Dear reader, I have been remiss. I have not posted in my Random Thoughts series in almost seven months. I have been doing a lot of random thinking since then. And I have collected even more random funny images. So without further ado, enjoy this Super Sized and Super Random collection of my Random Thoughts!
I've been reading more dystopian stuff than usual lately, not just in the news, but because I'm currently teaching a class on Utopias and Dystopias. I'm also teaching my Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy class, and depending on who you ask, Plato's Republic is a utopia, dystopia, or both.
What's the point of utopias and dystopias? Utopias seem, well, utopian and unobtainable. And boring, but I think the "boring" label is more a result of lack of imagination than anything inherent to utopias. I think we'd still have plenty to keep us busy if everyone's basic needs were met--we could finally go about figuring out what this whole human experience is supposed to be. But I digress.
Dystopias are either never going to happen, or depending on where and when you look, have been or are already happening. Especially as I write this on Indigenous Peoples Day, I'm reminded of a comment from Indigenous creator Dale Deforest at a panel at Worldcon in August that a lot of Native Americans have been living in various states of dystopia for hundreds of years and still today (I'm hoping for a swift and effective response to a typhoon in Alaska that has affected mostly Indigenous people).
But I think the "could it happen?" question is the wrong question, or at least not the most interesting question to ask. (Not that this stopped me from asking this last week when I showed my students an episode of The Handmaid's Tale). Sure, dystopias might remind us that things could get worse, and utopias might remind us that we could do better, but I think they do something even deeper.
As Mary Midgley said in her essay "Practical Utopianism," utopias and dystopias show us possibilities, often quite exaggerated, of where we could go, roadmaps of roads we may never travel, all to change our sense of the terrain. And I'd like to think this type of story can also expand our sense of possibility as what Ursula Le Guin called "realists of a larger reality."
Exploring the terrain of dystopias and utopias helps us to explore what we think about ourselves, our societies, and more, to find the many utopias, dystopias, and somewheres in between.
Toward that end, here are my reviews of some of the terrain of utopias and dystopias that I've been exploring lately: Utopia by Thomas More, The Blazing World by Margaret Cavendish, We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, The Hunger Games by Susanne Collins, Divergent by Veronica Roth, and Authority by Jeff VanderMeer.
If you are ever stuck in a dystopia or an ambiguous utopia, dear reader, may the odds be ever in your favor!
I meant to post this in July, after posting Part 1, but my summer plans overtook me. So here I am posting Part 2 after both my full Hugo ballot, a post on my Worldcon talks, and my report on Worldcon. Oh, well.
Here are my reviews of Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky, Someone You Can Built a Nest In by John Wiswell, and The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett. The last of these won this year's Hugo for Best Novel, which didn't bother me as I enjoyed the book, but it did somewhat surprise me: I found it enjoyable, but ultimately not as innovative or interesting as the others.
Anyway, I was getting close to the Hugo voting deadline when I wrote my original reviews on Goodreads, so I've expanded them just a bit here.
I've been home from Seattle Worlcon for a couple weeks now, but school starting immediately upon my return has kept me too busy to make a post about it. Until now! I'm happy to report that I had a great time!
Due to weather on Tuesday, my flight from Chattanooga to Chicago was canceled, and I had to rebook for the next day. I barely made it to my first panel in Seattle on Wednesday evening. I walked into the panel a few minutes late straight from the airport. Oh, and they lost my luggage in Chicago (I was reunited with it in Seattle several hours later).
Summer is almost over for me (school starts next week), but I have one more trip planned: I'm thrilled to be going to Seattle tomorrow to attend the 2025 Worldcon (World Science Fiction Convention)! Worldcon will take place at the Seattle Convention Center Aug. 13-17, 2025.
I will be on one panel Wednesday evening and giving one talk on Saturday afternoon, both in part through my role as President of the Science Fiction and Philosophy Society. Both are also in honor of my late friend and colleague Anand Vaidya, especially his work on artificial intelligence and moral standing. I'm hoping to someday teach a course on AI in science fiction and philosophy, so Worldcon will be a good step into that process.
My friend and cofounder of the Science Fiction and Philosophy Society, science fiction author Manjula Menon, will be on the first panel with me. She's also on a whole bunch of other panels, including one on "Artificial Honesty," South Asian speculative fiction, and more! See the full schedule for details.
More specific information on my panels can be found below. Maybe I will see you in Seattle!
I meant to post a bunch of reviews along the way as I did this year's Hugo reading, but the summer sort of got in the way. Oh, well. I still may write longer reviews for some of these and post them here (I did get to some of the novels in June), but since Hugo voting was due last night, I figured I'd just post my full ballot with a few general explanations while it's fresh in my mind. You can find short reviews for most of these on my 2025 Hugo Goodreads shelf.
Note that I didn't vote in all the categories. It's just too much (it's like taking on a part-time job!), and I don't feel all that qualified to judge some of the categories. Still, I managed to vote in most of the categories this year. See the Hugo website for the full list of categories and nominees.
As usual, I'm loosely following my principles of Hugo voting that I'm most interested in works that somehow break new ground in the genre, have some philosophical element, and/or are just plain enjoyable. Maybe other Hugo voters go on vibes, which are impossible to entirely eliminate, but I try reward things that are on the whole doing something new and interesting.
I'm thrilled to be attending Worldcon this year where I'll be on a panel and doing an academic track presentation as part of the Science Fiction and Philosophy Society. Maybe I will see you in Seattle at this year's Hugo ceremony on August 16!
As has become tradition, I've waited way too long to get started, but the good news is that I'm halfway through the novels. So, here's what I thought so far about The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley, Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky, and A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher. I will review the other three novels soon in Part 2, and, of course, there are novellas and many more categories as well. Stay tuned!
I first read Clive Barker's The Great and Secret Show about 30 years ago. It always stuck with me. Not so much specific plot points or even all the major characters, but certain ideas, scenes, and turns of phrase. I'm glad I decided to read this again. I loved it every bit as much, if not more, than I did the first time.
Like much of Barker's work, this might properly be called dark fantasy rather than horror, per se, although there are plenty of horror elements.
It's also, as the introduction to this edition informs us, a result of Barker's engagements with philosophy. As an academic philosopher, I was amused by Barker's distain for "philosophical equations" encountered in university philosophy courses (a fair criticism of much of what we in the biz call analytic philosophy). Instead, Barker has been intrigued by Big Questions about belief, imagination, and mind--a point which makes a lot of sense of his work, especially when you combine it with some Lovecraftian sensibilities and Barker's own gnarly imagination.
And when it comes to The Great and Secret Show in particular, Barker tells us that Carl Jung was a major inspiration. The idea of a collective unconscious is too fertile for artists and storytellers like Barker to pass up, and I can see why, especially when Barker creates something as interesting as the concept of the dream-sea of Quiddity as his own riff on Jungian ideas.
But maybe I'm getting ahead of myself. What about the plot?
We meet a man named Jaffe who works in a dead letter office in Omaha, Nebraska in 1969. He begins reading letters about something called the Art, a secret, more real world beyond our own, and a sea of imagination and dreams called Quiddity. He embarks on a quest to control this other realm for himself (first step: murder his boss). This part of the novel goes a bit quickly, but somehow Barker makes it work as Jaffe goes from miserable postal employee to megalomaniacal murderer in a few dozen pages.
But the real story picks up a few years later in town of Palomo Grove, California. Jaffe and an antagonist of sorts called Fletcher become something more than human, and draw the town into their machinations, which result, in complicated Barker dark fantasy fashion, in the birth of several babies with both human and nonhuman fathers.
Okay, the story really picks up 18 years later with the babies now young adults. And Jaffe and Fletcher are still around, but also not exactly human.
Things get, um, complicated from there. But every twist and turn along the way is worth the journey. We meet a washed-up Hollywood comedian. A journalist and his friend named Tesla, both of whom become vital to the story later, as are some of those 18 year olds (Tesla in particular is an awesome character). There's also an ape-human hybrid, a wizard residing in a pocket dimension, and a character from other Barker stories who shows up briefly in this one and (if I remember correctly) much more in the sequel, Everville (which I also plan to re-read). And eventually there are horrors from beyond...
And yes, this is Clive Barker, so there's plenty of gnarly violence and kinky sex (and plenty of gnarly sex and kinky violence).
I don't know if I could summarize the whole plot here if I wanted to, which gets complicated and involves a lot of surprises, but my recommendation is to enjoy floating on the currents in Barker's dream-sea.
But what about Quiddity? It's a beautiful and deep idea. Definitely one I remembered for the last few decades. It's Barker's riff on Jungian ideas, with his own special touches. Particularly beautiful is the idea that all humans swim in the dream-seas of Quiddity three times in their lives: once at birth, once when they sleep next to the love of their life, and again before death. It's the source of love and life and creation for human beings (and not just human beings).
It's also dangerous, at least in the hands of those who want to control it rather than be shaped and invigorated by it. I love this way of thinking through the deep mystery of the human creative process: what are we doing when we create art and stories? How is creativity tied to love and hope and meaning? Are there worlds beyond that which we can see and hear and touch? Are those worlds more real than we know? How would we know?
Reading this again makes me wonder if Barker was one of the authors that made me think the kinds of thoughts that led me to study philosophy. I'm glad he turned away from academia and became, well, Clive Barker. But I'm also grateful that he's still enough of a philosopher to write beautiful, deep, and complicated works like The Great and Secret Show. Barker may also have explored a form of philosophical idealism somewhat similar to Kashmiri Shaivism in classical Indian philosophy (all is mind, and mind is a type of creativity).
Like Quiddity itself, however, The Great and Secret Show is vaster than I can summarize here. My advice: take the plunge for yourself.
I have gotten behind on my reviews again. D'oh! Part of the blame is a trip I took last month, a trip on which I read these two books! So, maybe this is a good excuse for a double review post for The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter and The Orphaned Worlds by Michael Cobley.
Meanwhile, my annual reading of the Hugo finalists has begun, so look for those reviews soon! (I also will be at Worldcon again this year!)
I have gotten behind on posting book reviews lately (I did get one last month), so I thought I should get around to that now that the spring semester is over and grades are entered.
And today just happens to be May the 4th, aka Star Wars Day (as observed recently based on the pun on the date), so I figured I would add a little bit about the latest season of the Star Wars show, Andor. Also, like many other people, I saw and had a lot of thoughts about Ryan Coogler's Sinners.
Books reviewed here: She Who Knows by Nnedi Okorafor, A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas, The Waste Lands by Stephen King, The 1619 Project, edited by Nikole Hannh-Jones, Orbital by Samantha Harvey, John Dies at The End by Jason Pargin, and How Fascism Works by Jason Stanley.
There is also a super secret Star Wars day review hidden in here...
Let the reviews commence!
It took me a bit to get back into this story of Roanhorse's Beneath Earth and Sky series and to remember who’s who, but once I did, it was engaging and I still love this world as explored in this third and final (?) volume of the series. (See my thoughts on volume one here and volume two here).
Roanhorse continues a great exercise in "fantasy doesn't have to be based on European history and folklore." And I'm here for that 100%. I really love this fantasy inspired by the Americas. I love Tolkien, but fantasy can be so much more than "vaguely Tolkienesque," and Roanhorse is doing some of the best work in that direction.
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| A shot of the Hands Off Protest in Chattanooga, TN, April 5, 2025. You can see me in the street on duty as a crossing guard. (Credit: Sophia Cowan) |
Yesterday, April 5, 2025, saw the the confluence of two events. For Star Trek fans, it was First Contact Day, a day that celebrates first contact between humans and Vulcans, which in most Star Trek timelines will take place on April 5, 2063 (a mere 38 years from now!). Yesterday was also a Hands-Off protest with over 1000 individual events around the US, including here in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Millions of Americans nationwide protested the recent dramatic actions of the Trump administration and his ally Elon Musk.
How on Earth (or any other planet) could these two events be connected?
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.
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| The masks I carry with me everywhere, even though I rarely wear them these days. |
Five years ago today, the world changed with one press conference. The World Health Organization declared that the COVID-19 health crisis was officially a pandemic. I was traveling at the time. I cut my trip short and rented a car to drive home instead of flying. And everything changed.
Or did it?
I've been writing these pandemiversary posts since 2021. I often use it as a chance to reflect on how this experience has changed myself and others--and whether any of us have learned anything through our collective trauma.
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| MLK Day Parade, Chattanooga, TN, Jan. 20, 2025 |
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| The Chattanooga MLK Day Parade wraps up with the Howard High School Marching Band near the mural at the corner of MLK Blvd. and Peeples St. (Jan. 20, 2025) |
It's a chilly afternoon here in Chattanooga, TN, and I went down to watch our local MLK Day Parade. It's in the low 20's Fahrenheit (around -5 Celsius), which is considerably colder than usual for this part of the world, so the turnout was lower than usual. In the past, I've participated in the parade with my local chapter of United Campus Workers, but we didn't get organized in time this year. Since MLK Day is my favorite holiday and there's a weirdness this year as it coincides with a Presidential Inauguration, I figured I'd just go down by myself.
I took some pictures! And here they are, along with a bit of commentary. I will have a lot more commentary on the day and the state of US politics in another post, coming soon.
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| The Bessie Smith Center (the parade goes right by it) |
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| The parade begins! |
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| A good MLK quote for the parade |
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| Another mural on the parade route |
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| Obligatory selfie (I only break out the warm hat and scarf a couple days around these parts, but today was one of those days) |
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| One of my favorite New York landmarks: The Empire State Building |
After a nice, but all-too-short winter break, I'm hitting the ground running this week with a start to my spring semester as well as travel to the American Philosophical Association Eastern Division Conference in New York City! I'll be chairing a panel called "Building a Network of Scholars in Indian Philosophy: The Indian Philosophy Blog and Beyond" on Thurs. Jan. 9. I've been part of The Indian Philosophy Blog since 2015, so this will be a nice time to celebrate the blog as well as a chance to meet some fellow scholars and think about the present and future of our little sub-discipline.
