Oct 01 2021

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

Piranesi is a scientist, working to understand the world around him. That world may seem odd, or circumscribed, to readers, but Piranesi does not question it. It is the world, after all; the House. He does not inquire into its origins, nor try to understand its supports. Instead, he maps it. The House has Halls and Vestibules, of which there is apparently no end, and Levels. “The Lower Levels are the Domain of the Tides; their Windows — when seen from across a Courtyard — are grey-green with the restless Waters and white with the spatter of Foam. The Lower Halls provide nourishment in the form of fish, crustaceans and sea vegetation.” Then comes the level where Piranesi lives. Above that “The Upper Halls are, as I have said, the Domain of the Clouds; their Windows are grey-white and misty. Sometimes you will see a whole line of Windows suddenly illuminated by a flash of lightning. The Upper Halls give Fresh Water, which is shed in the Vestibules in the form of Rain and flows in Streams down Walls and Staircases.” (All Ch. 1)

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

What lies beyond? “Outside the House there are only the Celestial Objects: Sun, Moon and Stars.” He is also an explorer. To the west of the Hall he chose as his starting point, he has traveled 960 Halls, to the north 890, and to the south 768. To the east, parts of the House have collapsed, and he can go no further. “In all of these places I have stood in Doorways and looked ahead. I have never seen any indication that the World was coming to an End, but only the regular progression of Halls and Passageways into the Far Distance.” (Ch. 1) Fortunately for him, and for readers, Piranesi has an excellent memory. He knows the Statues in the Halls that he has visited, he knows his way around, he knows how to make provisions from the bounty of the House, and he knows practical things such as how to calculate the Tides that sometimes combine and rise quite high in the House.

Piranesi the book opens with Piranesi the person going “to the Ninth Vestibule to witness the joining of three Tides. This is something that happens only once every eight years.” His calculations are not as reliable as his memory. He has underestimated two of the Tides, and is in danger of being drowned or swept away. He clings to a Statue and hopes, or rather he prays to the House for protection. When the Tides recede while he still has breath, he concludes “The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.” (Ch. 1)

Piranesi is not really his name, it is what the other person in the House calls him. He does not particularly see the need to call himself anything else, or indeed anything at all. He is. That is sufficient. Piranesi, for his part, calls the other person the Other. The Other is also a scientist, though a bit moody. The two of them meet twice a week, generally for an hour each time. Piranesi supposes that the Other is very busy with his research in other parts of the House because he often seems hurried and sometimes cuts their meetings short. The Other is vague about which parts of the House he lives and works in, but that does not trouble Piranesi very much. They are working together in search of some great knowledge that will give them both deeper understanding of the House.

In his explorations, Piranesi has come across evidence that other people have also been in the House, at least for a while: skeletons. There are thirteen of them, leaving him to draw the conclusion that the world has only ever held fifteen people. He tends to the skeletons, making sure that the Tides do not carry them off, bringing them presents occasionally so that the deceased know that the living have not forgotten them. It does not seem a small number to him; that is all the world has had.

If Piranesi reminds me of another story, it’s The Slow Regard of Silent Things. In Rothfuss’ book, a major character lives in a particular world alone, with a heightened sense of the inanimate objects in that world, with rituals that shape their relationship to the world. Like Auri, Piranesi is slightly askew from the ordinary run of people.

Part of what makes this book great is the beauty and simplicity with which Clarke shows Piranesi and his world. The most extraordinary things are self-evident to him, while others escape his wit and attention entirely. How does he know concepts like week and month? What was he like as a child? Did he even have parents? None of this comes up in the diaries that form the text of Piranesi. As the story goes on, I found myself wondering more and more about the gap between what Piranesi discussed and what he obviously knew.

Crossing that gap is the greater part of what makes Piranesi brilliant, and plot details that are not apparent from the beginning are crucial to the changes. Things are not entirely as they seem, and there is more in the House than is reckoned in Piranesi’s science.

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Piranesi is a finalist for this year’s Hugo Award in the Best Novel category. It is the fourth book I have read in that category, and it will get my top vote unless one of the two remaining books is much better than I expect.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/10/01/piranesi-by-susanna-clarke/

Sep 30 2021

Dance Or Die: From Stateless Refugee To International Ballet Star by Ahmad Joudeh

I love dance books, and often find them a source of luminous prose and inspiration. Couple this with the true story of a stateless ballet dancer who grew up and performed in war-torn Syria, and who is active in dancing and advocating for peace and for the rights of refugees worldwide, and I absolutely had to read this memoir.

On those two subjects — the joy and power of dance, and the plight of those displaced by war — Dance Or Die succeeds tremendously. Ahmad Joudeh is at his most eloquent when describing his need to dance, how it compels him and how it makes him feel, how it serves as a refuge from all the ugliness going on around him. His prose is so lovely, it made me want to get up out of my seat and flex my own muscles and training. His writing is also evocative for its simplicity, in contrast, in stating the plight of his family, made stateless first by the annexation of Palestine, then by chauvinist citizenship laws in Syria. The absolute injustice that subjects people born without the correct set of papers to lives of fear and deprivation is a shocking scandal globally, and part of why I’m so firmly for open borders.

Alas then that this book is so infuriatingly vague on so many other subjects. The narrative is in strict keeping with the official story, tho even then, I felt like I gleaned more insight into what he’s really like by watching his So You Think You Can Dance Arabia video clips than I did here. The tone when discussing why his dad was so against him dancing, to the conflict in Syria, to the challenges he faced when competing on SYTYCD, all affected an “I’m too above this to explain” demeanor that really did a disservice to his story. Is it homophobia that causes the physical violence and death threats against his person? When he rebels against religion, is he saying “fuck you” to fundamentalists or to Islam as a whole? When he complains about facing racism from his fellow competitors, who are also primarily Arab, what exactly does this mean? Why is there not even the most rudimentary explanation of why war is tearing apart Syria?

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/09/30/dance-or-die-from-stateless-refugee-to-international-ballet-star-by-ahmad-joudeh/

Sep 29 2021

Pahua And The Soul Stealer by Lori M. Lee

Ever since her father left and her mom moved her and her younger brother Matt away from the larger Hmong American community to live in small town Wisconsin, Pahua Moua has felt like the weirdo outsider. It isn’t just that she’s the only Asian person in her class. Her single mom has to work long hours to cover expenses, leaving Pahua responsible for looking after Matt and severely limiting the eleven year-old’s social life and free time. And then, of course, there’s the fact that Pahua can see spirits that no one else can.

Having been raised, however loosely, in the Hmong tradition, Pahua knows about spirits and the shamans like her aunt who can communicate with them. But she also knows that not everyone else can see them the way she does. So she spends a lot of time pretending she can’t either, to varying degrees of success, even tho her best friend is Miv, the spirit kitten who accompanies her almost everywhere. When an effort to make friends her own age at summer school leads her to cross paths with the vengeful spirit haunting a local bridge, Pahua’s compassion, coupled with her shamanic abilities, accidentally sets off a chain of events that results in the bridge spirit stealing Matt’s soul and taking it away to the Spirit Realm.

With Matt’s body in the Mortal Realm getting sicker by the day and, according to Miv, only about three days left to save him, Pahua is determined to confront the bridge spirit and restore Matt’s soul. She gathers some of the shaman gear her aunt had left with them and heads to the bridge again, only to have a very different kind of supernatural entity appear when she rings her aunt’s summoning gong. Luckily, a shaman warrior in training named Zhong also shows up, who both lends a hand in defeating the demon and offers to guide Pahua in her ongoing search. It’s a little unfortunate that Zhong has a huge chip on her shoulder, but any ally is better than no ally, right?

As Pahua and Zhong join forces to travel to the Spirit Realm and save Matt, they’ll have to learn not only to work together but also how to navigate their way through the Six Realms of the Hmong. There will be plenty of reversals and revelations as the two girls search for answers and fight bad guys, all while exploring the rich mythology of their culture.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/09/29/pahua-and-the-soul-stealer-by-lori-m-lee/

Sep 28 2021

Big Panda And Tiny Dragon by James Norbury

While I originally picked this up as a children’s book, it is definitely a volume for readers of all ages, featuring sweet, simple lessons with some truly lovely watercolor and ink illustrations that invite you to stare at them for hours in delighted/delightful meditation.

Our two title characters are Big Panda and Tiny Dragon, a pair of unlikely friends who meet and journey together over a year and some months of changing seasons, discussing life, friendship and their travels in short, easily digestible paragraphs. The vibe is rather as if Calvin & Hobbes were far more laidback and thoughtful, and a little less wordy. James Norbury’s interest in Buddhism is clear even before his afterword, as the soothing tranquility of considered introspection and conscious mindfulness is present throughout the text and its accompanying illustrations. I only had an e-galley of this but find it not at all difficult to imagine how beautiful a physical copy of this book would be, showcasing the luminous art.

My only quibble, and this is just a philosophical difference, was in the application of the equation of waves in an ocean with thoughts in the mind. The equation was quite correct, but I thought the extrapolation belabored or, perhaps, not well enough explained given the restrictions of the format. Which is a very small complaint to make considering the dazzling thoughtfulness and sweetness of the rest of the book!

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/09/28/big-panda-and-tiny-dragon-by-james-norbury/

Sep 27 2021

Iron Widow (Iron Widow #1) by Xiran Jay Zhao

Yooooo. I love any book with an unapologetically, righteously angry female lead and this one did not disappoint! Also, Zetian is a disabled heroine who kicks ass! I don’t think I’ve ever read a book with such positive disability rep, which is partly on me but, let’s face it, mostly on publishing. Add to that the Asian aspect and I was already hugely predisposed to loving this, even before I laughed and cried and empathized my way through reading this terrific speculative fiction novel.

Wu Zetian is a frontier girl on a mission. After her beloved older sister dies at the hands of Yang Guang, a male ace mecha pilot, Zetian decides to enlist so she can assassinate her sister’s killer. She knows that doing this not only condemns the rest of her family but also forsakes the guy she’s been secretly seeing for the past three years, rich city boy Gao Yizhi. But vengeance is more important to her than anything, even love.

It’s something of a surprise to arrive at training and discover that her spirit pressure, the ability that allows people to pilot and transform the mechas, is high enough to immediately qualify her to partner with Yang Guang. But it’s only her iron will and murderous intent that allow her to climb out of their mecha later alive, the sole survivor of a process that usually takes the lives of the female concubine-pilot while leaving the male pilots unscathed.

At first, the army is scandalized, especially since Zetian staged her survival as a triumph, entirely out of keeping with the docility expected of women in Huaxian society. When she refuses to back down, they partner her with Li Shimin, the most powerful pilot in the army but also a boy with a reputation as a savage patricide. Zetian is fully ready to kill him too if she has to, but discovers a surprising kinship between them. As the pair slowly bond over the abuse they’ve each suffered, they begin to fight back against the suffocating restrictions and expectations placed on them both, in the process uncovering fearful truths about the world they live in.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/09/27/iron-widow-iron-widow-1-by-xiran-jay-zhao/

Sep 26 2021

The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes, Pt. 2

The Making of the Atomic Bomb turns 35 this year. My copy is a 25th anniversary edition, and it opens with the words, “More than seven decades after its conception under the looming storm front of the Second World War, the Manhattan Project is fading into myth.” The book itself was written and published in the age of Reagan, a time when the Cold War came closer to turning hot than it had for decades, and an American president casually joked about ending human civilization.

The Making of the Atomic Bomb

The Manhattan Project is receding into history. “The massive production reactors and plutonium extraction canyons at Hanford, Washington; the half-mile-long uranium enrichment factory at Oak Ridge, Tennessee; the several hundred thousand workers who puilt and operated the vast machinery while managing to keep its purpose secret, disappear from view, leaving behind a bare nucleus of legend: a secret laboratory on a New Mexican mesa, Los Alamos, where the actual bombs were designed and built; a charismatic lab director, the American physicist Robert Oppenheimer, who rose to international prominence until his enemies brought him low; a lone B-29 bomber incongruently named for the pilot’s mother, Enola Gay; a devastated city, Hiroshima, and poor ruined Nagaski all but forgotten.” (p. 1)

The bombs remain, though fortunately Reagan’s bombast gave way to willingness to do business with a Soviet premier, and the Cold War ended in a way that none had foreseen when Rhodes published this book. Now the twin challenges are first, limiting a 1940s technology in the 2020s and beyond, and second, the hard work of voluntary abolition. “I think of a world without nuclear weapons not as a utopian dream but simply as a world where delivery times have been deliberately lengthened to months or even years, with correspondingly longer periods interim during which to resolve disputes short of war.” (p. 9)

Rhodes intended to tell the story of the bombs and found that he was telling a story of discovery. He learned that

… nuclear physics is almost entirely an experimental science. Which means that the discoveries that led to the bombs were the consequence of the physical manipulation of objects in the laboratory; this metal box, fitted with a radiation source, a sample inserted, measured using this instrument, with this result, and so on. Once I’d mastered the jargon, it was possible to read through the classic papers in the field, visualize the experiments, and understand the discoveries, at least where their application to making bombs was concerned. (p. 3)

Understanding the physical events showed him something important about their human meaning.

It gave the lie to the naive belief that the physicists could have come together when nuclear fission was discovered (in Nazi Germany!) and agreed to keep the discovery a secret, thereby sparing humankind the nuclear burden. No. Given the development of nuclear physics up to 1938, development that physicists throughout the world pursued in all innocence of any intention of finding the engine of a new weapon of mass destruction—only one of them, the remarkable Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard, took that possibility seriously—the discovery of nuclear fission was inevitable. To stop it, you would have had to stop physics. If German scientists hadn’t made the discovery when they did, British, French, American, Russian, Italian, or Danish scientists would have done so, almost certainly within days or weeks. They were all working at the same cutting edge, trying to understand the strange results of a simple experiment bombarding uranium with neutrons.
Here was no Faustian bargain, as movie directors and other naifs still find it intellectually challenging to imagine. Here was no evil machinery that the noble scientists might have hidden from the politicians and the generals. To the contrary, here was a new insight into how the world works, an energetic reaction, older than the earth, that science had finally devised the instruments and arrangements to coax forth. … “It is a profound and necessary truth,” Robert Oppenheimer would say, “that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them.” (pp. 3–4)

Happy Petrov Day.

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Optional musical accompaniment to this post:

Red Car, by Trees.

The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes, Part 1.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/09/26/the-making-of-the-atomic-bomb-by-richard-rhodes-pt-2/

Sep 25 2021

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño

What would young Mexicans in the 1970s who cared about literature more than anything else be like? Roberto Bolaño gives at least one version in The Savage Detectives. The book is anything but a careful study. Over the course of its 577 pages, Bolaño pulls out nearly all of the stops (the book he truly pulled out all the stops for is 2666, which is more than twice as long as The Savage Detectives and still memorable a decade after I read it) as he portrays a would-be avant-garde literary movement, the visceral realists, and some of its members as they wrestle with writing, poetry, Mexico, each other, Europe, themselves, mental illness, growing older, and much more.

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño

Bolaño divides the novel into three parts. The first (“Mexicans Lost in Mexico”) and third (“The Sonora Desert”) are diaries written by Juan García Madero, a poet and new university student who is seventeen when the story begins in 1975. The second and far longer part (“The Savage Detectives” takes the middle 400 pages of the book) is a series of first-person statements by a very large cast of characters who had contact of one sort or another with the visceral realists from 1976 to 1996. Some of the characters recur, but many do not.

Amadeo Salvatierra opens several of the chapters. He’s from an older generation of litterateurs; by 1976 he’s earning his living as a scribe for the illiterate people of Mexico City. He likes his mezcal and his tequila very much, and the two visceral realists, the leaders of the movement, Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, are not above encouraging these habits as they ask try to glean information from him about a nearly lost Mexican poet of the 1920s, Cesárea Tinajero.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/09/25/the-savage-detectives-by-roberto-bolano/

Sep 24 2021

Gnomon by Nick Harkaway, Pt. 2

Harkaway takes the epigraph for Gnomon from The Emperor by Ryszard Kapuscinski. “When the first question was asked in a direction opposite to the customary one, it was a signal that the revolution had begun.” Ethiopia, as portrayed in The Emperor is a land of whispers and intrigues, barely contending with modern technology, shaped by the personal rule of one man applied to a country of some thirty million. It nearly directly opposite to England with the System and the Witness.

Gnomon by Nick Harkaway

Inspector Neith experiences imperial Ethiopia through the narrative of Berihun Bekele, a painter who was a young man in the waning days of Emperor Haile Selassie’s reign and a grandfather by the time of the story that Neith encounters. His granddaughter Annie is a brilliant technologist and is leading the development of an immersive computer game called Witnessed. The features of both the in-game world and the gameplay bear a close resemblance to Neith’s world of System and Witness. Is she seeing the early days of the world she knows? If she is, how did it get into Diana Hunter’s mind?

Inspector Neith also pursues the truth about Diana Hunter outside of the interrogation recordings, but the people she finds connected to the case are no less unsettling than the personas yielded up in the interrogation. One person, for example, turns up inside of Hunter’s house, which has been built as a Faraday cage, a place where the Witness cannot look. Neith encounters this person on subsequent occasions, and each time they seem to be invisible to Witness surveillance which is, at least in theory, ubiquitous. She talks to a person from an obscure corner of infrastructure governance who knows an improbable amount about interrogations such as Hunter’s; later Neith learns that the obscure agency also plays an important role in the Ethiopian narrative. Similar interactions with a bookseller, a technician who speaks of glitches in the System, a professor of semiotics and others point toward elements of Hunter’s various narratives and are pointed to by those same stories. Which way does the causation run? Is there any way to tell? Is there, in fact, a difference?

Neith finds herself drawn in deeper when one of her “real-world” interlocutors is murdered by something from within one of Hunter’s narratives. The event is impossible, and yet the evidence is incontrovertible. Moreover, it echoes an equally impossible killing inside another of Hunter’s narratives.

By this point, enough gnomons have burst in perpendicularly to make telling time by their shadows quite a challenge. Harkaway manages the act, showing events first in one light, then in another, with each flip of the switch casting a new illumination. It all comes together in the end of this hugely ambitious novel. It is not tied up in a bow, wrapped for the audience; instead, the lights converge leaving some things clear, others in shadow, with interpretation of the intersection of gnomon and plane ultimately up to the reader.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/09/24/gnomon-by-nick-harkaway-pt-2/

Sep 23 2021

Gutter Mage by J.S. Kelley

I want to sit J S Kelley down, look into their eyes and assure them that the world desperately needs a Gutter Mage series.

Okay, so maybe by “the world” I mean “I” but this book was just so much fantastic fun! Crossing an original fantasy concept with a hardboiled mystery with distinct Western elements, spiced up with excellent repartee and a bisexual heroine with equal amounts self-awareness and depth, this book just absolutely dazzled me. Our heroine Rosalind (named like all the other characters after the Shakespearean) is better known by the disparaging moniker Gutter Mage, tho no one’s ever called her that to her face twice. Earning a living as a fixer with the help of her childhood friend and business partner Lysander, she accepts a lucrative job that requires more than the usual amount of discretion.

Lord Edmund of House Ariel has recently become a proud parent, but his son has been kidnapped in what looks like an elaborate plan hatched by some very skilled mages, presumably of the upstart new Alath Guild. As there’s nothing more Rosalind enjoys than sticking it to some Guild Mages — and since Lysander really wants to build up his nest egg so that he and his lovely wife Portia can finally start expanding their family — this looks like the perfect case for them, with Lysander’s brawn and social skills backing up Roz’s considerable magical capabilities. But something smells fishy almost from the very start, and the further Roz and Lysander investigate, the greater the likelihood that they’re being lied to, and that the mastermind behind all this is the person Roz least wants to see in all the world.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/09/23/gutter-mage-by-j-s-kelley/

Sep 22 2021

Gnomon by Nick Harkaway, Pt. 1

Some time past the middle of the twenty-first century, Britain offers its citizens the safest, most democratic, best-adjusted society in human history.

Every person under the System is encouraged — though not compelled — to spend a certain amount of time each week voting, and is semi-randomly assigned to decision-making bodies for the duration of their session. Each body will most likely be around two hundred individuals strong, and will deal either collectively or in subcommittee jury group with anything from asylum requests or the allocation of medical resources to commercial disputes. It is the most nuanced and democratic system of direct governance ever devised, and it requires genuine participation from the polity. For the body of the state to perform its function properly, each person must make his or her own decision in the light of their personal experience and opinion without being influenced by others at the formative stage, so sessions are initially private and remain anonymous throughout. Each problem is proposed to each person in a way that is fractionally different, tailored precisely to pique their interest and understanding, their self-interest and their altruism, so that every choice is made with the greatest awareness of consequence and meaning. (p. 25)

Gnomon by Nick Harkaway

But the workings of a utopian participatory democracy are not what Gnomon is about. They are the necessary foundation of a story — or more properly a nested set of stories — that is both wider and deeper. It begins with Inspector Mielikki Neith making a televised statement about the death of a suspect in the custody of the Witness, while people use the System to examine her microexpressions to gauge whether her pained honesty about how everyone at the Witness feels this failure is faked, and Neith herself follows the polling numbers that trail across her screen. Or maybe it begins with the death of Diana Hunter, the death that distresses Inspector Neith because of the failure it implies, though Hunter’s case will do much more than distress her as Gnomon proceeds. Or maybe it begins with Hunter being called in for interrogation. The first words that she gives to the System are the title of the first section of Gnomon, “my mind on the screen.” In fuller form:

“I can see my mind on the screen.”
Hunter’s first thought during the examination is like the barb on a fishhook, and Neith instinctively loathes it. These eight unremarkable words cause her to tighten her jaw as if expecting a blow. The phrase is, to be sure, unusually clear and strong, quite ready to be vocalised. One must assume that Hunter was deliberately recording a message, in which case: to whom? To Neith, as the investigating officer? Or to an imagined historian? Why does the tone, the clean, discursive flavour of Hunter’s mind, trouble that part of the Inspector that is devoted to a professional mistrust of appearances? (p. 10)

A gnomon is the bar sticking out from a slab that turns a flat surface into a sundial. Its intrusion changes a physical phenomenon into a source of meaning and measurement. “In geometry, a gnomon is a plane figure formed by removing a similar parallelogram from a corner of a larger parallelogram; or, more generally, a figure that, added to a given figure, makes a larger figure of the same shape.” Gnomon is filled with such irruptions, things that intrude among planes, cast shadows, and change meanings.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/09/22/gnomon-by-nick-harkaway-pt-1/