“In My Country” by Thomas Ha in Clarkesworld magazine.
As an aside, and totally unrelated to why this is an important story (and especially so right now), this piece both explains and perfectly epitomizes why I love the stories I love, and what’s missing from those I don’t love, for whatever that is worth.
Burning Chrome was a favorite of mine in the mid-1990s, when I first read the title story in an Oxford sci-fi anthology I found for a couple bucks at a used bookstore.
Before that decade (and century, and millennium) was done, I’d read every one of these stories more than once, fascinated with the future Gibson painted, one I could see just around the corner. Some of these stories (like “Johnny Mnemonic” and “Burning Chrome” and “Dogfight”) I read over and over and over again. The best of these (esp. those last two) are really solid, tight, classic noir tales (albeit ones modeled after Jim Thompson’s The Grifters more than Dashiel Hammett’s gumshoes). The rest are, at best, stylistic sketching exercises; they more often have punchlines than plots. Gibson wrote all but three of these stories before Neuromancer, his debut and breakout novel (published in 1984.) Prior to 1982, Gibson doesn’t appear to have precisely known what a plot is. I’m not sure he’d argue with me on that; he’s said himself that although he’d been writing “stories” since the 1970s, the first one that was actually a proper story was ”Burning Chrome” (published in 1982, and basically a prototype for Neuromancer).
Cyberpunk is a future that looks an awful lot like the past, especially now (although even then, Gibson was firmly rooted in the past, sometimes formally—as with “The Gernsback Continuum”, other times more subtly, as with the noir plots he gravitates toward, and which become the heist/resistance themes that seem to form the skeleton of most cyberpunk stories still).
I’m old now, and Gibson, it turns out, is to me what Hugo Gernsback/1950’s “Populuxe“/Frank Frazetta/“Googie”/Eero Saarinen were to him. I think it’s appropriate that these are primarily visual artists and movements: Gibson has always been more of a visual artist and stylist than a writer, despite how culturally and politically prescient his writing has been. I’m given to wonder if that is why he’s proven so upsettingly accurate in his predictions (which I don’t think he thought of as predictions at all): the “Deep Pilot” might express itself in words, but runs its pattern matching on a purely aesthetic basis. We may be talking apes today, but at heart we will always be the monkeys that first daubed paintings of the world we hoped—or feared—we’d soon see on French cave walls.
“The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.”
William Gibson
Before this year, I had no clue The Power or Naomi Alderman existed—despite the acclaim the book met when it was published in 2016, and the fact that its apparently been made into an Amazon mini-series starring Toni Collette, who I absolutely love. A colleague in a crit group read a story I was working on, and recommended I read this. She was absolutely right.
When I say this is the bravest and most horrifying book I’ve read in ages, I’m not exaggerating. I actually had to stop about 10 minutes from the end because I was in a Thai restaurant in Orlando and was on the verge of bursting into tears, and didn’t want everyone staring at me. This book is easily better, and darker, than Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale (both a book and artist I hold in hella high regard).
One clarification: when I told my wife that this book was the bravest and most horrifying thing I’d read in years, she totally misunderstood what I found horrifying in the book. She assumed I was upset by the rapes. There are several very graphic and traumatic rapes of men by women in this novel, as well as broader sexual subjugation of men.
Frankly, none of that really bothered me. I’ve read fictional depictions and non-fictional accounts of the rapes of men and boys that I’ve found more upsetting. Talk to anyone who’s worked for child protective services and you’ll hear an earful. Humans are, on balance, awfully creative when it comes to being awful.
What got me about this book is that, evidently and despite it all, there was some small part of me that had continued to really and deeply believe that “everything would be better if women were in charge.” Alderman meticulously dismembered and violated that foolish, optimistic child that was still hiding inside me.
I do not endorse Seinfeld or Seinfeld (no deeply held conviction or ideological bone to pick there; he just never particularly worked for me, as a comedian or writer), but I do wholeheartedly endorse both the above sentiment, and reading the entire op-ed it came from (here’s a gift link 🎁🔗 ):
“Opinion: The life secret Jerry Seinfeld learned from Esquire“[*]
The takeways summarized in the op-ed are good and worth your time, and the core message is a fundamental truth:
Dedicating yourself to the mastery of a craft—against all odds and despite all distractions and obstacles—is the only path along which there is relief.
Along these same lines—delving into and reflecting on what it means to dedicate yourself to craft—I likewise wholeheartedly endorse this documentary (noting that, over the last decade I’ve revised my opinion on it in at least one important detail: although I still love the documentary, I no longer even mildly like any of these comics).
[*] I also don’t endorse Esquire—again, it never really worked for me is all. I do endorse the Washington Post, though. I read a lot of news reporting from a lot of sources, and there’s is consistently the most even-handed and makes the most honest attempt at being honest and accurate, in my humble.
PseudoPod 886: “A Wonder of Nature, In Need of Killing” by VG Campen
I loved this story, especially given the wonderful voice acting by narrator Sevatividam. Very strong vibes of “illegitimate lovechild of True Grit and H.P. Lovecraft.” Recommended for those who enjoy voicey first-person narrators, down-holler riverside oxy-and-meth country Americana, turtle soup, and county fairs.
You can listen to this story wherever you get podcasts, or at the following link, which also features the full text for those who prefer reading over being read to:
PseudoPod 886: “A Wonder of Nature, In Need of Killing” by VG Campen
(art credit: “Kalmarian swamp turtle” by Halycon450 released under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License)
(I do a fair bit of reading, which I track over on Goodreads. Trying to move some of that value over here, prior to the inevitable enshitification.)
This is a re-read (or really a re-listen for me). The first time I read A Canticle for Leibowitz I was maybe 17 at the oldest, so almost three decades ago now. Reading old books is a comfort, because it reminds us that even our most painfully modern woes—A.I.! Self-driving cars! A broad American passion for alluring misinformation coupled to a contempt for facts spoken by the “wrong” side!—were old and well-worn decades before I was born. This books is from 1959, and it’s third section literally opens with a guy working in his office and getting super frustrated with the malfunctioning A.I. he’s trying to dictate a letter to. Soon thereafter he and his subordinate have to dodge autonomous semis while crossing the street to get to the cafeteria. 😂
Setting aside Canticle‘s mild antisemitism(*), it’s refreshing to read religion in a scifi book written by someone who doesn’t have contempt for religion, but neither idealizes it, either. Miller (who I understand to have been a devout Catholic by the time he wrote the novel) respects that religious institutions, like any and all institutions, are political and can be petty, because they are operated by humans (who are political and petty). But he also highlights that religious institutions aren’t *just* petty political vehicles. He acknowledges the reality that people don’t cleave to religion out of fear or contempt or cruelty or because they hate the Other, but rather out of love and comfort and, believe it or note, a true and legitimate desire to bring about a good and just world.
We have religion in America now—right alongside our malfunctioning A.I. and glitchy self-driving cars. We’re gonna have it in the future. It’s absence in scifi is as weird and non-credible as the bizarrely small number of Black people in the Detroit depicted in Robocop.
(*) A “Wandering Jew” character plays a major supporting role in all three sections of this A Canticle for Leibowitz. I think enough people categorize the “Wandering Jew” as a foundational antisemitic trope that this should be a fairly non-controversial opinion. But I also know how the Internet works, so if you’re legit interested in discussing what precisely reads as antisemitic to me in this novel, feel free to reach out. Happy to chat.
I like this as satire and critique, but also just really love the rhythm of this graff:
With the advances we have made in pain management, prosthetics and ergonomic furniture, there isn’t a compelling reason not to become a Center-of-the-Plate contributor to the next course of global food mania. Write off that leg with the bad knee on your taxes; then hack it, cryo-vac it, ship it to a tycoon in Hong Kong who needs something rare to serve his guests at the executive dinner. It’s a win-win for din-din!
—Stephen Trouvere, “A Modest Proposal Regarding Office Veal“
Pairs well with Agustina Bazterrica’s Tender Is the Flesh (translated by Sarah Moses). My thoughts on that novel:
Straight talk: this book is a little like heavy metal poisoning. Its impact is pernicious, deep, and likely permanent. You’ll be powerfully tempted to pigeon-hole this as an allegory (about world-wide overconsumption of meat, about climate change, about patriarchy, about the deadly tendency to humor wealthy idiots)—but, jeez, don’t. That’s just a defense mechanism, your brain’s white blood cells trying to contain and thus destroy an interloper. Don’t cop out like that. Just let the story fully in, let it blossom and consume you.
It’s really a helluva book.
“Rare Providers” (by Ariel Marken Jack) is totally the monster lovechild of True Grit and “Gift of the Magi.” Recommended!
Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin: Tom Hanks
As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t always agree with Rubin’s choice of guests. But when this show is good, it’s really, really good. This episode with Tom Hanks is a really good one. I always love listening to accomplished craftsmen discuss craft (as I’ve said before, if there was a documentary interviewing accomplished old plumbers called “Talking Toilets,” I’d be there). In part, I just enjoy hearing the intricacies of any craft. But I also like the consistency that I hear across crafts and craftspeople, and it boils down to something like this:
In order to be good at a craft, we need to accept and embrace the fact that we are an intelligent conduit for that craft. We are nothing more, and certainly nothing less.
Hanks says basically that in a gajillion little different ways here, and each is worth hearing.
