76 – The Galaxy and the Ground Within
Ah, Becky Chambers. Absolutely the highlight of my 2023 reading year was discovering her work. The Galaxy and the Ground Within is the final book in the Wayfarers series and I am desolate to see it end. For weeks after finishing it I was in a state of denial, scouring news sites for the fifth book that I was sure would be announced. Sure, she has other books but they’re novellas and I already feel as if I don’t get enough time in her work to live with her characters. I wish she would just sell out completely and release a book like this every year. I need this in my life – books of calm tranquillity, full of nice people being nice, with the occasional weird bird orgy thrown in for spice.
The books walk a difficult line – wholesome without being cloying. Optimistic without a speck of Pollyannaish wishfulness. Each and every one of them has been fantastic. Even now, I feel the tragedy of 2023 is that I have reached the end of the series. I read this one after the Silence of the Girls because that book is genuinely quite upsetting, and the Galaxy and the Ground Within is a salve. More than anything else, I miss having one of these in the chamber (teehee) for when the world gets too bleak.
In this one, the premise shifts yet again – there is a freak accident in the space lanes above the planet of Gora, which is a kind of interstellar equivalent of a flyover state. It’s basically a motorway service station of a world, of value only for the amenities it provides to travellers awaiting allocation for departing the system. When all travellers are grounded by the accident, the story focuses on the lives of three waiting aliens and the journeys that they were hoping to take. They’re stranded at the Five-Hop, which is run by an amazingly indulgent single mother and her distracted and distracting child. She works hard to make sure that everyone who visits feels seen and valued, and with the extended and unexpected stay she has some relatively complex interpersonal politics to manage.
Except, this is a Becky Chambers novel and it shows the world as it could, and perhaps, should be. Everyone assumes the best of each other. They seek common ground rather than uncommon battlegrounds. They accept the value of differing perspectives and are respectful of the way in which different angles on the world illuminate its complexity.
I’ve been watching the West Wing again, and weird as it is I can see a lot of resonances between the Wayfarers books and the staff of Bartlett’s Whitehouse. The West Wing felt hopeful at a time when the real world was grim, and it was inspiring to see a television show that focused on fundamentally good people (even if they are, wall to wall, a bunch of arrogant dicks) trying to do fundamentally good things. The Wayfarers series has a similar kind of feel to it – the books make you feel optimistic because they contain within them a promise of how life could be if we were all just better people. Not impossibly better, but better in very achievable ways.
Unfortunately, in order for that to happen the human race and the systems it has invented would have to be radically different. The evolution of human society has been to industrialize cruelty and competition in a way that crushes our better instincts. That’s why Becky Chambers is a god-damned treasure – she shows a way of viewing the people around us that is not unachievably distant from where we are now. I’m not saying that the books made me a better person. Or even that they made me want to be a better person. But did they make me want to want to be a better person?
Also no. But I am extremely glad that I have read them and I recommend them wholeheartedly.
77 – I Who Have Never Known Men
I Who Have Never Known Men was another surprising book, because I’d never really heard of it and it turned out to be a staggeringly good piece of post-apocalyptic fiction. It’s not quite feminist post-apocalyptic fiction I’d say, even if it’s occasionally pitched that way. It’s not about a world that doesn’t need men. It’s just about a world that doesn’t have them beyond a short period at the start of the novel.
I’d say I’m going to be vague here because I don’t want to give spoilers. Really I’m going to be vague because, as good as the book is, it has that intensely frustrating quality of being absolutely uninterested in providing you with answers. It begins with women locked up in cages. Why? No idea. They are guarded by men who, while not actively cruel, are completely indifferent to the suffering or indignity of their charges. Who are they? You tell me. At some point, a siren activates and the men run off. Why did the siren begin to wail? Look, you might be getting a sense of what the book’s like at this point. They escape the cages, and emerge into a landscape of baffling logistical complexity and absolutely no catharsis of meaning.
If the characterisation wasn’t so sophisticated and nuanced it would be a book I would have thrown against the wall.
In the end though, despite the fact it is completely opaque as to what happened before, it focuses almost entirely on ‘how do we live now?’, and really that’s probably reflective of what the book should be about. The deeper questions of ‘how did we get here?’ are less pressing than the simple act of survival. And as the older prisoners begin to age into infirmity, the question becomes ‘And why does it even matter?’
As a warning, this book is bleak down to its bones. Haunting in a literal sense – the book will stick with you long after you read it. I’m writing this review months after I finished it and I still think about it regularly. Just out of nowhere I remember some of the story and am temporarily floored again. Just brought down by the sheer unceasing hopelessness of the story’s take on society and power structures.
This is a treasure house of a book, if you’re willing to accept joyless suffering as a treasure of its own.
78 – Because Internet
Because Internet is a fun book about language online. It’s thoughtful, well argued, well structured, and informative. I don’t really have much more to say about it though because, well, it’s a book about how language evolves online and short of repeating the content verbatim that’s probably enough context. It’s like giving a review of a non-fictional account of a journey to a country you already know. I can replicate her arguments, but in the summary it’s just going to lose a lot of its value.
It’s worth reading, so if you want to know about emojis and memes and why kids freak out about text messages ending in full stops versus not, it’ll hook you up.
79 – Hidden Figures
This book covers a lot of the same territory as Rise of the Rocket Girls by Nathalia Holt. Rise of the Rocket Girls was published first, which I always feel is a shame when a later book just happens to catch the zeitgeist in a more obviously combustible form. I guess the additional focus that Hidden Figures puts on black women was also more ‘zeitgeisty’ in 2016 and the publication of the two is separated by only a few months. I’m just saying – Rise of the Rocket Girls was first and I’d like to see it get more recognition.
Anyway, Hidden Figures is the same again, pretty much, with a slightly different focus. Many of the same people come up in the story, as you’d imagine, but it also illuminates the tales of others who didn’t get much prominence in Rise of the Rocket Girls. The writing is perhaps a little less elegant, the narrative a little less clear, and the story a little stale. The latter part though is purely down to the order in which you’re likely to encounter the books. I don’t consider them interchangeable – I think it’s definitely worth reading both – but they do form two largely overlapping Venn diagrams.
So yeah. It was good. But I preferred Rise of the Rocket Girls.
80 – If We Were Villains
Jesus, this book. It is Insufferable. the characters are insufferable. The premise is insufferable. The writing is unbearably pompous. Have I said that the premise is insufferable? Every single page of this book is a challenge to the reader. ‘I dare you not to roll your eyes’, it says. Times I succeeded at the challenge? Zero.
I still gave it four stars in Storygraph.
Okay, let me explain what the book is. It’s a kind of whodunnit, except it’s really a ‘whodidn’tdunit’. Oliver Marks has spent years in prison for a murder. After his sentence is served, he and the detective who arrested him meet up. The detective just wants the truth. He was never satisfied with the verdict or the confession, and so now that he has retired he just wants to know what really happened. And Oliver Marks, for the first time in a decade, is willing to talk.
It’s a fine premise. But here’s the problem with the book – Oliver Marks, the jaded ex-con, is a perfectly relatable, character. But he’s recounting stories about his time at an elite drama school where they all quote Shakespeare in the same way normal people might remark on the weather. No utterance is so bereft of import that it doesn’t deserve to be exclaimed in the Bard’s august prose. They don’t say ‘hello’, they say ‘Well shone, Moon. Truly the moon shines with a good grace’, and honestly I want to kick the stuffing out of each one of the unbearable, pompous twats. To which I would undoubtedly be rewarded with some extended soliloquy from King Lear. ‘Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life and I no breath at all!’, they’d intone as they passed thankfully into unconsciousness. ‘Then I defy you, stars!’ their friend would yell as I reached for my shotgun.
Seriously, I know that sounds extreme but they are unbearable in the way that only theatre kids can be – where they think that substituting their own wit for counterfeit exclamations makes them interesting and intelligent. It doesn’t, you little shits!
And they’re all so ponderously self-obsessed and so focused on their status and on the amazingly important work they are doing – which, I remind you, are basically classroom assignments of amateur theatre. I hate all of them so much.
And perhaps part of that is because I do recognise something of myself in it, because in the end this is a book about the community found within fandom and the intensity of connection that can be experienced through shared shibboleths of understanding. They might have an outsized sense of importance about what they are doing (sharing memes) but by god they’re all-in on their nerdery. And I too am all-in on my (varied) nerdery(ies) and it’s probably just as unbearable to other outsiders. And, if I’m honest, fandom insiders too. So, you have to forgive youth its indulgence and its passion. The characters, horrendously pretentious as they are, are laudable in the fact that – in a world where jaded cynicism is the currency of the day – they unabashedly love the object of their affection.
It doesn’t make it less irritating though, and it’s not helped by the fact large portions of the book are basically quotes from Shakespeare as the plays are acted out.
But still, there’s something here – a compelling mystery, a set of complex dynamics, and an aesthetic that is flawlessly executed. That I’d rate a book four stars despite hating such a big part of it so vehemently and aggressively – I can’t deny that there’s something magical in there.