Dear reader, I have been somewhat remiss in recent months about posting book reviews. To be completely honest, I have been a bit remiss in writing them at all. I mark them "read" intending to write reviews later and then... just sort of run out of steam or get busy or whatever. I've had Goodreads tabs open for months... At last the time has come to remedy this self-inflicted promise to myself. So here are some short-ish reviews of Almost Coming Home by Ursula K. Le Guin, Orientalism by Edward Said, Wool by Hugh Howey, A Touch of Darkness by Scarlett St. Clair, The Machine Crusade by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, and The Golden Apple by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson.
Almost Coming Home by Ursula K. Le Guin
This book is world building in its purest form. I'm glad I read this as a Le Guin fan and as a lover of world building. People who need things like conventional plots, characters to identify with, a cohesive narrative arc, etc. will probably not enjoy this at all, with the possible exception of some of the longer stories. There is something like a "novel" in several parts about the life of a woman named Stone Telling.
But otherwise this is, like I said, world building in its pure form. You get myths, legends, historical accounts, poems, songs, recipes, anthropological accounts, drawings, and so on. And an extensive glossary of an imagined language! And maps! And the world is so cool! It's a far future Northern California where people have, after some distant apocalypse, learned to live more in harmony with the land and with each other, or at least the main cultural group we get to know: the Kesh. Nowadays, we'd call this "solar punk," and maybe this is one of the founding documents of that sub-genre.
It's leaning utopian, sure, but to borrow a phrase from one of Le Guin's more traditionally structured novels, it's an "ambiguous utopia" (okay, maybe slightly less ambiguous than The Dispossessed!). In one short story, a group begins a small war while the narrator is angry at them for doing so. But for the most part, the Kesh and most of their neighbors do live in a sort of lo-fi peace. And it's delightful!
As the philosopher Mary Midgley says, utopias are not meant as literal blue prints of where we will go, but they shine a spotlight on where we might hope to go or new spots in the conceptual space of possibility.
My favorite utopias are the Culture of Iain M. Banks, Star Trek, and Le Guin's Hainish novels. I'd move to any of those in a heartbeat, but if someone offered to take me to live among the Kesh, those people who "will have lived" in Northern California, I might be almost as excited to leave, perhaps I'd even be always coming home!
(Some early editions used to come with a cassette tape of music from the Kesh, which is now available online.)
(See a slightly different version on Goodreads)
Orientalism by Edward Said
There's probably not much new I can say about this complex, influential book. I figured I would finally read the whole thing after having read parts of it and having heard others talk about it for decades. Having finally read the whole thing for myself, I do recommend it for any academic who works in any sort of cross-cultural field (for instance, I study classical South Asian philosophy). I also recommend it for anyone who wants a deeper understanding of what it is to live in our complicated, multicultural world.
One thing that stands out for me, especially against a lot of the hype both pro and con, is Said's deep commitment to humanist understanding (something he explicitly says in his 2003 Preface and 1994 Afterword). Said's Orientalism is not a rejection of any project of cross-cultural understanding as such. Rather, it's a call to be more careful and thoughtful about the traps scholars have fallen into and continue to reinscribe, pointing toward new, more nuanced, more skeptically self-critical projects of cultural understanding. This is one of those books that will influence me for a long time.
(See also my Goodreads review.)
Wool by Hugh Howey
Howey's not breaking much new ground or probing into hitherto unplumbed depths (those silos have been there a long time, both literally in the story and figuratively in the world of science fiction), but it's extremely well done and tells an interesting story.
The Apple TV adaptation finally got me to pick up this book. It's close to the TV series, at least at first. We meet a society of about 10,000 people who live in an underground silo. The basis of their society is the story that it's not safe to go outside due to some past apocalypse. The world building is detailed enough to be believable, but it doesn't drag down the momentum of the story. We meet several characters who start to uncover possible flaws in the origin story of their society. It's somewhat standard dystopian stuff, but Howey builds the mystery and does the reveals well.
Some of the characters are a bit different than they are on the show. Juliette, the more-or-less "main" character, is a bit more brash in the book than she is in the show (or maybe that's just how Rebecca Ferguson plays it), while Bernard, the more-or-less main antagonist, is even more unlikeable in the book (he doesn't benefit from Tim Robbins's charisma, anyway).
Since they live underground in a fabricated reality, it's hard for me to NOT make comparisons to Plato's Cave. And as in Plato's Cave, it's those who dare to educate themselves and ask difficult, probing questions that eventually .... well, let's not spoil how it all plays out in the novel (I won't worry about spoiling the 2300-year-old Plato's Republic). Let's call this Plato's Silo!
I've heard the sequels are really different, but if they're anything like this solidly readable novel with an intriguing central mystery, I look forward to reading them.
A Touch of Darkness by Scarlett St. Clair
My book club picked this one and I have been wanting to check out at least one example of the romantasy genre that has taken over the fantasy section in recent years just to see what the hype is all about, so here we are. I can't say this is exactly my thing, but I get why other people like it, if anything, for the steamy parts, which are, well, pretty steamy.
It's a pretty straightforward retelling of the Persephone and Hades story, but set in some kind of quasi-modern setting where Greek gods and mortals coexist. The world building is pretty thin. It's something like a contemporary rom-com spliced into the Persephone/Hades story: older powerful hot man and younger inexperienced hot woman, inexplicable love at first sight, excruciating will-they-or-won't-they drama, the thing where the two people don't like each other due to a misunderstanding, but then they make up (with repeated bouts of spicy makeup sex featuring increasingly ridiculous euphemisms for body parts), etc.
The plot is quite trope-y. And some of the things the protagonist says and does made me roll my eyes or even laugh out loud. And Hades is a weird, obsessive creep, or he would be if he were a real person in the real world. This is fantasy, after all, both in the sense of the genre and the everyday meaning; I get that few people would actually want someone like Hades in real life, but it can be fun to read about.
The writing is a bit trope-y, too, but it's readable enough. It's a quick read, even if I did maybe zone out a bit on some of the side plots.
So, all-in-all, as I said, this is maybe not my thing, but I'm not judging you if it's your thing. Those steamy scenes, though... I totally get that. Even my eye rolling and snickering were part of the fun.
The Machine Crusade by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson
In the past, I've defended these latter-day "McDune" novels by Frank Herbert's son Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson (BH/KJA). McDonald's or Taco Bell (my favorite) aren't "good" food per se, but sometimes they can hit the spot. Likewise, Frank Herbert built such a layered and intriguing universe that it's fun to spend some time there even if the "McDune" books aren't as good.
But I may have reached even my own limits in making this excuse with The Machine Crusade, the second book in the Butlerian Jihad trilogy. (I read the first book, The Buterlian Jihad, over 20 years ago).
...
All the usual complaints about BH/KJA are on full display: two-dimensional characters, plodding plots with no arcs, weird additions of things that Frank Herbert almost definitely did not intend, pulpy writing, poorly realized women characters (an intellectual badass who worries about being pretty for a man!), being at least twice as long as it needs to be (almost 800 pages!) ... and little of the philosophical depth and brilliance of Frank Herbert's novels.
...
The tragedy for me is that a really interesting novel could have been written about the Butlerian Jihad, which in Dune always seemed as much a philosophical and spiritual struggle about human nature as it was a any kind of physical war with machines. Such a novel would, in my mind, be more like God Emperor of Dune: lots of deep philosophical conversations punctuated with exciting plot elements. But in this version of the Butlerian Jihad it all becomes bad Terminator fan fiction with some Dune elements added to spice things up. It's not a deep struggle about what it means to be human (as I think Frank meant), but another bland military space opera. Will I read the last book in the trilogy? This second one really was a slog, so it may be another 20 years. But who am I kidding? I just love Dune too much.
I tend to think of the BH/KJA books as "what could have been" or one version of the Dune universe. Maybe a Kwisatz Haderach could see all the other possible versions in the vast and fascinating Dune multiverse.
The Golden Apple by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson
This is the type of thing that actively resists anything resembling a plot summary, but the wild conspiracies get deeper and wilder. There are more Lovecraft references. More details on Discordianism. I have no idea whether this will all lead to any real conclusion in the third volume, but honestly, who cares? I'll just look forward to the ride, wherever it takes me (if the Justified Ancients of Muu Muu allow it...).
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