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mburnamfink's reviews
2016 reviews
The March North by Graydon Saunders
challenging
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? N/A
4.0
The March North is an extremely specific book for an extremely specific kind of person. Fortunately, I'm that kind of person. The Commonweal series was a common punchline in the Something Awful forums scifi/fantasy book thread, at the intersection of "brilliant" and "unreadable" and "we are all Graydon Saunders". So when I found out that Saunders, in a fit of pique at American tech companies, was planning to remove his books from sale on all platforms, I decided it was put up or shut up time.
The plot of The March North is pretty simple. The commander of a military unit in a fantasy nation recalls a mission where he links up with a couple of wizards and goes off to defend the realm from an invasion of an enemy empire. There are some battles, the unit takes heavy casualties, but they win the day and return home heroes.
The tone of the narrator, the unnamed Standard-Captain, is terse and clinical. The other characters are named things like Twitch and Rust and Halt and Blossom, and military/magical jargon is thrown around like you already know how all of this works. The Black Company crossed with the Aubrey-Maturin series is a comparison I've seen elsewhere, and it's not wrong.
But what makes this book a treasure for that certain kind of person is the depth of Saunder's setting and how the implications of the worldbuilding unfold. The world of the Commonweal is far far stranger than the laconic writing conveys. The default state of life for most people has been nasty, brutish, and short due to the workings of generations of wizard-kings. Thousands of years of insane sorcerers feuding with each other has left the landscape haunted by demons and worse, river that turn to blood and fire and bile on a regular cycle, and meant that most political organizations end when some wizard decides to throw a mountain at the city.
Except in the Commonweal. About 500 years ago, the Commonweal figured out how to counter the power of wizards with collective action, something called the Focus, which is channeled through the Standards of the Companies of the Line. Prosperity in the Commonweal is protected by a magical binding called the Shape of Peace, which encourages people to work together, and offers a balance against the power of individual mages. Aside from the demonic invasions, life in the Commonweal seems almost utopian. They use the French Revolutionary calendar, and politicians who tell lies literally have their pants burst into flame.
So what this book is really about is learning how the Focus of the Companies work, what the accompanying wizards can do, and seeing that in action. Even with the cryptic style of the writing, some of the action is impressive. In an early scene, the Company and the accompanying battery play catch, with the battery firing black-black-black shot, simple iron rods, at cannon velocities, and the Company catching the shells with their Focus and ablating them to nothing in a shower of sparks, or deflecting them into the sky. The weapons of the battery go up to red-red-red, which has a "danger close" radius of 25 km. Assuming it's some kind of explosive (not a safe assumption), that puts red-red-red in the 20 megaton hydrogen bomb scale. The wizards have more subtle ways of killing: swarms of razor-winged steel butterflies, manipulation of air, heat, and minds, and compelling hosts of demons.
That said, there are a lot of flaws in this book. Characterization isn't. The three sorcerers assigned to the Company are some of the most powerful in the Commonweal, including the unquestioned most powerful magic user alive; Halt. We're told Halt and Rust don't get along in the opening chapter, some sort of long-running feud contained at the level of sniping in specialized journals and third-hand political maneuvering, but these two godlike beings just... do their jobs. The only character to get any generosity of description is Halt, who's corporeal form is someone's grandma, an old lady with her knitting and a ready cup of tea. Please ignore that she's riding on a firing breathing sheep-like creature the size of an elephant, or that she's older than reliably recorded history. As for the rest, I could tell you what they do, but not anything about their personality or character.
The Standard-Captain style also robs the climax of what should be it's tension. Taking a battered company on a suicide mission into a fortress containing the Archon of Reems, a sorcerer-king channeling the power of an entire empire of fire-priests and ashen victims, escaping a trap made of singularity-black antimagic cable and a whole amphitheater of demons, and undoing a binding powering an empire spanning road made out of crystallized despair, should be thrilling. But the writing is so detached it doesn't hit right.
Still, at the end of the day, I stayed up way too late finishing this book, which is the highest accolade I can give any novel. Saunders wrote the exact book he intended to write, and if it's not to your liking, well, you were warned up front.
The plot of The March North is pretty simple. The commander of a military unit in a fantasy nation recalls a mission where he links up with a couple of wizards and goes off to defend the realm from an invasion of an enemy empire. There are some battles, the unit takes heavy casualties, but they win the day and return home heroes.
The tone of the narrator, the unnamed Standard-Captain, is terse and clinical. The other characters are named things like Twitch and Rust and Halt and Blossom, and military/magical jargon is thrown around like you already know how all of this works. The Black Company crossed with the Aubrey-Maturin series is a comparison I've seen elsewhere, and it's not wrong.
But what makes this book a treasure for that certain kind of person is the depth of Saunder's setting and how the implications of the worldbuilding unfold. The world of the Commonweal is far far stranger than the laconic writing conveys. The default state of life for most people has been nasty, brutish, and short due to the workings of generations of wizard-kings. Thousands of years of insane sorcerers feuding with each other has left the landscape haunted by demons and worse, river that turn to blood and fire and bile on a regular cycle, and meant that most political organizations end when some wizard decides to throw a mountain at the city.
Except in the Commonweal. About 500 years ago, the Commonweal figured out how to counter the power of wizards with collective action, something called the Focus, which is channeled through the Standards of the Companies of the Line. Prosperity in the Commonweal is protected by a magical binding called the Shape of Peace, which encourages people to work together, and offers a balance against the power of individual mages. Aside from the demonic invasions, life in the Commonweal seems almost utopian. They use the French Revolutionary calendar, and politicians who tell lies literally have their pants burst into flame.
So what this book is really about is learning how the Focus of the Companies work, what the accompanying wizards can do, and seeing that in action. Even with the cryptic style of the writing, some of the action is impressive. In an early scene, the Company and the accompanying battery play catch, with the battery firing black-black-black shot, simple iron rods, at cannon velocities, and the Company catching the shells with their Focus and ablating them to nothing in a shower of sparks, or deflecting them into the sky. The weapons of the battery go up to red-red-red, which has a "danger close" radius of 25 km. Assuming it's some kind of explosive (not a safe assumption), that puts red-red-red in the 20 megaton hydrogen bomb scale. The wizards have more subtle ways of killing: swarms of razor-winged steel butterflies, manipulation of air, heat, and minds, and compelling hosts of demons.
That said, there are a lot of flaws in this book. Characterization isn't. The three sorcerers assigned to the Company are some of the most powerful in the Commonweal, including the unquestioned most powerful magic user alive; Halt. We're told Halt and Rust don't get along in the opening chapter, some sort of long-running feud contained at the level of sniping in specialized journals and third-hand political maneuvering, but these two godlike beings just... do their jobs. The only character to get any generosity of description is Halt, who's corporeal form is someone's grandma, an old lady with her knitting and a ready cup of tea. Please ignore that she's riding on a firing breathing sheep-like creature the size of an elephant, or that she's older than reliably recorded history. As for the rest, I could tell you what they do, but not anything about their personality or character.
The Standard-Captain style also robs the climax of what should be it's tension. Taking a battered company on a suicide mission into a fortress containing the Archon of Reems, a sorcerer-king channeling the power of an entire empire of fire-priests and ashen victims, escaping a trap made of singularity-black antimagic cable and a whole amphitheater of demons, and undoing a binding powering an empire spanning road made out of crystallized despair, should be thrilling. But the writing is so detached it doesn't hit right.
Still, at the end of the day, I stayed up way too late finishing this book, which is the highest accolade I can give any novel. Saunders wrote the exact book he intended to write, and if it's not to your liking, well, you were warned up front.
The Baroque Arsenal by Mary Kaldor
4.0
The Baroque Arsenal is a defense analysis that is very much of its time; published in 1981 and written in 1980, but which manages a few impressive futurological insights amidst a stream of invective.
Kaldor's main point is that contemporary military technology is not advanced, but could more precisely be defined as decadent, chasing increasingly marginal improvements in top-line metrics at the expense of combat effectiveness. This decadent is a consequence of the continuous mobilization of the Cold War, a cultural alliance between increasingly specialized types of military officers and large defense contractors, by which each class of weapon system (tank, fighter, bomber, destroyer, etc) is immediately rendered obsolete by an upcoming "follow-on" weapon system of the same type, which is superior in an objective way: higher top speed, thicker armor, more firepower, etc. These series of more cutting edge follow-ons are in fact more complex, less maintainable, and much more expensive.
The broader economic and social consequences of the baroque arsenal are what President Eisenhower perfectly described in his 1953 Cross of Iron speech. "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children." The arms sector, rather than contributing to national security, becomes a parasite that sucks up talent better directed anywhere else, that renders its workforce vulnerable to sudden swings in government contracting, requires public bailouts, and fails to deliver real innovation, because it is insulated from any real competitive pressure.
Kaldor traces case studies in Britain, the USA, and Europe more broadly. British global supremacy was built on the dreadnought battleship, a weapon system which saw serious action once, in the inconclusive Battle of Jutland, and which was too expensive to be committed to action. Post-war American hegemony was built on aircraft and armor. Europe has attempted to create a unified arms sector, but combined procurement programs like the Tornado strike-fighter have mostly been expensive and unsatisfying compromises. The USSR is the obvious counter to Western hegemony, and their approach is more conservative, though given the nature of data at the time, Kaldor can't be conclusive.
And for all the expense poured into advanced weapons systems, they didn't bring victory in Vietnam, keep the Shah in power in Iran, or help the USSR secure Afghanistan, and after 9/11 lead to American victories in Iraq and Afghanistan. Kaldor prefigures many of the arguments that would be used in the 1980s by the Military Reform Movement (see Hankin's fantastic Flying Camelot: The F-15, the F-16, and the Weaponization of Fighter Pilot Nostalgia for details), and which would also be tested by the Gulf War and the lopsided Allied victory in Desert Storm.
The one bit of futurism that Kaldor nails spot on, at 40 years remove, is the key importance of precision guided munitions(PGM) and sophistication in electronics as the future of war. PGMs played a key role in Desert Storm, but it's taken the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine to showcase how cheap and disposable militarized civilian drones can absolutely shred far more expensive weapon systems. The lesson of Ukraine, as well as NATO intervention in Libya in 2014, and maritime defense operations in the Red Sea in 2024, is that weapon systems can triumph over cheaper options, that PGMs are expended at an incredible rate, and that no one is rich enough to sustain using million dollar missiles to shoot down $5,000 drones indefinitely.
As for the rest, well, I believe the book, but it's not full convincing. Kaldor has more evidence to back up Eisenhower's rhetoric, though not enough by conventional standards. Spreadsheets make everyone an econometrician, and Kaldor's methods are much closer to winging it. If you're the kind of person to crack open a 45 year old book about defense procurement, this is a pretty good one. And if you're not that kind of person, you'll find it very tedious.
Kaldor's main point is that contemporary military technology is not advanced, but could more precisely be defined as decadent, chasing increasingly marginal improvements in top-line metrics at the expense of combat effectiveness. This decadent is a consequence of the continuous mobilization of the Cold War, a cultural alliance between increasingly specialized types of military officers and large defense contractors, by which each class of weapon system (tank, fighter, bomber, destroyer, etc) is immediately rendered obsolete by an upcoming "follow-on" weapon system of the same type, which is superior in an objective way: higher top speed, thicker armor, more firepower, etc. These series of more cutting edge follow-ons are in fact more complex, less maintainable, and much more expensive.
The broader economic and social consequences of the baroque arsenal are what President Eisenhower perfectly described in his 1953 Cross of Iron speech. "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children." The arms sector, rather than contributing to national security, becomes a parasite that sucks up talent better directed anywhere else, that renders its workforce vulnerable to sudden swings in government contracting, requires public bailouts, and fails to deliver real innovation, because it is insulated from any real competitive pressure.
Kaldor traces case studies in Britain, the USA, and Europe more broadly. British global supremacy was built on the dreadnought battleship, a weapon system which saw serious action once, in the inconclusive Battle of Jutland, and which was too expensive to be committed to action. Post-war American hegemony was built on aircraft and armor. Europe has attempted to create a unified arms sector, but combined procurement programs like the Tornado strike-fighter have mostly been expensive and unsatisfying compromises. The USSR is the obvious counter to Western hegemony, and their approach is more conservative, though given the nature of data at the time, Kaldor can't be conclusive.
And for all the expense poured into advanced weapons systems, they didn't bring victory in Vietnam, keep the Shah in power in Iran, or help the USSR secure Afghanistan, and after 9/11 lead to American victories in Iraq and Afghanistan. Kaldor prefigures many of the arguments that would be used in the 1980s by the Military Reform Movement (see Hankin's fantastic Flying Camelot: The F-15, the F-16, and the Weaponization of Fighter Pilot Nostalgia for details), and which would also be tested by the Gulf War and the lopsided Allied victory in Desert Storm.
The one bit of futurism that Kaldor nails spot on, at 40 years remove, is the key importance of precision guided munitions(PGM) and sophistication in electronics as the future of war. PGMs played a key role in Desert Storm, but it's taken the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine to showcase how cheap and disposable militarized civilian drones can absolutely shred far more expensive weapon systems. The lesson of Ukraine, as well as NATO intervention in Libya in 2014, and maritime defense operations in the Red Sea in 2024, is that weapon systems can triumph over cheaper options, that PGMs are expended at an incredible rate, and that no one is rich enough to sustain using million dollar missiles to shoot down $5,000 drones indefinitely.
As for the rest, well, I believe the book, but it's not full convincing. Kaldor has more evidence to back up Eisenhower's rhetoric, though not enough by conventional standards. Spreadsheets make everyone an econometrician, and Kaldor's methods are much closer to winging it. If you're the kind of person to crack open a 45 year old book about defense procurement, this is a pretty good one. And if you're not that kind of person, you'll find it very tedious.
House of the Rain King by Will Greatwich
inspiring
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
4.0
House of the Rain King is one of the rarer things these days. A novel that unabashedly believes in the power of good, that common decency can triumph over ancient injustice.
For monastic novice Emwich, this is the most important day in his life, the day when he takes his vows and becomes a monk sworn to the service of the Rain King. Pretty big stuff. And then the actual divinity shows up and everything goes entirely off the rails. It's one thing to believe in a centuries old mythic cycle; it's another thing to have an actual god who drowns people by his presence show up with a retinue of supernatural creatures and human mercenaries and demand the old ways be followed.
The Rain King's mythic cycle is one of flood, marriage, and sacrifice. Seven days of rain fill the valley of the Tile to brim, inundating every sign of human activity under the High Flood. At the end, a princess of the birds arrives and marries the Rain King, dying and becoming one of the saints. The Rain King departs, the waters recede, and life in the Tile begins afresh.
At least, that's the plan. The first obstacle is the ordinary obstinance of people in the face of catastrophe, as the good farmers, burghers, and monks of the Tile try really hard to deny the presence of a god in their midst, and the water lapping under their doors. The second obstacle is that the mythic cycle is grounded in truth, but only partially in truth, and the whole truth shall set ye free.
For there is corruption at the heart of the monastery, and the monks (save young Emwich) have forgotten the truth of their vows and are more interested in maintaining the web of debts that secures the valley. Tarwin, an orphan and victim of this system (he is enslaved until he pays off the debt of raising him), discovers early on that the flood has broken open a local ruin called the Rose Tomb, which is full of gold, and undead horrors, and gold!
These two storylines, or perhaps quests, cut a line through the human mercenaries, a band called The Sparrows. The Sparrows owe an obvious debt to The Black Company, with their skill at arms, absolute adherence to the honor of their contract, a surface nihilism concealing a moral heart. Brywna, one of the leaders of The Sparrows, is a bone deep romantic. Fichin, the other leader, is a callous materialist. The company splits to pursue both courses, and well, I won't spoil the book, but magic, adventure, and mystery happen.
House of the Rain King is a good book: imaginative, well-paced, often surprising, and warm-hearted. There are gems of writing and world-building that sparkle, and nothing that cracked my suspension of disbelief. But I also felt that there was an edge missing that would be present in a great novel, and the closest that I can come to expressing it is that while the story tracks many characters, they all have the same point of view. It's a strong, moral point of view, but what is most precious about myth is its fluidity.
(I received an ARC of this book from the author, and no other compensation)
For monastic novice Emwich, this is the most important day in his life, the day when he takes his vows and becomes a monk sworn to the service of the Rain King. Pretty big stuff. And then the actual divinity shows up and everything goes entirely off the rails. It's one thing to believe in a centuries old mythic cycle; it's another thing to have an actual god who drowns people by his presence show up with a retinue of supernatural creatures and human mercenaries and demand the old ways be followed.
The Rain King's mythic cycle is one of flood, marriage, and sacrifice. Seven days of rain fill the valley of the Tile to brim, inundating every sign of human activity under the High Flood. At the end, a princess of the birds arrives and marries the Rain King, dying and becoming one of the saints. The Rain King departs, the waters recede, and life in the Tile begins afresh.
At least, that's the plan. The first obstacle is the ordinary obstinance of people in the face of catastrophe, as the good farmers, burghers, and monks of the Tile try really hard to deny the presence of a god in their midst, and the water lapping under their doors. The second obstacle is that the mythic cycle is grounded in truth, but only partially in truth, and the whole truth shall set ye free.
For there is corruption at the heart of the monastery, and the monks (save young Emwich) have forgotten the truth of their vows and are more interested in maintaining the web of debts that secures the valley. Tarwin, an orphan and victim of this system (he is enslaved until he pays off the debt of raising him), discovers early on that the flood has broken open a local ruin called the Rose Tomb, which is full of gold, and undead horrors, and gold!
These two storylines, or perhaps quests, cut a line through the human mercenaries, a band called The Sparrows. The Sparrows owe an obvious debt to The Black Company, with their skill at arms, absolute adherence to the honor of their contract, a surface nihilism concealing a moral heart. Brywna, one of the leaders of The Sparrows, is a bone deep romantic. Fichin, the other leader, is a callous materialist. The company splits to pursue both courses, and well, I won't spoil the book, but magic, adventure, and mystery happen.
House of the Rain King is a good book: imaginative, well-paced, often surprising, and warm-hearted. There are gems of writing and world-building that sparkle, and nothing that cracked my suspension of disbelief. But I also felt that there was an edge missing that would be present in a great novel, and the closest that I can come to expressing it is that while the story tracks many characters, they all have the same point of view. It's a strong, moral point of view, but what is most precious about myth is its fluidity.
(I received an ARC of this book from the author, and no other compensation)
Indigenous Voices in Digital Spaces by Cindy Tekobbe
4.0
This is a tricky book for me to review. Cindy is a friend, I'm listed in the acknowledgments. I think the subject matter is important, and the structure and case studies are fairly interesting, at least as far as high academese goes. If you can't handle Cindy at her "I seek interventions into research problems created by mainstream critique and western theory, research practices that not only flatten meaning but reify singular authorship instead of valuing collaborative texts", you don't deserve her at her "The framing of good relations is largely unique to Indigenous research, but it is an ethical and holistic approach that would be of broad interest to cultural and digital researchers."
The book is structured in five chapters, an introduction, an account of a paper at the Association of Internet Researchers, a study of the Facebook group "Rezzy Red Proletariat Memes", an interview with the late Coast Salish comics artist Jeffrey Veregge, and the rise and fall of MazaCoin, a cryptocurrency launched by an Ogala Souix man Payu Harris, with each chapter introduced by a Chahta story. This book is about being an Indian academic in cultural rhetorics, about how Indians survive and resist in the 21st century, and about general methodological approaches that might be useful in digital culture. It does a really good job at the first, a decent job at the second, and leaves a lot to be done on the third.
I want to highlight some things I'll take away. The first is an explanation of the slogan "Water Is Life", associated with the Dakota Access Pipeline protest movement. In a settler-colonial mindset, "water is life" means that water is vital to life; humans are 70% water, we begin to die quickly without it, and while water is precious, clean water is an asset that can be calculated and balanced against a full set of priorities. In an Indigenous mindset, that of the Water Protectors, "water is life" means that water is literally alive. Water is a being with moral standing, one that we stand in relationship with. To build an oil pipeline across water resources is an act akin to regularly firing a gun into a neighbor's house. Even if you haven't kill anyone yet, you're going to.
A second is the way that Cindy and Jeffrey Veregge introduced themselves in their interview, by name, by profession (academic and artist), and by tribal affiliation. Cindy was not able to interview Payu Harris, and she speculates that he felt that having given many interviews about MazaCoin, talking to an academic wouldn't be useful to him. Another thread would have been a tie of kinship, from Cindy to another Choctaw to someone in the Ogala Souix to Harris, but she wasn't able to find that tie. These networks are very instantiated.
A third is how Indigenous people remix and rewrite their own history. My own opinion is that any Indian alive today is the survivor of at least three genocides: outright wars of extermination and removal by the American Army and other state sanctioned violence; campaigns of cultural extinction via Indian boarding schools and the suppression of Indian languages and religious/cultural/political traditions; and the ambient pressures of 21st century capitalism which flatten everything into a smear of content consumption. Along with these general trends, there are all the bad (inaccurate, incomplete, disparaging) stories about Indians: Savages (noble or otherwise), drunkards, poor, sick, etc. On one side Forbes and Russia Today are describing Payu Harris as a chief and descendant of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, claims which are at minimum lazy and racist journalism. And on the other side, posters in Rezzy Red Proletariat Memes are using a classical oil painting of 18th century Indian warriors (deerskin clothing, eagle feathers, bows and tomahawks etc.) to make a political claim about land back. We all live in a white male cishet Christian/technocratic hegemony, and we all have different ways of surviving and resisting.
What is shakier is the methodological approach to using stories as a research method. I'm not a digital rhetorician, I'm just an ordinary country doomscroller, but it strikes me that the academic techniques that we use to talk about entities like texts and cultures are entirely fucking inadequate to saying anything insightful, let alone true, about feeds and platforms and the churn of memetic internet activity. For all the talk of "digital natives", these venues are profoundly novel, profoundly artificial, and constantly changing. None of us are indigenous to the internet, and yet some people have the Heart of a Poster and others will never make a good post. Some places are funny, friendly, and interesting, and others are hostile wastelands of bots and scams. But we still don't know how to say that properly, let alone in a way that is durable and true.
The book is structured in five chapters, an introduction, an account of a paper at the Association of Internet Researchers, a study of the Facebook group "Rezzy Red Proletariat Memes", an interview with the late Coast Salish comics artist Jeffrey Veregge, and the rise and fall of MazaCoin, a cryptocurrency launched by an Ogala Souix man Payu Harris, with each chapter introduced by a Chahta story. This book is about being an Indian academic in cultural rhetorics, about how Indians survive and resist in the 21st century, and about general methodological approaches that might be useful in digital culture. It does a really good job at the first, a decent job at the second, and leaves a lot to be done on the third.
I want to highlight some things I'll take away. The first is an explanation of the slogan "Water Is Life", associated with the Dakota Access Pipeline protest movement. In a settler-colonial mindset, "water is life" means that water is vital to life; humans are 70% water, we begin to die quickly without it, and while water is precious, clean water is an asset that can be calculated and balanced against a full set of priorities. In an Indigenous mindset, that of the Water Protectors, "water is life" means that water is literally alive. Water is a being with moral standing, one that we stand in relationship with. To build an oil pipeline across water resources is an act akin to regularly firing a gun into a neighbor's house. Even if you haven't kill anyone yet, you're going to.
A second is the way that Cindy and Jeffrey Veregge introduced themselves in their interview, by name, by profession (academic and artist), and by tribal affiliation. Cindy was not able to interview Payu Harris, and she speculates that he felt that having given many interviews about MazaCoin, talking to an academic wouldn't be useful to him. Another thread would have been a tie of kinship, from Cindy to another Choctaw to someone in the Ogala Souix to Harris, but she wasn't able to find that tie. These networks are very instantiated.
A third is how Indigenous people remix and rewrite their own history. My own opinion is that any Indian alive today is the survivor of at least three genocides: outright wars of extermination and removal by the American Army and other state sanctioned violence; campaigns of cultural extinction via Indian boarding schools and the suppression of Indian languages and religious/cultural/political traditions; and the ambient pressures of 21st century capitalism which flatten everything into a smear of content consumption. Along with these general trends, there are all the bad (inaccurate, incomplete, disparaging) stories about Indians: Savages (noble or otherwise), drunkards, poor, sick, etc. On one side Forbes and Russia Today are describing Payu Harris as a chief and descendant of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, claims which are at minimum lazy and racist journalism. And on the other side, posters in Rezzy Red Proletariat Memes are using a classical oil painting of 18th century Indian warriors (deerskin clothing, eagle feathers, bows and tomahawks etc.) to make a political claim about land back. We all live in a white male cishet Christian/technocratic hegemony, and we all have different ways of surviving and resisting.
What is shakier is the methodological approach to using stories as a research method. I'm not a digital rhetorician, I'm just an ordinary country doomscroller, but it strikes me that the academic techniques that we use to talk about entities like texts and cultures are entirely fucking inadequate to saying anything insightful, let alone true, about feeds and platforms and the churn of memetic internet activity. For all the talk of "digital natives", these venues are profoundly novel, profoundly artificial, and constantly changing. None of us are indigenous to the internet, and yet some people have the Heart of a Poster and others will never make a good post. Some places are funny, friendly, and interesting, and others are hostile wastelands of bots and scams. But we still don't know how to say that properly, let alone in a way that is durable and true.
Orbital by Samantha Harvey
reflective
4.0
Orbital is a gorgeous modern-lit trick: One International Space Station, six astronauts, sixteen orbits, twenty four hours, about being suspended between the mundane and the sublime. This book shines in the flow of its language, and the precise attention to detail paid to the texture of life on the ISS. Sentences link to each other like the trajectory of a satellite, punctation a marker as arbitrary as crossing some boundary one hundred miles below.
What is sublime is the universe, the colors and swirls of Earth with its seas and storms and forests and deserts, the jeweled tracery of cities in the night, and the true infinity of the void. What is sublime is spaceflight, drifting like a fish or an angel through the modules of the ISS. What is sublime is the astronaut's place in history; a narrow bridge between the grounded past and an astral future. What is mundane is the mechanics of keeping bodies and the ISS functional; exercising two hours a day, cleaning filters and toilets, eating meals out of satchels, sending brief emails to family back home, feeding your body waste away in a zero-G environment it was never designed for.
The central metaphor of the book is Velázquez's painting Las Meninas, a 17th century painting famous for ambiguity in the subject, and the multiple points of view. The painting is nominally about the central ladies in waiting, yet Velázquez the artist appears in it, looking at his patrons the King and Queen of Spain, who are reflected in a small mirror indicated that they are standing roughly where you are. In the same way, Orbital is about you-the-reader looking at fictional astronauts looking at a real Earth, mediating Harvey's opinions about the unity of the universe etc.
It's all very clever, it's all very pretty. Not every book needs intense plots or characters, and they are minimal in this one. Chie's mother has died on Earth the day before. Nell is obsessed with the Challenger astronauts. Pietro befriended a Pilipino fisherman who is threatened by a typhoon the ISS crew can see. Shaun carries a postcard of Las Meninas, Anton and Roman are Russian, and one is a ham radio operator and the other one is considering getting a divorce. This is just an ordinary day, aside from the typhoon below and four other astronauts on their way to the moon in a billionaires capsule. It's realistic, astronauts are chosen for their ability to work with each other and not get emotionally entangled, and an explosive decompression or similar accident would be needless drama, but it leaves this book a little thin.
And as one final aside, male authors are notorious for not being able to write women, and I have to say that while Harvey is a gifted writer, at several moments when she examined the innermost thoughts of one the male characters, an astronaut or the husband of an astronaut, I was struck by the utter feminine artifice of the voice, a fantasy of how women want men to think nearly as blind as she "she breasted boobily down the stairs."
It probably doesn't matter. Men don't read books.
What is sublime is the universe, the colors and swirls of Earth with its seas and storms and forests and deserts, the jeweled tracery of cities in the night, and the true infinity of the void. What is sublime is spaceflight, drifting like a fish or an angel through the modules of the ISS. What is sublime is the astronaut's place in history; a narrow bridge between the grounded past and an astral future. What is mundane is the mechanics of keeping bodies and the ISS functional; exercising two hours a day, cleaning filters and toilets, eating meals out of satchels, sending brief emails to family back home, feeding your body waste away in a zero-G environment it was never designed for.
The central metaphor of the book is Velázquez's painting Las Meninas, a 17th century painting famous for ambiguity in the subject, and the multiple points of view. The painting is nominally about the central ladies in waiting, yet Velázquez the artist appears in it, looking at his patrons the King and Queen of Spain, who are reflected in a small mirror indicated that they are standing roughly where you are. In the same way, Orbital is about you-the-reader looking at fictional astronauts looking at a real Earth, mediating Harvey's opinions about the unity of the universe etc.
It's all very clever, it's all very pretty. Not every book needs intense plots or characters, and they are minimal in this one. Chie's mother has died on Earth the day before. Nell is obsessed with the Challenger astronauts. Pietro befriended a Pilipino fisherman who is threatened by a typhoon the ISS crew can see. Shaun carries a postcard of Las Meninas, Anton and Roman are Russian, and one is a ham radio operator and the other one is considering getting a divorce. This is just an ordinary day, aside from the typhoon below and four other astronauts on their way to the moon in a billionaires capsule. It's realistic, astronauts are chosen for their ability to work with each other and not get emotionally entangled, and an explosive decompression or similar accident would be needless drama, but it leaves this book a little thin.
And as one final aside, male authors are notorious for not being able to write women, and I have to say that while Harvey is a gifted writer, at several moments when she examined the innermost thoughts of one the male characters, an astronaut or the husband of an astronaut, I was struck by the utter feminine artifice of the voice, a fantasy of how women want men to think nearly as blind as she "she breasted boobily down the stairs."
It probably doesn't matter. Men don't read books.
Signature Wounds: The Untold Story of the Military's Mental Health Crisis by David Kieran
informative
medium-paced
3.0
Signature Wounds is a comprehensive, if theoretically disorganized, account of how the US Army and the Veterans Administration responded to psychological issues relating to the Global War on Terror. The book describes an array of programs to treat the psychological effects of combat, ultimately closing with the 2009 Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program and the embrace of Martin Seligman's "resilience" positive psychology as doctrine.
At its best, Signature Wounds presents deep accounts of policy entrepreneurship. While some changes were pushed from the top down, many of the efforts involved dedicated medical professionals and low-senior officers (say, Colonels and Major Generals in more staff roles, rather than three and four star generals, or unit commanders) trying to maneuver an institution that is very resistance to change to do something. These are interesting stories about the tension between the time required to develop evidence-based treatments versus the need to provide care immediately to those who are suffering, and about implementing a good idea versus span of control.
The best chapter concerns mTBI (mild Traumatic Brain Injury). One of the key medical developments of this era was the realization that being near explosions causes brain injuries, which manifest as cognitive difficulties and emotional instability. Emotional instability is also one the key diagnostic criteria of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, so teasing out the co-morbidities between physiological and psychological wounds was one of the major medical efforts of the era, leading to an evidentiary compromise that left few people happy.
The rest of the book suffers from redundancy: Kieran organizes his chapters thematically: general combat psychiatry, veteran's suicide, access to care in the active duty military, care for military families, mTBI, active duty suicides, and VA suicides again. This thematic organization is a defensible choice (academic writing is hard), but makes it difficult to piece together a chronology of psychological efforts and to integrate the story with one of the war more broadly.
On a weird note, the invasion of Iraq is recent enough that it's impossible to separate history and politics, and Kieran barely tries. Democratic politicians are quoted at length demanding better Army and VA psychological care, which Kieran outright describes as anti-Bush administration posturing rather than some kind of sincere effort to do good policy. Meanwhile, Rep Steve Stockman (R-TX) Veterans Second Amendment Protection Act, which requires a judge to make a determination of mental incompetence, and was a response to a VA anti-suicide campaign to supply gun locks when requested, is just lawmaking. The fact that the stated rationale for the invasion of Iraq, Saddam's weapons of mass destruction program, was a deliberate lie, and the role of the Coalition Provisional Authority in stoking the civil war in which the US military found itself embroiled in, are simply glossed over. Statements from the architects of the war, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Colin Powell are notable by their absence.
This inability to engage with the elephant in the room is a fatal weakness. Excerpts from veteran's memoirs sprinkled throughout the book suggest that one major source of their distress was that they knew they were fighting for a lie that the country didn't care about. Jonathan Shay's work on PTSD, Achilles in Vietnam (not cited in this book, fyi), locates a primary source of PTSD in the betrayal of moral foundations from above. In as much as the horrors of war are survivable, it's because the military fits them into a heroic context. The war in Iraq, which was transparently an imperial adventure run in a way to minimize the immediate political impacts, was a continuous moral betrayal. I'm hardly objective in this matter, but I didn't write the book. There's no such thing as unbiased history, but the poorly concealed biases in Signature Wounds are embarrassing.
There are interesting pieces in this narrative, which I'd assess as broadly one of demedicalization. While medical ideas serve as policy anchors, such as the combat stress reaction, PTSD, and mBTI, managing the distress of soldiers and veterans became a whole army project, not just one confined to psychiatric or medical specialists. Culture is what it is, and the macho culture of the military could not accept explicit carve outs for counselling. While there are substantial gaps in practice, for example, it is still shockingly difficult to maintain a timely and comprehensive record of veteran suicides, the Army did eventually adapt, if only after it was forced to by events.
At its best, Signature Wounds presents deep accounts of policy entrepreneurship. While some changes were pushed from the top down, many of the efforts involved dedicated medical professionals and low-senior officers (say, Colonels and Major Generals in more staff roles, rather than three and four star generals, or unit commanders) trying to maneuver an institution that is very resistance to change to do something. These are interesting stories about the tension between the time required to develop evidence-based treatments versus the need to provide care immediately to those who are suffering, and about implementing a good idea versus span of control.
The best chapter concerns mTBI (mild Traumatic Brain Injury). One of the key medical developments of this era was the realization that being near explosions causes brain injuries, which manifest as cognitive difficulties and emotional instability. Emotional instability is also one the key diagnostic criteria of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, so teasing out the co-morbidities between physiological and psychological wounds was one of the major medical efforts of the era, leading to an evidentiary compromise that left few people happy.
The rest of the book suffers from redundancy: Kieran organizes his chapters thematically: general combat psychiatry, veteran's suicide, access to care in the active duty military, care for military families, mTBI, active duty suicides, and VA suicides again. This thematic organization is a defensible choice (academic writing is hard), but makes it difficult to piece together a chronology of psychological efforts and to integrate the story with one of the war more broadly.
On a weird note, the invasion of Iraq is recent enough that it's impossible to separate history and politics, and Kieran barely tries. Democratic politicians are quoted at length demanding better Army and VA psychological care, which Kieran outright describes as anti-Bush administration posturing rather than some kind of sincere effort to do good policy. Meanwhile, Rep Steve Stockman (R-TX) Veterans Second Amendment Protection Act, which requires a judge to make a determination of mental incompetence, and was a response to a VA anti-suicide campaign to supply gun locks when requested, is just lawmaking. The fact that the stated rationale for the invasion of Iraq, Saddam's weapons of mass destruction program, was a deliberate lie, and the role of the Coalition Provisional Authority in stoking the civil war in which the US military found itself embroiled in, are simply glossed over. Statements from the architects of the war, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Colin Powell are notable by their absence.
This inability to engage with the elephant in the room is a fatal weakness. Excerpts from veteran's memoirs sprinkled throughout the book suggest that one major source of their distress was that they knew they were fighting for a lie that the country didn't care about. Jonathan Shay's work on PTSD, Achilles in Vietnam (not cited in this book, fyi), locates a primary source of PTSD in the betrayal of moral foundations from above. In as much as the horrors of war are survivable, it's because the military fits them into a heroic context. The war in Iraq, which was transparently an imperial adventure run in a way to minimize the immediate political impacts, was a continuous moral betrayal. I'm hardly objective in this matter, but I didn't write the book. There's no such thing as unbiased history, but the poorly concealed biases in Signature Wounds are embarrassing.
There are interesting pieces in this narrative, which I'd assess as broadly one of demedicalization. While medical ideas serve as policy anchors, such as the combat stress reaction, PTSD, and mBTI, managing the distress of soldiers and veterans became a whole army project, not just one confined to psychiatric or medical specialists. Culture is what it is, and the macho culture of the military could not accept explicit carve outs for counselling. While there are substantial gaps in practice, for example, it is still shockingly difficult to maintain a timely and comprehensive record of veteran suicides, the Army did eventually adapt, if only after it was forced to by events.
Beam Saber by Austin Ramsay
I'm still waiting for my perfect game in this space. Guess I'll have to write it.
4.0
Beam Saber is a FitD game about mecha pilots embroiled in a multisided eternal war. It's a good game, but not a perfect one. First published in Feb 2019, two years after the paper release of Blades in the Dark, it has lots early Blades-hack cruft, and the new systems are not fully integrated.
First the new. This is a game about mechs, Armored Walking Vehicles in the parlance of the setting, and along with the standard BitD actions, there are six more vehicle actions (Battle, Destroy, Maneuver, Bombard, Manipulate, Scan), and a system of vehicle quirks which are expended like Pilot stress. Drives are a new mechanic, two 4-segment clocks recording character ambitions. One or more full Drive clocks can be spent to permanently change the setting, or more boringly, negate harm/damage, make any roll an automatic 6, or provide a mega-assist to another pilot. Drives represent a solid way to align the mechanics and fiction, and provide a crunchy reward once you get there.
Similarly, Connection clocks provide mechanical support to bonds between characters, though with less impact as they only provide a trickle of XP. Having to be explicit about what your character believes about the other characters is likely a good practice at any table. Downtime has also been revamped, and there's new reputation and trust mechanics linking your squad to their faction.
As for the old, playbooks and special abilities are reskinned versions of the Blades defaults. The squad system, with strong and weak holds, is over-complicated for representing how the war is going, while not offering a ton of support for who the opposition is. There's an augmented reality / rogue AI sideline, which seems to be there to parallel the ghost field from Blades.
The setting is... fine. The galaxy is divided between five warring factions: Democracy, Theocracy, Corpocracy, etc. You're on a planet called Earth, which might actually be the ancestral lost home of humanity. Whether it is or not, a Kessler shell of debris makes getting to and from the surface difficult, so this war is fought in the mud.
I've got high standards and opinions about both FitD games and mecha games, and Ramsay has made design choices I don't agree with. Namely, in a mecha game I want support for the following questions.
First the new. This is a game about mechs, Armored Walking Vehicles in the parlance of the setting, and along with the standard BitD actions, there are six more vehicle actions (Battle, Destroy, Maneuver, Bombard, Manipulate, Scan), and a system of vehicle quirks which are expended like Pilot stress. Drives are a new mechanic, two 4-segment clocks recording character ambitions. One or more full Drive clocks can be spent to permanently change the setting, or more boringly, negate harm/damage, make any roll an automatic 6, or provide a mega-assist to another pilot. Drives represent a solid way to align the mechanics and fiction, and provide a crunchy reward once you get there.
Similarly, Connection clocks provide mechanical support to bonds between characters, though with less impact as they only provide a trickle of XP. Having to be explicit about what your character believes about the other characters is likely a good practice at any table. Downtime has also been revamped, and there's new reputation and trust mechanics linking your squad to their faction.
As for the old, playbooks and special abilities are reskinned versions of the Blades defaults. The squad system, with strong and weak holds, is over-complicated for representing how the war is going, while not offering a ton of support for who the opposition is. There's an augmented reality / rogue AI sideline, which seems to be there to parallel the ghost field from Blades.
The setting is... fine. The galaxy is divided between five warring factions: Democracy, Theocracy, Corpocracy, etc. You're on a planet called Earth, which might actually be the ancestral lost home of humanity. Whether it is or not, a Kessler shell of debris makes getting to and from the surface difficult, so this war is fought in the mud.
I've got high standards and opinions about both FitD games and mecha games, and Ramsay has made design choices I don't agree with. Namely, in a mecha game I want support for the following questions.
- The Pornography of Mechanized Violence: The whole point of the genre is big-robot-go-boom. I want guns, I want explosions, I want lasers, I want to feel like an angel of death bestriding the battlefield. FitD can do that, but it isn't great at it. The quirk system and AWV loadout system is similarly adequate.
- Pilot // Machine: In this game, pilots much more support and mechanical complexity than the mechs. In particular, there is not much support for taking a new vehicle for a special mission, and the six mech actions have lot of overlap.
- Your War vs The War: Tragedy as an inciting character moment is a useful reminder that the war has touch you individually, and while the game seems to say that the factions are big and essentially enemies of peace, it's hard to link that to good fiction about the rivalries and friendships between pilots.
I'm still waiting for my perfect game in this space. Guess I'll have to write it.
An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace by Tamar Adler
informative
inspiring
reflective
fast-paced
5.0
An Everlasting Meal is a wonder. I'm not much of a cook. Most of the cookbooks I own are along the lines of "Fast Meals for Busy Idiots", which is a problem, because I love food, and if you're just shoveling calories in your mouth, why not go for pizza, or burgers, or something out of a box.
Adler is a serious cook. She was the chef at Farm 225 in Athens, Georgia, cooked at Chez Panisse, and has been writing about food for over two decades now. She has opinions, but more than opinions, she has genuine enthusiasm for good meals, for doing it right, and for letting your senses and intuition guide you, rather than mechanically following a recipe.
The central point of An Everlasting Meal is to eat like a certain kind of prosperous peasant. Dietary staples are root vegetables, beans, leafy greens, and fatty gristly chunks of meat. Staple carbs like pasta, bread, and rice can be left to the experts and bought from a store. Learn to love the stewpot. Boiling and simmering is a forgiving cooking method that helps food taste more like itself, and leaves rich flavorful broths and ends to be incorporated into the next meal.
I'm not sure I have the patience for the farmer's market recommended in-season produce all the time, but the idea of roasting a giant portion of veggies on Sunday and finding ways to reuse it through the week is very appealing. Advice like "now add a grated cup of parmesan and freshly chopped parsley" is face-slappingly obvious. Woodchips would probably be edible with sufficient parmesan.
This is a book that is a joy to read, and deserves careful study.
Adler is a serious cook. She was the chef at Farm 225 in Athens, Georgia, cooked at Chez Panisse, and has been writing about food for over two decades now. She has opinions, but more than opinions, she has genuine enthusiasm for good meals, for doing it right, and for letting your senses and intuition guide you, rather than mechanically following a recipe.
The central point of An Everlasting Meal is to eat like a certain kind of prosperous peasant. Dietary staples are root vegetables, beans, leafy greens, and fatty gristly chunks of meat. Staple carbs like pasta, bread, and rice can be left to the experts and bought from a store. Learn to love the stewpot. Boiling and simmering is a forgiving cooking method that helps food taste more like itself, and leaves rich flavorful broths and ends to be incorporated into the next meal.
I'm not sure I have the patience for the farmer's market recommended in-season produce all the time, but the idea of roasting a giant portion of veggies on Sunday and finding ways to reuse it through the week is very appealing. Advice like "now add a grated cup of parmesan and freshly chopped parsley" is face-slappingly obvious. Woodchips would probably be edible with sufficient parmesan.
This is a book that is a joy to read, and deserves careful study.
The Best War Ever: America and World War II by Michael C.C. Adams
2.0
If you look for 'revisionist history' in the dictionary, you'll probably find this book. Adams goes at great length to penetrate the mystique of WW2, showing it as an ugly conflict where the average soldier lived in total terror, not knowing what he fought for, that made only half-hearted steps towards integrating American society, and helped destroy the social fabric of rural America. All of this may be true, and it serves as a nice counter-balance to the usual hagiographies, but as a whole this book exaggerates, elides, and is totally American centric. What about Germany, Russia, England, Japan, France, etc? (okay, it says that in the title, but really, those guys fought too). The home front stuff was alright for social history, but you might as well go to the way better primary source for the battles and read Eugene Sledge's With the Old Breed.
Volta: Science and Culture in the Age of Enlightenment by Giuliano Pancaldi
3.0
This book is pretty much what it says on the cover, a biography of Alessandro Volta, inventor of the battery, as well as an exploration of the Enlightment through his life and times. A great book for anyone interested in early batteries, or Italian natural philosophers, but Volta was in many way a peripheral figure in the Enlightenment. Some interesting theory about the use of science in diplomacy, to project power and prestige, but there are probably more fun sources elsewhere.