1 – A Thousand Ships
This is a lovely book, about the forgotten women of the Trojan war. It shines a light on the heroism that doesn’t exist on the battlefield, and does a fine job of that. ‘The casualties of war aren’t just the ones who die’, as it says.
It’s maybe not quite as elegant in places as I might like, relying a little too much on exposition and a little too lightly on implication. It’s also maybe a little too scattershot to really have many of the little stories land with much emotional heft – it relies on a kind of emotional connection to ‘The Women of Troy’ rather than to any specific character. The tragedy which is so heavily emphasized throughout is diluted because you never get a full mouthful of its flavour. It feels a little bit like it relies too much on the source material and where that is sparse, the story flits away.
In other words, the book is at odds with its own premise. It retells the stories of the *unforgotten* women of Troy. It’s kind of an anthology of what classical literature has already said, and that’s a shame. I guess inventing stories would have been ‘off message’ but I was hoping for a bit more than collecting together the already existing fragments of the past.
Maybe its biggest draw is the focus it puts on these stories though – elevating them to the primary narrative rather than to the background. I’m not sure though that’s enough to distinguish the book all that much given how Greek literature already has a number of classical writers who did that pretty well.
An enjoyable read, but maybe not a necessary one.
2 – Embrace Your Weird
I have been a fan of Felicia Day for a long time, ever since I saw her in the first season of the Guild, way back in… 2007? Jesus. That’s quite a while. I have watched her in a lot of things, I even used to leave her gaming streams playing on Youtube until her regular high-pitched singing broke something inside me. And I loved her first book, ‘You’re Never Weird on the Internet’ , which in my spreadsheet for 2015 I have rated as a full five stars.
Unfortunately, I don’t really recommend this book to you. It’s her primer on creativity, and while it’s not bad it’s somehow something worse… it feels inauthentic. It reads like it was written by Felicia Day, the persona. Not Felcia Day, the person. I say it ‘reads like’ because I don’t actually know her and I’m Internet savvy enough to know that the real-world Felicia is not the Felicia I see online. But regardless of that, this feels like it’s someone trying to be quirky and adorkable. It feels like someone play acting. Really, it reads to me like an editor trying to roleplay as Felicia Day and not succeeding. I’m not saying the book was ghost-written… just that if it was, it would explain a lot.
Perhaps it’s due to a lack of her confidence with the material, but I don’t think so. To its credit it doesn’t pretend to be evidence-based or grounded in the literature. It’s a personal exploration through some creativity techniques that the author has found useful over the years. And it’s absolutely riddled through with positive-reinforcement creativity exercises I refused to do. So perhaps it’s also on me for not fully engaging with the material. A lot of the writing seems like padding (‘It’s been a while since I wrote something oddball, so here’s an oddball reference’). And a lot of the exercises seem like the kind of thing you throw to a class of schoolchildren when you’re too hungover to actually teach anything.
‘God, I don’t know kids. Draw a tree or something. Write your personal strengths into the trunk, and then it’ll help you somehow’.
But also, I am perfectly prepared to concede that this just isn’t a book for me. Perhaps it’s my sociopathy showing but a lot of the pep-talk stuff isn’t really necessary – my philosophy has long been ‘start making crap, and then refine it until it’s less crap, and keep doing that until you abandon it, ‘release it’ and move on to the next thing’. I long ago resigned myself to the fact that you can’t please everyone with the creative work you do, and you should settle instead for pleasing yourself. In fact, I probably go too far in that direction – my work on Epitaph (my MUD) became a lot less fun the day I opened up to players. I’m not well placed to judge then if there’s any real alchemy in drawing your negative thoughts in a cage and then saying ‘Okay, now you don’t have to listen to them’. I’m fairly sure my negative thoughts won’t stay imprisoned just because I wrote them on a piece of paper. Unless I was doing it with some kind of magical pencils given to me by a freed genie. Much of the book, in other words, is deeply unconvincing.
But the book is – at least – a sustained exercise in cheerleading in a way that few books are. I do believe Felicia Day wants you to make things. I do believe she wants you to find joy in creativity for its own sake. And perhaps that’s enough for a book of this nature. But honestly, I’d say go read her first book instead. I think it’s actually better at communicating the thesis of this book.
3 – The Space Between Worlds
This is a pleasantly written book with an interesting pitch. In many respects, it reminds me of the Pratchett/Baxter collaboration ‘The Long Earth’, but it does something more meaningful with the premise. In the Long Earth, a method is found to step between alternate dimensions to explore variations of our world. Each is separated from ours by one main difference – only in the prime Earth have Homo Sapiens ever emerged. The infinity of the Long Earth, in other words, is largely just infinitely lonely until the press of human expansionism robs it of its solitude.
The Space Between Worlds has a slightly different take on it – the only alternate worlds that are reachable are the ones closest in ‘resonance’ to our own. The more differences, the less likely anyone can reach them. A few hundred alternate Earths – much like the prime Earth – that are full of people – much like the ones you know. And if you exist in one of them, you will die if you try to visit. Safe passage is permitted only to a world which you have vacated.
And that’s where the book really finds its feet – imagine a world where you can only visit if the ‘you’ that belongs authentically is dead. Who would you recruit as the explorers for this strange reality? You probably wouldn’t recruit the best and the brightest, because what are the chances for that within the set of hands dealt out by fate there’s enough death to make it worthwhile? The rich, protected by their wealth, survive. The healthy persist. The privileged largely retain their privilege. So, who do you send? You send the poor. The outcasts. Those with so rough a life that their survival was only ever odds on. Those whose next breath was always on a knife edge in any given set of variables.
And there are plenty of those, because in addition to being an exploration of privilege the book is also a head-on dissertation on classism. The rich live in a walled city, with gardens and walkways and a shield that protects them from the worst of an apocalyptic sun. The poor live on the periphery, ruled through fear by the terrible emperor who once almost choked our protagonist to death. The technology for traversal exists with the rich. The ‘human resources’ are to be found amongst the poor. So they are brought into comparative luxury, only to be denied the sense of belonging that others take for granted. It’s not just a space between literal worlds, but also sociological worlds.
And intertwined into all of this is a story of family and identity and what it actually means to be an authentic person. Our protagonist is constantly dealing with an identity crisis that is only exacerbated by the feeling of contempt she projects onto those with whom she spends most of her days. She knows that her time with the company is numbered – that sheer actuarial statistics mean that they need fewer and fewer traversers every day. And yet, her upbringing has left her believing that there’s no reason anyone could find value in her other than what misfortune has been brought to her alternate selves. I’d say it’s also an insightful book about imposter syndrome, but it’s not quite that straightforward.
It’s a good, rich, and interesting blend of elements let down only somewhat by the fact that the story itself is only so-so. And it is perhaps too ambitious for its page count – its themes are compelling and reasonably well executed, but I couldn’t help but feel it would have woven a more convincing hypothesis if it had fewer moving parts. No one part of it excels, because it doesn’t really get the opportunity. It’s a revenge tale that never really builds the character relationships to make it satisfying. It’s sci-fi without the focus on either the sci or the fi. It’s a love story where the participants are, truthfully, quite had to love. It’s a socioeconomic tract built from relative shallow observations. There’s a lot of telling and not showing, which makes it an unconvicting character study. It feels… flighty.
But also, I did enjoy it and the fact it reached so far is commendable even if in doing so it missed a lot of what could have made it extraordinary. If you chase two rabbits, you will catch neither. Here, there are rabbits everywhere you look but all you really end up with is a few handfuls of fur.
4 – Piranesi
Big picture, shallow stuff out of the way first – my word, but Susanna Clarke can write. Piranesi is beautifully written, and it is a very good read. Overall. But ultimately this is also a book that I felt lied to me, and a lot of the goodwill it had initially built up evaporated at about the 30% point. I’ll try to explain why without offering direct spoilers, but even the non-spoiler version may spoil things. So caveat emptor. Er… caveat lector? I never did Latin at school.
Anyway, this isn’t a whodunnit. But it is constructed like one to begin with. And more annoyingly, like a really good one. But it’s not about the who – that’s pretty obvious as soon as characters are introduced. It’s more like a whatdunnit and that’s very compelling. You know the characters, you’re pretty sure who is villain and who is victim, but you have no idea what’s actually happened. You have identified criminals but still need to work out the crime. It’s an inviting mystery.
The clues are subtle, but everywhere. They’re delivered in such a skilful way that I was scouring every statement for the solution to the scenario I was being presented. And I was very happy with the book at this point. I felt like we’d come to an accord and I was pleasantly engrossed in mentally exploring the contours of the weird puzzle it was presenting me. Probing all the potential solutions against a growing dataset of empirical data. I felt like I was making progress. A character would make a slight remark about something and it would tingle a bit of my brain that said ‘Oh, that’s significant because it implies a lot’. And I don’t think this is down to me projecting onto the book – it doesn’t say it’s a solvable mystery but I think it wants you to engage with it in that way. I definitely got the ‘come hither’ look in its eyes.
But there’s at least two tiers of quality in a whodunnit. The first is the kind where you get the solution at the end and think ‘Oh, wow that’s clever’. It doesn’t really matter if you were right in your own deduction. You were given ample opportunities to work out the solution and if you did or you didn’t, it’s all on you. The book never cheated.
The other tier is when the solution ends up essentially being ‘And the killer is… this guy who has only been mentioned in two sentences’. And that’s such a cop-out because essentially the book is saying ‘the rest of the book has not mattered, because there was no way you could have reasonably guessed this. Unless your approach to the mystery was thinking of a shock reveal and working out its content by the literary equivalent of gravitational lensing’. In other words, you take a very ‘meta trope’ approach and say ‘Well, it can’t be anything hinted at in the book, so the solution must exist in the set of things that haven’t been hinted at’. This is the M. Night Shyamalan level of artless hackery.
And honestly, that’s what I thought Piranesi was when I got to the ‘reveal’ point. I felt utterly cheated because it’s not fair to construct what seems like an immaculate mystery when you do not commit to an immaculate solution grounded in the context which you have presented.
But I kept reading, and if you discount the fact it implies it’s a book that it isn’t then it builds back the goodwill that it squandered because it shifts into a whydunnit. And since it’s already betrayed you at the pivot point, you can just immerse yourself into the story. You’re obviously not supposed to be a participant in making meaning of what’s going on. You’re to be told things, so just go limp.
That’s probably a good approach in the end, because a lot of the moving pieces in Piranesi have exceptionally predictable orbits after it reveals the bigger picture to you. Those orbits are just described in exceptionally compelling ways.
That really leads to my main conclusion. I liked Piranesi a lot. I don’t know why.
It’s not the characters, because this may be the first book I’ve read where there’s no character development, and in fact mostly what you get is character regression. The eponymous Piranesi is a vapid placeholder of a person. A transplanted Pollyanna with all the nuance of a blank sheet of paper. The interesting people are described primarily in historical terms. And the main antagonist only develops as a character if you hadn’t already picked up on him twirling his moustache and tying his metaphorical victim to the metaphorical train tracks.
It’s not the plot, because again I’m not sure I’d describe the book has having one in the traditional sense. I mean, by the definition of ‘events happening in a sequence’ it does tick the box but very little of it feels especially linked to the agency of the main character. He’s a passive receptacle. A person for things to happen to.
I guess in the end it’s linked to the setting, which as I say is fascinating and full of mystery, and that does at least retain its shine at the Betrayal. The environment doesn’t lose its appeal at that point. Its appeal shifts into a different kind of mystery. And it is beautifully described in ways that – even when you know the central mystery is essentially bereft of logic – continue to enthral. As I say, there’s no question mark over whether Susanna Clarke can write.
That seems like a weak hook upon which to hang your hopes, but Piranesi is still the best book I have read so far this year.
Only book 4 of 52 finished though, so that’s not making much of a claim.
5 – Ancillary Justice
Ancillary Justice is a sci-fi novel that’s been distantly pinging away on my radar for a while. At its core, it’s a story about a dead spaceship’s brain trapped inside a comparatively fragile human body. But it’s more than that, because it’s a book that plays around quite a bit with the flexibility of its medium. More than anything else, it reminds me of Dune in terms of how it absolutely does not give a damn about making itself accessible to a reader. But it doesn’t do this (much) in terms of invented jargon or historical context.
One of the ways it does it is by layering the reader’s gender expectations onto a gender neutral language. Everyone, unless they’re being referenced in an in-universe language with explicit pronouns, is a ‘she’ which then leads to a mental picture of the universe that can violently reshape without warning. It’s confusing, but also quite clever in that it pokes a lot of fun at what gender expectation means in a vast, complicated universe. Absent direct observation of sexual characteristics, widely variable cultural mores mean that secondary indicators are all but useless. Makeup is coded male in one system for example, and female in another. In one sense, it’s all very fashionable and modern. But the impression I got from the writing was that this is a book that is more in line with third-wave feminism than modern Twitter activism – it’s a rejection of the dominance of cultural gender norms and an acceptance of the supremacy of individual identity. It harkens back to a time when differences in emphasis between ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ in any given person could still be described and accepted as simply ‘having a personality’.
Anyway, the pronouns used in the book are really confusing. Until they’re not.
And this intentional opacity also extends to what seems like a complex feudal, Imperial system of class, rank, privilege and status to which you are given no introduction. To be a member of the empire is to be a citizen, and to be a citizen is to be civilized. No matter the sophistication of a society, if it is not formally part of the empire, it is to be forcefully annexed and its denizens brought into the light. There’s a strong sense of the Roman empire in all of this in that it’s a philosophy that is fundamentally fascistic, expansionist, and yet weirdly accommodating. Local gods are rarely taken away, they are simply absorbed into the myths and rites of the dominant society. The Holy Roman Empire did a lot of this too – Zoroastrianism and Mythraism and such are the source of many of our most enduring myths of Catholicism.
Right from the start then you need to come to terms with a complex sociological structure that you can tell is far more important in every interaction than you’re equipped to handle. And on top of this it’s also drawing from wildly varied philosophies of social interaction. There’s the very Western conception of ‘old money’ versus ‘new money’, but also a vaguely Eastern tinge to the way in which mandarins are assigned administrative rules. There are obvious social hierarchies butting up against Chinese inspired conceptions of meritorious ‘scholar officials’. The tensions between these are a core theme of the book.
And to help you explore all of this, the book helpfully starts by trying to explain how to perceive the world when you are made up of thousands of autonomous processes (spread over mechanical systems and the sinister ancillary ‘corpse soldiers’ of the title) with tens of thousands of distinct sensory channels. So – that’s nice.
I’m making the book sound like it’s almost vindictive, but I don’t think that’s what’s being done here. It’s not vindictive… it just feels vaguely alien and I think that’s a strength in a piece of sci-fi like this. It makes you feel like a tourist, in part because none of the characters in it are the reader stand-in to whom everyone feels compelled to offer an explanation. There’s no muggle-born Harry Potter to whom Ron can explain magic for the benefit of the reader. There’s no Neo from the Matrix, newly emerged into an unfamiliar world and in need of exposition. For all its perverse structuring, it feels like a respectful book that trusts you to gradually familiarise yourself with the weird universe it is projecting. Stick with it, and it’ll reward you for the effort.
In other word, Ancillary Justice is the first book in a while that I might describe as intentionally (albeit non-traditionally) ergodic, as in requiring a special exertion to navigate and digest. And that’s kind of odd, because few pieces of ergodic literature are so otherwise conventional in their construction. It’s a novel, and it makes no effort to transcend your structural expectations. But like Dune, it is so wrapped up in its own mythology and context that it is simultaneously its own cipher and its own Rosetta Stone.
I may be hyping that up a bit, but I really did enjoy Ancillary Justice a lot even though it felt like an unfriendly book to begin with. And I think a big part of that is because the need to engage with the text creates a lot of fascinating opportunities for projecting your own interpretations on the events. I remember years ago hearing someone talking about watching an old English television program about very proper etiquette at a Victorian dinner party. They could never understand how shocking it was for a woman at the table to stay with the men for the post-meal cigar. There’s a lot of situational knowledge that comes along with understanding the implications there, and they’re bound up in a time period, a geographical location, and a certain understanding of the places people are to occupy in social events. Ancillary Justice feels to me like being thrust into a confusing puzzle of manners and being left to work it all out based on the observable fallout of every action.
It’s real good.