::The Books of ’21::

part the 2

I think this essay will be in three parts, and I know that’s a lie. There will be 3 updates titled “The Books of ’21” with some number of ::colons:: shielding them on the flanks. There will, however, be two books that have found their way into their own special pages. Yes, this is unfair to the dozens of other books I read and loved, but it had to be done. Someone has to sit on the throne as long as that seat exists. You’ll learn the first in this collection; I’m not going to spoil the surprise up here! Work your way down. There isn’t too much, I promise.

The Cyberpunk Phase

You might accuse me of only having read these books because of the release and failure of the video-game Cyberpunk 2077, but you’d be wrong. I actually wanted to get back into the genre after showing my wife Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell. She’d seen Akira and we watch the movie every year, yet she hadn’t had the pleasure of what I think is a top-5 anime film. No, I won’t give you that list right now, I’m busying writing this.

Snow Crash – I first tried to read this book sitting in my blue Miata (1991), parked in front of the pool cross the street from the apartment where my friend lived. Terrible time in my life. The sun beating my sad-self, unable to concentrate, depressed as the American economy. It was 2012 and I didn’t think the book was trying my hardest to focus on was any good. The Deliverator? Some stupid try-hard gun? This was bad. I wouldn’t try again for almost a decade. Going from 20 to 30, or around about close enough. Seeing the world scramble any semblance of order to bits. Seeing myself being driven mad by love, then by education, then by labor. Six years in a pizza prison, only to be freed through the necessity for better insurance, the insanity of the American healthcare system. I couldn’t seem to make out the great joke that was Life for most of the time. I missed the punchline, just as I missed the punchline of Snow Crash. There are many who, as undeveloped 20-somethings, could get it, but I wasn’t one. No, I had to become my own Deliverator for it to sink it. I had to grow up and see the madness and become a writer myself. Lose the fear of getting words on the page and embrace the crowd. Snow Crash, I see now, the kind of book that makes me want to write. The author is having fun and in no way obscures it. If Stephenson gets a thought, he finds a place for it. Was I expecting this book about an internet before the internet (don’t get caught up in the semantic) to talk about the Tower of Babel or Chomsky or Enki? He’s doing this job wrong if I could have. We get a cannon of ideas, and it’s going to blast you, ready or not.

Cryptonomicon – I immediately lept into Cryptonomicon. Stephenson had me under a spell and I didn’t want to be let go. I’ve since read pretty much everything he has to offer, saving a few so I can relive the moment in time I was first spellbound by the idea cannon. We’ll have a lot to talk about when I get to the Books of ’22. When approaching one of Stephenson’s period piece things, it’s good to have some knowledge of the time under your belt, to get how he’s riffing it. If listening to most of his catalog has taught me anything, it’s that he’s never playing you straight. Crooked as the rain, never time to explain- if you will. Thinking of cyberpunk as the quintessential post-modern speculative fiction genre demands the duality of Neal Stephenson and William Gibson: both who see the nodal points of the world make fiction around them as sunny-ridiculous or overcast-straight, respectively. Is this the kind of book you’d find on the bookshelf of some tryhard, probably libertarian who had maybe read a few pages because “wow this has the word crypto- in it!” but really has it there next to some dogshit self-help books to attempt to look kinda cool and this book being a large-marge at almost 1200 pages? You know it’s a perfect shelf-stuffer for the bullshit-artist in your neighborhood who keeps it in a pile across from his (and yes, Virgina, I will assert a “he” pronoun there) couch where he might try to suggest looking how smart he is while also trying to suduce you in the mistake-of-the-week of saying a hesitant “Sure” to a pretty-much-creep that some friends threw on you as a blind date. Yes, but we all have to make sacrifices, and if those kinds of people let Neal write a few more books, it’s all the better.

Daemon – There’s a reality where I don’t finish this book. It’s in the Amazon top 100 list of “technothrillers (audible)”, toward the bottom far past the Neruomancers and other mainstays of “not trash”, to have blurbs that don’t quite sell it. And actually, I don’t think there’s all too much TO sell. The book is fine enough, although I think 5 years later Stephenson did it better with Reamde as the “about an MMO but also conspiracy all wrapped in a neat triller”. Look, no one kills someone with a copy of Love Actually in the stolen private jet of a Russian mobster in this book, okay? It’s just interesting enough that I don’t discredit whatever list I found it on.

Freedom (™) – the sequel to Daemon, however, is the real deal. You see the name and probably reconsider me a dunce for thinking so, but it really does go the distance. It takes the techno-dystopia we live in and spins it to make a techno-anarchy. I think some ideas from this book have influenced this one short story I’ve been working on, so that’s enough for me to just talk about it all the time. Love to be an idea-thief. But really, this book is good. I’d have a hard time recommending Daemon, but it’s worth it to make it through the 489 pages (16 hours audio) to get to the better end. Mentally, I often disparage how this modern world works. The Luddites were onto something. No, really, they were: they saw that mechanization of the textile industry would destroy their way of life, even if this was post-capitalization of England. I really don’t want to talk about England as much as I do: it really got away from me in my May garden update, but so much of our modern world originated on that shitty little island. Life got away from them and I don’t think we’ve ever had more than a few moments with life, really. The machine of big-whatever keeps slipping it away from us, intentionally or not. The development of consumerism in the 60s has had us chained to a speeding car, meaning we’d better run faster or get dragged and flayed along.

Obsolescence would no longer have to be “planned” if the consumer experience could occupy a particular mental space- the gap between dissatisfaction with the present reality and the dream and fantasy about the future.

Ages of American Capitalism
A HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
By Jonathan Levy

But this is something I’m going to get into in another far-too-long essay. I have some more research reading to do before I get too far into that. Freedomtm does feel like a book against consumerism, about returning to the land WITH technology instead of being completely consumed by it. The internet and information technology give us almost limitless power in many regards, but if we’re funnel into using it for gossip or spending or time-burning, then we’ve come no further than the dark age of witch-burning. Potential energy can be turned into mere heat pretty easily. Watching the days go by, water flowing underground.

Count Zero – having finished most of his books, I think I can say that the Sprawl is my least favorite Gibson trilogy. Fundamental as it is to modern sci-fi and spec-fic, I think it’s the least readable, least enjoyable. The Bridge is much more fun, Blue Ant is more literary, Jackpot is… to be seen. Having finished Mona Lisa Overdrive this month, I think that’s my favorite, but Count Zero does get somewhat close. This was a pizza book, read during the pizza period, so I couldn’t concentrate on it as much as I wanted. I was far too busy hauling that store on my back, making sure nothing got messed up as I placed pepperonis at a puzzling pace. Round in a spiralspiralspiral, a nautilus of grease and burnt dreams. Frozen cheese like white matchsticks. I don’t know if I’ll ever revisit this book.

The Forever War – I finished this book during the 15 minute period after getting my second COVID shot when you’re not supposed to leave because you never know what’s going to happen. I had a pillow in my car because, during my breaks at work, I’d lean by seat back on my super-compactsuper-compact of a Toyota/Scion and listen to a podcast or audiobook or study. Why stand when you can sit and why sit when you can lay, or recline, or whatever. Our bodies are on the decline and you should give it some respect. Wonderful book. No wonder it won the Huge, Locus, and Nebula.

Caliban’s War – This book is sitting here because I didn’t have a section specifically for scifi (that would be boring) and because this was already the time I listened to it. Mostly I remember it being summer and me washing dishes at work. This book was fine, I guess, but I don’t know if I really have to drive to continue this series. I was getting them for about a fiver on Audible, but now I’ve found ~another~ way of getting books, so I don’t exactly have to settle anymore. As a more toned down space drama, I think it’s a reasonable read, I just don’t think it’s literary enough for me, being the type of nincompoop I am.

Dauntless – All comments on this book will be made in the Fearless log. See below.

Fearless – I’m surprised I made it to book 2. Just… terrible. Don’t bother, because I’m not. The quest for actual good space operas will never end, I fear.

Getting Cultured

Player of Games – it wasn’t really my intention to read this book. I wasn’t mistaking it for another book as I did in another section, I just wasn’t really interested. I got most of the way through Consider Phebus (the first novel), but I didn’t think that was particularly a captaving book. The chapter where they played “Damage” was enjoyable, even if not much else really caught my attention, so I decided to give something called “Player of Games” a shot if it had anything to do with that. I stopped reading a few chapters in because something else caught my attention. Some non-fiction or something, I dont’ remember. Of course I stopped reading right before the book got interesting. Right before this became my favorite science fiction series of all time. There’s no more quest for THE series anymore, because this is it. You can tell that he worked on this and Use of Weapons first and for a long time. They have that fermented quality you don’t get with quick novels whatever shit Sanderson is putting out these days.

Use of Weapons – Player of Game showed that Ian M. Banks had the chops to write a higher minded and entertaining science fiction novel. Use of Weapons shows that he was one of the greatest, and this isn’t even my favorite novels of his. It was the first one to really make an explosion, fully following its title and even being loaded for bear, bareing it’s souls and Ian’s and mine and yours. You can TELL that this book was in the oven for awhile. Dueling narratives, one reverse chronological, that finally show the weird nature of the Culture universe, aren’t even the alpha stars of this sea of constellations. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be mentioned and heralded: the universe of culture is weird and just gets weirder. These books feature the covert cultural operations force Special Circumstances, which push various worlds and governments and, well, cultures to joining the hungry beast that is the Greater Culture of post-capitalism, post-poverty, post-gender, trans-galactic-and-alien-inclusive civilization. SC comes around again and again, but focusing on operatives and smaller operations that attempt to sway only one planet each is necessary for getting your head around what will eventually become a increasing level of complication in terms of scope of impact. I’d say just go and read this book, but you need to prepare yourself- the title implication of violence isn’t only cover deep. This isn’t the place to start reading the Culture Series, but it’s the place you finally begin to understand it.

O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,

Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

— T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, IV. Death by Water

Look to Windward – the title here comes from The Waste Land, as seen above, and I eat that shit up. Same with Hyperion by Dan Simmons; including literary references and homages in your scifi novel draws me like ants to well everything ants aren’t picky and I am maybe I’m not like an ant. This is a book about a religious-led terrorist plot in repercussion for an attack by a more powerful and somewhat imperial force… that came out in 2000. Talk about reading the room right. This book starts the trend of showing how some forces of the universe are so much grander than the limits of our understanding. One key character is the the Hub Mind to a Orbital, the manager/denmother/overseer of a ring world that, toward the end of the story, gives a wonderful monologue on the sheer difference between the intelligence of a space age artificial intelligence versus that of our fatty pink natural computers. I really don’t want to get into explaining plots as part of these entries because that’s not what I either set out to do or enjoy doing. Just know that this book is my favorite of the series.

Inversions – a look from what it would be like to have a member of Special Circumstances come to your planet. I enjoyed this book far more than most people in Goodreads seemed to, although I get feeling like this as a waste in the sense that we lost Banks far too soon.

Matter – I actually won’t be talking about Matter here since I want to make an essay specifically for this book SINCE it has some top rated (top liked?) negative reviews on Goodreads, my favorite site to hate. If anything makes me appreciate a piece of media, it’s seeing someone say something negative about something I’ve consumed. I’ll talk to you later about this book.

Surface Details – getting into later Banks, you start getting so many fantastic world building details. That was honestly my favorite sections of this second-to-last inclusion to my favorite science fiction series (the Book of the New Sun is a single work).

Hydrogen Sonata – the end to a wonderful writer’s career. It’s a heart breaking book for that reason. It’s not his best, but it’s what we have. I can do nothing more than cherish it.

Thank you for putting up with what is essentially my writing practice. I ended up taking a break after I finished college and need to work out the old finger muscles. I genuinely do want to talk about these books, but I don’t know that I would in a format that requires a bit of time investment on my part since a. we’re both short on time and b. the time I have to actually type tip tap isn’t too long. When I go to the book channel on random discords I’m a member of, it’s never to the level that I want it. Not many people are in my position where they’re reading/listening for 8 hours a day, nor do they have the eclectic taste of moving between sci-fi/spec-fic, non-fiction, and renown literature.

Postscript: what took so long? Like, really, that was a long time, man, I was working through some things and trying my best to beat work. I think I’m starting to get there.