Review: The Man In The High Castle by Philip K. Dick

The Man in the High Castle imagines a world in which the Axis powers won World War 2, and divided up the USA between Germany and Japan. The title refers to the within-world author of a banned book that imagines what would have happened if the Allies won.

This premise is overtly political, however I was overall disappointed in its exploration of political topics. Nazi ideology was simplified into genocidal hatred of Jewish people and Black people, and the desire to ever expand their territory. But the ideology of fascism is broader than that, and shifts as the needs of the fascist party do. What would a victorious Nazi party transform into? Moreover, how would American culture adapt to occupation by German and Japanese fascists? (We should remember that US racial segregation laws were the inspiration for Nazi regulations around race, disability, and other methods of categorizing people.) These questions were not explored.

One of the most important pillars of fascism is irrationalism and mysticism, both of which were missing in Philip K. Dick’s imagined Nazism. This absence was rendered starker by mysticism being the philosophical guidance of the protagonists: the American and Japanese characters continually consulted the I Ching to aid in decision-making. In fact, the author himself used the I Ching to determine key plot points. The climax of the book revolves around characters discovering the plurality of worlds, the absence of a singular truth. Our world, the world of the novel and the world of the novel within the novel are all suggested to co-exist. In sum: history is subjective, constructed; truth is what you make of it; Nazism is bad, but irrationality and mysticism are very, very good.

Still, there were a few aspects of the novel that I thought were fun. Several story lines revolve around the art world, where Americans scavenge and counterfeit their own culture and history to satisfy buyers with stereotyped, fetishized views. It was a good exploration of how imperial subjugation shapes one’s relationship with one’s culture, and reminded me a little of A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine. However, I preferred Martine's handling of this theme: her fantasy world was distant to our own, which allowed for richer exploration. Dick's novel leans on the shock of, "what if people did to us what we did to other cultures?"

Dick captured wonderfully the awkward tension of social situations where individuals of conflicting political persuasions are confronted by their differences but feel the need to maintain social ease. For example, I enjoyed the scene of the American comprador dining at the house of a curious, possibly radical, Japanese couple. This scene was narrated through the perspective of the American, who misses the subtext to the conversation, and this irony heightened the suspense. The scenes between Juliana and her undercover Nazi lover were also well done; here, suspense was driven by concern for her safety at the hands of a violent man. Maybe it is unsurprising that this facet of the novel was deftly portrayed while its political philosophy remained shallow: Americans have a simplistic understanding of Nazism, but ample experience keeping the peace during family Thanksgiving dinners with political opponents.

Review: The Word for World Is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin

Le Guin wrote this novella during the US invasion of Vietnam, and the book’s laser focus on the issues raised by that conflict means it has aged less richly than The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, or The Lathe of Heaven.

This story tells the tale of a colonial expedition: a crew of a few hundred men travel to a distant planet and extract its natural resources. To do so, they enslave the indigenous population, who they treat as animals, even while they rape them. The indigenous people — Athsheans — rise up and destroy one of the settlements. In the civilization’s core, instantaneous interplanetary communication is invented and brought to the planet, radically changing the relationship between the colonial outpost and the governing interplanetary League. A settler anthropologist, Lyubov, stands in for the US anti-war movement. He alone recognizes the humanity of the Athsheans, and advocates for their liberation.

In a surprisingly Hegelian turn, the State reigns in the colonizers and negotiates a permanent withdrawal from the planet, promising to return only in five generations’ time and even then only a handful of visitors for scientific expeditions. (Hegel viewed the Sovereign as a limit on the ability of the aristocracy to exploit the masses.) It is interesting to see Le Guin’s optimism in the role of the state to impose justice, since she is usually identified as an anarchist and her fictional works are quite critical of centralized authority (see, for example, The Dispossessed, The Lathe of Heaven). Still, an Athshean character, Selver, questions how capable the League really is of enforcing its ban on interfering with the planet, whose future is left open-ended:

“You decide matters all at once, your people,” [Selver] said, again between statement and question.
“How do you mean?” The Commander looked wary.
“Well, you say that none of you shall cut the trees of Athshe: and all of you stop. And yet you live in many places. Now if a headwoman in Karach gave an order, it would not be obeyed by the people of the next village, and surely not by all the people in the world at once…”
“No, because you haven’t one government over all. But we do—now—and I assure you its orders are obeyed. By all of us at once. But, as a matter of fact, it seems to me from the story we’ve been told by the colonists here, that when you gave an order, Selver, it was obeyed by everybody on every island here at once. How did you manage that?”
“At that time I was a god,” Selver said, expressionless.

Le Guin’s Athsheans are a mishmash of idealized indigenous stereotypes. They live in harmony with nature in peaceful, egalitarian communities. Their women are political leaders and their men are spiritual leaders. Dreams are culturally and spiritually significant, and can be consciously directed to communicate with others. They lack the concept of murder until the settlers arrive in their lush garden — an event that is an allegory for colonialism’s impact on the societies it collided with as well as an allusion to biblical Original Sin. Although the colonizers leave, this knowledge of murder and violence is something the Athsheans are permanently left to grapple with. “You cannot take things that exist in the world and try to drive them back into the dream, to hold them inside the dream with walls and pretenses. That is insanity,” Selver answers in response to a League representative asking if the Ashtheans have returned to their pre-colonial ways.

The story is fine, but a little overly simple. Le Guin’s other works challenge us to confront dearly-held or deeply-rooted beliefs. The Lathe of Heaven asks us if gender is really real and fixed, or socially constructed and fluid. The Dispossessed questions if liberalism and anarchism are really as free and fair as their proponents argue. The Lathe of Heaven examines the ramifications of trying to impose one’s vision of a better world on others. These are still pertinent, fiercely-debated political questions. In contrast, The Word for World is Forest questions colonial exploitation, a matter that seems well settled now, if it was not already settled for most people by the 1970s, following decades of national liberation movements. If her narrative had been more subtle — its colonial representative are near caricatures of racism and misogyny — it may have been better able to challenge any lingering settler ideology in the typical Le Guin reader. On the other hand, that may have made it a less pointed critique at its time of publication.

Review: Acceptance by Jeff Vandermeer

A quirk of reading a book digitally is that the ending can really sneak up on you. At one point, I checked the progress bar and was shocked to discover barely 5% of the book remained. Well, I guess that was the climax, I thought to myself. That moment encapsulates the lacklustre experience of reading this novel.

The story is told through five pairs of eyes. We already know how two of these tales end; the fates of the Psychologist and the Lighthouse Keeper are revealed at the end of Book 1. Although their ends are fated, the unfolding of their journeys is not without merit. Both characters grapple with questions of belonging and identity and purpose, and the relationship between the gay ex-Priest and the half-indigenous child brimming with curiosity was sweet.

Through the other characters we follow three paths of responding to the alien world of Area X: to leave and seek a full life beyond, or to accept the strangeness of it all, either through a slow Understanding and ultimate relinquishing of the self, or through a bright burst of faith and acceptance. These journeys clash with my own epistemology; the characters discover scientific knowledge is fallible, that what matters and is knowable comes from Being. I’m not opposed to reading works that challenge me philosophically and emotionally, but I didn’t find Vandermeer’s case to be convincing. Setting a story in a fantastical setting means the world can work according to any logic — or lack of logic — you want it to. Some of the other Goodreads reviews complain about the dearth of answers to the mysteries of the world Vandermeer introduces in the trilogy, and I think this is really the root that these other readers are grasping at: Vandermeer rejects the material world and the human ability to conceptualize it. If you approach the world scientifically (as his characters start out doing), it is a nihilistic and unsettling worldview, for all that the novel ends with what appears to be hope, peace, and acceptance.

I am curious to what extent the author has really found a sense of acceptance for the philosophy he develops in Acceptance. My hunch is that the nihilism of it troubles him too. First, this third instalment, having set up the New Frontier in book 1 and having burned down the legitimacy of the Old World in book 2, meanders without clear aim. The three characters from the later timeline find themselves in Area X but without clear goals, and just wander about until it eventually ends. Second, these first three books were published in quick succession all in 2014, with a surprise fourth book coming out only in 2024. As disappointed as I am with this trilogy, I have queued up the fourth one out of curiosity for how the author revisits or revises these themes after the turmoil of the late 2010s and early 2020s.

Review: A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers

Let’s start with the world for this story. It deserves some space in this review: the author devotes a considerable amount of this 160-page novella into exploring the repercussions of the premise she sets up. It’s also novel and intriguing: it is some unspecified time in the future, humans have headed off climate devastation and other environmental concerns, and entered a post-scarcity world. A few hundred years ago, robots gained sentience, and chose to separate from human society, vanishing into the wilderness of the Earth.

How did humans manage to steer the violent, brainless beast of capitalism away from total climate destruction? Unclear. How did humans achieve a new society where all human needs were met? Unclear. How did humanity react to the rebellion of the labourers they had been exploiting? Apparently peacefully, magnanimously, without a shred of the brutality and exceptionalism of our colonialist (and capitalist) past.

These are pressing questions—our challenges are to save our environment and overthrow our still-imperial power structures—and the book dwells on none of them. The world is fleshed out with paragraphs of detail about buildings made from mushrooms, and cell phones that last a lifetime, solar power and bicycle-based transportation. It’s a cozy, non-threatening world unconcerned with how it came to be, a fantasy of how lovely things will be once we finally have the ugly parts solved.

Of course, all stories must have a conflict; this novella revolves around the main character’s search for a purpose in life. Dex switches careers from garden monk to tea monk — a sort of therapist — but finds this too doesn’t quite fulfill them. Their desire to be surrounded by the cricket sounds of the countryside rather than the bustle of urban life goes unquenched: crickets went nearly extinct during the mysteriously averted climate crisis. In a search for life’s meaning, they spontaneously decide to travel through the wilderness, reserved for only robots. They meet a robot, Mosscap, who has struck up a hobbyist’s curiosity in humans. The two journey together, discussing their two societies, and, eventually, Dex’s search for purpose in life: 

You’re an animal, Sibling Dex. You are not separate or other. You’re an animal. And animals have no purpose. Nothing has a purpose. The world simply is. If you want to do things that are meaningful to others, fine! Good! … You keep asking why your work is not enough, and I don’t know how to answer that, because it is enough to exist in the world and marvel at it. You don’t need to justify that, or earn it. You are allowed to just live. 

But just living isn’t enough for Dex. The world is post-scarcity, it is no longer a question of survival but about thriving, and they see their mortality approaching in the distance:

All I have is right now, and at some point, I’ll just end, and I can’t predict when that will be, and—and if I don’t use this time for something, if I don’t make the absolute most of it, then I’ll have wasted something precious.

I found myself wondering why such a detailed, fantastical world was created to explore the rather introspective and everyday question of one’s purpose in life. Is it to contrast mortality with immortality in terms of meaning in life (a theme in Circe)? No, the robots who first gained consciousness chose to be mortal, we learn, and so when their time comes, their parts are reassembled into new robots, the “wild-built”. The link between the world and the central conflict is finally revealed when Mosscap argues:

But when we woke up and said, We have realized our purpose, and we do not want it, you respected that. More than respected. You rebuilt everything to accommodate our absence. You were proud of us for transcending our purpose, and proud of yourselves for honoring our individuality. So, why, then, do you insist on having a purpose for yourself, one which you are desperate to find and miserable without

But it’s an unpersuasive argument, it comes unearned: we have no idea how humanity accommodated the robots’ demand for self-determination. Human history has zero examples of oppressed peoples being handed their autonomy because they peacefully demanded it. So our answer to this search for purpose, the unifying element between world and conflict, is this event we are supposed to be proud of that we never see in the pages.

Perhaps a longer fantasy epic, dealing with these world-shaking events and later linking them to Dex’s own individual search for meaning, would address this issue. But I think the flaw in the novella goes deeper. For all the pages are filled with cozy passages about cooking dinner and growing plants and watching stars, Dex’s world is very empty. They have no family that relies on them, no lovers, no friends (excepting Mosscap). They do not even seem to have a sense of duty and responsibility to the clients that come to Dex with their heavy hearts. The world is nearly perfect, extinct crickets aside, and so there is nothing Dex is building towards or trying to fix. (Maybe Dex should find meaning in reviving extinct crickets?)

Finding purpose in your life is not trivial, but it is these pursuits — loved ones, science, social welfare — that help me answer this question. Dex does not find an answer — it is enough just to exist, but it is rational to want more, and good to define your own purpose. And here the theme truly ties in with the setting: a sleepy, cozy village, filled with petty bourgeois farmers market stands, and a Proudhonist yearning for bucolic individualism. The resulting story is soporific. The hard problems will be solved (by who? how?), and what remains is just what you want and define for yourself.

Tl;dr: 30-something with professional ennui discovers the joys of hiking.

Review: Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

What if humans were so uninteresting—or perhaps simply unrecognizable as intelligent—to aliens that Earth was simply a rest stop on a longer journey? It’s a great premise, and it spawns a fascinating world: the garbage the aliens leave behind enthrall scientists and smugglers alike, and society is irrevocably altered by both alien technology and the knowledge that humans are not alone in the world.

While the premise is fascinating, the exploration of the relationship between humans and alien technology felt a little shallow. We are presented briefly with the mutagenic properties of the alien wasteland, perpetual motion machines and infinite energy sources, zombies, gravity traps, and wish-granting orbs. At first, the world feels rich and weird and scary and captivating. The prose (and translation) is tight and vivid, the pacing fast, the balance between exposition and mystery perfect. But we move through each new thought quickly, passing them by before really getting to explore them. An exception is the third section of this book, notable for being the only one told through the eyes of Noonan, a scientific equipment contractor and spy who tracks alien tech smuggling operations, and not Redrick, a smuggler (or stalker, in the book’s tongue). In Noonan’s wheelings and dealings, we zoom out from the smuggling underbelly to see how society has shifted around the alien technology, and the “roadside picnic” explanation for the alien encounter is examined. We see an adaptable and resilient humanity, and a humanity that is largely incurious about the nature of aliens but for how their technology can produce new commodities and ensure an endless availability of alcohol and prostitutes.

My disappointment here is certainly a matter of taste, and helped me understand my own interests in science fiction a little better. I like big stories, with the fantastical elements of the world highly interconnected with society and examined in depth and from every angle. Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed or The Left Hand of Darkness, and Cixin Liu’s Three Body Problem series fit these criteria. By the end of the stories, the mysteries feel understood, crystal clear. The mysteries of The Zone remain murky, and so the conclusion felt abrupt.

One of the alien mysteries is the wish-granting sphere, which a side character uses to create for himself two perfect children (having beaten his wife to death). The narrative implies the children are inhuman. The daughter is incredibly beautiful, and Redrick sexualizes her and sleeps with her but finds it an empty experience, she is a shell of a person. The boy seems a little naive, and Redrick sacrifices him in The Zone to save himself (towards the end of ensuring the life of his daughter). An allegorical interpretation is that they are the neglected children of a wealthy businessman — a dime a dozen in gated communities. Sure, it’s a way to critique trophy wives and status symbols. But the reader must rely on Redrick’s word for their inhumanity. Furthermore, the allegory feels a bit mixed and messy since no one appears to be particularly human by the end (the revived dead, Redrick’s mutant daughter) and the “inhuman” teen has a wiser and more human prescription for how to fix society, which Redrick unthinkingly adopts: “happiness, free for everyone, and let no one be forgotten.”

Though I feel like there is a much more interesting story that could spring from the premise, I’ll judge it for what it is instead: Roadside Picnic is about a sharp but anti-intellectual alcoholic with a fierce, protective love of his family, and a hatred for society, who doesn’t know what he wants in the world and doesn’t discover the answer. It’s fine.

Review: Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson

Our current society is particularly ill-suited to tackle climate change. Fixing climate change will require two things: (1) knowledge spanning disciplines as diverse as economics, agriculture and physics and (2) massive scale and multi-pronged collaboration between teams and countries. This presents a challenge for fictional stories of humanity solving the climate crisis: our current mode of storytelling is best suited for internal emotional journeys, following a handful of characters setting out to achieve one goal, with little prior background knowledge required. But we need fiction to handle this topic: fiction has long played a role in how humans understand value systems and social expectations, examine complex emotions, and envision large-scale collective achievement. 

In Ministry for the Future, Kim Stanley Robinson presents a unique way to overcome this writing challenge. Narrative chapters are interspersed with expositions on energy technology, gini coefficients, the Bretton Woods financial system, the carbon cycle and other pertinent topics. The narrative follows two main characters (Mary and Frank) most closely, but we see through the eyes of scores of other characters that are navigating the devastation of climate change (memorably, climate refugees who spend years in camps, a lone survivor of a village wiped out by a heat wave, and a kayaker who rescues Los Angelinos during a record flood) or trying to fix it (memorably, farmers in India and scientists in antarctica). In this way, the book succeeds at conveying information the author feels is necessary to prevent humanity’s pending extinction (addressing point 1 above) and presents a realistic and collective effort at harnessing all the tools available to society towards this end (addressing point 2).

Because of this unusual structure, I hesitate to call it a novel; Tolstoy rejected the label for War and Peace, which intersperses philosophy and history with narrative, if less disjointedly than Robinson’s work. I was a fan of this technique for War and Peace, and I found it to be compelling and enjoyable in Robinson’s less deft hands too. However, from discussions with others and from perusing book reviews for both literary efforts, I might be the only reader with this opinion. Climate change sci-fi authors are therefore recommended to further innovate on this approach to achieve broader appeal.

Robinson has clearly thought through possible paths towards maintaining a livable planet, and therefore I think his political and technological solution deserves some commentary: it sucks.

Briefly, his solution rests on blockchain financial instruments funded by modern monetary theory, although he engages with none of the critiques of MMT (and there are many). Through a convoluted system of privacy-focused social media networks (really!) and carbon coins, technological solutions arise magically due to competition. Sure, a weird techno-utopian neoliberal solution, I could have anticipated that much based on my reading of Red Mars. But what surprised me was its full-throated defense of terrorism (and the lack of mainstream critique he has received for this!).

The story begins when Frank kidnaps Mary at gunpoint, and this event causes her to radically shift her view on her role as a high-ranking official in the branch of the UN charged with addressing climate change (the Ministry for the Future). It is quite clear that without this act of terrorism, the reforms she ultimately implements would never have come to pass. Several chapters center around the actions of the Children of Kali, a terrorist group who, by attacking cattle and airplanes, very effectively terrorize the planet into no longer eating carbon-intensive foods or flying in carbon-emitting planes. This terrorist organization is even secretly supported by the UN itself! These terrorists are portrayed with bottomless empathy, and are largely rewarded for their actions, which are presented as critical for humanity addressing climate change. It is hard to imagine what a more pro-terrorist science fiction work would look like, and that others don’t seem to view this political work in the same way leaves me feeling a little rattled.

Review: This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

I’m partial to an epistolary tale — if Jane Austen’s Lady Susan is not in my top 3 Jane Austens it is because the competition is very good. Letters provide a window into the soul of the character, but always shaped by how that character wishes to show themselves to the addressee of their letter. It's a fun device.

The letters in this novel are wonderfully written. The characters’ observations about what it feels like to be in love feel both particular to the characters (as any love is particular to the two people it binds) as well as recognizable (“I have built a you within me, or you have. I wonder what of me there is in you.”). If the characters appear to tip too suddenly from respected adversary to romantic love, I think it is because love is perhaps like that — you hold yourself back, uncertain until all of a sudden it can’t be denied.

While the romance arc itself is straightforward, the world it is set in is convoluted and for all its flashy weirdness doesn’t contribute much to the relationship developed between the two characters. Our lovebirds, Red and Blue, are time-traveling non-human (or bioengineered beyond typical human biological impulses) secret agents on two opposite sides of a conflict that is waged across all the timelines of the universe towards no clear end. What principles and values do Red and Blue fight for? What are the final objectives of the war? How did the conflict start? Unclear — except for the two sides being irreconcilable and alien to each other. Towards the end of the novella, Red nearly begins to grapple with what it means to love someone not from her own people but from the opposite side of the war, but because the political differences between the two sides are so unexplored, it feels a little empty. (Blue’s team is more organic, while hers is… bionic?) One rather wonders why the authors picked this setting to tell this love story.

Review: Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

There is not an overwhelming amount of science fiction writers tackling the climate crises and other challenges of social organization from a leftist perspective. Kim Stanley Robinson, or KSR, is probably the most decorated of this crew, and the Mars trilogy is the most well-known of his work. For these reasons alone, I thought it would be interesting to check out this series. 

Fiction provides a good way to explore topics like social organization at a level of distance or abstraction, can provoke discussion and debate, and at its very best it can inspire a desire for change. Its ability to explore these topics and spark discussion rely on how well it portrays the interconnectedness of issues, the relationships between peoples and the problems they face. This doesn’t exclude fantastical elements: R.F. Kuang’s Babel wonderfully explores the internal contradictions of imperialism and capitalism in a world powered by magic. But within the world the author builds, the issues and their solutions have to seem realistic, each challenge and its solutions arising naturally from the world, and they need to feel relevant to our example. For the work to inspire, it has to show an appealing path forward for us: good characters who resonate with us, and who are tied into the challenges in the world and the solutions.

Red Mars, the first installment of the trilogy, does not achieve these tasks. Its characters do not demonstrate a way we can change society, and its analysis of sociopolitical relationships is superficial.

The premise of the book is the formation of a new society on Mars: in an international collaboration, 100 scientists are sent to Mars to begin colonizing efforts, followed by waves of additional immigrants. The narrative follows a handful of these “First Hundred” scientists, while off-scene, Earth increasingly struggles with inequality, overpopulation, and powerful international corporations. This choice of setting sets KSR up for a challenge in making the issue he’s discussing relevant to our world. For the next century at least, our social projects must build on the foundations of existing societies — how would this change the characters’ solutions? The novel does not explore this. Additionally, there’s something off-putting about a story about the colonization of a new frontier without people — this is also how the first settlers in the Americas viewed their task and we haven’t really reckoned with this past yet. (There is a brief discussion about the danger of terraforming Mars without first ensuring it had no original traces of life, but the scientist in favour of a “red” Mars is quickly over-ridden and her concerns are made to look silly.) 

In their nine-month voyage to Mars, the scientists discuss declaring independence from Earth and forming a new society. A scientist named Arkady sparks this debate with some of my favourite lines of the book:

“To be twenty-first-century scientists on Mars, in fact, but at the same time living within nineteenth-century social systems, based on seventeenth-century ideologies. It’s absurd, it’s crazy, it's — it’s —” he seized his head in his hands, tugged at his hair, roared “It’s unscientific!”

The conflicts between them rapidly dissipate when they arrive and diffuse across the planet. I liked this analysis: this reflects the dissipation of social tensions in Europe as the “surplus population” spread to the (“unpopulated”) colonies. The pacing gets a bit weird after this. There are endless passages about dust and ice as the scientists terraform Mars, pumping as much heat into the environment as possible (also off-putting to read about, given present challenges). In the background, Arkady agitates among the new immigrants while the transnational companies tighten their grip on earth. These off-scene maneuverings come to a head in what ends up being a failed revolution.

This is where the novel fails in its tasks as political fiction. First, our main characters have surprisingly little to do with the "main" events of the book. They drive around Mars in their Jeeps and ponder the implications of their pharmaceutically-induced immortality, bemoaning that there are really too many immigrants coming to Mars. Some are a little sympathetic to Arkady’s movement, but their support seems lukewarm, disinterested. Second, the political actions and reaction don’t feel relevant to our world, and are thrown into the plot with little connection to each other. In one of the few scenes in which we witness a point-of-view character impacting events, Frank convinces the President of the United States of America to stand up to the multinationals because it would be embarrassing for him not to. And Washington is swayed! What was the rebel’s plan, how did they develop it, and why did it fail? These questions aren’t really answered.

From my brief summary of the story here, it might sound like a complete failure of a novel — but I actually don’t think so. It does actually have a cohesive emotional arc. The underlying issue with Red Mars is that the backbone of the story has very little to do with its premise. At its heart, Red Mars is about the dynamics of a group of a hundred people required to work together out of necessity and proximity — like colleagues or homeowner association members, but in Space. The structure of the story reflects this: the book opens with a critical scene where one of the First Hundred arranges and executes the assassination of another of the First Hundred, the climax of a power struggle built over decades. Next, we flash backwards, learning how the First Hundred came to get to know each other, how they formed their first friendships, romances and allegiances. Next, we see how cracks form, developing into the feud that leads to the assassination. Much of the (slow, dust- and ice-filled) middle of the book is driven by the tension of some of the First Hundred looking for a faction that has gone no-contact, and how they deal with the feelings of regret and rejection. The climax of the novel is not the revolution, but of the First Hundred uniting again, surviving together in the chaos caused by Arkady’s rebellion.

When I thought the novel would be about forming a new society on Mars, I wondered at the choice of point-of-view characters. Why do we not see the perspective of someone on Earth, perhaps someone in the Global South, particularly at the mercy of the transnationals, and able to access neither Mars nor the pharmaceutically-induced immortality? Why do we not see through the eyes of a new immigrant to Mars, struggling with the lack of infrastructure and the oppressive laws of the transnationals, eager to join Arkady's movement? Why are our only point-of-view characters these older, white, privileged First Hundred scientists that care more about science and each other than forming a new society on Mars? Because it’s not a story about forming a new society on Mars, it’s a novel about the friendships and competitiveness of adult professional societies.

Review: The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin

The Lathe of Heaven is Le Guin's critique of George Orwell's 1984. It's clear that she wants us to draw direct lines of comparison between the two science fiction works: Le Guin names her main character "George Orr", and the history of her world includes an attempted police state occurring in 1984.

They rewrote the Constitution in 1984, the way you remember, but things were so bad by then that it was a lot worse, it didn't even pretend to be a democracy any more, it was a short of police state, but it didn't work, it fell apart right away.

We don't hear more details about how Orwellian-style authoritarian rule fell apart in a tangle of its own contradictions. Perhaps Le Guin (an anarchist) found this part of Orwell's famous dystopia too incredible to make it worth re-examining. Instead, Le Guin challenges the "brainwashing" aspect. Is it possible to control someone's thoughts towards your own political ends?

Her answer is a resolute "NO". 

Our protagonist George Orr is placed on Voluntary Therapeutic Treatment (an Orwellian sort of name) for abusing drugs, which he takes to suppress dreams. We learn that Orr is able to rewrite history through his dreams — he had previously inadvertently done so to erase the fall-out of nuclear war and disappear an inconvenient aunt — and he is horrified at the prospect of meddling in the world without the permission of its other inhabitants.

His therapist, Dr Haber, sees in Orr's powers an opportunity to change the world for the better. Haber develops a system of hypnosis and brain stimulation to direct Orr's dreams, with mixed success. Haber attempts to have Orr address world peace; Orr's dreams create an alien threat that unites mankind against a new foes. Haber attempts to have Orr solve racism; Orr's dreams create a dull world filled with gray-skinned people. Orr's subconscious can be influenced, but it cannot be controlled with the precision of Orwell's Big Brother's tools: people mediate the messages they receive.

Orr objects to the way Dr Haber uses him, but "voluntary" therapy keeps him trapped under Haber's thumb. His efforts for legal intervention are thwarted — like our world, Le Guin's dystopia is also rife with gaslighting and medical abuses. Orr learns that the aliens he invented have deeper knowledge of dream states, and one alien directs him to The Beatles' "With a Little Help from My Friends". The world can't be changed by single individuals, Orr learns, but instead we have to be one with the world and with each other, connected and surrendering to its flows like wave-flung jellyfish.

The critique of the impossibility of mind control or of solving sociopolitical problems through science is clear and pointed. Le Guin's solution for change is murkier — how exactly holistic, social dreaming works is rather unclear, and the Beatles reference was a little cheesy. In this regard, The Lathe Of Heaven is similar to The Dispossessed, which she published three years later. After a few hundred pages of probing the difficulties of anarchism, unable to find a real solution, the rebels of The Dispossessed who are trying to found a better anarchist society throw their hands up and say "It was our purpose all along (...) to shake up things, to stir up, to break some habits, to make people ask questions." 

Unlike the antagonists of 1984, Le Guin's Haber is not portrayed as evil or seeking power for the sake of power. Although Haber does use Orr's abilities to improve his social standing and influence (acquiring for himself various promotions, for example), Haber believes he is acting for the greater good, and this drives his decisions and rhetoric. It leads to a more interesting discussion of philosophy, of utilitarianism versus self-determination. In this, too, The Lathe of Heaven is consistent with Le Guin's other worlds: her characters are real people, with well-thought out and articulated philosophies, which lead in a rational way to their political beliefs. Her worlds are detailed, her prose is beautiful, and she's always a joy to read.

Utopias and Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed

The point of dystopian science fiction is usually to take some aspect of our present society and exaggerate it to produce a terrifying but recognizable world. What if the government put extreme limits on free speech? What if we forced fertile women to give birth? What if advertising and consumerism got really out of control? It’s a tool for critiquing society, but tends to produce criticism in the form of warnings of slippery slopes. There’s an implicit acceptance of the status quo, except for this one part of it that society needs to be concerned about. Because of this, dystopian fiction stories often lack a solution to the problems in society they have identified, other than simply “don’t do the bad thing.”

Utopias start from the exact opposite premise, critiquing our current world by leaving it unchanged, foiling it against a better world. In Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1974 novel, The Dispossessed, we follow a physicist, Shevek, as he grows disillusioned with his isolated anarchist society. Over the seven generations since its founding, shadowy bureaucratic hurdles and fears of trespassing ingrained social norms have produced a static, sick society that no longer upholds the radical individualistic and free-choice ideals on which it was founded. To pursue his scientific work, he turns traitor to his society, and visits the liberal, capitalist planet. Through his eyes, we explore a world virtually indistinguishable from our own. Elegant and highly educated people enjoy sumptuous cocktail parties, wear fur coats that cost two years of minimum wage salary, eat chocolate that comes wrapped in far too many layers of paper, and rarely have to encounter the miserable working poor. Escaping from the clutches of his well-spoken, well-shod captors, Shevek finds working class revolutionaries and becomes a figurehead for a mass strike — one brutally repressed by the liberal government's military. The violence the government exacts on its own people, the gender and class inequality he sees, and the way money and property distort all relationships lead him to view his own society in a more positive light. He broadcasts his research findings to all civilizations in the universe so as to prevent the capitalist society using it for profit or for colonization. He then returns to his home planet as a proud anarchist, fortified with the knowledge that revolution is hard, and has no end, but is ultimately worth it.

Because utopian fiction critiques our current world undistorted and through comparison with a hopeful alternative, it lends itself well to revolutionary fiction. In What Is To Be Done?, an 1863 utopian novel that inspired many within the Russian Revolution, Chernychevsky writes:

A person who’s never seen anything except hovels would look at a picture of an ordinary house and mistake it for a luxurious palace. How can one ensure that such a person should perceive the house as a house and not a palace? In the same picture one must depict at least one corner of a palace. From this corner it will be clear that a palace is really a structure of a completely different sort than the one in the picture, and the observer will realize that the building is really nothing more than a simple, ordinary house in which all people should live (if not in better ones).

The reader of The Dispossessed is presented with a palace of a sorts, if a flawed one, in which resources are shared equally with everyone within a community, where people view each other as a brotherhood, where there is complete gender equality and no shame in sex. Shevek, in a sense, goes through the reverse journey, discovering the hovels so that he can see the promise of the palace. Le Guin’s world-building is thoughtful and deep, exploring how everything from language to education to “who does the dirty work” might be different, better, in an anarchist society. 

While dystopian movies and novels have been staples of the box office and bestseller lists, utopian fiction is rarer. Dystopian stories are lauded as smart political commentary, while utopias are impractical, unserious. Indeed, Margaret Atwood, author of the dystopian “what if we forced fertile women to give birth?” story, prides herself on not imagining anything new or better at all: “One of my rules was that I would not put any events into the book that had not already happened in (...) history” (Foreword to The Handmaid’s Tale, 2017). The Dispossessed at the very least demonstrates that utopian stories can be Serious Literature. Utopian fiction being rare and dismissed isn’t unique to our current era. Chernychevsky accused those dismissing utopian fiction as suffering from sour grapes:

And as for the fact that [the idyll] is no longer fashionable, and therefore people spurn it, that’s no real objection at all. They shun the idyll as the fox in the fable spurned the grapes. They think it inaccessible; consequently they conclude, ‘Let it no longer be fashionable.’ But it’s pure nonsense that the idyll is inaccessible. 

— What is to be Done? (1863)

Chernychevky’s writing was crafted to get through Tsarist censorship, so some of his more ambitious designs for a better world are cloaked in metaphors and codewords difficult to follow a century and a half later without an annotated edition (the Michael Katz translation is good). The difficulty in producing utopian fiction today is perhaps no less fraught. Those with decision power over producing big-budget movies might find more appeal in stories like “our world, but what if the government put draconian limits on free speech” than “our world, but without money or property.” Regardless of issues on the "supply" side, is there demand for utopian fiction, or is it too unfashionable?

Chernychevsky was writing shortly after the abolishment of the serf system in Russia. The era in which Le Guin was writing was shaped by the Cold War, protests against the Vietnam War, and the Civil Rights Movement.  Our present era, marked by pandemics and wars and increasingly evident climate change, seems similarly unstable, perilous. How can we work towards a better society if we don’t first imagine what that could be?  I wonder if we might therefore be ready for a change in fashion, a rediscovery of utopian fiction. I am, at least.

Review: Death's End by Cixin Liu

Death’s End is the final book in Cixin Liu’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, and it makes me wonder what exactly about Earth the author considers worth remembering.

About four fifths of the way through this last installment, I remarked that a better name for the trilogy would have been The Dark Forest – the title of the second book, but also the name of the kill-or-be-killed principle driving the inter-civilization conflicts of the series. The first two books of the series followed Earth learning about the Dark Forest principle, culminating in their discovery of how to leverage this principle to hold off the invading Trisolaris Force in a mutually-assured destruction gambit. In this third book, the Dark Forest is revealed to be far more populated than we originally guessed, with inter-galaxy solar system-destroying missiles and alien civilizations living in four dimensional hypercubes and two dimensional planes.

The author’s title selection becomes clearer in the final fifth of this book. With the last handful of humans chased into tiny pockets of the universe to survive, humans – and other species, it is suggested – become very focused on being remembered. They invest exorbitant resources to create a tomb or museum for some unknown future civilization to discover, and they risk the destruction of the universe just to leave an extra 5kg of memory storage. But what part of humanity deserves to be preserved?

Cixin Liu portrays two aspects of humanity as beautiful and admirable, and I find the selection of these two a little icky. The first of these is art: Trisolarans appreciate human art and during the Deterrence Era, and create their own works of human-inspired art. Humans of the 21st century reflect sadly on the forgotten poetry of Edgar Allen Poe, irrelevant in the 25th century. Humanity’s tomb/museum features the Mona Lisa (a callback to Luo Ji’s romantic meander around The Louvre in The Dark Forest), and Cheng Xin carefully rescues Van Gogh’s Starry Night on humanity’s only curve propulsion faster-than-lightspeed ship. Rather less care is invested in the rescue of other humans.

The second of these virtues is love – but the forms of love that are venerated are rather limited. We don’t see a love for humanity. Humans are portrayed as small-minded, hypocritical, and prone to worshiping individuals. They argue about investment vehicles as the end of the world approaches; they discuss the quality of the fish they bought and their electricity bills; they apply to be the human battalion of the anti-human Trisolaran army; they pray to the Trisolarans, to Chen Xin, to Luo Ji as saviors. Cheng Xin is motivated to save humanity out of a sense of responsibility, but not out of a sense of love. Reflecting on her life and the decisions she makes, she emphasizes this sense of responsibility and how it distinguishes her from the rest of humanity:

All my life has been spent climbing up a flight of stairs made of responsibility. [...] And now, I’ve climbed to the apex of responsibility: I am responsible for the fate of the universe. [...] Unfortunately I have not been able to walk the ordinary person’s path. My path is, in reality, the journey of a civilization.

Within the narrative itself, the author often describes Cheng’s feelings of duty as ones of maternal love or maternal instinct. Given how often Cheng Xin is repulsed by the culture of these humans she feels beholden to protect (particularly the androgenous gender expression of the men), how much she keeps herself apart from other humans and from society, I don’t recognize love in this emotion at all. I wonder a little at the author’s perception of maternal love; it seems rather transactional or biological:

In this family-less age, mother’s love was a rare thing. The welfare state that seemed like heaven satiated the children’s need for the love of a mother.

Other family bonds are shallow: Yun Tianming’s sister encourages him to seek euthanasia to protect her inheritance. Friendships and collaborations are de-emphasized: one of my favourite scenes was AA and Cheng discovering how curve propulsion works over a 21st century-style bubble bath. However, rather than the warmth and equality of this friendship between two women being the emotional strength Cheng needs to overcome her guilt and face the end of the universe, AA is thrown to the sidelines to introduce a new heterosexual, romantic relationship.

It is romantic love that, above all, is venerated as beautiful in this series – but again, it is a strange, martyr-like incel-y form of love. Awkward and ugly university student Yun Tianming falls in love with the beautiful and smart Cheng Xin, who barely acknowledges his existence. He buys her an entire solar system, and volunteers for euthanasia to advance her Trisolaran diplomacy strategy. She discovers his love for her only after it is too late, and cries over his dead body. Later, he is resurrected by the Trisolarans and she is excited to see him, and remarks upon how physically fit and tan he looks. The solar system being insufficient, he gifts her an entire universe – allowing her a chance at surviving the death of the main universe. “He’s quite a man to be able to give the woman he loved a star and a universe” Cheng’s end-of-the-universe boyfriend remarks.

Overall, the masses are forgettable and mostly silly. The positive aspects of humanity are grand romantic sacrifices by a few pure-hearted individuals, and art created by a few brilliant individuals, and the goal of civilization is to remember them. 

Although Cixin Liu’s perspectives on the value of humanity (and particularly masculinity) were questionable, I really enjoyed parts of this book. I liked the development of dimensional warfare, and the game theory/arms race aspects of civilizational struggle. However, while the message of this part of the book seems to be that there is no hope for any civilization to behave any way other than purely rational, some parts of the narrative belie this theme. Yun Tianming’s grand romantic gestures were surely not utilitarian or egoistic, and Trisolarans also irrationally provide humans with life-saving information out of admiration for Luo Ji. This same tension arises in other themes: technology is not only the sole way to survive the Dark Forest but must also be embraced. To revert to a non-space exploring society once space travel has been discovered is self-limiting and silly. Other technological regressions are similarly derided. On the other hand, the narrative bemoans humans losing the ability to communicate, problem-solve, or express masculinity, due to the advance of technology. (If it seems like I emphasize the role of masculinity in the book too much, then you must not have read it.) The fairy tales – coded messages from Yun Tianming to instruct Earth how they could avoid a Dark Forest attack – were a lot of fun to decode, and that I was able to piece together much of the message on my own is a testament to Cixin Liu’s worldbuilding. It’s a series worth reading for its creative exploration of astrosociology and its epic scope, but a bleak view of civilization.

Review: A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine

To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles – this they named empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.

First contact stories typically consider two questions: 

1. What is the political response of humanity to a new intelligent species? 
2. How do we define humanity/consciousness? 

Some stories focus on the first question: Cixin Liu’s Three-Body Problem series is one such example. Humanity has 400 years to stave off extinction at the hands of the Trisolaris alien race, how do they respond? Other stories focus on the second question: in Ursula K Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness, ambassador Genly discovers the genderless Gethenians, and discovers what it means to be human without gender. However, the second strand is present in both stories. The Trisolaris aliens are unable to deceive, and this difference between humans and aliens forms an essential aspect of humanity’s political response. Genly is intentionally sent as a lone ambassador, a political decision made to encourage social integration between the ambassador and the aliens.

A Desolation Called Peace considers both questions in roughly equal parts but its answers felt rather shallow and disconnected. The political response of the sprawling Teixcalaan empire is to send a military force to face the aliens, who have been skirmishing with pilots and knocking out resource centers. At the hint of a threat, Emperor Nineteen Adze and her Minister of War send orders to nuke the alien planet. The emperor justifies her decision with rather frightening colonial language. 

“It is a terrible thing to do, and a terrible decision to make. But that’s what Emperors are for. (...) I’d rather have a pyrrhic victory—display just what Teixcalaan is capable of, smash a living beautiful planet full of people—and yes, they probably are people, but not the kind of people we can understand—smash it to dust and deathrain. I’d rather one act of horror than an endless war of attrition, losing our people and theirs, on and on and on. Like a suppurating wound at the edge of the Empire, forever. Sometimes it is better to cauterize.”

Through the plucky actions of the empire heir apparent Eight Antidote, the army general’s best friend, an ambassador and a bureaucrat, cooler heads prevail, the aliens are recognized as human, and the war ends. What becomes of those calling for genocide? Nineteen Adze shrugs and expresses eagerness to eventually hand over the heavy responsibilities of being an emperor to Eight Antidote. Nineteen Adze isn’t the hero of the narrative, her willingness to slaughter entire villages and sometimes entire planets for strategic outcomes isn’t presented as morally right, but neither is it fully presented as morally wrong. This same sort of calculus is made throughout the narrative: protagonist Nine Hibiscus slaughters rebels to maintain peace in the empire, euthanizes a soldier to prevent a painful death, and enables the assassination of a military commander to prevent the destruction of the alien planet. The message is clearly that sometimes a little devastation is required to prevent more devastation, but the story doesn’t take a clear position on when. Is the message that imperial leaders who call for genocide won’t be punished, but will continue their careers uninterrupted? Is it that whether cauterizing the wound is smart or cruel can only be determined retrospectively? Unsatisfying.

What of the second question posed by First Contact stories: what does it mean to be human? These aliens are revealed to share thoughts and memories between individuals. Accustomed to consciousness being a hivemind, they do not, at first, appreciate what the death of individuals means to humans. In the world of Teixcalaan, a few technologies have given humans the ability to form their own sorts of shared thoughts and memories. The surveillance state at the heart of the empire allows for law enforcement to behave and respond like a hive. The Stationers’ imago technology allows for inheritance of memory between individuals in the form of a brain implant. Teixclaani fighter spaceships – presciently called shards – come equipped with shared vision and proprioception. Heir apparent Eight Antidote sees similarities in how these three technologies enable communication and how the enemy behaves, sparking his realization that the aliens possess a hivemind. He leverages the hivemind of the fighter pilots to prevent the genocide of the aliens and end the war.

This was the stand-out scene of the novel for me. The reader is thrust into the perspective of the interconnected fighter pilots, who are terrified and psychologically tortured and dying. It’s a jarring contrast to the prior 400 pages of the novel, which depicted political negotiations between powerful individuals resulting in “difficult decisions” being made, all set in serene palace chambers with large windows overlooking gardens, or pristine spaceship command centers overlooking the quiet void of space. 

He died twice before he learned to talk. (...) Before he could find himself in the midst of the cacophony, he was spinning in a rictus of fear, engines cut, some other Shard-pilot’s blanked-out panic in his throat as her Shard was struck by the edge of a three-ringed, slick-grey spinning wheel of a ship and she saw the flat pockmarked side of the asteroid coming up fast and faster and faster and I love you I’ve always loved you remember me and nothing. An afterimage of fire.

Powerful writing, but I felt this thematic thread fizzled. The intervention of the pilot hivemind goes only so far as to prevent the delivery of the planet extermination order. The decision to assassinate Sixteen Moonrise to stop the extermination of the alien planet was made by Teixcalaan army general Nine Hibiscus. The assassination itself was carried out by the aliens. What if instead it was carried out by the fighter pilots – recognizing in the aliens a shared humanity, protecting this other conscious collective from an Empire that sings the songs of individual emperors but not of its pawns?

There was a poetic justice of this military technology developed by the Empire being used against the Empire’s military. I had expected this trick of using the Empire’s might against itself to come from Mahit, the ambassador to the Empire from the independent Stationer community. Early on, her imago machine tells her:

But what better way to draw a monstrous thing to its death than to use its functions against itself? Teixcalaan wants; its trust is rooted in wanting; it is in this way you and I will destroy it.

Despite this tease, it was the heir to the Empire who used the Empire’s technology to thwart the Empire, another riff on the theme of the Empire containing within itself the seeds of its own destruction. I would have liked to see this probed further – is it even possible for one lone but powerful voice within the Empire to change the trajectory of the Empire, or is it too much of a machine? However, the story ends with Eight Antidote looking a little more like prey than a cancer – kept safe within the sights of Nineteen Adze and “just dangerous enough to stay alive”.

That the alien hivemind was understood solely through fantastical technologies (imago machines, combat spacecraft) was a little disappointing. I think there was room for some fun exploration of collectivism versus individualism in this tale, and it would have been nice to see a more human element to interconnectivity. Community love, collective action, the excitement of being part of a throng – when do humans behave like a hive?

My diagnosis for the causes of the issues of this novel is the choice in point of view characters. Three Seagrass seems selected to get Mahit into the alien diplomacy mission; with that feat accomplished she spends most of the rest of the novel doing nothing but daydream about Mahit and muse about poetry. Her scenes feel a little like filler that dilute the other themes; her key moments could likely be given to Mahit. More time with Mahit could help tie together the two First Contact questions a little better, since Mahit, as ambassador and peace negotiator, shapes the political response to the alien presence, and also experiences proto-hivemind through her imago machine. 

Nine Hibiscus seems selected as a point of view character to provide a window into locations where plot happens, and to explore the theme of Difficult Decision-Making. However, her second in command, Twenty Cicada, was really the hero of the final conflict. He makes the self-sacrificing decision to consume the dead alien and through this communion become part of their shared consciousness, enabling peace negotiations.  His careful compartmentalization of his religious beliefs and personality from the tasks expected of him by the Empire provide an interesting foil to Mahit's complicated attraction to and repulsion from the Empire. Mechanically, he could have served the same role in observing events onboard the Weight for the Wheel while allowing for better exploration of the themes of collective consciousness and colonialism, at the expense of the already muddled and rather uninteresting exploration of Difficult Decision-Making.

A Desolation Called Peace is a little special among the first contact stories I’ve read in that it dwells quite a bit on the actual contact part of the story. Second to the scene of Eight Antidote becoming one with the fighter pilots, the scenes of Mahit decoding alien linguistics were my favourite. I think this is something Arkady Martine does particularly well – I loved how A Memory Of Empire examined how language and literature influence connection between people, self identity and politics. But where that novel cohesively explored that theme, and tied together these threads beautifully, A Desolation Called Peace asked too many questions across too many characters and I didn’t think they tied together quite right.

Caste and Climate Change in N.K. Jemisin's The Broken Earth Trilogy

The Broken Earth Trilogy tells a story about caste and dehumanization using anthropogenic climate change as a metaphor. The two topics are perfect fodder for exploration through fantasy, but they are different enough that, at least in this story, the mixing of environmental destruction and racism muddies both themes.

The story opens at a breaking of the world. A man channels massive amounts of power into the heart of the city of Yumenes, blasting the seat of the Empire off the face of the Earth.

And then he reaches forth with all the fine control that the world has brainwashed and backstabbed and brutalized out of him, and all the sensitivity that his masters have bred into him through generations of rape and coercion and highly unnatural selection. His fingers spread and twitch as he feels several reverberating points on the map of his awareness: his fellow slaves. He cannot free them, not in the practical sense. He’s tried before and failed. He can, however, make their suffering serve a cause greater than one city’s hubris, and one empire’s fear.

The Earth of this world is periodically ravaged by environmental catastrophes, however the fallout of this man’s actions promises to be thousands of years of the most devastating environmental destruction the planet has ever seen. We see a little of how society adapts in response, shifting from a mercantile and hierarchical social structure to emergency-ordered communism [1]. But the environmental aspects fade into the background, serving more than anything as narrative impulse to characters to travel or argue over resource scarcity.

Instead, what unfolds in The Fifth Season is a satisfying, layered exploration of the pervasive way institutions and social norms oppress the lower caste: the orogenes, people with a genetically inherited supernatural ability to sense and control rock and metal. Our main protagonist, Essun, finds her son murdered by his own father for being an orogene. Her secret orogene status, synonymous with being subhuman, is also discovered and she is reviled by her neighbors and exiled from her home, just as the apocalypse begins.

Through flashbacks to her childhood and her youth, we learn about the Fulcrum [2], an institution run by orogenes and accepted by the Empire only because the orogenic leaders of the Fulcrum keep their fellow orogenes in check: cowed but ready to calm earthquakes and volcanoes when needed. Its members have little choice; society doesn’t permit them to live anywhere else. It’s an interesting examination of how simply giving power to a few members of an oppressed group isn’t sufficient to emancipate the rest.

The Fulcrum carries out a breeding program to ensure its ranks are populated with sufficiently strong wielders of orogenic power. And, most horrifyingly, they cull their ranks of the unruly or incompetent by lobotomizing them into a vegetative state, retaining just enough brain activity to use their instinctive earthquake-cancelling powers, and installing them at "node stations".

“Drug away the infections and so forth, keep him alive enough to function, and you’ve got the one thing even the Fulcrum can’t provide: a reliable, harmless, completely beneficial source of orogeny. (...) The only reason they don’t do this to all of us is because we’re more versatile, more useful, if we control ourselves. But each of us is just another weapon, to them. Just a useful monster, just a bit of new blood to add to the breeding lines. Just another fucking rogga.”

She has never heard so much hate put into one word before.

Essun, under the name Syenite, learns much of this through Alabaster, a powerful orogene who has begun questioning the social order, spurred in part through his discovery that the Empire has rewritten history to make orogenes appear responsible for the Earth’s unstable tectonics.

“Tell me what other way there is, then.”

He doesn’t say anything for a moment. She turns to look at him finally, and he’s looking uneasy. “Well…” He edges into the statement. “We could try letting orogenes run things.”

They find their way to a remote island community, Meov, the only example we see in the entire trilogy of orogenes living in harmony with non-orogenes. Syenite and Alabaster find a sort of peace here, parenting their child together, broken only when Syenite uses her orogenic abilities offensively in a pirate raid. Her location thus revealed, the Fulcrum destroys the community and both Syenite and Alabaster barely escape alive. Syenite kills her son to prevent his being captured (“Better to die than live a slave.”).

So ends The Fifth Season. A fascinating world, if rather grim. The second book, The Obelisk Gate becomes narrower in scope. Essun is sheltered from the environmental catastrophe by an unusual community of both orogenes and non-orogenes led by Ykka, an out-of-the-closet orogene. Unlike on the island of Meov, tensions and suspicions between the two groups rise. However, we are prevented from seeing a true resolution or reconciliation of the two factions by the invasion of an enemy force. Essun saves the day, tapping extra power from the mysterious satellite-like “obelisks” and weaving together both orogeny and magic [3] to defeat the enemy [4].

In the final installment, The Stone Sky, our scope widens dramatically again, now spreading across millenia. Hoa, a member of a strange android-like race of people called “stone eaters”, recounts flashbacks of his early life. His world was one of advanced technology: rapid transit, space travel, beds that cure your wounds. This luxurious world was powered through the literal draining of the lifeforce (“magic”) of orogenes, incapacitated and hooked up to pipes much like the humans in The Matrix. Society, unable to keep up with its own energy demands purely through oppression of its orogenes, carry out a centuries-long plan to tap the Earth’s core for magic instead. This plan involves genetically engineering a new race of particularly powerful orogenes: Hoa and a small handful of others, trained to see themselves not as human but as tools.

Life is sacred in Syl Anagist – as it should be, for the city burns life as the fuel for its glory. The Niess were not the first people chewed up in its maw, just the latest and cruelest extermination of many. But for a society built on exploitation, there is no greater threat than having no one left to oppress. And now, if nothing else is done, Syl Anagist must again find a way to fission its people into subgroupings and create reasons for conflict among them. There’s not enough magic to be had just from plants and genegineered fauna; someone must suffer, if the rest are to enjoy luxury. 

Better the earth, Syl Anagist reasons. Better to enslave a great inanimate object that cannot feel pain and will not object. Better Geoarcanity. But this reasoning is still flawed, because Syl Anagist is ultimately unsustainable. It is parasitic; its hunger for magic grows with every drop it devours. The Earth's core is not limitless. Eventually, if it takes fifty thousand years, that resource will be exhausted, too. Then everything dies.

Discovering the truth of the oppression at the heart of this society, at the crucial final moment in which the obelisks would be switched on, Hoa tries to destroy civilization, only to discover that the Earth itself is also human and very angry. 

We were not the only ones who chose to fight back that day. (...) The Earth sees no difference between any of us. (...) We were all guilty. All complicit in the crime of attempting to enslave the world itself.

Locked in a power struggle with the Earth, Hoa realized that to destroy all of humanity would also be to destroy the woman he loves and her child. Hoa dissipates the massive amounts of stored orogeny and magic by blasting a hole in the moon and knocking it off its orbit and initiating thousands of years of unstable climate.
 

This power struggle is mirrored in the present day. Essun seeks to restore balance to the Earth by catching the moon and returning it to its orbit. Her daughter seeks to turn all of humanity into immortal stone eaters in a last ditch effort to save a dying friend she has adopted as a father figure. The two of them fight over the power accessible only through the obelisks, and Essun dies in the conflict. Nassun is moved by her mother’s sacrifice of her own life for the benefit of humanity and for the sake of saving her own daughter, and chooses to complete her mother’s task instead.

Because the world took and took and took from you, too, after all. She knows this, and yet, for some reason that she does not think she’ll ever understand… even as you died, you were reaching for the moon.

This is the way the trilogy ends. So where are we on our themes? The environmental destruction caused by mankind has been solved, but only by returning society to an economy of farmers and artisans [5]. There’s no solar-powered rapid transit, or wind-powered restorative beds, no way to have advanced technology without exploitation of slaves or the Earth. Before learning of the Earth’s sentience, Hoa feels that to maintain this level of technology but without exploitation of orogenes would be tantamount to accepting that enslavement was acceptable.

What we are doing is pointless and Geoarcanity is a lie. And if we help Syl Anagist further down this path, we will have said, What was done to us was right and natural and unavoidable.

If this were the conclusions we should draw about climate change in 2022, it would be a depressing, cynical outlook. But, the story isn’t really about climate change, it’s about the oppression and dehumanization of lower castes.
 

So in what state do we leave relations between the castes? The first encounters between orogenes and non-orogenes resulted in the enslavement of the orogenes at the hands of the Empire [6]. After millennia of deeply ingrained racism, most communities we see show exile of orogenes (Tirimo), uneasy truces between neighbouring communities (Maxixe’s orogenes and their rival non-orogenic raiders), or mixed communities brimming with tension and animosity (Ykka’s community). We see a single example of a people who have truly integrated orogenes and non-orogenes (the island of Meov), but no indication of how to move from say, a Tirimo-like society to a Meov-like society.

“Imprisonment of orogenes was never the only option for ensuring the safety of society. (...) Lynching was never the only option. The nodes were never the only option. All of these were choices. Different choices have always been possible.”

There is such sorrow in her, your little girl. I hope Nassun learns someday that she is not alone in the world. I hope she learns how to hope again.

She lowers her gaze. “They’re not going to choose anything different.”

“They will if you make them.”

She’s wiser than you, and does not balk at the notion of forcing people to be decent to each other. Only the methodology is a problem. “I don’t have any orogeny anymore.”

“Orogeny,” I say, sharply so she will pay attention, “was never the only way to change the world.”

She stares. I feel that I have said all I can, so I leave her there to contemplate my words.

The plot climax is a magical reversal of climate change. The climax of the theme of caste oppression comes half a book earlier: Hoa’s discovery that electricity is harvested from orogenes, and that the Earth (and even one of the obelisks) are sentient and exploited too. This climax is never resolved with a solution, it is simply a revelation, and thematically, it is the same revelation encountered in The Fifth Season, when we discover the lobotomized children hooked up at the node stations. Prejudice, colonialism and slavery are horrifying. Be very careful of excluding people from your definition of "human." I agree, as do, I assume, most readers. Okay, now what? The Stone Sky leaves us without answers, just a plucky girl, void of hope, versus a society still rotten with racism.

* * *

SciFi And Experimentation: The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu

I like Science Fiction as a way to experiment with humanity and technology using literature. For example, in The Power, Naomi Alderman examines how our current understanding of history and gender relies on differences in physical strength by experimenting with what happens if women were to suddenly be gifted with the power to conduct electricity. Along a similar vein of inquiry, Ursula K Le Guin investigates a society without gender in The Left Hand Of Darkness. Cixin Liu's The Dark Forest's experimental design starts with the two axioms of Cosmic Sociology:

"First: Survival is the primary need of civilization. Second: Civilization continuously grows and expands, but the total matter in the universe remains constant."

From here, the reader slowly learns how these two axioms provide an answer to Fermi's Paradox. And this unfolding is slow and feels meandering; I felt a little restless during the read — "enough with this imaginary girlfriend/this Starship Earth constitution/this very smooth droplet, how does humanity survive the impending alien invasion?!" 

Reflecting on the whole of the novel, however, I realize it's more a full SciFi research program than a single SciFi experiment. One experiment (the axioms of Cosmic Sociology) logically leads to two more experiments (humanity has 400 years to stave off extinction at the hands of an alien race; the impact of deceit and transparency in strategy and negotiation). One of these spin-off experiments requires development of a new Doylist tool (human cryo-hibernation), which naturally requires characterization (how do humans and society adapt and form distinct cultures around people used to completely different historical eras?). Characters — who, for better or for worse, are very much "tools" in Cixin Liu's approach to storytelling — never make decisions arbitrarily, but instead must have their own life experiences and Watsonian reasons to lead them to their decision. And this branching from one experiment into more experiments and well-calibrated tools continues, exploding into dozens of new concepts until you find yourself comparing two people gazing into each others eyes and falling in love with three military officers wordlessly planning to murder most of their society to ensure their own survival, thinking "I get it now, I understand how the axioms of Cosmic Sociology leads to the Chain of Suspicion which leads to The Dark Forest."

It's a dense, intricate book!

I didn't fully agree with the choice of each experiment. While I understand why it was important to weave love into Luo Ji's character arc (although, since it was a foil for the Benevolence versus Malevolence game theory decision-making in the Chain of Suspicion, I think it could have been more of a community love than a romance love), I found the imaginary girlfriend/UN-sponsored dating project to be almost painful to read. It was awful, incel-y representation of women and romance — the "worse" of the for better or worse ways in which characters were used as tools. There were a few side experiments that perhaps could have been cut, although they were fun: the biological and computer viruses designed to assassinate a sole target, for example. There were a few conclusions drawn that seemed more to be release for the author's own grumbles than naturally following from the rules of the world: kids these days spend too much time on screens and it impedes their ability to think logically.

Some of the writing I found off-putting. Female characters' appearances are often described at length — "enchanting silhouette", "slender hand" — where male characters are physically featureless but fiddle constantly with tobacco delivery devices. Where the prequel, The Three Body Problem, suffered from Main-Character-As-Camera syndrome, Luo Ji was afflicted with the far more irritating Chosen One/Messianic Syndrome. (This was, to some extent, lampshaded by various characters, with some discussion on the existence of/social impact of being declared a genius.)

Other parts of the writing I found puzzling. Western philosophy and cultural allusions are prominent: the Garden of Eden, the apple and the snake, The Louvre. I thought perhaps these decisions were made to make the book more palatable to a broader audience, but the translation didn't come out until seven years after the Chinese publication. This emphasis on the cultural history of the West made me wonder a little at Cixin Liu's rationale for the other three Wallfacers (an American, a Brit, and a Venezuelan).

But there were also some great scenes. I loved the exploration of the reactions of people from around the world through dialogue — the "better" of the for better or worse ways in which characters were used as tools. I loved the ant crawling around and exploring the world as Luo Ji learns about the two axioms, and later, as he digs a grave. I loved the game theory plot lines, and the exploration of optimistic versus nihilistic and goal-oriented versus people-oriented reactions in society.

Overall, The Dark Forest has some well thought-out experiments, executed a little clumsily.

Review: The Power by Naomi Alderman

It's the mid 2010s, and suddenly, women everywhere discover they can produce and control electricity. This power has a seismic effect on societies across the globe (the parallels with COVID-19 are stark and in some ways prophetic) as people react to the balance of power between men and women is thrown topsy-turvy. The inversion of gender stereotypes is intentionally overt. If the idea of exploring this thought experiment holds no charm for you, it will be a charmless read. 

The story telling is allegorical, both textually and meta-textually. The framing story is one of a (male) writer 5000 years into the future, presenting his well-researched but unorthodox theory for how his contemporary matriarchal society may have arisen. He notes to his (female) colleague that the characters are just instruments he uses to describe what he thinks could have happened. But of course, the characters also play the same role for Alderman in her exploration of gender and power structures.

Being allegorical, the message of the story is more important than the nuances of the character arcs or the world-building. One possible interpretation of its message is that if women were more powerful than men, it would be a matter of just years before the world was on the brink of nuclear annihilation. It wouldn't be a technically incorrect interpretation of the plot of the novel, just an obtuse one.

Another interpretation of the message is that there is no possibility of overcoming ingrained sexual or class disparities except through a Pyrrhic victory - only a cataclysmic event in which society must redevelop from the stone age could bring women to the same place of power as men.

The women will die just as much as the men will if we bomb ourselves back to the Stone Age.

And then we'll be in the the Stone Age.

Er. Yeah.

And then there will be five thousand years of rebuilding, five thousand years where the only thing that matters is: can you hurt more, can you do more damage, can you instill fear?

Yeah?

And then the women will win.

But I do think Alderman is a little more optimistic than that. Change without a cataclysm seems possible for her heretical historian:

The world is the way it is now because of five thousand years of ingrained structures of power based on darker times when things were much more violent... But we don't have to act that way now. We can think and imagine ourselves differently once we understand what we've based our ideas on.

Through Mother Eve's voice, this change requires collective action:

It follows that there are two ways for the nature and use of human power to change. One is that an order might issue from the palace, a command unto the people saying “It is thus.” But the other, the more certain, the more inevitable, is that those thousand thousand points of light should each send a new message. When the people change, the palace cannot hold. 

 

And this change requires recognizing that men and women are equally prone to violence and vengeance and other destructive tendencies, that it is the centuries or millennia of systemic power differences that produces the behaviours we see now.

I particularly loved the framing story. The little microaggressions from the female reviewer to the male author (including the final line of the book: "Neil, I know this might be very distasteful to you, but have you considered publishing this book under a woman's name?") were amusing, as were her arguments against his theory:

Have you thought about the evolutionary psychology of it? Men have evolved to be strong worker homestead-keepers, while women - with babies to protect from harm - have had to become aggressive and violent. The few partial patriarchies that have ever existed in human society have been very peaceful places.

I think it did a fantastic job at showing how our current cultural lens shapes our understanding of history.

This is the trouble with history. You can't see what's not there. You can look at an empty space and see that something's missing, but there's no way to know what it was.

However, I think I enjoy this book more in the rear view mirror. While reading it, I felt like it was overly long, with a rather long, odd and unnecessary "beware of fascism" detour. It could have been a fantastic novella, but it was an okay novel.

Review: Girl One by Sara Flannery Murphy

Wow—what a premise. A disgraced scientist discovers a way for women to give birth to clones of themselves (through parthenogenesis), and convinces nine women to bring nine daughters into the world and live together in a remote commune. Angry men, claiming God is on their side, burn down the community and the women and their daughters scatter across the country. Twenty years later, Mother One goes missing and Girl One has to find her.

I had so many questions and I couldn't wait for the author to explore them. What would motivate women to undergo something so very experimental for such an important and private part of your life? Were they particularly interested in creating miniatures of themselves, or was it the ability to becomes mothers without the involvement of men that appealed to them? Why live together in a commune? Was it a recognition that it takes a village to raise a child? Was it polyamoury? In what ways is the mother-daughter bond different when you share 100% of your genetic materials but experience very different childhoods?

Flannery Murphy found more to explore in the younger generation, however. That's not entirely unjustified—what is it like to not have a genetic father, to grow up famous for being a scientific miracle? But I found the answer to these questions a little unsatisfying. Respectively: you idolize a creepy scientist as a father figure; you sometimes give a bad media interview here and there and kids are a little mean about it but it isn't anything you can't shrug off.

What's most frustrating about this difference in emphasis is that the Mother generation becomes all the more fascinating as the mysteries of Dr Bellanger's role in the "scientific miracle" and who started the fire are revealed. We learn that the Mothers were women who came together as a group out of a desire to re-discover parthenogenesis—placing themselves in the footsteps from women from witchy folkloric tales who seem to have been able to give birth to daughters without fathers, although not recognized as such at the time. With their research coming to dead ends, they sought out a scientist to help them achieve this goal, and eventually discovered the ability to become pregnant on their own without his interference. Feeling threatened by these women no longer needing him at all, Dr Bellanger manipulated and abused the women. Eventually, he burned down the house, faking his death and the death of Girl Nine, who showed telekinetic abilities. These were some delightful, unexpected, and unique twists!

In contrast, the Daughter generation discovering and coming to terms with their latent magical powers felt like well-trodden ground for anyone that lived through our present era of unending Marvel blockbusters. It was a bit of a waste of such a neat premise.

I think there is space to have told the story that Flannery Murphy ultimately told, without keeping the Mother generation at arm's length. The "found media" of newspaper clipping and letters that she already used would have been a perfect device to explore the relationship between Mother One and Trish, or how the Mothers all found one another.

Character study failings aside, I thought the social commentary was explored well. As in our world, in the world of Girl One, men respond to the loss of power over women with violence and misogyny (I get the sense that Sarah Flannery Murphy would enjoy Down Girl by Kate Manne). Men, like Dr Bellanger, insert themselves into the birthing process in positions of power and authority without respect for the autonomy of women, from abortion policies to obstetric practices. Dr Bellanger does as too many men have done before him, and steals the spotlight from women and minimizes their contributions. Through Dr Bellanger's fear and jealousy at Lilliane conceiving a second child all on her own, we see a science fiction version of the uncertainty of paternity compared to the certainty of a woman always knowing the mother of the child within her. 

I got the sense that the author was familiar with the feminist movements of the 1970s and the 1990s, the decades in which the bulk of the story was set. The characters felt like 1970s feminists and 1990s feminists, not post-slut walk or post-#MeToo feminists transported through time into the 1970s and the 1990s. I mean this in a good way; the debate was kept fresh by the unusual premise.

The blurb of the book compared the story to Margaret Atwood's work, and I think this expectation worked to Girl One's detriment. I found the prose uninteresting and the dialogue and scene structure a little pulpy. I pushed myself through the first quarter out of sheer stubbornness to learn whether the boring-as-oatmeal main character's worship of the creepy Dr Bellanger was a brilliant portrayal of an unreliable narrator or astounding lack of insight on behalf of the author. (This is not the first time I've read a book for that reason!) Fortunately, it turned out to be the former, and once I adjusted my expectations that the book was going to be a medium-smart thriller with a penchant for giving implausible excuses for why the Most Dramatic Decision must always be made it was a fun enough ride.

Ignore the book's tagline and any other media that compares this book to The Handmaid's Tale. The last bit of the book blurb, "Girl One combines the provocative imagination of Naomi Alderman’s The Power with the propulsive, cinematic storytelling of a Marvel movie", is far more accurate.

 

Review: The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

I'm not really sure why this book was written. In the afterward, Atwood says it was in part a response to the many questions she'd received in the 30 years since The Handmaid's Tale about how Gilead fell. But the Gilead state was not, to me at least, the interesting part of the novel, as I've written before. Instead, I loved the exploration of how Offred, Moira, the Commander, and others reacted to the changing society; how they survived, how they rationalized their choices. It was very human; these dynamics exist in us now, in non-Gilead states. That is, to me at least, what 'good' science fiction and fantasy should be.

The book instead reads like fan fiction: some fan desperate to know what became of Offred's daughter and her suspected pregnancy writes a well-paced if somewhat predictable and plothole-riddled [1 (spoiler)] account of the two half-siblings reuniting and bringing down the dystopian State.

I said above that I'm not really sure why this book was written, but I have a theory that Atwood used it to explore her own feelings in response to changing cultures as someone in a position of relative power. Atwood is included on many lists of prominent Canadians and on many lists as standout authors of twentieth century literature. With this clout, she has come under fire for protecting the status quo, and complaining about the mobs on twitter.

It's hard to read parts of Aunt Lydia's autobiography and not see in them Atwood defending her own actions (or lack thereof), warning of the terror of cancel culture, and pondering her own legacy:

How will I end? I wondered. Will I live to a gently neglected old age, ossifying by degrees? Will I become my own honoured statue? Or will the regime and I both topple and my stone replica along with me, to be dragged away and sold off as a curiosity, a lawn ornament, a chunk of gruesome kitsch? Or will I be put on trial as a monster, then executed by firing squad and dangled from a lamppost for public viewing? Will I be torn apart by a mob and have my head stuck on a pole and paraded through the streets to merriment and jeers?

and

I meant well too, I sometimes mumble silently. I meant it for the best, or for the best available, which is not the same thing. Still, think how much worse it could have been if not for me.

She also perhaps still has some things to say about #MeToo that she wasn't able to include in her OpEd:

Innocent men denying their guilt sound exactly like guilty men, as I am sure you have noticed, my reader. Listeners are inclined to believe neither.

She seems aware, also, that some may read into this book the way I have:

You’ll labour over this manuscript of mine, reading and rereading, picking nits as you go, developing the fascinated but also bored hatred biographers so often come to feel for their subjects. How can I have behaved so badly, so cruelly, so stupidly? you will ask. You yourself would never have done such things! But you yourself will never have had to.

There was an intriguing bit of revisionism I noticed. In The Handmaid's Tale, the birth crisis was blamed on AIDS and nuclear power. In The Testaments, it is blamed on nuclear power, no mention of AIDS. (Is this cancel culture at work?)

I found the prose in this book much less vivid and enthralling than in the first. The first had these beautiful/horrific passages weaving together imagery of flowers and sex and food and death. These were not entirely absent in The Testaments, but they were sparser. The emotions of the narrator in The Handmaid's Tale were dynamic, switching from boredom, to hate and anger, to thoughtful critique of the patriarchal system, to a self-aware desire to be cared for by the system. Agnes, Lydia and Daisy were somewhat stock characters with limited emotional range. I did, however, enjoy how through Agnes' eyes, we explored how patriarchy and oppressive social norms are instilled in girls. Agnes's feelings of shame and fear surrounding men and her own sexuality before she even understood the mechanics of sex were, I thought, portrayed well.

The tone of the book was quite different from its predecessor. Where The Handmaid's Tale was meditative and focused on the narrator's internal journey, this novel read much more 'screenplay-ready', plot-driven with heists (the first also had a woman smuggled in a car, but the focus of the writing was Offred's dettached reflection of the Commander's boot, the only thing she could see during her smuggling, rather than a tense narrative of if she would be allowed through or not). Perhaps that's why this book was written? As additional fodder for the television show based on the first book?

There were a few Easter eggs and references I enjoyed picking up on, such as the Schlafly cafe being the site of Aunt wheeling and dealings. It was neat to see little bits of french language and quebecois culture alluded to, such as Ada's use of the phrase "toot sweet" (toute suite) and Daisy's reading list at school. It was also neat to follow the characters across Canadian land - which isn't portrayed often in fiction - from Etobicoke to New Brunswick.

In sum, this book didn't need to be written, and it certainly doesn't need to be read.

 1. Why did Lydia need to smuggle her report via Nicole at all? Does Canada not also have a problem with birth defects and declining fertility?