Left of Bang
I always roll my eyes when someone trots out what I call ‘the one word answer’. That’s whenever anyone looks at a complex scenario and can easily articulate a single word that explains it. ‘Racism’, ‘sexism’, ‘ableism’. It doesn’t matter what the word is – the world is too complicated for one word answers to meaningfully illuminate it. Police shootings in particular have been ideologically packaged up as ‘racism’, but the real truth is more complex. It’s a racism issue. It’s a socioeconomic issue. It’s a high-stress situation issue. It’s a training issue. It’s a public funding issue. It’s all of those issues, and more, all tightly bound up in a way that means you can’t really fix any of it until you fix all of it.
I’ll give you an example of what I mean. When I was young I used to drive a beat up old Ford Fiesta. And, being plagued with chronic insomnia, of an evening I’d go for a drive and listen to music as a way to quieten the clamour of activity in my head. I’m as white as a white man can be – any whiter I’d be a prism. And I got pulled over by police, stopped, interrogated – occassionally very aggressively… easily a good couple of dozen times over the course of a couple of years. I once had a police car follow me all the way into the parking lot at work, block my car in full view of my place of employment, and interrogate me for five minutes before apologising and acknowledging that I probably wasn’t the guy they were looking for. I once got grilled by a police officer because I stopped to tie my shoe-lace by the gate of a nice looking house.
If I was black, it’d be easy – and convincing – to pass those incidences off as racism. In my case, it was a socioeconomic thing. I look a lot poorer than I actually am. Even on my best days I look like someone that’s been homeless for quite some time. When I got a better car, when I got a more impressive title and job, all those incidences just… stopped. Or when they occurred, they ended a lot quicker and with a lot more apology on the part of the officers. There are, in other words, lots of reasons why things happen and to focus on one is to miss the others. Racial identity and socioeconomic status are intertwined and interdependent in a way that makes all easier answers completely unworthy of serious consideration.
It’s in that spirit, when police shootings became the cause de jure of social media, I decided to take a step back and try to work out why they happened. And in that I turned to a book called ‘Left of Bang’, which is a military and law enforcement training guide belonging to a programme called ‘Combat Hunter’. It’s a combat profiling technique used by people in high stress, high risk environments to place themselves in a mindset to be proactive about incidents rather than reactive. ‘Bang’ is the inciting event – the explosion, the gunshot, the knife being pulled from a pocket. Left of bang is ‘before’, right of bang is ‘after’. The book talks about how to stay ‘left of bang’ as long as you can so as to properly prepare for what comes afterwards. It’s a bit of a dry read but it’s also superbly insightful. If Michael Westen of Burn Notice was going to write a book, it’d definitely include a lot of what’s in here.
It’s a process that’s taught in a lot of police academies now, and by understanding its intentions you start to see why certain situations escalate to shootings and others deescalate to questioning. There’s a very worthwhile and open discussion to be had as to whether police should be trained like soldiers (I think probably not) and whether the first response to most incidents should be an armed police officer (I also think probably not). There’s also a very worthwhile discussion to be had on the socioeconomic profiling that police do, and how assumptions built into that profiling result in racially charged tragedies. If you did want to understand the process that leads to a shooting though you couldn’t go far wrong with picking this up. It’s absolutely shorn of politics or justifications. It doesn’t put forward a thesis that any shooting is justified. In fact it notes particularly that police officers shouldn’t be operating with a hunter mindset when making split second decisions. The book very effectively illustrate the difficulty and complexity in making a life-or-death decision and how little time you have to make it correctly. In most circumstances, the thing that triggers an instant decision is three observations that are incongruous with normal baseline behaviour. That’s all that stands between someone deciding to pull the trigger, or not pull the trigger.
The book is definitely worth your time.
Leviathan Falls
Oh boy, am I sorry to see this series end. It’s been with me for a long time – nine books in a franchise I have been following for a bit under a decade. It’s been such a grand epic, told on such a long scale, that until this month I’ve almost always been in the position of having another book to which I can look forward. And now it’s done.
The Expanse is a remarkable series of novels. The worst never dip below ‘really good’, which is a level of quality that is very difficult to sustain for so many thousands of pages. And these characters – wow. I have had close friends that have been more transient. Jim, Amos, Alex and Naomi have been reassuring figures for me. We’ve shared a lot of tragedies together. We’ve fought a lot of hopeless battles and won. And I was very sad to say goodbye to them.
As to the book itself, it’s not the best of the series but it’s also not the worst. And I remind you, the worst never dip below ‘really good’. It is though a little… meandering. There’s a lot that happens that doesn’t really seem to mean anything. Perhaps it’s a pacing thing, to ramp up the tension of the ending. Perhaps it’s a reluctance on the part of the authors to conclude their epic series. I was glad for every minute with the characters, but truthfully I’d say that a good half of the book feels like it’s just spinning the wheels of the story.
As events build towards the finale, The Expanse faces the great challenge of every cycle of books that has so much work invested in its narrative… how can it end in a way that is satisfying to everyone? To its credit, the Expanse has long set a precedent here… the universe is unfair and plot armour doesn’t work within it. You’re primed for the fact the ending was never going to be happy, and the best you can hope for is bittersweet. The Expanse ends gracefully, in a way that feels semi-cathartic. It’s only semi though – all the tension that has been effectively built up over the years doesn’t quite get enough time to fully release. That’s a little frustrating because of how long it takes for the book to eventually find its proper trajectory – the payoff for years of engagement with the books feels like it’s not quite fully paid up in the metaphorical balance sheet. At the end, I still felt like I was owed something. I couldn’t say to you what it was. I just felt like the series ends by patting its pockets and saying ‘Sorry I’m all tapped out’ while I’m still checking my bank account for the missing payments due.
But still – goodbye Rocinante. It’s been a hell of a journey.
The Lies of Locke Lamora
I genuinely feel like kicking myself for having owned this book for so long without reading it. Much like A Canticle for Leibowitz, it’s a title that deserved so much more than sitting unloved on a shelf. It is absolutely excellent and it is fitting punishment I guess that I finally got done with it a mere two hours into Depth Year 2022 because I otherwise would have rushed off and bought the sequels.
The Lies of Locke Lamora is a dark urban fantasy set in the kind of time period you’d be familiar with from a whole range of media franchises. It’s vaguely Victorian London but with magic. Vaguely early New York but where the gangs are united. I don’t know the exact term for it (and with Project Unplug I can’t just go look it up) but it would be very familiar once you’d read a chapter. And within this city of Camorr we find Locke Lamora and his Gentlemen Bastards – thieves to the gentry and perpetual innovators in the field of aristocratic con tricks. The book, which is lengthy, is an exploration of one particular con and the con…sequences it sparks off.
And it is really, really good. After a little bit of a slow start, it sparks off into something genuinely magical. The plot might be a touch on the predictable side but it is so well written, so evocatively described, and so well characterized that you need to really make an effort to be bothered by it. Every other part of the book – particularly the worldbuilding that is unobtrusively threaded through the character development – is almost perfect. There are pages upon pages of whimsical, rambling exposition here but you never notice them because they’re suffused through the text like a gentle and unobtrusive aroma. Lynch, the author, never tells you anything about the story without sprinkling a little pinch of mystery around its context.
And yet, it’s a book that never gets lost in its own cleverness. You never get the impression you picked up an encyclopaedia of someone’s invented world. Instead everything is presented in the terms in which its introduction matters, and the result is something compellingly opaque. For all the wonderfully described world, you still end up with a head full of mysteries. The main difference is – you care about the answers, because they are so intimately bound up in the action of the story.
I won’t spoil anything that happens in the book – I loved it too much to do that – but this is one of those rare six out of five books. I don’t just recommend you read this, I will go out of my way to positively encourage people to pick it up.
The Life Changing Magic of Not Giving a Fuck
You know what annoys me about this book? Mainly that it’s a book at all. This has been my life philosophy since I was about twenty and if I had thought it was a publishable thesis I would have leapt on the chance. It’s a simple idea, one that works exceptionally well. Basically – you don’t have to care about everything. You don’t need to have responsibility for how people feel about what you do. Your life is full of obligations you don’t want and people you can’t stand. You work from a limited budget of fucks in your life. Every fuck you give unwillingly reduces ends up reducing the number of fucks you have available to give for things you genuinely value.
It’s a simple idea, and the book attempts to turn it from a general approach to life into a formal system. It don’t think it works in that respect, but I do think you should all consider where your fucks are going and whether your fuck budget is balanced at the end of the month.
Master and Commander
I loved the movie Master and Commander. It’s a shame it wasn’t successful enough to spark off a franchise because there’s nothing quite like it. But reading Master and Commander does highlight that this is a series that is for a very specific audience – an audience that, for example, doesn’t mind reading through several pages of dense nautical notes on rigging just so you know ‘They made the ship go fast’. If you know your t’gallants from your mizzenmasts, and your royals from your mainstays then it can be fascinating in a kind of stressful, overbearing way. But if you don’t want to spend a few hours studying the sailing configurations of an 18th century brig then maybe this isn’t a book for you.
Me, on the other hand – I really enjoyed it. Mostly.
For one thing, Master and Commander is beautifully written when it’s not coming across like the Hayes technical manual for a 36-gun frigate. I’ve described it to Mrs Meeple as Jane Eyre goes to sea… which is a bit of a disservice because I don’t like Jane Eyre at all. But the focus on etiquette and courtly manners and the deference of rank is all very much in that ballpark. The relationship between the cheerful Jack Aubrey and the more phlegmatic Stephen Maturin is where a lot of the dialog really sparkles. The conversation is scintillating and witty in a way that makes me think I would have enjoyed an invite to the Captain’s table myself. The whole book is a love-letter to an era of sail that has long past, and it reminded me forcefully of Antoine de Saint-Exupery when he said ‘If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.’
But for all its charms, the book does go on long beyond the point it should gracefully retire and that can be exhausting in a novel where a single paragraph may require you to give up on the plot while you unravel the specifics. Large parts otherwise comes across as baffling. It’s like a book with assigned homework whenever things get interesting. To defeat a greatly superior ship, for example, the HMS Sophie employs a trick of proximity to get in close at a point where the cannons on the enemy are pitched too high to be able hit the smaller ship. But it’s explained in such precise and unwavering detail that the greater point often gets lost in its telling. It’s very easy, ironically, to get tangled up in the rigging of the narrative.
But still – I did enjoy it a lot and if you like the idea of a book that expects you as a reader to put in the due diligence, I recommend it to your attention. I’ll be reading the whole series I suspect, but perhaps only once I achieve a masters degree in nautical jargon.
Press Reset
This is much improved over Jason Shrier’s first book, but it still suffers from the same basic problems – mainly that it seems like one decent point of rhetoric that gets repeated like an old vinyl album with a scratch. This is his basic thesis – the games industry is incompatible with living a healthy life. And he’s right – of course he is. The uncertainty is chronic, and many workers are exploited for their desire to make games for a living. Studios close regularly, games get cancelled mid development, and the industry pivots so often it can make you dizzy.
It’s all true, and he makes the argument well and supports it with many examples. In fact, he supports it with too many examples. It doesn’t really feel like an idea that needed to be a book – it feels like it would have been better paced as a series of articles on a website. There’s certainly enough content in here to fill the page count, and it’s a good read even with its constant repetition. Shrier writes well and is clearly well acquainted with the necessary people to go for a real deep-dive into the topic. It’s just… okay man, I get it. You’ve made your point, you don’t need to keep on making it again and again in slightly different ways.
Really I think the two Jason Shrier books are worthy in their own ways, but instead of writing two decent books he should have put them together in one superb book. As they currently stand, it’s as Bilbo Baggins said – it feels too thin, like not enough butter spread over too much bread. ‘You don’t know when to take yes as an answer’, is sometimes said of someone who keeps trying to convince you of something past the point was necessary. He had me on board at the half-way mark in both of his works, they could have ended there.
Did you see how I said the same thing – like, seven times – in slightly different ways? That’s Press Reset.
(That’s eight times)
Project Hail Mary
You may remember from previous newsletters that I didn’t really care for Artemis, the second book from Andy Weir. Fearing he might be a one-hit wonder, I turned to Project Hail Mary only to find my early fears confirmed. Having failed to execute upon his concept in Artemis, he has basically returned to the architecture of The Martian for his third book. In terms of structure and style it’s basically The Martian 2.0. Sure, it has a new main character and the stakes set considerably higher but it has very loud, very insistent echoes of his first breakout novel. But you know what? It turned out I was absolutely okay with that.
We see hundreds of books a year that are formulaic, in the strict sense. Dozens of crime mysteries. Thousands of relationship dramas. Millions of books that are basically the same as other books out there. However, Andy Weir is the only person producing books that are built on the theme of ‘let’s science the shit out of these problems’. I found Project Hail Mary very engaging once I stopped thinking of it as a rehash of an early book and started thinking of it as an entry in a new genre of literate, educational sci-fi,
I mean, I guess that’s not strictly speaking a new genre but it’s certainly a novelty to find these kinds of books being made into movies.
It’s not quite as good as his first book, but it’s really enjoyable once you get past the first few chapters. It starts with a bang, but in a way that feels muted because of its similarity to the Martian. Give Weir a little slack there though because the story is actually great once it gets going, and it sets up an excellent premise for a book that keeps on giving.
If you liked the Martian, I think you’ll find this a very worthwhile read.