11 – Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow
When I watched the movie Free Guy, I felt like I couldn’t really enjoy it. I found it hard to switch off my brain in the way an obviously brainless movie requires. A movie about games, it turns out, is hard for me to simply absorb. I have to critique it. And this book – is about games. Sort of. Maybe it’s fairer to say it’s a book set around games.
I enjoyed it a lot but also found quite irritating in places as it dipped into the uncanny valley of the Tesco Value game pastiches that drive much of the storytelling. I rarely bother with the acknowledgements in a book, but I did dig into these to see whether the shameless rip-off of Brenda Romera (amongst others) would be given some time and discussion. And it isn’t. So, that’s pretty bad form given how the daring inventiveness of one early game serves as an important element of incitement for everything that follows. It’s not plagiarism, but it does have the dull thud of something shiny made from counterfeit materials.
That’s what I mean when I say it’s hard not to critique a book like this. For me, anyway. I see too much of the Oz behind the curtain. There’s a fair amount of this kind of thing, such as supposed technical accomplishments that were out of step with the technology of the time, or how certain academic aspects were structured in the narrative. Little bits of friction with my understanding of the field that cause regular glitches in my mental matrix. Regular conceptual stutters that remind me that I’m engaging in a work of competently, but not perfectly, researched fiction.
A lot of people have asked of this book if they’ll still enjoy it if they’re not a gamer. I think I’d have liked it more if I wasn’t.
But there are other problems here. It’s a book very much about relationships and how they change in line with age, tragedy, success and failure. Those relationships though are… unconvincing. They’re supposed to be complicated and messy and interwoven. It didn’t come across that way to me. For characters that alternately love and hate each other, I didn’t feel any authenticity in the dynamics. It often felt performative – being done for the benefit of the reader, clumsy exposition and all. There is one particular ‘turning point’ in the book where a collaboration goes irredeemably sour based on a chain of conjecture so tenuous that the perpetual grudge it sparks is mystifying. The resentments that build up don’t seem organically connected to the story. I found that unsatisfying because it always felt like everyone was letting things fester in a self-destructive way on flimsy pretexts. Honest ‘friends’ would resolve such things with either a conversation or a relationship ending fiery argument. Especially friends who show how easily they can critique each other. It’s all just loose and disconnected.
Also, until perhaps the last third of the book, I didn’t like any of the main characters. And I loathed several of the side characters too. There is a lecturer in the book who is so smug, patronising and predatory that I found the sections involving him difficult to read. That’d be great if he eventually got an appropriate comeuppance, but his abusive nature is simply softened away into a broad, passive acceptance – he remains a friend and mentor throughout the text. Come on, if you’re going to add someone like this to a book at least have them fall into a volcano at some point.
So none of that is great. But the book does have a lot going for it to make up for these flaws.
It’s written very well, and manages to convincingly integrate insight into ‘outsider psychology’. A number of the themes did resonate with me, since I grew up in this era and could recognise a lot of myself in it. In that, it comes across as a more emotionally literate version of Ready Player One – my overall perception is positive in part because of a warm glow of nostalgia, and a sense of being seen. There are moments of genuine emotional catharsis threaded through the occasionally stilted dialog, and the arc of the characters – while not well motivated – is certainly well structured. It follows a narrative trajectory that is, to borrow one of the references from the book, ‘proportioned to the groove’. For a book about games and game culture, it does a great job of conveying just how sophisticated the inspiration for gaming can be. And it is also, occasionally, insightfully acidic about gamer culture, game criticism, and the modern zeitgeist.
It handles its bigger themes well too – themes of belonging; of jealousy and collaboration; of living with disability and pain; and of moving on from failure. It does well with the recurring themes of loss, and how life is essentially one big catalogue of accumulated trauma. It’s sensitive to issues of class and poverty while not being preachy. And, core to much of its messaging, it is an explicit and convincing deconstruction of the sexist misattribution of accomplishment.
It’s strengths make up for its weaknesses. Not a book that blew me away, but one that did keep me engaged.
12 – Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982
I’m not sure I’ve read a book before that has made me quite so profoundly sad without giving any individual moment of catharsis. As in, it doesn’t culminate in anything that gives you anything so obvious as a reason to cry. It just presses down on you, again and again and again. The book felt to me like a meditation on narrowing opportunities, with possibilities for a truly fulfilling life of self-actualisation constantly being gradually closed off with every page. It feels claustrophobic. But worse, it feels inevitable. I’d normally critique a book like this for being so workaday with its writing, but here I think it’s very effective. It’s stark, unadorned, and matter-of-fact. That’s part of what makes it such a disheartening read.
Simple pitch is this – Kim Jiyoung has started to think she is other people. Mostly women she has known. And she’s started to manifest their personalities, to the alarm and upset of the people around her. The book then delves into her life, to try to locate the cause of her malady.
Of course, it’s not quite as simple as that because as the book explicitly makes clear – this isn’t a story about Kim Jiyoung. This is a book that attempts to speak for all Korean women. And to further highlight that point it does something that I think is unique in all the fiction I have read. It provides the receipts, as the kids say, of all the factual claims. It has footnotes provided that give the same kind of evidentiary rigour as you’d expect from an academic paper.
And I can understand why, especially given the energetic response this book has had amongst anti-feminists in Korea. A prominent woman simply saying she’s read the book can result in an angry backlash. It’s a book well aware that it is controversial simply for existing, and it has gone out of its way to make sure it can’t be easily dismissed.
Look, I don’t know anything about South Korea really. I don’t know what it’s like being a woman there. I can’t build my entire perception of the country around a single novel. But if I was going to do that, it’s hard to imagine a book that can kindle anger quite like this one while still being essentially ground in the statistics. And it does this in a book that doesn’t really dwell on the anger. It can’t, it’s too shrouded in resignation.
The book is almost passive in how it presents the living circumstances of women in Korea. Kim Jiyoung is sometimes angry, often resentful, but in the end always accommodating. And in other books (Never Let Me Go, for example) that’s a recipe that leaves me cold. But there’s a kind of alchemy at play here, perhaps because of how tightly coupled it is to the world in which we actually live. The hidden subtext everywhere is a call to action. ‘Kim Jiyoung doesn’t have the luxury of being furious about this, so you need to be furious for her’. And so every indignity, every societal bias, every structural and systematic flaw bites at you.
And let me tell you – every page is a denouncement of Korean society and the way it is structured in favour of men. Early parts for example talk about how the women are expected to perform the duties of the home, look after children, and take care of in-laws. At which point the husband’s parents will say ‘Look at our son, and how he looks after his family’. Sisters do work to fund the education of their brothers, and do so willingly as they see it as part of what it means to have siblings. And then they slowly come to the realisation that this is a one-way transaction and they’ll never find this reciprocated. And then, ‘Look at your eldest brother and how well he’s done for himself’. Kim Jiyoung is raised in a country that basically makes it almost impossible for women to be remarkable except in a domestic role. And yet it’s a country where Kim also finds herself being described as a parasite for living off of her husband’s wages. I’m sorry Kim – the game you are playing was rigged from the start.
I’ve raved before about Invisible Women (5 stars, go read it) and I think Kim Jiyoung, born 1982 is an immaculate pairing. Invisible Women gives you the macro lens that shows how women are made less through poorly designed systems. Kim Jiyoung gives you a detailed look into what that actually means. Invisible Women is largely impersonal. Kim Jiyoung is intimately personal. Nowhere is the link more explicit than when the book talks about the prejudice she experiences when seeking help from a doctor regarding the pains she has accumulated from endless house work. ‘Don’t you have a washing machine for laundry and a vacuum cleaner for cleaning? Women these days – what do you have to whine about?’.
That section ends with an observation about how all parts of society have experienced technological progress that supposedly makes life easier, but it’s only in the domestic realm that the work is diminished as a result. ‘She often noticed there was a polarised attitude regarding domestic labour Some demeaned it as ‘bumming around at home’ while others glorified it as ‘work that sustains life’, but none tried to calculate its monetary value. Probably because the moment you put a price on something, someone has to pay’. The book invisible women is largely built around this important observation.
Kim Jiyoung, born 1982, is a visible woman and I think the book that makes her so is great.
13 – Sea of Tranquillity
NASA are awesome at naming things. I’ve thought that for a long time, just like almost every sensible person. They have a gift of marrying the sound and meaning of lovely words to grand aspirations. And then they throw these magical incantations out into the world, where gradual cultural accumulation can make the hallowed through association with the temporary limits of human endeavour.
Endeavour. That was one of theirs too.
Anyway, all this is to say that the title of this book carries with it a lot of meaning that the text has to live up to. And I’m pleased to say… it does!
Emily St. John Mandel is a wonderful writer. I loved Station Eleven when I read it – found myself beguiled by the intricacy and occasional fragility of the style. She invests her books with an authentic intimacy that makes them striking. Sea of Tranquillity is no exception. It’s a little pressed butterfly of a book – full of beautiful colours and biological curves that obscure the subtle poisons that race through the veins of the experience.
I didn’t have any expectations when I picked this up. Hadn’t even really read a blurb about it. I just thought ‘since I really enjoyed Station Eleven I think it would be a safe bet to pick an Emily St. John Mandel book for this year’s project’. It starts as a kind of period novel focused on the exiled son of a rich family, send off to The Colonies for expressing a socially distasteful view on the British empire. And I was a little worried, as this is the kind of book that leaves me largely cold. Not a fan of the period, not a fan of colonialism, but also wearied to my core about the modern discourse around it. I’m not up for another lecture on the topic. I thought I was in for a rough time of it. Thankfully – no.
I’m not giving anything away here because this is all part of the book’s blurb. This is a story about the passing of time told through a series of significant time shifts forwards and backwards through the centuries. An ‘anomaly’ occurs in the lives of several people, which connects them temporally, tied together in a ball of cause, effect and human connection. The event is significant for all of them, and exploring its connotations are a big part of what the book is about.
Really though, like all great books, it’s a book about people – their presence and their absence. The noble son finds himself alone in an impossibly complex world over which his nationality claims mastery. A novelist finds delayed success with a prescient novel and struggles both with the adoring crowds, with the mundane journalists, and then with the absence of both. A workaholic sister has discovered something troubling in her work and wants, more than anything else, to protect her brother from the consequences. The slipping frames of chronology let the imagination take in a lot of different vignettes before the deft writing ties them all together.
I don’t really want to say too much here, since I felt an electric delight when I found out what the book was really about. Mainly because it’s a topic I find alarming. And fascinating. And unconvincing. And compelling. One of those things you believe is wrong in substantive part because you hope it’s wrong. I found it surprising and delightful when the curve of the book touched its periphery and it covers everything in an thoughtful additional layering.
Yeah, this is a lovely book, by a writer who absolutely knows how to make words dance. It’s a hard recommend.
14 – A Memory Called Empire
This is my second five star book of the year – an amazingly good debut novel from an author who has instantly shot up my ‘names to watch’ list. It’s literate sci-fi in the finest tradition – a book that explores social and philosophical issues without relying on anything as inane as a hectoring author-insert delivering a sermon on the mount. It lets the themes emerge organically, in service of the story, and in the process makes a much more convincing – and nuanced – exploration of complicated topics. Some people talk of the Expanse as the sci-fi version of Game of Thrones. It’s always struck me as a weak link – all they really share is some authorial inbreeding. I think a Memory Called Empire is a much stronger candidate for that title, such as it is. This is a book that is, from start to finish, a masterclass in making ‘palace politics’ exciting while also saying something meaningful about the real world.
The core of the book – the plot, if you will – is that there is a vast, all encompassing empire that regards all outside its domain as ‘barbarian’. Something very similar, in fact, to the framing of Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie. After an incident involving the previous ambassador for an independent space station on the verge of civilization our main character is summoned to the court at a time of emerging crisis. Forces are moving against the aging and ailing emperor, and the battle for succession is being carried out – first through the subtle propaganda of poetry, and eventually through violence in the streets. Mahit, our new ambassador, finds herself embroiled in the events and desperate to steer them in a way that protects the independence of her home.
The plot though isn’t really where the book shines. It’s in its deeper messaging.
Mahit is a Stationer, and they operate within different moral norms to the empire. Their small population means they are forever at risk of losing cultural knowledge, and to preserve it the more prominent members of society will have the memories of their predecessors implanted into their brains. Thus begins a long process of ‘becoming’, where two egos try to find the ways in which they can become something new and greater than the sum of its parts. And in that, they must decide on what is to be saved and what is to be discarded. The theme of identity is a major part of the book, with it constantly asking and then addressing the question of ‘What do we mean when we say ‘we’, or ‘I’, or ‘us’, or ‘them’?’. When are we a ‘we’? And when do we become ‘you and me’ instead? Where are our allegiances, and how fragile are they? What can we ask of ourselves, and what can we ask of each other?
And that’s important, because one of the other dominant themes in the book is that of belonging in a place where you can only ever be a visitor. That no matter how much you learn the language, the idioms, the culture… you’ll always be one of ‘them’. Placed in a position where people can never see you as truly civilized, because civilization exists solely within the heart of the empire and by definition it cannot be found outside its reach. Mahit, growing up in adoration of the culture in which she finds herself, is simultaneously pulled in the directions of her duty and her love of the dominant cultural hegemony. Sometimes we can’t have what we really want, for reasons we understand and accept but cannot internalize. Mahit wants her home to remain safe from annexation, and n the process of serving that goal she must perpetually render herself alien. She has to reconcile her contradictory desires – while having another set of memories already acclimatized to her surroundings – without losing herself entirely. Every time she comes in contact with Empire, that becomes more difficult to do.
And within that, she has to contend with multiple layers of what power means. It’s cultural – the ability to effortless integrate into a societal context. The absence of that power means isolation, and the visceral separation that it forces between those you admire and those to whom you belong. True belonging comes from speaking the language of power, and if that language is marked by its linguistic dexterity, allusions and wit… well, there’s only so far you can learn to mimic it.
It’s the power of glamour – the intricate poetry of the empire and the gaudy novels of history are what stationers grow up on. It’s like Levis, and McDonalds, and all our chemists becoming pharmacies. It’s a softer kind of colonization of the kind employed by the United States – a gradual merging of sensibilities as the greater power consumes the individuality of the weaker. At a certain point you have to ask – does it even really matter what flag flies above a parliament if culture is homogenous?
And then there’s the power of – well, power. Of unfathomable military might and the ability to project force in limitless quantities. In that, it’s not even the violence that’s the power. Merely the awareness that violence is always the simplest resource. Lsel Station survives by placating the tiger, but the tiger is docile only as long as it is fed. There’s a lot of theatre in interstellar politics here – the Empire requests indulgence of Lsel Station as a kind of ironic formality. ‘We wish to enter your space, please may we have permission?’. It’s a shadow play. ‘We will ask for permission, provided you never forget you have no power to deny it’. It’s an affectation of civility that only serves to underscore the true power dynamics. It’s the realpolitiks of survival.
There’s a lot happening here, and the nuance is marvellous. It’s expressed through exquisite world-building, character development, and subtle dialog. It’s a genuinely superb book, and I look forward to reading the sequel.
15 Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women who Propelled Us from Missiles to the Moon to Mars
I don’t have a huge amount to say about this book as it’s largely Queens of Animation again but not quite as good. In the book’s defence, it’s hard to say if it’s that’s just an artefact of which book I read first. It was very good, but it was also considerably less absorbing because it didn’t feel like it was covering a lot of new territory. It was largely the same story of the chains of societal expectations, but through the lens of a different organization.
Actually, since this came before Queens of Animation that’s not fair. But life isn’t fair. What can we do about it? Nothing, that’s what.
Anyway, the book takes an extended exploration into the careers of women at what would become the Jet Propulsion Lab, a major resource originally linked to the US Army and eventually to NASA. Founded by a few university friends who were exiled from their institute because they kept blowing it up, JPL would go on to play a pivotal role in many important NASA project – especially the satellites that were sent into the far reaches of the solar system. Galileo was one of theirs. Cassini (in part) too. Voyager – yeah, that was theirs.
But as usual, the history books often omit the women who had pivotal private roles as the focus is put on the public accomplishments of men. JPL hired many women as computers (as in, people who literally computed mathematical things), and over time this department became staffed almost exclusively by women as various managers and supervisors worked to keep the social dynamics working the way they did. ‘Engineers define the problems, and computers solve them’ was a mantra at JPL – that goes a long way to outlining just how critical their work was. However, they rarely got the same kind of recognition as their male peers.
Unsurprisingly for the time, when it’s work done by women it’s not worthy of attention. And as time goes by, if it’s worthy of attention then it’s becomes work that shouldn’t be done by women. The book notes the impact of the introduction of digital computers, and how a female dominated profession became a female minority profession as digitization became ever more important and the skills became more accessible.
The experiences of the women at JPL are less objectively shocking than at Disney – largely because of the camaraderie enabled by preferentially recruiting women to the work. That doesn’t mean it’s all cream and strawberries. One woman, several months pregnant, puts in a request for one of the parking spaces nearest the entrance so as to save her having to trek from the farthest reaches of the parking lot. She’s fired almost instantly, because JPL’s insurance couldn’t cover a pregnant woman.
JPL, I remind you, make unstable rockets full of highly volatile explosives.
Facing this kind of summary termination, the women of JPL must hide the complexities of their real lives. They keep their pregnancies hidden, take annual leave to cover the birth, and then are back at work a few weeks later. What really shines through here though is how much they all seemed to have loved working there – at a time when careers for women were mainly secretaries, nurses and teachers here was a place where a woman could excel on the basis of her talent and intelligence. Even now, JPL is the part of NASA that has the most women working in technical positions.
It’s a good book, full of interesting testimony and flavour, but it’s also quite disjointed in places. It feels stitched together from imperfect parts in a way that is occasionally mismatched and confusing. It’s occasionally weirdly fictionalised in its biographical details, adding rhetorical flourishes that the primary evidence could not furnish. But it’s also full of vim and energy and does a fine job, like Queens of Animation, in surfacing the hidden accomplishments of women at the very periphery of human accomplishment.
‘Enclosed in aluminium, a treasure lies within Voyager’s memory banks. Written on only forty kilobytes of memory, thousands of times less than what an iPhone holds, are programs first hand-written with pencil and paper by an extraordinary group of women. The programs represent only a slice of their work but were constructed at the pinnacle of their careers. Those programs are remnants soaring amid the space dust. They are the legacy of women written in the stars.’
Who wouldn’t want that as an epitaph for their career?