account of an unremarkable conflict, written more like a historical text than a novel. Major action is often described offhandedly and with so little punch that I had to reread a couple sentences to realize a central character has been stabbed or something.

JD Salinger - The Catcher in the Rye

Did young derelicts really talk like Holden Caufield or Kerouac characters in the 1950’s, constantly repeating the same phrases over and over? Did people really say “what I did was…” before telling you what they did, or add “and all” to the end of every sentence? Did they constantly say, “to tell the truth,” “the truth is,” “if you want to know the truth?” Wouldn’t our parents and grandparents who were young in the 1950’s talk like that then? Is it a figment of fiction, like the transatlantic accent?

Great book though.

​

Yes, my book list suggests, for it is also a map of other times and places, the ones in the pages and the towns, cabins, farms, hotels, and wet patios in which I read them.

Though 2021 was a blur of groundhog days, it also seems like I read Utopia Avenue ages ago. And the Me who read Utopia Avenue didn’t know jack about terraforming and longevity until Red Mars came along. And that dude’s mind had not yet been exploded by Sapiens or Homo Deus, or put back together by science and Tao. 

Therefore, cosmically, Taoistically, the idea that I languished as another rona year slipped quietly away is an illusion, because the person who sat here last year is not the person who sits here now. That guy was a clod. He hadn’t even read Sandman.

​Nonetheless, writing about all the books I read in 2021 would take forever, so I’ll stick to the highlights.

Dean, Griff, Elf, and Jasper (I actually remember their names a year later) are so well-rounded and everything they do is so relatable and interesting that you want to follow their whole careers. I’m annoyed that their music doesn’t actually exist. But the music of the 60s that inspired the story does, and I have a new rapport with the nonfictional artists that drift in and out of its alternate history. The research is deep, and the fact and fiction flow seamlessly with the pace of a modern TV show. No doubt there are adaptations twinkling in more than one producer’s eye.

Stephen Hawking - A Brief History of Time

I’ve read it two or three times, and though the finer points of quantum mechanics somehow still elude me, the broad-scope introduction to modern cosmology is a whole education. Hawking was one of the best at writing science for the science-adjacent. 

William Gibson - Neuromancer

The granddaddy of the cyberpunk genre was a bit underwhelming. It read like a manuscript for a graphic novel, with lots of in-world jargon for objects and concepts that would look cool in ink but which caused me to hydroplane when reading. The terse style also left the characters feeling thin. Still, it’s genre royalty and very cool to see some of the conceptual code that cyberpunk was built from.    

Kim Stanley Robinson - Red Mars

I knew nothing of Red Mars, other than that it was a thick paperback that had been sitting on my shelf for 10 years, but I am glad I picked it up. It’s academic hard SF, set in a near future that’s a lot nearer than it was in 1994, but still feels prescient and plausible. Maybe inevitable. It’s an exploration of the red planet and the technologies that could very well enable humans to colonize our neighboring rocks and become godlike in the process. Life extension treatments, colossal autonomous manufacturing AIs, advanced habitat fabrications, and biological terraforming projects all seem like natural and inevitable features of the interplanetary industrial revolution. Meanwhile, ideological clashes and tribalism among the first Martians cause suspicion and intrigue and endanger the whole shebang. The politics are amazing - a vision of the divergent ideas and factions and human bullshit that will certainly compel any arkload of colonizers, as they rocket away from Earthbound handlers, to realize that they are the masters of their destiny and the progenitors of a new human subspecies. It’s a rollercoaster of optimism and pessimism, the highs of super science and the lows of human folly, the havok of clashing morals and competing revolutionaries. Seems like it’s already coming true. 

Yuval Noah Harari - Sapiens & Homo Deus

Speaking of a new human subspecies. Sapiens is the Big Picture. A cosmic perspective of the ascent of our species through millenia, with all vain anthropic illusions removed. Not the first (Harari cites Guns, Germs, and Steel as a major inspiration), not the only, and not the last, but the one I read and which blew me away. Harari explains the divergence of homo sapiens from Neanderthals and other siblings, the circumstances that drove migration and the tiny adaptations of races, the proliferation of empires that shaped civilizations, the cognitive, agricultural, and industrial revolutions, the advent of fictions with the ability organize large groups of monkeymen for common goals (i.e. gods, spirits, nations and companies), the invention of money, the need for trust, the dataflow functions of economies, the inexorable will of the Market, the pseudo-sentience of collective ideas, and endless other profound cosmic observations and opportunities to say “oh, shit.” 
​
Sapiens shows us how we got here, and Homo Deus tells us where we’re going. It examines how emerging technologies will inform human evolution and how our inevitable assimilation with technology will result in a new species of god-like post-humans. It posits Dataism as a new post-religion, a big-picture cosmology to frame all other cosmologies, a perspective that explains the rise and fall of empires, the propagation of species, and the clockwork of life as data processing systems of varying efficiency. Your existential confidence may wilt, but I think we can choose to be empowered by uncomfortable revelations, rather than recoil from them. Should we dread the imminent ending of homo sapiens, or take heart in the natural conclusion of a story well told? Can there be any better outcome for our species than running our course and yielding the stage, rather than self-annihilation? Why squirm with existential dread when we can instead welcome the future and create new stories that prepare fellow sapiens for the transition? 

George Saunders - A Swim in the Pond in the Rain
​
Saunders presents his Syracuse MFA short story class in book form. You get a professor’s infectious passion for literary fiction and tools for deep analysis without the cost of tuition. Using examples from the Russian masters, he helps the reader unlock the complexities of literary fiction through thoughtful examination. Plebes like me who had to slog through the Norton doorstoppers in high school might find stuffy classics to be more like a high proof liquor, to be sipped, analyzed, and appreciated while burning the throat.

​Cory Doctorow - Little Brother
​
Teen tech wizards take on the surveillance state using an Xbox and other easily accessible technology. It’s the first in a series that deeply examines privacy in the modern day from a high school perspective. I love the whole concept, though some of the YA pretensions and colloquialisms were a little cringe. The relationship and coming-of-age plots feel real, though tacked on and not as strong as the main plot.

​The story was a clear inspiration for Brave New World and 1984 (don’t know how upfront Huxley and Orwell were about that, haven’t googled it), but seemed to lack some of the illusive lasagna layers that the later greats packed their stories with. Maybe the subtext eluded me; I stayed busy just trying to keep the alphanumeric character names straight. Born into a dystopia of diminished humanity to serve an ineffable collective purpose, the characters’ lack of identity may have shocked the Soviet sensibilities, but it is hard to relate to cardboard characters with serial number names. 

​Michio Kaku, Various - Best Science Writing 2020 

A collection of essays from major journals and publications describing cutting-edge science of all varieties. Scientists are making it very hard to write science fiction, because in many of these essays, the real developments and breakthroughs put the imaginary ones to shame. 

Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse 5

By far my favorite Vonnegut book of the half dozen or so I’ve read, possibly because the disjointed nonlinearality of the story fits his mordant style so well. It’s a heartbreaking ride in the scattered mind of an American soldier as he endures the horrors of childhood, war, and alien abduction, essentially all at the same time, over and over again, somehow made even more haunting by Vonnegut’s playful, ironic style.
​
Jerry Newport, Mary Newport, and Johnny Dodd - Mozart and the Whale

A memoire of the uncommon lives and turbulent relationship of a husband and wife on the autism spectrum. This was a wild ride I was not expecting. Fresh from Homo Deus, which is largely concerned with the incredibly narrow peephole through which a typical human experiences reality, it was fascinating to ride behind the eyes of folks with a different vantage point.  

Their stories are interweaving quests for love and meaning that veer through extremes of loneliness, triumph, mental illness, substance abuse – a whole HBO series of drama. Jerry’s homespun support group leads them to the limelight of the autism community, and they unintentionally become an example of a successful relationship on the spectrum. Neither believes they’ve discovered any trick to living more fruitfully than anyone else, but their support makes all the difference to some of their group members, and we wonder how their own journeys might have gone if they had more support when they were young. Their recollections take us back to a time before autism was recognized for what it is, when people on the spectrum were just oddballs to be ostracized or worse, and it is both distressing and galvanizing to see how deeply the cards are stacked against this community in other times and places.
​

 at once esoteric and elusive, intuitive and attainable. Through playful, matter-of-fact observations we consider the contradictions of modern life, the cognitive dissonance of having one foot in the past and one in the future, of “eating dinner for lunch.” It’s handy to have read Lao Tzu and the Tao Te Ching, the primary Taoist text, as well as the Christian bible. But many religious traditions resonate in Tao. From my limited introduction, I take Tao not as a replacement for a belief system, but more a reminder of the inherent mind-blowing wonder of existence and a framework for spiritual edification, which seem essential to the right functioning of any belief system.  
​

The rest

A few other books that I didn’t bother to make notes for, though deserving of recognition mostly they be:

Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
Carl Sagan - Broca’s Brain
Philip K Dick - The Man in the High Castle
Andy Weir - The Martian
Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett - Good Omens
Roger Zelazny - This Immortal
Dan Simmons - Hyperion

​Kavalier & Clay and High Castle were a little underwhelming for the hype. Didn’t much care for Hyperion. This Immortal was good but pulpy. Broca’s Brain and The Martian are excellent tributes to science, and Good Omens is an absolute delight.

And that took forever anyway. Shoot.

Dahlia said the coast was sinking. She spoke softly, reading a report from the dark web. The road north may be unguarded. I pointed out that they hadn’t said anything about it on the Amazon Update. 

“They also say there’s no fires, but we see the smoke,” Dahlia said. She placed a hand on her belly. I thought of the unnatural heat that gripped our mountain, and the spring foliage that forgot to bloom. 
The next day, I quietly retracted the jacks on our RV while the community was at prayer. 

Smog lay like a blanket on the city as we came down. Beneath, the heat and carbon smell were suffocating. Tent-dwelling humanity lined the streets. We passed Amazon trucks with no drivers; mounted stun guns ensured their cargo would travel unmolested.

Our home had no such defenses. I became nervous as the city walls converged, the broken streets slowed our pace, and the people emerged. Desperate hands banged our doors and windows. Dahlia leapt from her seat and began rearranging furniture to block the door. 

We rounded a corner, and suddenly the city yielded to grey-blue void as streets and towers slipped under a surge of foam. Dahlia was right; the patrols had abandoned Pacific Coast Highway to the clawing ocean. 
​
The road before us sloped into the languid tide, but I gunned forward. The banging stopped. Her hand found mine as we hit the water, slowing, sinking… until solid, glistening concrete finally surfaced, and we left LA behind. 

 ​​One fateful St. Patty’s day a few of us piled in for the latest Insomniac Wonderland shindig in San Bernardino.

We rolled out from the AV on the 138, cruising beside the aqueduct under an uncharacteristically cloudy sky. These were mean, misanthropic clouds, soaring past like a hostile army marching ahead to mass at our destination. It was an ill omen.

Tyra was driving her hooptie, a late 90’s magenta sedan with no make or model besides Tyra’s Car. The weather was bringing Tyra down; this was a rare mid-semester break and she was determined to enjoy a day without neuroscience. She begged the clouds to clear. Ten thousand other kids were likely offering the same prayers as they descended from the woodworks of Southern California.

Miki sat in the front. She was the manager of the Palmcaster Cinnabon, and every hour or so she would suddenly start talking to one of her bun girls on the phone. There was no audible ring, and her underlings needed frequent coaching, so she launched into random conversations and it took a minute to figure out if she was talking to someone in the car or not.

Lucille and I sat in the back, Lucille assembling kandy art with a big bead kit on her lap, me deeply considering the back of the mauve-and-greyhound-hair upholstery (I always snuck a weed hit in my driveway before a trip. I’d be toast all the way to the little restaurant on the mountain ridge that separates the AV from San Bernardino County, where I’d remind everyone that my family ate there once for my great aunt’s birthday when I was a kid).

The details might not be entirely accurate. Lacking the benefit of photos or gratuitously unforgettable moments, I might estimate details that are highly probable composites of similar experiences. If the grand tapestry of our adventures has a few threads loose, well, you can still make out the pattern.

What is a sure bet is the radio tuned to an unbroken stream of colorful pop trance and big room cheese, and Lucille busy in her vast kandy bucket. She’d acquired scores of the little bracelets from the events we’d been to in recent years. She made some new ones for us and some to be exchanged in deep moments in stage crowds or portapotty lines or on the grass with the rollers.

Despite the clouds, the hype train was on the tracks. The lineup had dropped on a drive home from Vegas six months earlier, and I remember Lucille read off names like Magnetic Man and Andy C. Now here we were, charging back to the NOS—a venue where only vibrant sunshine and flawlessly produced massives could exist.

We landed at Subway around noon. The place was already circulating with costumed kandy kids and fairy folk, but the real fun was watching the muggles frown over their sandwiches at these characters, unquestionably thinking another goddamned rave.

We hopped over to the Knight’s Inn, our eternal base of operations. The Knight’s is cheap, it’s a fifteen-minute walk to the NOS, and in those days there was a Denny’s in the parking lot. We got there early; the more time you spend in the motel, the sillier the evening’s outcomes.

I plugged my ipod into the portable jambox and played that fire. The girls started getting ready, a process they’d gotten down to a clockwork three or four hours of makeup and costume construction. This left me a lot of time to get privately drunk, have deep thoughts that I resolved to one day write about but have now forgotten, watch random TV shows, and float around the room pushing Jooses and selecting beats.

Tyra was on board with the Jooses. She kept one by her workstation to swig with one hand while the other flat-ironed her hair into Alice shape, getting amped as her costume came together and the music got louder. Lucille and Miki sat on the bed drinking and jamming and somehow applying makeup and costume lashes without gouging each other’s eyes out with their deadly pronged instruments.

I lurched into the bathroom every hour or so and lured one girl or another away from the mirror with a drink so I could wiz or take a shiznit. I had to be careful not to knock over the bags and bottles and tools laid out on every surface like the Mad Hatter’s teaware. The air grew thick with sprays and polishes and pheromones and a muggy moisture–the rain had begun to fall. A dark omen still hung overhead. The girls took turns peeking out the window, sipping and cursing the weather. The soft drumming of the drops was like the rattle of bones churning under the tide of fading dubstep outros.

I went outside to fart and pick my nose. In just about every doorway of the motelplex leaned costumed ravers and black clad dudes, grimacing and smoking cigarettes like sailors about to steer into the heart of a storm. A few colorful huddled groups raised anchor and embarked, charging and screeching behind umbrellas against the rain’s blinding lash. It was really pissing now, but it was after 4; the gates were open, somewhere in the mist.

“Are we really going out into that?” Miki joined me at the door. She was a sexy Mad Hatter with a giant costume afro.

“Oh my God,” said Lucille, the White Rabbit, drinking a Joose.

“We’ll just have to drink until we don’t feel the rain,” I resolved. Maybe that’s where it all went wrong.
​
“I’m down for that plan,” Tyra said from inside, batteries charged, finalizing her leggings and tall black boots.

And so we continued to Joose and jam, and soon the rain let up to a drizzle and we struck out.

​It was a long, wet power walk, the girls under light jackets and an umbrella, me in a thin button-up shirt. The sky was tarnished steel and the streets were empty as we approached the soggy NOS. The sidewalks and entry lines, normally overflowing with a parade of loaded ravers, instead sucked scattered groups to the gate like discarded flyers and titty cards swirling down the hose-blasted pavements and into the gutters of the Las Vegas strip before the dawn joggers arrive. No intoxicated bros, no crying acid kids who came up too fast, no thumping bass from the stages. It was downright eerie. We quickly circled the drain and entered Wet Wonderland.

Inside was as you’d expect from a setup like that. The decorations were subdued, tied down, or curtailed entirely. Paper lanterns looked like they blew into the trees and got stuck. Many of the typical hanging lights were probably taken down ahead of the wind and rain. The crown-jewel pond was a dull Mirkwood bog full of dead Hobbits, and raindrop ripples were multiplying on its surface. Across the water, one of the stage hangars stood dark and lifeless. We took it all in, a Wonderland drowned and denuded, and steered toward the only music we could hear, picking up the pace in the drizzle, passing wandering ghosts in full-body plastic ponchos.

“Faaauuucckk,” Tyra yelled periodically as we walked. She’d been doing that since we left the motel. That and other things. I was resigned to just being wet the whole time, but half the stages being off was a beating and she was taking it hard. Fortunately, the Madhatter’s Castle stage was slamming; Treasure Fingers was mashing two Empire of the Sun tracks as we approached, and morale immediately improved.

There was a bar with no line nearby, and Miki and Tyra went right back out in the rain for drinks. This may not have been necessary; I’m told we ran into a classmate of Lucille’s around this time, did a whole effusive greeting and kandy exchange, and were already so charged that none of us have any memory of it.

By now everybody in the fest was seeking shelter under that big white tent, but it was still early and spacious. Miki and Tyra came back with vodka Redbulls and we huddled for warmth in the back and gang pressed passerby to take pictures of us while all costumes were at full glory. Feeling revived, we started considering moves of action. Treasure Fingers yielded the stage to Norman Doray. Would we stick with house music, in relative comfort, or dare the elements in search of bass? No victory is without risk, but there were rumors that the bass stage was dead. Workers were bringing in generators, some said. Were the artists bumping to later times, or just not playing? Nobody knew.

“We have to see Crizzly! Crizzzzlyy!” Tyra yelled, her volume knob broken off at 10. So we struck back out into the rain, full of hope and caffeinated liquor.

We passed the Cheshire Woods stage, dead and dark and locked up. Chess Village, where the bass would normally be melting the atmosphere, was silent as Davey Jones’ watery grave. A big security dude guarded the door. People were leaving in disappointment. Crizzly was nowhere to be found.
​
This was the moment Tyra lost her mind.

“CRIZZZLLLYYYYYIIIEIEEEEIEIEE,” she wailed into the rain. It was becoming clear she was on another level. The confluence of Joose and calamity had short-circuited her brain. The rest of us wanted to be on that level too, so we went for another drink. If the whole festival was going to shiver under the house and trance tents, we’d drink enough enthusiasm to sail our boat into the long rave night.

But that’s not how it went. As we stood in the rain-soaked drink line, slumped and stoic and trying to becalm Tyra, the queue was suddenly perforated by hustling bass heads. They were converging on Chess Village. The stage was on. “Oh shit,” I declared, and we booked it after them.

That dark damp aircraft hangar was already rattling. Crizzly picked it up somewhere in the middle of his set. The pit was barely starting to coalesce. You got the impression that somehow the ear-splitting volume was even more punishing on such a porous, defenseless crowd. Tyra started mingling with random groups and making friends. We got down.

The stage’s lineup was legend and we could have easily stayed there the whole time, but as soon as Crizzly stepped off there was conflict in the crew. Maybe they had to go to the bathroom. Maybe they wanted to get a drink. Maybe Tyra was doing something that Miki and Lucille didn’t think was a good idea. My brain only knew that Mistajam was opening with the hits, and my brain was raising its hackles against distraction. I moved up into the crowd as Midnight Run came on, nodding along with all the goofy stoned heads, but I wasn’t there long before I had to admit the volume was probably mowing down all my inner ear cilia. I went to hover on the far side of the hangar, next to an open exit leading into lashing rain and cold. I watched in awe as a trio of skinny mostly naked tutu girls locked arms and strode heedless into the maelstrom, and the image bore itself into my permanent memory.
​
Then Lucille found me. They wanted to go see if the other house stage was on, but Tyra was running amok. Manager Miki was used to handling chaos and wrangling Tyra, but apparently our girl was beyond reason. “Leave her,” was my savage reply. “She’ll follow us if we go.” I didn’t even want to go, but I was trashed, and with a vague direction calling and no higher mental faculties left as ballast, the boat was leaving the dock.

Halfway across the NOS, it was clear the lure didn’t work. Lucille wanted to go back and get her. Miki was over it and said Tyra’s new friends could have her. We were deadlocked in what was perhaps the strongest recorded instance of what scientists would later describe as “Tyrarism,” a phenomenon in which Tyra becomes so blacked out drunk that no rational argument can persuade her and simultaneously so ebullient and that no social decorum can limit her passions. While Tyrarizing, her primary directive is to socialize, spread love and stir up everyone’s secret sauces. Looking back, I don’t have room to talk; I was in a fugue state of single-minded determination to get to the music that would characterize many salty experiences at many festivals.

Lucille, a kind soul, went back to get Tyra. Miki and I pressed on. The Caterpillar’s Garden stage was indeed alive and crowds were pressing to get in for the Dim Mak takeover. We squeezed in and hung by the entrance so Lucille and Tyra could find us. Dimitri Vegas & Like Mike were on, and it was fine. Miki and I danced to some big room and had fun.

Eventually Lucille found us with Tyra in tow. Tyra had become convinced that Miki and I were back at the stage that Lucille was taking her away from and that they needed to go and get us, and it took all of Lucille’s psychology tricks to get Alice to follow the White Rabbit across the venue. The ordeal left Lucille thirsty, so she and Miki wanted to get drinks while Tyra stayed with me at the stage. We explained the plan to Tyra. They’re getting drinks. Stay here. They’ll be right back. Ok. Traffic could only flow in one direction in the hangar, so it would be a mission for Lucille and Miki to get to the one exit in the back and return through the front. Tyra and I stayed put and danced.

The DJs churned through eight or nine bangers. The rain must have picked back up, because the hangar was quickly filling with soggy ravers. Tyra and I got pressed in but held our ground near the entrance, and I kept an eye on the door while we danced.

“Miki and Lucille are gone,” Tyra noticed.

“Yeah. They went to get drinks. They’ll be right back!” I had to yell over the music.

“Do they know where we are??”

“Yeah. They just left. They’re coming right back.”

The crowd was piling in, but we held our ground and danced.

“I don’t think they know where we are,” she worried.

“They do. We’re staying right here so they see us. They’ll be here in a minute.”

“They’re probably outside looking for us!”

“No, they know where we are! They’re coming right back!”

The crowd was getting so thick we could barely move.

“They’re not going to be able to find us!”

“They know where we are! We have to stay here!”

“We have to find them!”

And with that she was diving into the outflowing crowd and streaming toward the exit in the back.
​
“NOOOOO!” I yelled, plowing through people after her. Somehow the raw inertia of Tyrarism carried her swiftly through the crowd like a leaf in a stream while I struggled over logs and brambles. I watched her head bob in the current as we reached the exit, locked in the flow of outbound traffic and washed into the pissing rain.

I finally caught up with her where the crowd thinned behind the hangar. I said some stern things and took her by the hand to steer us back around the building to the entrance. The rabble was exponentially more dense around the front door, a press of people 30 deep trying to squeeze in and escape the rain and falling darkness, but we made it through and found Miki and Lucille and they had my drink.

As daunting a task as it seemed, it was already time to go back to the Chess Village to get a good spot for Magnetic Man. Miki and Lucille wrangled Tyra as we jumped back into the outgoing people stream and back into the rain.

Now it was fully dark and getting cold. The grounds were soaked and muddy, but kids were laying in the grass around the pond nonetheless. The way was lit by sparse halos of colorful lantern light.

Back in the bass stage, Camo & Crooked were kindling DnB heat like a comfortable fire in the hearth. We had some time to spare, so we sat against the wall and watched Tyra wander back into the crowd. One of us kept an eye on her as she floated around and pollenated various groups. That the Tyrarist state could last so long and at such intensity was a miracle of physiology. What other esoteric chapters of neural plasticity have been written and forgotten on nights such as these? We watched her pick up trash from the ground and, not knowing quite what to do with it, stuff it into her shirt. When she returned, she offered handfuls of trash to us as a gift, with a face of childish innocence. Lucille took her to a garbage can to throw it away. Some of it Tyra folded up and put in her boot for later.

Then the moment I’d been waiting for since Lucille read “Magnetic Man” from the lineup in the car half a year ago arrived. There was a brief changeover after Camo & Crooked, and I dragged us deep into the crowd. The first skull-crushing note of sub-bass dissolved the adversity of the day from my brain. “We brought some real UK weather with us today,” the emcee joked as Skream, Benga and Artwork came on. Hahaha. Yes. All right. Let’s go. Boom, bass so heavy it scrambles your eggs and mutates your DNA. Flash, white strobes like deep space pulsars, activating the prefrontal cortexes of primitive life on distant planets, turning space monkeys into space men.

The onslaught was so pure that it reinvigorated Tyra’s hippocampus. She was in the crowd next to me, dancing away, face blank like a wax figure, and suddenly I saw her astral-self return to her body. She blinked, still dancing, looking around, awareness dawning but with no context for the dense crowd or the crushing sound she awakened into. She realized I was beside her.

“Where are we?” she asked in genuine confusion. Still dancing.

“Magnetic Man.”

“Oh. Where are Miki and Lucille?”

“Behind us.”

There they were.

“Oh. How are we here? What did we do?”

“We went to some stages.”

“Did we already see Crizzly?”

“Yeah. You had fun.”

“Oh. Why don’t I remember anything?”

“You were drunk.”

“Oh.”

And so we were each contented to be stretched and compressed by 90 minutes of superior UK space-time manipulation. We stayed in the thick of it until High Contrast took over, then went back to the rest wall. Tyra was trying to understand how she got to this point in time, and wondered why we were all giving her a cold shoulder. Lucille told her we’d tell her about it later.

Andy C wasn’t on for an hour, but the weather outside was merciless, so we sat on the floor through High Contrast and gathered our strength. Tyra discovered trash in her boots and boobs and started pulling it all out piece by piece, more confused than ever. The brain is an amazing thing.

Then the lights went down and we reentered the fray as Andy C’s live stage rolled out. The massive “A” was something to behold, a control booth like the pilot seat of a Gundam from which the man could shred eyes and eardrums, one of the first large-scale traveling A/V DJ shows and probably the most grandiose a DnB DJ has ever had the audacity to construct.

​By the end of that nasty set we’d been in the bass stage for over four hours. Our ears were devastated. Tyra was ready to get started. We decided to brave the elements one last time and end the night at Steve Aoki.

We took one step outside and screamed. It was 1 a.m., drizzly, and freezing. Our only choice was to huddle and keep moving, back to the Caterpillar’s Garden. The sky was black, the ground a shimmering Van Gogh painting. Tons of dark figures were already pouring out of the exit gate.

The Garden was dark and smelled like wet dog, but the crowd was much more porous than before. Aoki came on and played the hits, and we borrowed energy from our future selves to dig it. My head bobbed but by my shoulders sagged under the weight of 1,000 Jooses and vodka redbulls. The whole crowd was in a similar state. Aoki deployed his crowd-surfing raft and I was surprised he didn’t just flatten the poor kids he landed on. We tried to stay out of the way; if Aoki tried to sail over us we’d be crushed. Cakes were thrown, Warp vocals were screamed, and Travis Barker came out to do the drum part of their new collab. Rad.

The lights and music faded. Grim reality waited outside. One last time we left the body-warmth of the stage and entered the unforgiving night. Our clothes were all soaked, and the cold at 2 a.m. chilled our souls. There was the usual bleak procession to the gate and over two miles between us and the Knight’s Inn. To wait in the cab line would be a sure death, so we marched in silence over muddy grounds and littered streets. I was as cold as I’d ever been. I willed my mind to wander outward and insulate itself from my body’s desperate reality, aware that this was how lost Everest climbers and Antarctic explorers slipped into the warm embrace of an icy grave.

The big Denny’s sign in the distance was neon salvation. We didn’t have the strength to get food, but it showed us the way. Crossing the threshold, my shoes were soaked, face and fingers numb, body sore and muscles collapsing like I’d gotten my ass beat by evil snowmen. Blurry costumes were peeled off and discarded. We bargained for shower rights. Someone said “Tyra goes last” and we laughed. Tyra didn’t get it.

Thus ended Wet Wonderland. It was a rare and incomparable experience, a testament to the resilience of friendships and the human body, from which we ultimately learned nothing, nor changed our behavior in any way, other than to remember that when you sip the cup that says “drink me,” be prepared to shrink or grow to untenable sizes.

10/10.

Robert Anton Wilson & Robert Shae - The Illuminatus Trilogy

This book is many things. It is revealing, bewildering, appalling, empowering. It is myth and prophecy, a treatise for confusing times (times like 2020-the fourth year after the multiverse diverged and reality became less reliable, and by when the space squid carcasses really began to rot). Yes, it was published in 1975, but like that post-Nixon era I expect the story becomes more resonant when the world’s architecture of unseen enigmas is (fnord) most Discordant. 
​
More specifically, the trilogy is a 1,000 page acid trip spanning decades and dimensions and connecting every major conspiracy theory from Atlantis to the Rosicrucians to John Dillinger; the Foucault’s Pendulum of psychonautic interdimentia. I loved how cleverly the eternal struggle of conservatism and counterculture could be depicted on this stage, with many of the big-name authoritarian ghouls and conflicts of the mid-century doused in LSD and wrapped in mysticism and somehow making more sense than textbooks ever did. Now with 2020 hindsight, I think even the most bodaciously insane caricatures of mid-century sociopolitics were probably right on the money, and I can better appreciate how bizarre our little slice of the multiverse really is.

Ursula K. Le Guin - The Left Hand of Darkness

An ornate vision of humanoid society evolving from a different roll of the cosmic dice, of course devastatingly revealing of our own social constructs, particularly gender and relationships. It’s a brutal wintery journey of a soul far from home, trudging through anthropologically rich and sociologically complex environments and devoid of sci-fi tropes (save for those that developed in its wake). Which makes it sci-fi at its best, I’d say, simply putting the traditional human in the role of the observer, asking a big What If? and letting the dendrites of story squiggle and unfold. I’ve read just a few of her hits so far (Left Hand, Earthsea, The Lathe of Heaven, and a translation of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching) but it only takes one to ken Le Guin’s reputation as a SF grandmaster.

Aldous Huxley - Crome Yellow
​
One day I looked through the free audiobooks on my app as my car rolled to the exit gate. I tapped something by Aldous Huxley, whose Brave New World is foundational sci-fi and one of my favorites. Crome Yellow, I found, is not sci-fi. It’s actually Huxley’s first novel, published in 1922 and featuring an heirloom country mansion and the society of poets and flappers who dwell in and around it. It reminded me of Gatsby, with its detailed depiction of society in this slice of life and its satirization of the leisure class. And poor Denis, the aspiring poet, smoldering creative spirit, ennui-stricken intellectual, sensitive piner for the ladies of leisure but forever alone. I guess young authors have enjoyed skewering their self-inserts throughout the centuries. 

The ornate prose was savory in narration, like a well-set English breakfast table and polite conversation. Recommended if you’re interested in subtle symbolism and satire or just the timbre of fine early-century writing. I also recommend giving random picks like this one a chance, because how else will you discover that you’re into those things?  

Neil Gaiman - The View from the Cheap Seats

I had a phase as a writer in my early 20s where I aspired to be Gaimanesque. I don’t think I’m the only one; Gaiman has sort of become a genre of his own. His characteristic New Weird / SF novels and adaptations populate bookshelves, movie racks, comic bins and Hot Topics around the world. I think creatives love him because it makes it look so easy, scribbling stories into notebooks by hand in his woodland sanctuaries, traveling nonstop for talks and appearances, blogging prolifically and providing introductions to what, 40% of all genre fiction published in the last 10 years? His style is so easy-going, so English, and so appetizing to the Harry Potter generation, even in nonfiction.

​This collection is full of wild stories and enduring work from throughout his career, always with the perspective of a bemused writer of speculative fiction contending with the uncanny situations and general weirdness of success. One could do worse than emulate the Gaimaneque.

Frank Herbert - Dune

Speaking of foundational sci-fi. I bought this rad copy of Dune in 2015 or so, and every year I told myself this is the year I read Dune. This year it was true. My love of vintage sci-fi is partly a fascination for tracing the roots of genres and artistic movements through their waves and webs and cultural contexts. Understanding the time and place a story was written in is as interesting as the story itself. Reading Dune, I could instantly see why it’s a genre-defining classic, and recognize its genetic heritage in so many of its descendents. It was like finally listening to The Clash and realizing half of all EDM songs sample them, which I also recently did. 

Carl Sagan - Contact

I found this first edition in a little bookshop in Idyllwild and thought it was a steal. I’d never read Sagan and I’d only seen the movie once in film class, and I think I slept through a lot of it. Though the book didn’t turn out to be quite as collectable as I’d hoped, the story blew away all expectations. Sagan’s passion for science is infectious; Ellie is one of the best-rounded and well-written protagonists in the genre; and the ideas are top notch hard SF. I left the book tripping on the yin and yang of science and religion, and inspired to share the love of scientific literacy in a time when that seems to be in short supply . (Along those lines, I highly recommend Alan Lightman’s Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine, a collection of an astrophysicist’s meditations on life, God, physics, reality, all the good stuff.) 

Greg Sestero - The Disaster Artist

My reading of Contact was peppered by giggles and full-on laughs from Lizett as she read The Disaster Artist nearby. Even if you’ve seen the movie, and The Room itself, you’re not ready for how funny this book is. The movie is just the tip of the ice-berg. The whole scenario is the most baffling, entrancing product (or perfect storm) of money, passion, naivete, and an entrepreneur from another planet. 

Ram Dass - Be Here Now

I’ve been trying to describe this book for half an hour now. Each time I take a line and decide the words are inadequate and return to the beginning. I guess it’s hard to capture one’s experience with any holy book; endeavors of the spirit are personal and concern feelings for which language can only produce a pale imitation. This book, with its unconventional presentation and illustrations, speaks to those feelings, disheveling the strictures of text and language like a drop of acid to facilitate sincere reflection and deeper connection. 

It’s a book about spiritual journeys, and a pan-denominational tool for those embarking on their own. The first part is an autobiography detailing how psychologist Richard Alpert journeyed to the ends of the earth and the depths of the mind to find enlightenment, and returned as the yogi Ram Dass. His story is far out. 

The second part, the weird brown pages that make up most of the length, “is a free-form collection of metaphysical, spiritual, and religious aphorisms, accompanied by illustrations.” That’s the wikipedia version. The section is meant to be a tool for meditation, a doorway into the self. Approaching this kind of thing honestly, or “doing the work,” is not a commitment to occultism or anything weird; it’s just a tool to re/connect with one’s spirituality. To regain awareness of the world and the self and the inseparability of the two. To consider your body as you haven’t done since you were a child, rediscover the presence of it, and the wholesome unity of spirit and form. You might think thoughts that usually only form under the influence of substances, but people have been getting high this way for a very long time.

The third part is a more functional guide for following your spiritual path, with tips and techniques and inspirational quotes from the Bible, the Baghavad Vida, Bob Dylan, and more, and the final part is a list of books for further reading. 

Anonymous - Go Ask Alice

The immortalized diary of an anonymous teenage girl on a journey of addiction and destruction. I thought it was moving, but now that I’ve looked it up on wikipedia and learned that it was probably not authentic, I feel kind of disillusioned. If it was actually written by a 15-year-old girl on a spiral of lost innocence and self-destruction at the end of the psychedelic era, it is fantastic. If it was written by a 50-year-old Mormon therapist and youth counselor as anti-drug propaganda, it is wackalicious.  

Jack Karouac - On the Road

It was a summer of journeys, here in my apartment amid the pandemic, and On the Road felt like a natural next step after Alice. The steps that followed, riding with Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty and a revolving cast of vagabonds as they crisscrossed the country from the 1950s to the 1960s, were grinding, exhausting, and somehow refreshing. 

The romance of the endless road and compulsion to fly down it night and day, year on year, trading one life for another at each juncture was part of the new spirituality of post-war America, an indelible part of the emerging beat/hippie movement and counterculture. It was a time and place like no other, and again I was as fascinated by the context and the connections to literary canon and world events that the writer drew from as the story itself. Reading from a yellowed paperback (though not quite original vintage) helped invoke those bygone days, the ephemeral America that Karouac bummed and worked and hitchhiked his way through. That world seems mostly vanished, or at least, a group of charismatic nomads couldn’t get away with the things these characters got away with anymore.

Though I didn’t come away compelled to hop a box car or drive aimlessly into the heartland reliant on hitchhikers for gas money, I was in awe of the whole freeform jazz and drug-fueled era and the people who lived in it. Now learning that most of the characters are stand-ins for the Beat Scene pantheon (Ginsberg, Cassady, Karouac himself) makes it that much crazier.   

John Updike - In the Beauty of the Lilies

Do you ever browse the shelves of your AirBnB, maybe take a couple books down and see how your hosts have curated the literary character of their inn? No? Well I do. I’ll spend some hours in the corner chair with a random volume of Roman history or Hindu wisdom, or in this case, a prosaic-looking piece of Americana by an author whose name rung a bell as Highly Literary and which I probably would never have glanced at otherwise. I don’t expect to find a lot of reading time with friends in a cabin, but being programmed to rise early, I had my coffee and bore my hangover each morning with In the Beauty of the Lilies, and the early chapters’ elegant account of a minister suddenly and devastatingly losing his faith had me shook enough to order a copy when I got home and put it next in line. I also resolved to buy at least one of the books I find on the shelves at each place I stay from now on.

Lois Lowry - The Giver
​
How did they let me graduate middle school without reading The Giver? I pulled Lizett’s copy off the shelf for a short read after finishing Lilies and realized I’d been missing a critical piece of adolescent education. It’s one of those stories you can reference in conversation for the rest of your life, part of the literary heritage of a generation. Personally, though, I coveted the story for its beautiful simplicity and flawless execution, qualities I will spend the next 100 years trying to emulate. 

Susannah Clarke - Piranesi

One of the only books I’ve ever pre-ordered in advance of publication. Susannah Clarke’s debut Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is my favorite stand-alone novel, the absolute GOAT of rainy, Romantic literary pastiche, and though Piranesi is entirely unrelated to that book, I’m pretty much committed to reading anything Clarke puts out. In contrast to Strange & Norrell, which is massive and complex, Piranesi’s story is (deceptively) small and simple, yet somehow no less a labyrinthian neo-Goth M.C. Escher painting of a story. 

Carl Sagan - The Demon Haunted World

​With so much bad faith politics and science and media illiteracy dominating the public conversation this year, Carl Sagan’s treatise on scientific investigation felt like the antidote to a slow-acting brain poison. With the goal of sharing scientific literacy with a non-science audience or those who haven’t benefited from a science education, Sagan deconstructs many of the myths and superstitions of history (witches, demons, astrology, UFOs) while wisely and respectfully identifying the failures of logic that keep them around. It’s empowering, reassuring, and sometimes horrifying, but a skeptical, scientific mindset and a “baloney detection kit” are tools every high school graduate and congressperson should have. 

JRR Tolkien - The Lord of the Rings
​
Long has the tale called me. I recently found and ordered the same mysterial one-volume edition that I first checked out from my middle school library, and Foundations of Stone plays in my head with every glance of it on the shelf. As a kid, this massive tome was an object of fascination, a daunting and addicting quest that I availed myself of off and on, never penetrating much further than the Breaking of the Fellowship until high school. Those early chapters are like the eternal summers of childhood, when the world’s conflicts are still just far-off rumors and the need for haste does not yet drive the heart. 
 
Returning to Middle-Earth as an adult in our darkest winter, I felt much more heavily the weight of the ringbearer’s errand, and recognized the real servants of darkness proliferate in our own age. The later chapters are rife with evil, grotesque transgressions of a faithless legion, creatures driven solely by a malicious will to power, heedless of the ruin that lies in the wake of their toadying, or of the encroaching blight that would consume orc and man alike.
 
It was all too familiar, and uncannily I identified with Gandalf’s apprehensions, his worries of having watched and waited too long, his horror at revelations of the enemy’s muster, his knowledge of a gathering darkness that but for the barest hope will surely overwash our world for an age of man, if another age there should even be. 
 
“I wish it had not come in my time.” 
 
“As do I, but we must do what we can with the time that is given us.”
 
The soot and smoke of industry were only just beginning to choke the horizon when Tolkien wrote. Though he dreamed the saga from the trenches of the second world war, Tolkien maintained that any resemblances to real persons, politics or conflicts were just a reflection of man’s enduring struggle with wickedness, a fantastic projection of the conflicts in the hearts of men. But art reveals truth, and Tolkien may have been more prescient than he knew. I see a lot of orcs when I check my Twitter feed. 
 
A fell culture of callowness and malice again emerges from dark places, driven by power-hungry charlatans who bewitch and exploit otherwise good people in their pursuit of dominion. A cloud of fear and ignorance bruises the sky and demoralizes those who stand for justice. Our institutions are infiltrated by people who stoke fear and hatred and abjure wisdom, who use deception and bad faith to inflame grievance and grow their hoard. Age on age, maybe it is always thus, but it feels like we are coming to a precipice after which another age may not follow. If the forces of ignorance and malice come to full power, then the muster of the wise may fail to stop the destabilization of our world, and a blight will fall that may never lift, certainly not in the age of men, and increasingly it seems we have but a Hobbit’s chance of averting doom.
 
Still the GOAT.