|
I assumed doing another end-of-year book post would just be a depressing summary of another brief, identical COVID year. I’m sitting on the same couch by the same fire on what could be any morning of the last few years, with the same raindrops and ronaballs tapping on the window. Have I ever really left this spot? Read more  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.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
What's this?A public repository of projects, fictions, and other transmissions. Archives
February 2023
Categories |
RSS Feed