Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I kickstarted my year by re-reading Reverend Insanity. I won't bore anyone with a recap, all I'll say is that it took me 4 months to finish not because I was slow, but because the novel is both great and very, very long. About 5x the entire HP series.
But I digress. Reverend Insanity is peak fiction. Go read it.
Outside of that singular, four-month nostalgia trip, this was a bad year for books. It felt like walking through a library where all the ink had run, leaving behind only the faint smell of pretension and pulp.
The Golden Oecumene Trilogy (John C. Wright) I am sitting on a full review of this, much like a hen sits on an egg that refuses to hatch. The barrier is purely technological. I write in markdown, and Substack demands a rich text editor, and the activation energy required to convert the formatting is currently higher than the energy required to simply stare at the wall and sigh.
The story concerns Phaethon, a man in a post-human utopia who decides he would rather own a spaceship than be happy. It is solid hard sci-fi. Wright builds a world of remote-controlled bodies and dream-logic Internet architectures that feels surprisingly robust. It is the sort of future the effective accelerationists dream about, assuming they stop tweeting long enough to actually build anything.
The Years of Rice and Salt (Kim Stanley Robinson) I have already written about this. The premise is a banger: The Black Death kills 99% of Europe instead of 30%, leaving the world to be carved up by China and the Islamic Dar al-Islam. We follow a group of souls reincarnating through the centuries, trying to build a history that doesn't end in trench warfare.
It is a good book that fails to be great because Robinson treats Buddhism less like a religion and more like a narrative device he bought at a discount store. The theology is contrived. The characters feel less like reincarnated souls and more like KSR wearing different hats, lecturing the reader on the inevitability of scientific progress. It is Whig history with a side of curry.
Perdido Street Station (China Miéville) I tried. I really did. I read half of this brick before throwing it across the room, or I would have, had it not been on my phone, and had I not been worried about scratching the screen.
Miéville is a talented writer who has fallen in love with his own adjectives and the way his tongue tickles his taint. The setting is New Crobuzon, a city that is essentially London if London were made entirely of grime, cactus-people, and Marxian alienation. So basically just London, albeit with denizens who are more literal in their prickliness. The plot allegedly involves Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin trying to restore flight to a bird-man, which eventually unleashes psychic moths that eat minds. Oh, and he also fucks a cockroach woman. I'm not sure if it's good or bad that the cockroach bit is above the neck.
But getting to the moths is an ordeal. You have to wade through three hundred pages of atmospheric sludge. It is navel-gazey. It is the literary equivalent of a goth teenager showing you their collection of preserved insects for six hours. The pacing is nonexistent. Miéville seems to believe that if he describes the dirt on a windowpane with enough polysyllabic words, it constitutes a plot point. It does not. 6/10.
The Simoqin Prophecy (Samit Basu) This was a re-read of a teenage favorite, and unlike most things from my teenage years, it holds up.
It is Indian fantasy, a genre that is tragically underrepresented. Basu takes the standard "Farmboy Saves the World" trope and beats it to death with a cricket bat. The hero, Prince Asvin, is sent on a quest, the only sincere man in town, surrounded by people who know they are in a book or at least have a refreshing tendency to say fuck you to the plot and do sensible things. It is meta without being annoying, which is a rare feat. Tracking down the epub for the third novel required me to scour corners of the internet that haven't been visited since 2008, but it was worth it. Western readers might miss the puns, but good satire transcends cultural boundaries.
The Outside (Ada Hoffmann) There is a specific genre of modern sci-fi that I call "HR-punk." The Outside is the apotheosis of this genre.
The protagonist is an autistic scientist who accidentally invents a heresy that attracts eldritch gods. She is autistic. She is also a lesbian. The author is autistic. The author is possibly a lesbian. Did you get that? The book will remind you. It confronts the cosmic horror of AI gods who eat human souls, but the real horror is the prose.
It feels less like a story and more like a diversity statement written by a committee of Lovecraftian entities trying to avoid a lawsuit. It is absolute dross. The identity politics are not the subtext; they are the text, the cover, and the barcode. It is a book that demands you clap for it, not because it is good, but because it is brave. It is not brave. It is boring.
Theft of Fire (Devon Eriksen) This is more like it. A decent sci-fi page-turner. It’s about a roughneck space trucker and a genetically modified heiress trying to steal a superweapon. It’s The Expanse meets Firefly, but written by someone who really, really likes engineering schematics.
I am a Richard Morgan fan. I like Hard Men Busting Heads (In Space!). Eriksen delivers this. The physics are hard, and so am I : radiators, delta-v, the silence of the void. Unfortunately, the book suffers from the "ChatGPT Problem." It makes predictions about AI that became obsolete roughly three weeks before publication. I look forward to a sequel.
The "Mid" Pile: Footfall, Live Free or Die, Through Struggle, The Stars I group these together because they all suffer from the same pathology: The inability to write a human being who sounds like they have ever spoken to another human being.
Space Pirates of Andromeda (John C. Wright) Wright again. This is an odd duck. It feels like Wright watched Star Wars, got annoyed at the physics, and decided to rewrite A New Hope with accurate orbital mechanics.
We have a princess, a gallant Space Cop, and an evil empire with a Death Star. But in addition to the Force, we have very rigorous adherence to the laws of thermodynamics. The dialogue is baroque. The characters are larger than life in a way that feels operatic. It is a 7/10 novel that I finished on a long flight, sandwiched between a crying baby and a man who smelled like old cheese. It passed the time. I will not read the sequels. I have mountains to climb, and by mountains, I mean another four million words of Chinese cultivation novels.
More options
Context Copy link