21 Friday Jun 2024
Posted in Uncategorized
In August I’ll have another story out in the anthology Two Hour Transport 2 from Fairwood Press. Preorders are already being accepted at the publisher’s website! Check out the cover–I’m so excited to be sharing a TOC with so many amazing authors.
20 Thursday Jun 2024
Posted in book reviews
Tags
A few years back during a conversation with a fellow tracking student, they mentioned a project they were interested in: investigating tracking in Lord of the Rings. I recently re-read the first two novels and the frequency of tracking, how it’s used to reveal plot points and character behavior as well as important details of Middle-Earth’s landscape and history, jumped out at me. Tracking doesn’t just occur occasionally in LotR; it’s a thread running through the entire story. Among other things, it underlines Aragorn’s claim to the kingship of Gondor: here is someone who knows the country he moves through with an intimacy of belonging that counters any claims of his being an outsider. It’s not as overt as his leadership against the armies of Mordor, his prowess on the battlefield, or his work in the Houses of the Healing, but it underscores his deep knowledge of the world in which he lives.
This possession of deep knowledge that informs both perception and understanding also describes Hild, Nicola Griffith’s fictionalization of real-life British saint and historical figure Hilda of Whitby. In Menewood, Griffith’s second novel featuring this protagonist, Hild is required to step out of the role created to protect her from the vicissitudes of seventh-century British dynastic conflict and into one where she must use her intellect and skill to survive, to protect her friends and allies, and to exact retribution against those who destroyed all she held dear.
Tracking plays a prominent role in this story, and not only in reading marks and signs to find out where a quarry has gone. Hild’s ability to notice, interpret, and predict rivals that of Sherlock Holmes. Whether the quarry is a deer, an intimate friend, or a sworn enemy, her method remains the same: an art of noticing that reads the stories the landscape tells, with uncanny accuracy. Though onlookers have a tendency to ascribe her abilities to witchery or divine providence, it’s clear all along that Hild’s is a human skill: honed to a rare capability, but human all the same. At one point, when she observes birds taking flight and by this predicts and mediates trouble for herself and her companions, I was reminded of a story the tracker and naturalist Jon Young likes to tell about locating a mountain lion by following bird alarms. (He was successful.)
So I want to recommend this book to all my tracking friends, but that’s not the only reason to read Menewood. Griffith has always been skilled at immersing the reader into the lives and worlds of her characters, whether they’re an exiled scion in a cyberpunkish future (Slow River), a tough-as-nails Norwegian ex-cop (The Blue Place, Stay, Always), or a government agent re-establishing contact with a colony on another planet (Ammonite). That skill was in full flower in Hild, and even more so in Menewood, as the stakes of Hild’s life and her people’s lives are raised to the highest possible. Hild’s status as something of an oracle—a godmouth, in the parlance of the novel—was always a precarious one, with the necessity of striking a fine balance between accurate foresight and telling her patron, the ambitious, cunning, but shortsighted Edwin king of Deira, what he wants to hear. That this eventually goes catastrophically wrong is itself foreseeable, and brings about one of the most vivid, difficult, and brutal parts of the novel. When Hild emerges from the disaster, it is with the recognition that she will have to step forward into the fullness of her power, leveraging all of her intelligence, discernment, physical resilience, and capacity for bringing out the capacities of others. (I found myself wishing that all middle managers were like Hild.) In roughly the novel’s first half, she’s on something of a pedestal, placed there by the ambitions and goals of others. In the second half, she stands on her own.
Other reviewers have remarked on how readers may find themselves at sea with the history, place names, and people participating in this story; many of the latter did exist, but unlike more recent episodes of British history, little is known about them. As for place names, those have mostly changed; Griffith inserts a few deliberate anachronisms to help readers along. I found myself consulting the family trees, glossary, and maps far more often than I usually do when reading the sorts of books that tend to include them. This is the kind of thing that either interferes with your enjoyment of a book, or not; I found that it didn’t in this case, and actually helped me understand some of both the political and physical landscapes of the story better than otherwise. This is perhaps in part because this is a real landscape that—climate change and modern industrial development notwithstanding—to some extent still exists today. In addition, Griffith did a lot of research into what the landscape of her story looked like back then, and it shows. Landscape affects behavior, and that’s as true for humans as it is for other animals. Even in our increasingly automated and convenient modern world, this is true; it’s definitely true for Hild and her contemporaries, who of necessity live in relationship so intimate to their land that it shapes their very natures.
That intimacy and the material reality of it is one of many immersive aspects of Menewood. I’ve read few novels where the assertion that “an army marches on its stomach” is more true and evident than in this one; a moment where Hild encourages her followers to snack on what are essentially Fruit Roll-Ups before a battle is a moment of levity and insight all rolled into one (gotta carb-load before heavy physical exertion!), and then there’s the running not-really-a-joke where she encourages them to carry eggs with them. (Frank Reynolds would approve.) That materiality and physicality is everywhere present in Menewood, even in its darkest and grimmest moments—yet balanced with a wonderful economy in Griffith’s prose. That may seem like an odd thing to say about a novel that clocks in at over 700 pages in hardcover, but it’s true: this is not a story that wallows in gory details, even though there’s gore aplenty in the battles and their aftermaths. The same selectivity of detail makes for some surprisingly strong character moments; Griffith is a master at turning a phrase, an expression, or a gesture into a communication that speaks volumes. This is as crucial in the novel’s most intimate moments as it is in its most high-stakes political negotiations. (Sometimes, those are the same thing.)
I hesitate a bit to say that those jonesing for the remaining A Song of Ice and Fire books would be well served to check out Menewood and its predecessor, but they do scratch a bit of the same itch. Okay, there’s no dragons or frozen zombies marching out of the north, but there is a wall of massive strategic importance, and the political stratagems and maneuverings eventually breaking into armed conflict are if anything more intricate and sophisticated (though the armies, once they clash, are far smaller, as befits the period). So if that’s your jam, Menewood is immensely satisfying.
There’s also far more going on in it than that comparison might imply. It’s a fascinating story, richly detailed, with all the depth and complexity that make Griffith’s novels so rewarding. I hope it won’t be ten years before the next one.
04 Thursday Apr 2024
Posted in book reviews, It Came from the To-Read Pile
While I mostly write about new (or at least new-ish) books here, my to-read pile has a backlog occupying several years and a multitude of bookshelves and boxes before we even get to the actual stacks of books forming a retaining wall next to my bed. It’s a haphazard collection, assembled piecemeal and somewhat at random. Rather like the library in A Canticle for Leibowitz.
If you’re into classic science fiction, you’ve probably heard of this one even if you haven’t read it. It’s one of those titles that turns up on lists, has yet to go out of print, and while some of it reads pretty dated now (even allowing for a nuclear apocalypse in the interim, it’s hard to read communication technologies that were cutting edge in the 1950s as futuristic, and the only woman in the book with a name is dead), it’s pretty easy to see why it’s on such lists, and why people continue to read it. The back matter on the mass-market paperback copy I picked up years ago is evocative:
In a hellish, barren desert, a humble monk unearths a fragile link to 20th-century civilization. A handwritten document from the Blessed Saint Leibowitz that read: pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels—bring home for Emma
Canticle was published in 1959 and bespeaks an awareness of atomic annihilation that was still present, albeit less immediate, when I was growing up in the 1980s. Thus the survival of something as pedestrian and random as a shopping list (though, as emerges during the story, the survival of this particular shopping list is less random than that back cover text might imply) perfectly sets up the story of struggling to preserve fragmentary knowledge against not only the vicissitudes of time, but against deliberate attempts to obliterate it. What is preserved might be so removed from its original context as to make no sense; or, it might tantalizingly hint at that context which has been lost. Both occur in A Canticle for Leibowitz, a fix-up that links together three distinct stories separated by time, but all centered on a Catholic monastery located in the American Southwest following a nuclear apocalypse.
Climate change has pretty much replaced nuclear war as the thing that will destroy humanity in SF or disaster fiction, but for decades a mushroom cloud was how the world would end—definitely with a bang rather than a whimper—and day after-type stories were pretty common. What’s rather remarkable about Leibowitz is its setting—though given that one of the functions of monastic communities in the past had been the preservation of knowledge, it’s a logical one—and hints of the supernatural in the ancient figure who turns up from time to time, seemingly looking for the Second Coming. This setting and this character tie together narratives spaced centuries apart, yet in each one history has a way of repeating, or at least of rhyming with what came before. This is a pretty major theme of the book overall, and it’s one of the ways the monastery continues to justify its existence and resistance to outside interference: its goal is to salvage and preserve, even knowledge that its community believes should not be used and which their predecessors were killed for having and trying to save.
That question—whether there exists knowledge so dangerous that it ought to be destroyed—is never really resolved, and in a way that’s the point of the book. It’s an argument against the notion that human history is a story of progress: that today is better than yesterday, and yesterday was better than last year, and last year was better than a century ago. The prospect of nuclear annihilation was a hell of an argument against this idea all by itself, but in Canticle this is just the mechanism for a wider-ranging observation: that much of human history is striving to keep from falling over our own feet. This manifests in a few different ways beyond the frequent existential threats to the monastery, its principles, and its ways of life: by the end of Canticle, the shadow of a mushroom cloud once again appears on the horizon, even as humanity prepares to step off planet.
While much of the novel has the feel of a western, with attendant scenes of violence and threatened violence—quite aside from the looming shadow of nuclear annihilation—a lot of what’s important in Canticle happens in conversations. Here, the tensions of the novel play out in verbal sparring, often satirical in tone: between prelates and politicians, between the recurring figure of the ancient pilgrim and the brothers of the monastery, between the preservationists of the abbey and the scientists who want to sift through that preserved knowledge as they attempt to rebuild civilization. That rebuilding, as the end of the novel shows, is a mixed blessing, but Miller is careful not to blame civilization itself. As Douglas Adams wrote, people are a problem.
Despite significant elements of the book being very much of their time, it’s easy to see why Canticle has endured as a classic. The questions that it asks are never really settled; that’s the point. And if the informational storage technologies it depicts seem somewhat antiquated, plenty of librarians and archivists will tell you that in a lot of ways, physical media are easier to preserve, and to access later, than digital ones. In that sense, A Canticle for Leibowitz remains timeless.
23 Saturday Dec 2023
Posted in days in the life, still life
Tags
hogfather, mythology, Newgrange, observances, still life, Stonehenge, wheel of the year, winter, winter solstice
Decades ago now, when I’d left behind the monotheism I was (somewhat nominally) raised in, I started a multiyear journey knocking around in various forms of paganism as they occur in the U.S.—New England at first, and then the Pacific Northwest. These were, by and large, either Wicca or Wicca-derived, which is to say that they draw most of their inspiration and practice from European antecedents, whatever appropriations from elsewhere have occurred along the way. Of key importance in all of them were solstices and equinoxes, moments in the relationship between planet and sun in the former’s revolution around the latter that marked points of extremity.
My understanding of and association with these things was largely symbolic, but one of the things about living in the Pacific Northwest (as in many of the places where deep myths around these celestial occurrences originate) is that you really can’t help but notice the seasons. Notice them, at least, even if it’s only to observe that it’s rained for seven days straight, or the sun has set and it’s not even 5 pm yet, or it seems like it takes more coffee to get through the day than it did six months ago. Point being, whatever symbolic or spiritual significance is ascribed to them, these are concrete, observable astronomical phenomena. “Axial tilt is the reason for the season,” as the joke goes. It also happens to be literally true.
We frequently talk about aetiological myths in derogatory ways, highlighting the ignorance of the people who came up with them. I’ve always found this a little unfair, not least because in the present days when we presumably know more, you’ll still find people who come up with the most bizarre, irrational explanations for things that seem designed more to fit their own assumptions than any clear-eyed observation. But also, the deeper one delves into myth, the more apparent it is that the assumption that even aetiologies are meant to be taken literally causes us to miss a great deal of their power, and how mythologies function socially, culturally, and psychologically.
Point being, while the Wiccan Wheel of the Year is cobbled together from several disparate sources, in the time and place that I live I’ve come to find it a useful and surprisingly accurate model for marking the seasons. While current convention in America is to consider the winter solstice as the start of winter, the Wiccan convention of the cross-quarter days sets a seasonal transition right around Halloween. That’s always made more sense to me anyway, especially where I live now, and all the stuff about thinning veils and honoring the dead and the dwindling season and the importance of hospitality seems to say: now it’s wintertime. Outdoors reflects this, with the deciduous trees losing their leaves, the temperatures dropping as the hours of daylight lessen, the birds that I see and hear changing as seasonal migrations begin, and squirrels hurrying at frantic pace to stow forage for the winter. Halloween and Yule mark two points of a liminal time when it’s dark and cold, and it takes extra effort to keep the lights on and ourselves and each other nourished. At a solstice ritual I attended this year the gathering was treated to an appearance of the Mari Lwyd, the Welsh Christmas horse. This is no jolly figure, but a reminder of the dangers of privation and the importance of community. Mythical figures map back to real things in the real world—just not always in the way we think.
This week I started reading Bernd Heinrich’s Winter World as part of my tracking studies. The book’s not just about wildlife activity in winter landscapes, but about what’s going on with them physiologically as the weather gets colder and resources scarcer. Everyone knows that animals hibernate—but what that means is something far more remarkable than, I think, is commonly understood. We can go out into snowy weather and marvel at how the world seems to be sleeping; so much is observable by stepping out the door, or even looking out the window. But there’s a lot more going on in that landscape than meets the eye, from the physics of freezing water to the mechanics of torpor to the effects of changing durations of daylight on circadian clocks. We can’t perceive all of that in an instant, but we can toss up models and stories that feed our intuitive sensations of seasonal change.
Those things affect us, humans, as well, even as I’m sitting in a well-lit dining room typing this on a laptop’s bright screen, while outside the day has one second more of daylight than yesterday. We respond by putting up lights, making giant pots of soup, snuggling under blankets, and doing other things to maintain the bubbles of warmth around ourselves. We, maybe, think about the isolation of previous years, about how our fallow season of rest and ingathering is just when microscopic pathogens that exploit our sociability and need to be with one another tend to thrive. There, again, much is going on that we can’t see, or see only indirectly. Stepping outside at this time of year can be stepping into a silence akin to early in the pandemic, when one day I heard a red-tailed hawk call from further away than I ever had in the city, because the constant traffic on the freeway below my house had been silenced. It feels as though the entire world has gone to sleep.
But it hasn’t. While it’s cold and dark up here, in the Southern Hemisphere it’s the summer solstice; close to the equator, meanwhile, these seasonal extremes are far less pronounced (and those of the Pacific Northwest are mild compared to, say, Alaska, or Finland, or Siberia). These times of rest are local; a time to reconnect with what is near at hand and close to home.
I read something recently, a response to the question of how someone can celebrate the season—or one of the holidays that occur during the season—when there’s so much strife and horror and death in the world. I’d say that that question feels particularly pertinent this year, except that I honestly can’t recall a year that it wasn’t. Anyway, the response said something like this: instead of celebrating, I observe. I like that, not least because all those wintertime legends and stories, however fantastical, were born out of observation.
This morning, I woke up and observed that the daylight had come again.
21 Thursday Dec 2023
Posted in book reviews
Tags
A Stranger in the Citadel, book reviews, Fahrenheit 451, librarianship, libraries, Ray Bradbury, Tobias Buckell
Though A Stranger in the Citadel begins on familiar ground, Buckell plants hints early on to indicate that this books-are-illegal, reading-is-punishable-by-death dystopia isn’t going to go the way the reader most likely expects. That’s a good thing; fresh takes on this particular trope are thin on the ground, even as it unfolds (again) in real life.
As a former librarian I felt especially chilled by the tagline on the front cover, a commandment that emerges at key points in the novel’s unfolding crisis: You shall not suffer a librarian to live. That’s particularly unnerving right now, when libraries are once again a culture-war battleground, and librarians are being accused of prurience by the kinds of people who don’t believe in reading the books they object to before objecting to them.
We’ve been here before, both in fiction and in real life, and it’s not much of a spoiler to observe that the early parts of this story unfold in ways that genre has led us to expect: Lilith, our protagonist, privileged daughter of the ruler of a walled city where literacy is a crime, has first her worldview and then her world shattered by the arrival of a librarian from outside the walls. The librarian, Ishmael, is unsurprised by the unwelcome he receives, but he is one of those for whom his mission matters more than his life. So far, so good, and it’s testimony to Buckell’s skill as a storyteller that this continues to be interesting even if you assume you know where it’s going. There are mysteries: why is literacy not only a mortal sin, but its purveyors automatically condemned to death? Why is this the nature of the bargain by which humanity receives all it needs from the cornucopias that not only feed every city, but provide for every other material need? Why are muskets specifically the weapons the Citadels defenders use, and against what threat? Why, when things fall apart as they inevitably must, does betrayal occur from the quarters that it does?
Much of Lilith’s story lies in answering these questions, though she doesn’t realize it at first. We as readers might sympathize with her desire to restore what she knows to be normal, especially after the last three to four years, but we know before she does that this is a fool’s errand. She’s already been exiled from the Garden, but hasn’t yet found the fruit of knowledge—of good and evil, or of anything else. Indeed, it is her ignorance that leads to her exile, as much as her curiosity, for she has entirely misapprehended the nature of her world and the nature of her own place in it. This is a danger of illiteracy: when you only know one story, to contemplate that others might exist becomes a difficult thought indeed.
A Stranger in the Citadel will remind of Fahrenheit 451, which is deliberate in the sense that the latter was one of Buckell’s inspirations. He works through an element of Fahrenheit 451 that people often miss: the outlawing of books is not something imposed from above by some authoritarian force, at least not at first, but the result of popular demand. The people of Ninetha and the other cities of A Stranger in the Citadel are at least deriving material benefit from the deal. And they have not sacrificed stories: readers will recognize tales told by Ninetha’s griots that are derived from books that we have read. In fact, this is a world with a robust oral tradition, and it seems at first that Buckell is setting literacy and orality in opposition. What he’s actually doing is a lot more interesting; societies with strong oral traditions can and do maintain impressive integrity of their texts, because remembering these texts is a social act. This ultimately makes Lilith more receptive to books and the idea of using books to preserve knowledge than she might otherwise be.
A Stranger in the Citadel does end rather abruptly; I don’t know whether Buckell intends a sequel. There’s certainly enough left open at the book’s end for one, but it’s also not unsatisfactory for the story to wrap where it does. While he never fully explains how the world which is ultimately revealed came about—that could be something for a sequel, if there ever is one—in our present-day situation it’s all too easy to see how we might get from here to there. On the other hand, the future posited in A Stranger in the Citadel is so remote that it’s hard to read it as any sort of caution, even if the librarians in that future have very similar jobs to today. “Knowledge, and the verification of that knowledge, and the classification of that knowledge,” Ishmael says, and it is gratifying as one who used to make my paycheck doing just that to read those words. In the almost two decades that I did that work, it often felt as though few outside the profession understood what we did or why it mattered. For all the remote strangeness of its setting, A Stranger in the Citadel gets that right.
01 Friday Dec 2023
Posted in book reviews
I’m going to start by confessing that I don’t read horror all that often. No shade on the genre, but I got nightmares complete with sleep paralysis after I read The Shining, and the Alien movies disturbed my dreams for weeks. A story’s got to be really good for me to subject myself to the possibility of these kinds of replays. It says something, therefore, that Tananarive Due’s latest novel came to my attention anyway. I’d been hearing about her for some years (and in fact met her very briefly over twenty years ago, which I would not at all expect her to remember) but I have so many books to read already, am I really going to add another one in a genre that I haven’t even read enough of to know whether I like?
The answer is yes, obviously, or I wouldn’t be writing this. And, I’m glad I did.
A trope that I’ll pretty much always show up for is the restless dead, regardless of genre. If ever a country were haunted, America is: colonization, slavery, and war have seen to that. One could reasonably argue that anywhere humans live is subject to the same, but so much of America’s history of these things is so recent that we’re only a few generations out—and really, not even that—from atrocity. The most affecting stories Due has shared from her book tour are of conversations with people who were sent to the reformatory in which her novel is set—one of them quite recently. To paraphrase William Faulkner, the past isn’t dead. It’s not even past.
I was lucky enough to hear Due interviewed by Nisi Shawl, a Seattle writer whose work I’ve long admired. During the interview, she talked about why she had chosen to write this story as fiction rather than as memoir (though she’s done that, too: the book Freedom in the Family covers her mother’s work as a civil rights activist). There’s a way fiction has of telling the truth, even when it’s not literal. Events at the Gracetown School for Boys might not have unfolded exactly as related in The Reformatory; my own personal jury on ghosts is still decidedly deliberating. But it’s easy to imagine that events like those related in the novel took place, and the framing that Due chooses to tell this story provides the reader a means to grapple with some truly disturbing stuff. (Something else she mentioned in that interview: as bad as what the living humans do to each other in this novel, real history is worse. There are monsters in this story, and most of them aren’t ghosts.)
I’m not a big fan of insisting that everything has to be useful, but one of the benefits of fiction is as a vehicle for grappling with difficult, even terrible things. In America right now there are an awful lot of people who would prefer it if we didn’t grapple with the difficult, terrible parts of our history as a nation. But a country that can’t bear to confront its own history is a country with a fatal weakness in its collective character. If reading actual history is too much, well, maybe a fictional story will provide a more accessible avenue.
That’s not the best reason to read The Reformatory, though. The best reason is that it’s a damn good book. Here’s the premise: in June 1950, twelve-year-old Robbie Stephens, Jr., is sent to the Gracetown School for Boys. This is a six-month sentence for the crime of kicking the son of the wealthiest landowner in the area. The son is white; Robbie is Black. Everything that follows unfolds from these circumstances, which are anything but circumstantial. Due has a deft hand with characterization and setting; her scenes are a master class in conveying tension—not just the dramatic tension of the scene, but the social tensions at play in this setting and among these characters. Here, even the best-meaning people have, or believe they have, limited power to change the circumstances before them that they know are terrible; the agents of a system enact that system in racist ways without ever believing themselves to be racist; such systems twist and victimize everyone involved. The story’s ghosts, when they show up, highlight and accentuate the rules of this story and its world that its author has already established.
Despite all of this, The Reformatory does not read as didactic. It is, in the end, about a family trying to stay together against impossible odds, and the strength of community, and the importance of recognizing evil when we see it. It’s been getting accolades since the day it was published, and deservedly so: this is the work of a master of craft and story, and now I’ve got to go back and read everything else she’s published.
23 Thursday Nov 2023
Posted in ruminations
There’s this image that keeps going around on social media. If you’re on Facebook you’ve almost certainly seen it: a big-eyed, sad-looking baby bird with bright blue and gold plumage and weird-looking feet. This, per the accompanying text, is a baby peacock:
Except it’s not. It’s not a baby bird at all.
The thing about baby birds is that they’re unobtrusive. When much of the rest of Nature is trying to eat you, and you don’t have any means of defending yourself, one way to survive is to just not be noticeable. It’s a strategy common to a lot of baby animals, from birds to deer.
But let’s say you don’t know that. Going by Google search results these days, looking up a baby peacock gets you either the image I posted above, or something that looks like it belongs in a backyard chicken hutch. (The latter is what they really look like, in case you’re wondering.) There’s a lot going on here, from the enshittification of online search to people sharing things with inaccurate labeling or descriptions (something that predates AI, and for that matter the Internet) to the lack of discernment concerning the real and the fake, but what troubles me the most about things like this is the lack of a common frame of reference that includes the world beyond our screens.
Though I’d seen the ostensible baby peacock image before, it happened to resurface in my Facebook feed, side by side with a photo of an actual baby peacock, the day after I’d gone camping in a friend’s patch of forest alongside a river. One of the reasons I like to get up early is that the time around dawn and early morning are prime time for seeing wildlife. There were two families of mergansers hanging out on the river during the time I was there, the babies at different stages of development. One family, the babies were quite small, and watching their mother helping them navigate the boulders and currents was like watching a put-upon kindergarten teacher trying to herd her class. The other, the juveniles were almost as big as their mother, and glided after her in an orderly line as they made their way up and downstream. I’d only ever seen adult mergansers before, so getting to watch two families for a few mornings in a row felt like a treat.
If it sounds like I’m valuing real, if rather unremarkable, birds over an AI-generated piece of digital art, well, yes, I am. If it sounds like part of that value judgment is that the mergansers really exist and the baby peacocks as represented in that digital image do not, well, yes again. But while I have my issues with AI art—most of it’s really bad, and I wonder why the authors of the software are so often trying so hard to get it to make things that can pass for human creations, and I remain unconvinced that it’s art at all—that’s not what troubles me the most here.
It’s that so many of the people who view and reshare the image don’t know that it’s not representing what it claims to; and, when this is pointed out to them, they don’t care. It’s cute, after all, and how often is the average person going to need to know what a baby peacock looks like anyway?
Okay, sure. The chances of most of us meeting a peacock, baby or otherwise, are pretty slim, though feral peafowl are distributed increasingly widely across the United States and in some areas have earned the dreaded moniker of pest. (I have opinions about that designation.) But crows, for example, are common across the globe, despite which a substantial chunk of the Internet believes that baby crows look like this:
It’s not so much that seeing real baby crows is all that simple, especially if you don’t really know anything about them. It’s the taking for granted that an image represents something real because it’s cute, and because we want it to, and because we don’t have the necessary knowledge to recognize that it’s not what it claims to be.
That last part is what troubles me the most. A few years ago I encountered this term: “shifting baseline syndrome.” There are a few different ways to look at this, but one thing it refers to is the human propensity to compare our perception of our current environment to one that was established earlier in our lives, typically in childhood. That established earlier perception is our baseline. But there are two problems: one, childhood memory is pretty hazy for most of us, such that we might not recognize our current environment as impoverished by comparison; and two, that baseline is itself impoverished in comparison to a past from before we existed. The term was first coined to describe generational shift in fisheries, so it’s only appropriate to show an example involving fish:
This misapprehension of the natural world isn’t new. It’s a well known and much-lamented feature of modern life, and there are entire schools and subcultures out there dedicated to repairing it (I’ve spent a considerable amount of time in one of them). The AI-generated baby peacock is more of a symptom than a cause; we believe in it and share it because we don’t know about baby birds, and into that gap comes something cute and recognizable enough to seem plausible. But I also think that fakes like this can make the problem worse by convincing us that this is what the things they purport to depict are supposed to look like. A lot of nature isn’t particularly cute or charismatic at first glance. It’s still part of the world we live in, a world from which we aren’t really separate and on which we have massive, catastrophic effects, mostly without being conscious of it.
It’s not that I object to fanciful images in and of themselves; much of the art in my house is of imaginary things. But none of that art purports to depict something that you can go out the door and find in the world somewhere. If the baby peacock was being passed around as a baby flumperstinker, I’d still think it was lousy art, I still wouldn’t be a fan of AI art generally.
I just happen to think that knowing how things really are is important, and being able to inform ourselves about things we haven’t directly witnessed is important, and even the most innocuous-appearing image can fool us into not recognizing the real thing when we see it.
And that has dangers far beyond birdwatching.
16 Saturday Sep 2023
Posted in ruminations
Early in the latest round of the library culture wars, there was a reaction I kept seeing from people who were ostensibly on my side of the argument: why are these parents so concerned about what’s in the library when there’s a whole Internet full of undesirable material they can complain about? Running a close second was this one: if there’s a book they won’t let you get from the library, I’ll mail you a copy of your own!
Understand, these are people who are supposedly in favor of libraries and librarians. They have also missed the point.
If you’re of a certain age and grew up in America, you probably remember the movie version of The Music Man: the one with Robert Preston as Harold Hill, and Shirley Jones as Marian. The character of Marian, and especially Jones’s depiction, informed a lot of people’s canonical idea of what a librarian is: stuffy, stuck-up, and a stickler for the rules. This is largely, I think, because Marian initially isn’t swayed by Harold’s charms (and good for her, since Harold is a con artist), but let’s also not forget that several prominent women in the town dislike her for exposing their children to “dirty books” (there’s an extended joke about Balzac that I totally didn’t get as a kid). There’s a larger theme in The Music Man about corruption and influence that the tension between Marian and her neighbors plays into.
I mention this because this is very much a tension that exists in American public libraries generally; the character of Marian wouldn’t work if she was just a piano teacher, or if she worked in a candy shop. (Maybe if it sold dime novels.) But dime novels and candy cost money; the way that you avoid their influence is by not buying them. Libraries, though, are open to all, with a stated mission not to sell a product, but to inform and influence the mind. This is important to understand as not just a nice idea, but a legal and moral principle, underpinned by being funded using public money.
For this very reason, public libraries are unlikely things. I’ve come across the observation more than once recently that if public libraries didn’t already exist in America, they wouldn’t be allowed to. I think this is actually true. A space open to everyone and supported entirely through taxes? With selling things and making money occurring absolutely nowhere in its mission? (Money from fines and book sales typically goes back into the budget, and more and more libraries have disposed of fines altogether.) With contents curated according to published standards, by people professionally trained in their curation? (Imagine if the Internet were held to that standard.) Can you imagine any municipality, no matter how progressive or idealistic, in this country trying that today? This is worth reflecting on because public libraries are public spaces. This makes what happens in them important.
It’s also the source of tension in the current culture wars around libraries—which, by the way, isn’t new. I’m old enough to remember the previous rounds with this playbook going back to the 1980s. The books being objected to were different—most of them are still on the American Library Association’s most banned books list—but the objections to them were exactly the same. Mention sex in a book a ten year old might read, and next thing you know, they’ll be having it, or so the thinking goes. (I can personally attest that this is nonsense. What I did get when I was ten was a lot of information that helped me make healthy choices later. The time to learn this stuff is before you need it.)
Just as before, the real stakes are whose voices and what information we validate by allowing it to exist in a public space accessible to everyone, whether they avail themselves of it or not. As the people challenging these books themselves often point out, the books and the information in them don’t cease to exist just because the library doesn’t have them—and it is true that the alternative means of accessing them are more accessible than they were in the 1980s. But the presence or absence of something in a library is a statement of validation, and the conversation around what should be present or absent is increasingly adversarial.
Unless you work in libraries you probably don’t know this: the usual way that a book or anything else gets added to a library collection is by a librarian choosing it according to specific selection criteria. Those criteria can encompass the expressed desires of the community in which the library is situated, the collection development policy of the library, reviews in publications like Library Journal and Publishers Weekly, and the librarian’s professional knowledge and subject matter expertise. (In the library where I worked for 18 years, I selected all of our science and nursing materials for most of that time. I’m neither a scientist nor a nurse, but I worked with plenty of both, solicited their opinions and feedback, and read a great deal of their professional and research literature—as well as the curricula of their academic programs. All of these were factors in my decisions.) There’s a great deal of literature on the subject of collection development itself. Most of it’s pretty dry and not very interesting unless you’re a librarian (and even then some of it’s a cure for insomnia) but all of it wrestles with the question of what a library should have, since it cannot have everything.
But note the first item on my list of criteria: the expressed desires of the community. This could most simply be interpreted as: the library should have what most of the community wants, and exclude what most of the community does not want. After all, no library can contain everything, for reasons of both space and budget (and if you want to argue that searching for information on the Internet is free, I invite you to take a real hard look at how well Internet search works these days).
This, however, is a misapprehension of both the purpose of public space and the purpose of libraries. Community desires cannot be the sole determinant of what a library contains. That would render a library’s purpose to be merely to confirm what the people who might enter into it already know (or think they already know), which is anathema to discovery. There are people who believe this, to the point of fetishization; you can tell because they completely lose their minds when libraries get rid of obsolete materials to make way for new.
But part of the point of a library is to be larger than the conventional wisdom of the community it serves. This principle necessarily informs the selection process of what goes into a library’s collection. It’s also, though not always, where challenges to what’s in that collection come from. Most libraries have a challenge process that attempts to find the line between someone having an objection to this or that material, someone else wanting or needing to have access to that same material, and the larger context of the library itself and who it serves. This nebulous ground becomes the site of battles over questions like whether LGTBQ characters should be acknowledged to exist through the presence of books about them in the collection—and this is why the Internet, bookstores, or offers to mail books to individuals, admirable as all those things are, are not solutions. It’s always been possible, if not always easy, to get hold of materials that one’s neighbor might object to, or that go against nebulously stated community standards. In question here is whether materials that some people find objectionable or obscene nonetheless belong in a designated public space. (We had a chance for the Internet to be designated public space, but that ship appears to have sailed.)
This conversation has always been relevant to libraries, and is pretty much always going on, but right now the discourse is at a fever pitch—and largely defined by people on one side of the argument. Often they haven’t read the books they’re objecting to, which makes their habit of citing sentences or scene fragments out of context more than a little suspect. Or, one aspect of the book that makes them uncomfortable is taken as being the book’s entire subject. People objecting to library materials containing LGTBQ representation often argue that they aren’t claiming that these materials are obscene, exactly, they just don’t agree with “normalizing homosexuality” (scare quotes because that was the exact phrase used!) by having And Tango Makes Three in the children’s books collection.
This is why buying copies of banned material or giving them to people deprived of them by their removal from the public library, as helpful as these actions can be, are not solutions. The defining characteristic of public libraries is that access is determined not by personal preference, nor by ability to pay, but by collective definition of what belongs in the public sphere. This is not solely, as librarian Mary Jo Godwin famously wrote, that a truly great library has something in it to offend everyone. That’s actually rather incidental to the larger principle at work; namely, that if we are going to believe in the value of civic institutions at all (an unpopular idea at present no matter what your political alignment) then we have to believe in the role of libraries in enabling discovery, expanding knowledge, and facilitating the broadening of perspective beyond one’s own beliefs and observations, and act accordingly.
This does not mean that nothing in the library can ever be subject to question or even challenge. If the library is a public square, then the public has a role and voice within it. However, it also means that those who wish to ensure that public space stays open to discourses that others might find uncomfortable need to do more than provide alternative means of accessing stories that have been excluded. The tactics of those who wish to exclude are quite overt, but they also show the grounds where objections to those tactics can be raised.
It also means acknowledging that libraries are a space where these questions are never settled, as much as parties on any or all sides of any particular question might like them to be. The battles being fought now over library collections, as I mentioned up above, have been fought before. Only the particulars change, and they don’t even change that much. Just because the battle is ongoing, though, doesn’t mean it’s not worth fighting. It might be hard to conceive of a fight over a particular book as a fight over people’s right to exist…but it’s worth remembering where those fights can lead.
28 Monday Aug 2023
Posted in book reviews
Every time I picked up this book to read another (lengthy) chapter, my mind tacked “Après moi…” to the title’s beginning. I don’t know if Stephen Markley had that saying in mind when writing the book, but I wouldn’t be surprised. The phrase, attributed to King Louis XV, presages disaster, but with a kind of resignation: we saw the cliff ahead, and accelerated.
The deluge being referenced in the title of Markley’s doorstop of a novel is more literal than that, though. This isn’t much of a spoiler: very early on, oceanographer Tony Pietrus has modeled a warming trend that presages climate catastrophe, including a sea-level rise that will drown the American Atlantic seaboard, most of the country of Bangladesh, and a great number of the world’s islands, among other geographies. And while the novel’s cast of thousands interact in various ways with this emergent catastrophe, the overall trajectory—and theme—remains both clear and inevitable.
This is pretty grim stuff to begin with, but by situating the novel in what is very clearly our own contemporary present and near future on the one hand—there are references to presidencies up through the early Biden administration, to COVID-19 and January 6th, and to well-established and increasingly obvious meteorological, climatological, and ecological trends—and by unfolding a plot that consists largely of everything that’s happened recently only worse, the overwhelming mood for all of The Deluge’s 900+ pages is one of doom. It’s like that joke about the Tarot deck that consists entirely of 72 Tower cards, unfolding with the inevitability of a train derailment even as (some of) the passengers try to apply the brakes.
Climate change, ecological disaster, and what we do—or don’t do—about them have long been the province of science fiction. Indeed I was often reminded of other novels, especially Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, which has undergone something of a rediscovery of late due in part to its prescience. Yet The Deluge doesn’t really read like science fiction, at least not initially. Though the opening chapter features Pietrus’s discovery, it’s veiled by his receipt of a threatening note in the mail, complete with mysterious white powder. That’s not a future projection, it’s contemporary, from the faux-anthrax scares of 2001 up to as recently as this year. Science fiction can have a contemporary setting, but part of Markley’s point is that what’s happening in The Deluge isn’t speculative, except perhaps arguably at the very end. This sets the book apart not only from Parable, but other novels exploring similar terrain such as Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake.
In some ways The Deluge is more of a techno-thriller, except that it’s made clear from the outset that the principal problem that needs to be solved here isn’t technological. The fix, instead, requires something far more challenging: getting a sufficient mass of people convinced as to the nature of the problem, what needs to be done to solve it, in a position to actually take meaningful action. That close to 900 pages elapse with a number of major characters killed off in horrible ways before something like consensus even begins to emerge gives you an idea of how difficult a problem that is, even in fiction. It also sets The Deluge apart from the Michael Crichton style of contemporary techno-thriller, for all that the initial setup is reminiscent of the genre Crichton helped establish. Markley has larger ambitions in mind.
Despite the grimness and complexity of its content, much of The Deluge goes by faster than you’d expect. There are parts that don’t: the parts where it feels like Markley sets aside the story and its characters to earnestly inform the reader of a great deal of necessary technical detail, political and historical context, or the statistical scope of the latest disaster. These infodumps tend to occur at moments of accelerating catastrophe; the effect at times is to throw a roadblock in the path of the narrative. It feels somewhat churlish to complain about this: the world is ending and I’m demanding to be entertained. But some of these passages are real slogs, such that one wishes Markley had brought the vividly detailed efficiency he deploys elsewhere to bear.
On the other hand, one can only endure so much vivid detail. It’s all here: not just ecological catastrophe, in the form of hurricanes, heat waves, floods, wildfires, and even earthquakes, but human catastrophe as well, from suicide to murder to terrorism to assassination. This is probably realistic; for one thing, in the scenario Markley posits things are going to get a whole lot worse for most people before they get better, and for another desperation has a tendency to breed violence. At least some of Markley’s characters—all vividly drawn and to some degree sympathetic—are in a position to influence events, a few of them dramatically. Others are just trying to avoid being swept away. The results are often explosive.
A stylistic choice that seems as though it shouldn’t work, but does, is Markley’s adoption of a different narrative mode for each of his major characters. Tony Pietrus, the oceanographer we meet at the novel’s opening, has a fairly standard close third point of view. But we only get to know Kate Morris, the impassioned activist whose vision and verve drive a great deal of the action, through the eyes of others—mainly her lover Matt, though her life winds through those of several of the other characters by the novel’s end. The brilliant analyst Ashir al-Hasan communicates mostly in white papers, albeit with a bent for personal narrative. Direct-action activist turned ecoterrorist Shane’s chapters are told with inset snippets from the points of view of other characters in the scene, and hard-luck case Keeper’s chapters are told in second person. Plus there’s collages of news headlines and the occasional Vanity Fair or Atlantic article—they read like they’re from those publications, too, Markley’s remarkable skill as a stylistic chameleon extending even that far.
It works. It works surprisingly well, and the effect is to broaden the scope of the story still further, to accentuate the impression that these are narratives arising from disparate sources rather than from the mind of a single author, as though all of this were being assembled after the fact by some archivist or historian. Not that Markley goes for the device of making all of his narrative seem like documentation. That doesn’t work as well as it used to for one thing, in this age of ephemeral social media; for another it’s kind of tired and runs the risk of robbing the narrative of its immediacy. Thus while The Deluge does include newspaper and magazine articles as well as the occasional page of collaged headlines, most of its story is told in relatively straightforward fictional narrative. All of his characters are interesting. A few of them are even good people. And what ultimately makes reading The Deluge worthwhile are its small moments, the tiny actions of individual characters adding up, the realization—possibly too late—that there is no choice left but to do something, anything.
As I write this, a tropical storm has just hit southern California for the first time in over 80 years, while a boiled-brass sun sets over Seattle through a high haze of wildfire smoke. Smoke has become an annual visitor to western Washington just since I moved here in the late 90s, but this year the eastern U.S. got their own taste of it. It’s been so hot across so much of the country that I’ve felt grateful that Seattle’s summer heat waves haven’t hit triple digits this year—but I remember the heat dome of 2021 and how local temperatures skyrocketed to 107 degrees F, unprecedented for this region.
And yet life goes on. That’s the other thread running through The Deluge—how life continues, how business as usual attempts to continue. Until it literally can’t. For all of the novel’s narrative tricks, for its occasionally relentless lugubriousness of theme, for all that near the end it does take on a science fictional cast as technology (partially) saves the day, for all that the intersections of some of the characters’ lives come to seem contrived to the point of improbability, in this sense above all The Deluge is both hopefully and depressingly realistic. It’s fitting, then, that it ends with a question mark; albeit, I think, an optimistic one. But it’s optimism at a knife’s edge, and the question is whether we’ll find our way before all of us go over.
28 Friday Jul 2023
Posted in book reviews, other authors
It’s a little astounding to me that I haven’t read Urban Bestiary (published in 2013) before. Author Lyanda Lynn Haupt, it transpires, is practically a neighbor; we both live in West Seattle, and when she describes certain encounters and experiences in this book I can imagine with a fair amount of specificity where they might have occurred. I recall the series of incidents involving nesting owls that she relates in her chapter on predatory birds. And, it so happens, I’ve studied with several of the people she mentions or cites: David Moskowitz, Jon Young, and others affiliated with the Wilderness Awareness School in Duvall, where I’ve taken just about every class they offer for adults.
In fact, it was a talk I gave on wildlife tracking at PLU, where I worked for 18 years and from which I retired last month, that led me to this book: one that had lurked on the shelves of the library where I served as (among other things) science librarian without my knowing it. A colleague who attended the talk mentioned the book to me; I checked it out, read it, and was astounded that I hadn’t come across it before. So it sometimes goes, in tracking: earlier this week I walked past a nearly denuded seal skeleton several times on a Washington coastal beach before I noticed it was there. (In my defense, someone, probably a park ranger, had mostly buried it in beach detritus, and it didn’t smell much.) Sometimes you don’t notice things until you notice them.
As it happens, I came to Haupt’s book at the perfect time for it to inform some of my own thinking around wildlife tracking and observation. When we get into tracking, it’s often with the hope of seeing something really cool, outside of our everyday—and I have to admit, my first-ever viewing of wolf tracks was just such an experience, deep in a remote mountain area several hours’ drive from Seattle. Tracking has taken me to locales I might never have explored otherwise, and taught me a lot about places I’ve visited even when tracking itself wasn’t the intention. It’s taught me to pay attention to my surroundings in a way both conscious and intuitive; I learn a lot about who’s been around recently while hiking or even walking around my neighborhood, even when their presence isn’t obvious.
That last is increasingly what tracking has been about for me, and it’s the focus of Urban Bestiary as well. Most of us live in cities; even those of us who spend a lot of time hiking and backpacking are actually pretty unlikely to lay eyes on a mountain lion or bear (I saw my first of the latter on a backpacking trip just this month; I’m 49 years old and have been hiking for most of my life) but there’s a good chance we’ve seen and even interacted with squirrels, rabbits, raccoons, and maybe even coyotes or foxes. Not to mention birds; Haupt, whose previous work includes the book Crow Planet, is at her most observant and lyrical in her chapters on birds, encouraging reconsideration of pigeons, crows, and even house sparrows and starlings.
Indeed, a reader might be moved to recall urban wildlife encounters they’ve had; to realize that there is, as Haupt puts it, “wilderness in our midst,” that we are not in fact separated from nature at all. Perhaps this book has moved people to experience what she terms the “slender mental shift” that engages the tracker mindset; while there’s a fair amount of skill and learning involved in doing tracking well, the mindset shift is foundational and requires nothing more than an opening of perspective. I was reminded of my own early experiences that led me to tracking: the coyote who dashed across the major arterial near my house very early one morning; the eagle soaring above a nearby urban forest, majestically ignoring the harassment of half a dozen crows (I’ve since followed crow ruckus to observe all kinds of things); the straight line of compressed vegetation in my backyard that served as a highway for all sorts of small beings; the orb weavers that spin their webs around my porch light every fall. (I do wish Haupt had chosen to include insects and other arthropods in her bestiary; perhaps she thought this would be too much for readers still coming to terms with the genius of rats to accept, especially given how many of them live in our houses.)
What makes a book like The Urban Bestiary so valuable is that not only does it facilitate understanding of species more of us are likely to observe, interact with, and learn about, but it also makes this kind of observation and understanding accessible. Wolf tracking, for example, requires going to remote locations that can be difficult to reach even if you lack disabilities that make backcountry travel challenging or impossible. Far more people can investigate a backyard, a park, or even a planting strip on a city street. Doing this can reopen our perceptions to just how remarkable species that we regard as familiar, even pestilential, really are, and thereby start to question the idea that rarity is what makes a wildlife encounter special.
More than that, however, I’ve observed for many years now that when it comes to urban wildlife encounters, a lot of people tend to lead with fear. A coyote sighting means pets and children are in danger (despite neither being part of a coyote’s preferred diet); molehills in the yard are unsightly nuisances (despite the benefits moles offer of free soil aeration and nutrient mixing, not to mention pest control); a raccoon out in the daytime means it has rabies (untrue, though it may well have babies it’s trying to feed); starlings and house sparrows crowd out other, native bird species (probably also untrue, so far as research has been able to determine). Leading with curiosity instead, as Haupt advocates, opens up whole new worlds that exist intermixed with our own; these species are common in urban environments because we humans have created the conditions for them to thrive. Recognizing our own responsibility for this through curiosity and observation leads not only to greater care for the places we live and the lives of other beings within them, but greater care for our world in general. And that can only be a good thing.
Genevieve Williams 