🪐👻 Feast of the Spectre

06 January 2024 Thesis Notes

Preliminary

met a former therapist named Judith and talked about her story she’s writing about a woman with DID who discovers her husband is having an affair with herself, talked about thesis stuff with her, also Salvanorola. she said she will bring a book for me tomorrow

working on the neoliberalism section of the conclusion

Freewrite

2023 Reading in Review

Most Impactful Book (or Series):

Terra Ignota, by Ada Palmer [Too Like The Lightning, Seven Surrenders, The Will to Battle, Perhaps the Stars]

This year I lost of one of my best friends. There have been many books that helped me and kept me company while I continue to grieve, but the most important thus far have been the four books of the Terra Ignota series. A future history set in the mid 2450s narrated by a self-declared criminally insane convict named Mycrof Canner with a blend of science fiction, magical realism, history, philosophy, theology, giant space robots, gender, fashion, and speculative political theory, I have now read the complete series twice between September and early January. Its a series I know I’ll be thinking about and coming back to with the rigor and desperation of scripture for as long as I am reading and thinking about books. I have a page on my blog where I’m accumulating thoughts, feelings, unhinged ravings about this series; someday an essay may come together. For now, it has become my go to reading recomendation for everyone in my life, in no small part because I want to talk to everyone I know about these books without spoiling them. Read these.

Worst Book

The Digging-est Dog, Al Perkins

Trash, Zero Stars. No, Negative Stars. Absolutely awful and depressing. First time reading it in decades after it having been a mainstay on my childhood bookshelf. Why anyone would give this to a child is beyond me.

Books About Cities

The City &The City, Mievile.

Second or possibly third reading. A detective story set in two cities which occupy the same grosstopological space. Definitely makes more sense on re-reading. Some of the most interesting geographical worldbuilding I’ve come across. You’ll never exist in a city quite the same way again.

Invisible Cities, Italiano Calvino

Poetic, spare, thoughtful, one of those books that hollows out spaces in your soul and therein assembles its impossible and meloncholy architecture. Rewards slow, repeated readings. Also unfortunately rather misogynistic, and not in a way that can be easily parsed from its other attributes. Calvino really needed a feminist editor to call him out on his bullshit. Well, he’s dead now and won’t profit from your purchase.

Kraken, The Scar, and Iorn Council, Mieville

I was reading Kraken when Belle passed away and finished it on the greyhound en route to her funeral. The Scar and Iron Council followed shortly after. Kraken is an dark, broding urban fantasy set during one or several apocolypses (apocolypsi?) in London following the theft of a giant squid. The Scar takes the form of a letter written by a linguist empressed into service aboard a floating city/armada, the second book in Mieville’s Bas Lag series. Iron Council is the third in the trilogy, following a revolutionary uprising which includes slave revolts, political assasinations, and a rouge railroad team who hijack a train and escape into the wilderness, pulling up their tracks and reusing them as they build a new way of living across an industrial revolutionary organpunk society. Both The Scar and Iron Council, like all of Mieville’s work, feature cities which are as much charachters in the narative as any individual, but the individual charachterization in these two in particular reaches a mastery I’ve rarely encountere. I laughed, I cried, I cried a lot.

Books about Spiders

Children of Time and Children of Ruin, Adrian Tchaikovsky

Evolutionarilly accelerated hyper inteligent spiders in Spaaaaaace! I won’t look at spiders the same way again. There was also some generation ship political intrigue which was decent but I definitley cared a lot more about the arachnid charachters than the homo sapien ones. There’s also some really excellent transhumanist themes and charachter development and the second book introduces octopodes into the mix, which is nice.

Books about Roman History

The Imperium series by Robert Harris (Imperium, Conspirata, Dictator)

A reconstruction of a real life lost text, the biography of a enslaved secretary/political aid to Marcus Tullius Cicero, following his education, political carrer, exile, and eventual assasination (spoilers for events of the first century BC). It definitely made me think a lot more about Cicero and the lives of enslaved people extemely close to imperial power brokers. It taught me a lot about rhetoric and the roman judiciary system and patron client political systems.

Books about Generation Ships

Children of Time deals with generation ships, but it is Escaping Exodus and Symbiosis, by Nicky Drayden, that were really broke new ground for me in this subgenre favorite of mine. Follows an afrofuturist society thousands of years removed from Earth, whose rockets failed before they could reach new earth-like planets, forcing them to terraforming the guts of gigantic space whales living between the stars. Gender, religion, caste, and so so so much xenobiology abound. Unfortunately for both the humans and their hosts, havinng cultures of humanity colonizing your digestive system isn’t exactly a great health condition, so as the space whales (I’m sorry I cannot remember their species actual name, one of many reasons I’ll need to re-read them) are dying out and humanity must again radically change their ways or face the life extinguishing void of space. We need more climate fiction like this if we ourselves are to adopts a symbiotic relationship with our own biosphere.

Books that Left me saying, Wait What???

House of Suns, Alastair Reynolds

Wow wow wow wow wow. The novela regarding the many main charachters’ childhood interspersed throughout this hefty 505 page space opera was my favorite part, with one of the best opening lines of any book I read this year. Transhuman development has stretched human lifetimes to the millions of years to enable sub-light travel across the galactic disk. Beautiful charachterization of the narative’s many-bodied demigods and their inter- and intra-personal relationships. A somewhat contrived but overall well executed galaxy-wide detective story with space battles stretched out accross millions of miles and thousands of years. Then I guess the author got board cause in the 5 pages he waves away much of the central world building and says yeah that’s basically it story over. Alastair, I know you are quite comforatble writing ten thousand page epic space opera series: please return to House of Suns someday and let us know how it all turns out!

Ubik, Phillip K. Dick

A psychothriller replete with Dick’s quintessencial theo-ontological musings, showcasing many of his favoirite tropes (precogs, psychics, resurection, time travel) in one of his weirder by also more compelling treatments. My favorite parts: the grafiti in the bathroom and news broadcasts from beyond the grave. Honorable mention for The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, which shares many of the same themes and tropes and has a more compelling cliff hanger but also is much more depressing and, you guessed it, even more mysoginistic than usual for Dick.

The Thessely Books (The Just City, The Philosopher Kings, and Necessity) by Jo Walton

Time traveling gods decide to do Plato’s Republic, gathering philosophers, slave children, and 22nd century robots from accross the millenia and dropping them all on a Mediteranian island from antiquety. A spiritual predecesor (pun halfway intended) to my favorite Walton book (and one of my favorite books in general, Lent), sharing a number of charachters and themes though (probably) not the same continuity. A really compelling exploration of Platonic philosophy, ethics, and politics, as well as meditation on gender, sexual trauma, legacy, and revenge. Also we get to see Socratese make friends with some robots which is really sweet. The final installment, Necessity, expanded the ambitions of the worldbuilding by leaps and bounds, but due to its brevity and the author’s decision to skip a generation between each book it’s also the least developed and leaves a lot to be desired. But hey, I can heartily recomend the first two books, and if you’re hooked by the charachters and the general conceit, then by all means go ahead and finish the series.

Three Moments of an Explosion, Mieville

Wow was this one from this year? According to my records I finished it January 31st. For whatever reason I tend not to read many anthologies, though I’m actively trying to incorporate them more into my reading plans. This one really ran the gambit from ‘wow that’s so surreal/hearbreaking/fascinating’ to ‘wait what?’ I really liked The Buzzard’s Egg, The Design, the one about the festival with the animal sacrifices gone wrong, The Dowager of Bees, and the title story, among others. I do not expect I will read Säcken. The one with the man with the dusty hat on the other hand I haven’t been able to stop thinking about and its definitely influencing my own poeti-politics. Its hard to talk about any of the stories without spoiling them a great deal because most of these are concept-pieces, ranging from vignyettes to novellas. If you’re a Mieville diehard you definitely need to read this (looking at you Jonathan) but I would definitely reccomend starting with Embassytwon or The City and The City or even New Crobazon before jumping into these, cause there are a ton of ‘what the hell did i just read’ moments going on. Except the final story, The Design. That one is so sad and so good and I would reccomend it to anyone interested in macabre medical magical realism romance stories. So still a pretty narrow audiance but yeah, wow, The Design is defintiely a high point in my short story reading in the last few years.

Books about Governmental Burracracies

His Master’s Voice, Stanislav Lem

Funnier on the re-read, and also sadder. Lem has a true gift for discomforting ambivalece. Follows the establishment of a two thousand-plus person secret research center founded to study a transmission from the stars.

The Palace of Dreams

Definitely a stand-out among my spooky readings from the last several autumns. The story follows Marc Alem, the scion of a cadet branch of a politically influential and ill-fated family of politicians and generals from Albania who for generations have served and been persecuted by the imperial dynasty of an alternate history Ottoman Empire, which has survived to at the United Ottoman States. Marc seeks and for reasons not at all clear to him acquires a posting in the Ministry of Dreams, charged with receiving, categorizing, interpreting, and acting upon the reported phantasia and nightmares of the empires millions of subjects, in order to better guide the policy of the Emperor’s government. The prose is "spare...and quietly terrifying" (as reviewed by The Wall Street Journal) and contains some of the most effective description of the atmosphere of nightmares that I’ve yet to come across.

Books that Have Fun with ✨ Form ✨

Multiple Choice, Alejandro Zambra

A re-read. Written in the form of a multiple choice state test (specifically those employed by the government of Chile) so procede with caution if you residual anxiety from fill in the bubble exams. Somber, occasionally surreal, haunted by the ghosts of Pinochet’s regime and familial disharmony. This is not a happy book.

The Cyberiad, Stanislaw Lem

Fairy tales following the exploits of two Constructor Robots who build and beguile their way through the galaxy. Deeply philosophical, like all of Lem’s works, its also just really charming and fun. But also depressing. Noticing a theme?

Quotes and Commentary

NEO-LIBERALISM, INDIVIDUALISM AND BIOMEDICINE

[made it through 7/10 pages, reading wise, still need to do quotes and commentary]