The Antisocial Socialist

 Just finished: The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley. I don't know what to make of this, and will definitely be checking out the Wizards vs. Lesbians episode on it (not that I always agree with them, but they do raise perspectives that are interesting). I would say overall the prose and characters carried it. I got to know these people, I fell in love with them in the same way that the narrator did. It was compelling, as the kids say.

But I don't think the ended quite landed and I'm struggling to think of why. In part (and this is confirmed a little in an interview that follows the book), it's hurt a bit by the first-person narration. Bradley is telling a much bigger story than the narrator sees, and while that thankfully rescues it from being a didactic Message Book, it might have swung too far towards the other direction where I'm not exactly sure what it was trying to say. It's one of those books that straddles the literary and genre, and I tend to prefer genre in a literary style than literary fiction exploring genre. 

That said, it was so relentlessly well-written that I feel like my ill-defined issues with it are kind of irrelevant because I highly enjoyed it.

Currently reading: Bad Cree by Jessica Johns. I'm almost done this one. It's almost the reverse—protagonists figuring out genre solutions to literary fiction problems. I was given a warning about this book and I'm yet to figure out why.

What Feasts At Night by T. Kingfisher. I didn't read the first novella in this series (What Moves the Dead) despite it having my favourite cover the year it came out. So it's taking some getting used to. On the plus side, the opening is suffused with so much gothic horror that I find myself turning into a young woman fleeing in a white gown across the moors, holding a candlestick.

 I hear some of you like podcasts and some of you also like books so why not have a podcast about a very good book that you can pre-order now. The latest episode of Wizards & Spaceships, "Blight ft. Rachel A. Rosen," celebrates not just the beginning of the podcast's second season (!!!) but the release of. Well. Tentacled queer magical Canadian anti-fascist fantasy. And the trials and travails of bringing such creative pursuits into reality. So go check it out (preferably on an app and not on the website), like, subscribe, share, etc.

 Did you miss these? I've been busy with life and watching Andor.

Okay finally finally Law & Order Toronto is tackling Barry and Honey Sherman, which I have been looking forward to since they announced the show. It also tackled the Ontario Science Centre closure by the Ford government. The former crime is unsolved; the latter is out in the open despite Doug Ford still wandering around a free man somehow.

Anyway, the problem is once again that the actual cases are both more interesting than the plot we get here.

A pharma CEO and his philanthropist wife are murdered in what at first looks like a murder-suicide but isn't. With the company's sale to a larger company pending, there are a lot of potential suspects. She's also posed to look like a painting that she overpaid for at an auction, and that her best friend/interior designer wanted but couldn't afford. The designer, as well as the pharma CEO's brother, both have a decent motive to kill her. On top of that, she was on the board for the Ontario Science Centre, which a developer wanted to close in order to build luxury condos on it.

The killer is the designer's husband, and his motivation was that the developer bribed him to get rid of the philanthropist, who was only one holding out against the sale. Yawn. So really none of the reasons why the Shermans' murder is interesting, and none of the reasons why the closure of the OSC is criminal rather than simply corrupt.

Just finished: Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons From Marine Mammals by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Yeah, this ruled. Go read it. It won't take you as long to read as it took me (reading in class during silent reading time, with constant interruptions). It's beautiful, juicy, voluptuous, joyful. You'll love it. I found the exercises at the end a little cringe but everything else was fantastic.

The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar. This one also really landed the ending. It spoke to the tense and contradictory position many of my radical academic friends, especially the BIPOC ones, face in the university, and on a broader level, spoke to the class anxieties that any of us in the Professional Managerial Class (god how I hate that term) undergo. And it's just beautifully told.

The Four Sisters Overlooking the Sea by Naomi Kritzer. Whoops I haven't been logging the novelettes I've been reading, but I want to give a shoutout to this one, both because it's excellent and also because it continues the themes of the previous two books I mentioned. It's a selkie story about an academic forced to give up her career after she loses all of her research data and her husband gets tenure. She finds herself temporarily in a seaside town, "editing" his work, when the seals that she had been studying years ago return to the coast. This one is so great and has a dark enough streak running through it that it can't be accused of coziness, even though the plot is essentially "woman finds a place where she belongs and people she belongs with."

The Brides of High Hill by Nghi Vo. This is another Singing Hills novella, so I want to say that if you, like me, loved the other ones, you will also love this. With the caveat that if you liked the other ones because they were relatively gentle stories, you may have the reaction to this one that some Goodreads reviewers did. This instalment takes a sharp turn into Gothic horror, which, personally, I am here for, and it might be my second favourite after When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain. Cleric Chih accompanies a young bride to the decaying estate where she will marry a man three times her age; the title of the novella gives away one twist, but the other is even more brutal and delicious.

The Tusks Of Extinction by Ray Nayler. I actually didn't expect to like this one as much as I did, mostly because the title sucks and it didn't get great reviews. But. It's very cool. It's about a ranger protecting elephants in Kenya. She's murdered by poachers, but before she died, she'd uploaded her consciousness, and a century later, she's downloaded into the brain of a newly de-extincted (de-extinctified?) woolly mammoth. The mammoths have been re-introduced into the Russian steppes, but as the only surviving elephants are in captivity under heavy guard, they've been failing to thrive because mammoth culture has been lost. As the only expert left in elephant behaviour, she has to teach them how to be mammoths.

Okay I am slightly obsessed with the mammoth de-extinction project, which has all kinds of thorny ethical and scientific issues but has non-zero scientific validity, plus I just really want to ride a woolly mammoth before I die. This actually does address the objections in a way that's interesting, and the characters, their grief and trauma, and the plot are all very compelling. 

Currently reading: Bad Cree by Jessica Johns. I've been meaning to read this one for awhile. It's a coming-of-age horror novel about a Cree girl whose dreams begin to manifest upon waking. She had left her home in Alberta to escape the grief of losing her older sister, but in order to find out why she keeps waking up holding, say, a severed crow's head, she is forced to return back to her family. Really good so far.

Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wiswell. People have been raving about this one to me for ages but I've avoided it because it keeps being described as cozy. Fortunately so far the coziness is about how warm being nestled in your dead father's entrails are. Okay, I'm intrigued.

Oh no! This was yet another good episode. If they keep this up I'm going to have to stop hate-watching and watch-watch it.

This one is about a tech CEO getting gunned down in a parking lot, along with a food delivery driver. The cops at the scene conclude that the latter was in the wrong place at the wrong time, but...

( you'll guess it before you click, just like I did. )

Just finished: Lost Ark Dreaming by Suyi Davies Okungbowa. I ended up loving this one. The scary mermaids were...not mermaids. (I don't want to give spoilers, but I imagine that a Black reader will understand much earlier than I did.) I should have seen what they actually were coming but I did not, and it was incredibly cool and incredibly brutal. It's funny because this story has like, half a dozen tropes I normally dislike, but it was done so well that they completely worked in this context. This ended up being my pick for best novella in the Nebulas based on vibes alone.

Currently reading: Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons From Marine Mammals by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Frustratingly, I'm like a chapter away from having finished this. Let's just say that it is a perfect pairing with Lost Ark Dreaming. 

The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar. I'm not finished it yet but let's just say it was going to be a toss up as to whether this was my Nebula pick. This is a very strange and dreamy story about class divisions and the carceral state on a mining ship. In the Hold, generations of workers are Chained, never seeing anything other than their miserable conditions. But a boy who is good at drawing is plucked from the Hold and brought up to the ship's university, where he joins the bluelegs, people like his professor, who get an electronic ankle bracelet instead of a chain. Some people even have no fetters, and get names instead. This is so cool so far.

This one was pretty generic, to the point where I'm not sure what it's based on. A comedian playing the Skydome Rogers Centre for the first time drops dead, poisoned by digitalis.

( spoilers )

I am putting this entire thing under a cut. The episode has to do with the Filipino community, and by absolute coincidence, last night 11 Filipino people, including at least one child, were murdered in a horrific van attack in Vancouver. This episode aired a few weeks ago and has nothing to do with that but if you read anything about the murder and are worried about being re-traumatized, you might want to skip it.

( spoilers )

 I keep thinking about the campus free speech fights. The Harper's Letter. Running those names through my head, over and over again, serious IRL writers and intellectuals who genuinely claimed, just a few years ago, that one of the greatest threats to global democracy was the suppression of free speech on American college campuses. Now that that suppression is happening in plain sight, fewer than a quarter of them have had anything to say about it. Which really qualifies what they meant by "free speech" in the first place.

Of course, no one is a free speech absolutist, not for real. I knew they were as disingenuous then as I am now when I say, "FREEZED PEACH" in response to campus repression, not just in the failed state but here in Canada too. Since not everyone can have free speech, we all really only support the free speech of people who at most we are aligned with, who at least we are not threatened by.

At least I admit I don't believe in free speech. At least I am less of a hypocrite.

Ah! But the left in general, making its noises about free speech now when we were trying to shut down poor Jordan Peterson's anti-trans bigotry, or Milo Yiannopoulos' misogynoir a few years ago. Had we just been a little nicer to them—

—nah, they still woulda shoved us into vans. Come the fuck on. Grow up, exist in reality.

The similarity across the political spectrum, from the anarchists and communists to the centrists and the liberals to the conservatives to the Nazis to the right-libertarians is that for each group, there is a category of people who we all believe need to absolutely shut the fuck up. That category is a little narrower in some bits of the spectrum than others. Where the difference lies is what each side does about speech that they consider dangerous.

These terrifying campus cancellation campaigns, what was their goal? To make sure that students' tuition money and taxpayer dollars weren't spent platforming people who want to make some of these kids dead. I think that's a laudable goal, but even if I didn't, let's look at the strategies of these campus protesters. They protested. They exercised their own rights to free speech, which was never framed as such. Sometimes they snuck in and glued someone's office doors shut. They used their communal strength to speak, to block, to generate solidarity, and when things got violent, the cops stood with their backs to the provocateurs and their weapons to the protesters. When these protesters failed, they were beaten and disciplined and defamed in the press and serious intellectuals wrote concerned letters about how they were triggered snowflakes.

Now look at how the right gets speech it doesn't like shut down. They call the cops. They hit up the US Secretary of State on Twitter and give them names of activists they'd like deported, please and thanks, and he answers their call. They celebrate secret offshore death camps. They vote in governments that pass laws that outlaw speech, that outlaw speaking in support of that speech, that create "bubble zones" where speech is not allowed at all. They deport students for writing op-eds, all in the name of free speech. They take over governments so that they, and only they, can decide who gets to take a piss. They do not put their own bodies on the line—they are scared of "harm," after all, of "emotional violence"; they Karen up the biggest manager they can find and complain until the state does the silencing for them. 

To the extent that there is a crisis of masculinity, it's not because of feminists. It's because these whining, snivelling pee-babies have less balls than I do.

 Hmm, what to choose for today? I think maybe It Could Happen Here's "Robert's Guide To the Next Six Months of Danger and Resistance." It's not a happy episode, of course, but Robert is doing good work by calmly assessing various threats and how you should react to them (acknowledging, of course, that different people will have different risks). He goes through some of the models that are likely to happen: Will you get disappeared into an off-shore concentration camp? Will Trump invoke the Insurrection Act? etc., their probability, potential fallout and effects, and how worried you should be.

I don't know what more to say. This kind of work is important because I know for me, I tend to see what's going on and get panicked into paralysis, which is the point of the US government firehosing acts of pure evil. We need to fight back of course but you can't fight back if you're frozen in terror.