Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief
That’s the point; Star Wars is about Luke coming to grips with his (magical, destined, prophetic) heritage. Star Trek is about exploring a (fictional) universe. Picard isn’t coming to grips with anything. He’s doing his job. The audience doesn’t need to know how The Force works to be invested in Luke’s journey. The movie didn’t spend five pages of dialogue trying to pin down the BTU output of a Lightsaber. The precise energy signatures of the warp drive engineering bay is probably an integral component to whatever it is that appeals to people that like Star Trek. Probably.
Try setting Star Trek in the nineteenth century, perhaps during the U.S.’s Manifest Destiny inspired westward expansion. What, are they going to “prime directive” the native Shoshone peoples? Are we going to get fifteen minutes of discussion about what type of wood the wagon tongue is made from, and how much torque it can withstand because it is maple instead of oak? It just doesn’t work. Actually, strike that, it kind of sounds awesome. Oh wait, that happened, and it was called SeaQuest and it was terrible. Because, “They live under the sea, it’s Star Trek under the sea” was the whole premise. But it didn’t have the fictional Star Trek universe. That’s what people cared about! Tricorders and the Federation and what have you. Name a character from SeaQuest. Or an antagonist. Or some sort of characteristic of the world. Besides “the ocean.” Without Wikipedia. Maybe you know the name of the ship. I didn’t, but I just looked it up, and it’s “SeaQuest.” Seriously. That’s pretty lame. Check please.
But Star Wars? That story is about a lowly farm boy who finds out that his father is not only a high-ranking lord in the local political landscape, but that he has inherited both the legacy of magical powers and the prophetic destiny of dismantling the existing system. Also known as every fantasy story ever. It is set in space. That’s the twist! Robots and wookies instead of horses and elves. And it is glorious.
So, I’m pretty firmly entrenched in the fantasy side of things. Which is no good, at least from the perspective of trying to sell me personally on L. Ron Hubbard as an author.
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The Secret Chord
David, far from perfect, feels believable compared to standard fantasy or fable characters who are often touched by the divine or go on to unite kingdoms or forge nations in peace and harmony. For all its biblical foundation—God and prophets and a chosen people—Goliath was just a man, albeit a large one. David had children that grew up spoiled and violent; David was a man inflamed by lusts; David was an upstart and usurper:
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Drink: The Intimate Relationship Between Women and Alcohol
As someone living in a predominantly female neighborhood in Manhattan—renowned for its air of “safety” over “excitement”—I was curious to find some rationale behind the observably more frequent clusters of women stumbling around on late Thursday, Friday, and Saturday evenings—hailing cabs and buying electrolyte-replenishing Gatorades—than groups of men. And while this anecdotal tale is completely irrelevant to any sort of methodical inquiry into the subject of women and alcohol, it is the type of digression that you should brace yourself for if you’re planning on picking up Drink.
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Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe
It isn’t a failure that Time Reborn doesn’t answer questions—what is important is realization that the framework in which we do physics, rely on math, and oversimplify the world to fit our algorithms and equations is examined and excoriated as wish fulfillment. The digital age continues to reduce people to numbers and alters the world to fit the lens of self-effacing code. It is increasingly important to avoid a fallacious “natural” justification for mathematical simplicity in attempting to understand the universe, else risk giving credence to a "true" or "pure" mathematical view of markets or web traffic or any other social construct.
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Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking
Quiet seems to want to claim a piece of “...the self-help industry, into which hundreds of thousands of Americans pour their hearts, souls, and some $11 billion a year...” and lands firmly in the self-justification section. The anecdotes typically reinforce this dim view. Rather than appealing in a Mlodinowian style that provide a personal connection to the the underlying facts, many vignettes are simply synecdoche in the guise of specificity:
The quiet persistence shown by many Asians, and Asian-Americans, is not limited to the fields of math and science. Several years after my first trip to Cupertino, I caught up with Tiffany Liao, the Swarthmore-bound high school student whose parents had praised her so highly for loving to read, even in public, when she was a young girl. When we first met, Tiffany was a baby-faced seventeen-year-old on her way to college, She told me then that she was excited to travel to the East Coast and meet new people, but was also afraid of living in a place where no one else would drink bubble tea, the popular drink invented in Taiwan.
It’s not that the story of Ms. Liao isn’t compelling, it’s that she is meant to stand in for “Introverts” with a capital “i”. It reaches too far. That is what made so many sections of this book a complete slog; granular anecdotes are wedged into a framework that is then extended beyond their incredibly narrow scope.
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Melmoth
Melmoth the Witness, denier of the resurrection of Christ, damned to walk the earth as witness to humanity’s secret sins. She is our global order in freefall: viewer of systemic evil as it crushes humanity into despair. Hers are the steps—the C.S. Lewis Inner Ring speech—that gently caress a person into becoming a monster:
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The Buried Giant
While I still visit the Fantasy section, it is like returning to your hometown after college—you’re happy to be there for a short while, but you won’t be taking anything with you when you leave. Looking at the covers and reading the blurbs, most of it is just doesn’t hit me in the same way; I cannot care about another teenage sorcerer or a child pirate that turns out to be an heiress or dragon in disguise. Not because I am above goblins or faeries or enchanted accoutrements, but because the writing can often be embarrassing. I still enjoy the plots, even if they do tend toward clichéd; it isn’t exactly fair to read hundreds of Fantasy paperbacks and expect to be surprised—that familiarity breeds comfort and is part of the appeal, anyway—but that doesn’t change the fact that I don’t want to drag myself through the level of prose that felt appropriate to me two decades ago
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Turing's Cathedral
It is difficult to keep the obvious truth—that computers were recently created by people—in plain view. George Dyson is Hesiod for the Prometheus tale of the men and women of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study. Access to accurate documentation of a creation myth—the origin of electronic computers, technology as simultaneously useful and dangerous as fire—makes Turing’s Cathedral a strong recommendation for anyone.
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The Vorrh
Maybe if it is your thing—weird, indescribable plots filled with horrible atrocities and seemingly pointless activities bound together in beautiful words and engaging, thoroughly bizarre, characters—then this will be your book.
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Acceptance
But the comfort of the familiar cannot be discounted, even when one considers the familiar rather tedious. So I launched, pell-mell, into Acceptance within a day of closing Authority. Can I blame the publishers for having all three books published within the same year? Probably not. Did the availability—the difference between joyously snoozing past your alarm on a workday and popping up full-awake at 7am on a lazy Sunday morning—contribute to my burnout, or might I never have returned at all if time had forced distance?
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The Folly of the World
In keeping with genre fantasy are the requisite scenes of a sexual nature—The Folly of the World adroitly positions them as character development and applies their substance to reinforce the plot, rather than as the adolescent titillation of the prototypical hero’s journey where a heteronormative questing team's budding romance plays out with tepid ennui. The explicit detail is dialed up, but beyond the smut sits a standard plot of three adventures searching for a bauble; the rub is that all three are miscreants and the tale is told in increasingly unreliable voices. The plot is vehicle for character development—standard genre constructions apply.
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Authority
Authority brings the periphery into view, and you quickly find it better remained in the imagination.
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Annihilation
Plotwise, not a whole lot actually happens. Its strength lies in the cohesiveness of its narrator and her interpretations of the world as it shatters around her. She remains the same, for the most part, and learning about her is a treat. That she’s rational to the point of robotic makes her the perfect narrative lens and accounts for some of her actions; as readers, of course we want the narrator to take the dangerous, almost ludicrous risks. “No coincidence, no story.”
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The Golem and the Jinni
The ubiquity of multi-point-of-view narration that has overtaken modern fiction fits smoothly into The Golem and the Jinni. Both characters address the same concerns—apartments, jobs, friends, society—in very different ways. The swaps of narrative perspective at the chapter breaks do what they should in a great book; the reader wants to continue with the Golem at the start of a Jinn chapter, yet at the start of a Golem chapter the recently ended Jinn chapter lingers in the mind. As the two characters’ lives become intertwined, the perspective swaps increase in both speed in frequency, sometimes occurring multiples times within the same chapter. This structural choice emphasizes their relationship in a way that rigid “one chapter, one perspective” would not, and heightens the ties that bind them together in the mind of the reader. Their separate and unique stories have fused together in a very real, physical way.
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On Immunity: An Inoculation
Reviewing is not static regurgitation—it is not pumping out synopses but filtering words through one's self: speaking to whether I enjoyed or didn’t enjoy a book; whether the knowledge was worthwhile or worthless; whether the whole experience came together into something greater than ink on a page. I respect the books I choose to spend my time with, and I expect them to respect me. I never sit down with a book and cackle eagerly as I scheme to hoist the author by his or her own petard. I am open to the words—I want to hear them. That is why I am reading. Books, ideally, have my trust until they lose it; I try my best not to crack a cover with my view already askance, awaiting the narrative to conform to my expectations before I will accept what it says. On Immunity didn’t insult me. It isn’t trying to sell me something, isn’t trying to change my mind or shame anyone or garner more clicks with inflammatory rhetoric. It makes statements; it supports them with evidence. It conveys thoughts; it presents them as logical and introspective. It is a lovely book, honest to what it is; no polemic but a narrative absorbing and reforming the zeitgeist around vaccination.
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Cruel Optimism
More capitalist entrenchment begets less mobility: see our current globe-spanning supply chains that require a handful of ultra-powerful conglomerates to maintain them. It certainly feels like there aren’t a lot of options for, say, food, outside of industrial agriculture. Certainly not on the lower end of the economic spectrum, and all of a sudden you are focusing on your car, apartment, cell phone payments and supporting all these necessities have forced you out of planning the revolution. The system maintains itself while precluding real thought of anything else. And its primacy in culture colors everything:
[Slow death, the physical wearing out of a population in a way that points to its deterioration as a defining condition of its experience and historical existence] takes as its point of departure David Harvey’s polemical observation, in Spaces of Hope, that under capitalism sickness is defined as the inability to work.
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The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable
Colonialism via capital-accumulation proxy may staunch during the resurgence of baronial dynasty at home, but likely it will only be further masked by our own suffering as wealth continues to congeal amongst the top stratum. In short, without any hands on the levers of government except the very wealthy, we’ll all get fucked.
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The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business
“To smell this fish, please click ‘I accept’. By accepting, you have given permission for all data about your fish-selecting to be entered into a database so that in the future, only the fish we think you might enjoy will be presented. Unless one of those Congolese fisherwomen pay us a small advertising fee; then we’ll cram whatever shit she dredges out of the lake into your face first. Algorithms!”
I can’t imagine a better future.
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