The Antisocial Socialist

Fiction

1.The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann

Fiction:
1. Faust, First Part, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
2. Wolf's Path, Joyce Chng
3. The Bright Sword, Lev Grossman
4. The Downloaded II: Ghosts In the Machine, Robert J. Sawyer
5. Who We Are In Real Life, Victoria Koops
6. Faust, Second Part, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
7. 120 Murders: Dark Fiction Inspired by the Alternative Era, Nick Mamatas (ed.)
8. School of Shards, Maryna and Serhiy Dyachenko
9. Never Whistle At Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology, Shane Hawk (ed.)
10. May Our Joy Endure, Kev Lambert
11. Demon Engine, Marten Norr
12. Slow Horses, Mick Herron
13. Together We Rise, Richie Billing
14. Love Medicine, Louise Erdrich
15. The Butcher of the Forest, Premee Mohamed
16. The Dragonfly Gambit, A.D. Sui
17. Lost Ark Dreaming, Suyi Davies Okungbowa
18. The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain, Sofia Samatar
19. The Brides of High Hill, Nghi Vo
20. The Tusks of Extinction, Ray Nayler
21. Someone You Can Build a Nest In, John Wiswell
22. The Ministry of Time, Kaliane Bradley
23. Bad Cree, Jessica Johns
24. What Feasts At Night, T. Kingfisher
25. real ones, Katherena Vermette
26. The Siege of Burning Grass, Premee Mohamed
27. Withered, A.G.A. Wilmot
28. Service Model, Adrian Tchaikovsky
29. A Sorceress Comes to Call, T. Kingfisher
30. Alien Clay, Adrian Tchaikovsky
31. The Tainted Cup, Robert Jackson Bennett
32. Bread and Stone, Allan Weiss
33. Signal to Noise, Silvia Moreno-Garcia (re-read)
34. Thyme Travellers: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Sonia Sulaiman (ed.)
35. Notes From a Regicide, Isaac Fellman
36. Antifa Lit Journal Vol. 1: What If We Kissed While Sinking a Billionaire's Yacht?, Chrys Gorman (ed.)
37. Ten Incarnations of Rebellion, Vaishnavi Patel
38. Girls Against God, Jenny Hval
39. Katabasis, R.F. Kuang
40. Kalivas! Or, Another Tempest, Nick Mamatas
41. The Bewitching, Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Non-Fiction:
1. Bad Fire: A Memoir of Disruption, Tucker Lieberman
2. Orwell's Roses, Rebecca Solnit
3. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, Omar El Akkad
4. Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons From Marine Mammals, Alexis Pauline Gumbs
5. How To Write a Fantasy Battle, Suzannah Rowntree
6. Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth Of a Golden Age, Ada Palmer
7. Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism, Sarah Wynn-Williams
8. Gothic Capitalism: Art Evicted From Heaven and Earth, Adam Turl
9. Genocide Bad: Notes on Palestine, Jewish History, and Collective Liberation, Sim Kern
10. The Magic Words: Writing Great Books for Children and Young Adults, Cheryl B. Klein 
11. To Leave a Warrior Behind: The Life and Stories of Charles R. Saunders, the Man Who Rewrote Fantasy, Jon Tattrie
12. The Emotional Craft of Fiction: How to Write the Story Beneath the Surface, Donald Maass
13. Censorship & Information Control: From Printing Press to Internet, Ada Palmer (ed.)

Poetry:
1. The Book of Questions, Pablo Neruda, William O'Daly (Translator)
2. UpRising, Kelly Rose Pflug-Back (ed.)
3. You Better Be Lightning, Andrea Gibson

Plays:
1. William Shakespeare’s As You Like It: A Radical Retelling, Cliff Cardinal
2. Too Good To Be True, Cliff Cardinal
3. Huff & Stitch, Cliff Cardinal
4. Cottagers and Indians, Drew Hayden Taylor

Books With Pictures In 'Em:
1. The Memoirs of Miss Chief Eagle Testickle: Vol. 2: A True and Exact Accounting of the History of Turtle Island, Kent Monkman
2. Ghost Ghost, Crooked Little Town, and The Same Water, Richard Fairgay
3. Spotlight on Labour History, Cy Morris
4. Dakwäkãda Warriors, Cole Pauls
5. Do a Powerbomb!, Daniel Warren Johnson and Mike Spicer

Short Things:
1. The Four Sisters Overlooking the Sea, Naomi Kritzer
2. It's Okay, Just Set Me On Fire, Billions Against Billionaires

 This week's episode is Wizards & Spaceships' latest, "Postcolonialism in SFFH ft. Suzan Palumbo." Suzan is a rising star in the Canadian speculative fiction scene and also just a very lovely, funny person. In the episode, she discusses the tropes and traditions that are baked into genre that reinforce colonialist mindsets, and the BIPOC authors pushing back against it. It's really good go listen.

 Just finished: You Better Be Lightning by Andrea Gibson. I never had the privilege of seeing Gibson perform, other than on YouTube, so this is as close as I'm ever going to get. They really were a brilliant poet. Some of the poems lose a bit in print—they tend towards the storytelling and autobiographical, and that reads much less powerfully on the page than in speech—but this is a fairly minor critique. Gibson writes powerfully about queerness, gender, disability, and the climate crisis, and their furious energy is made all the more poignant by their premature death earlier this year.

Currently reading: Censorship & Information Control: From Printing Press to Internet by Ada Palmer. This is an exhibit based on a course that Palmer taught and it just makes me wish I could take the course. I'm screenshotting bits to text to people. Her central argument is that the total state censorship we see depicted in 1984 is the exception rather than the norm; more often censorship is incomplete, self-enforced, or carried out by non-state entities like the church or marketplace. This is obviously important when we talk about issues like free speech, which tends to be very narrowly defined when most of the threats to it have traditionally not come directly from the government (I mean, present-day US excepted, but it took a lot of informal censorship to get to that point).

The bit about fig leafs, complete with illustrations, is particularly good, as is the bit on Pierre Bayle, who hid his radical ideas in the footnotes to his Historical and Critical Dictionary in lengthy footnotes that he knew no one would read.

You can get this for free if you want to read it btw.

Just finished: To Leave a Warrior Behind: The Life and Stories of Charles R. Saunders, the Man Who Rewrote Fantasy by Jon Tattrie. This was so good. Saunders was a fascinating person both on and off the page, but also the biography is really well written and a page-turner. I don't have a lot to add beyond that you'll like it if you're at all interested in genre fiction, Black social movements, and/or the history of Black communities in Halifax. Or just interesting people in general.


The second is that a lot of the advice amounts to "write better," with no real suggestions for that. Like, he quotes part of a Churchill speech to talk about inspiring leaders, and one of the exercises is "give your character an inspiring speech." How. Tell me how. Or at least analyze the Churchill speech to talk about what's working in it. 

The problem with talking about emotion in writing is that this is built often through a prolonged time with the characters, so if you quote excerpts from books no one has read (there are a few classics in there, but a lot of the examples are from books I'd never read, like Christian fiction), you need context. This is something Klein does very well in her book—she talks about the well-known ones that we'd all have encountered, like the awful wizard books and The Fault In Our Stars and the Hunger Games, but her most detailed analysis is a book she edited called Marcelo In the Real World. Assuming no one has read it (I'd never heard of it), she not only analyzes lengthy passages, but sets up the entire context of the story so we can see why those passages work. Whereas Maass quotes a paragraph and assumes we'll get the emotion, whereas my reaction is, "who are these people and why should I care?"

But most of all, it's very shallow for a book about, well, feelings. He warns away from sending your characters to overly dark places or making them overly dark people, and the autobiographical sketches suggest an upper-middle class, cishet, white, cozy life. Readers want to feel connected and inspired by your characters, so they should be positive and inspirational.

I'm sorry what.

I was hoping, in a book like this, to get a sense of how to better twist the knife. His breakdown of The Fault Of Our Stars amounts to "we feel sad because of how these kids lived, not how they die." Really? Is that all you take from it, emotionally speaking?

One passage really stands out to me, and that's an incident where he describes trying to pay for tickets for a game that his young son really wants to see, only he's lost his wallet on the subway. His wife is with him but doesn't have her wallet. He is faced with a moment of panic at the prospect of disappointing his son.

Okay, that's pretty good! I like the idea of investing relatively low-stakes moments with emotion. Only...he goes on to talk about something else, and then adds "by the way my wife had her wallet after all so she paid and I regained my cool and we all saw the game." Which, I'm sure is what happened, but why tell the story if that's the ending?

If I were writing it, off the top of my head, why not have the parents argue, the wife codependent on her husband, the husband irresponsible to leave his wallet on the subway. It could get public, ugly, and explosive. And then the child starts crying, more upset at the prospect of his parents fighting than missing the game. In an upbeat story, they realize that their son is the most important thing and stop fighting in order to comfort him. Or in a more adult story, they make up, coldly, but the resentment continues to fester, and the absent wallets become a metaphor for patriarchal control. Anything other than "oh it all turned out to be fine."

So yeah this book didn't do it for me.

Currently reading: The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. The library gods sent me a chaser after that last one. It's about two generations of women; Minerva, in 1998, lives on a rather beautiful and extremely haunted campus, researching a forgotten author who was a contemporary of Lovecraft. In 1908, her great-grandmother, Alba, lives on a farm and years for the elegant, sophisticated life that her uncle leads in the city. I've just hit the point where Minerva runs into the wealthy son of a university donor who knew the author and has been invited to brunch with the family, and Alba's uncle has come to live with them (and maybe convince her brother to sell the family farm). Anyway, it's SMG, obviously I'm into it.

Just finished: Katabasis by R.F. Kuang. Yeah, she lands the ending. This was just too good—scathingly funny, unexpectedly sweet, and a worthy take on Dante's Inferno. It's one of those ones where I rush to Goodreads to see what stupid people thought about it and I think the complete opposite of that. I just love Alice so much, basically.

Currently reading: Kalivas! Or, Another Tempest by Nick Mamatas. Complete coincidence that I'm reading two genre takes on classic works of literature with similar titles one right after each other. Anyway, this is the cyberpunk take on The Tempest that you didn't know you needed. Caliban/Kalivas is the last free-range human, i.e., lacking in post-human augments and able to die in a post-apocalyptic world of godlike enhanced assholes. It leans very heavily into the play's anticolonialist themes and also into our current state of being ruled by lunatic billionaires who want to live forever. It's very good, obviously.

Just finished: The Magic Words: Writing Great Books for Children and Young Adults by Cheryl B. Klein. I don't really have a lot to add: This was good and useful, especially if you're in the revision stage of a project, which I am not. It weirdly made me want to read a few of the books that it talks about as examples, though with my TBR list as it is and a general disinterest in YA literature, I likely won't.

Currently reading: Katabasis by R.F. Kuang. It's time, fuckos! I've had a hold on this one since I read a bad review of it. I have heard that Kuang often doesn't land her endings, which I hope is not the case, because this has one of the best openings I've come across in a good long time. It begins with Alice Law, a postgrad in linguistic magick, preparing a chalk circle to go to Hell to retrieve the soul of her recently dead advisor, Professor Grimes, because he's on her dissertation committee and is her only chance to get tenure. The cost for going to Hell and returning is half your remaining lifespan, but Alice is more than willing to pay that in exchange for having a stable job, making her possibly the most relatable character in genre fiction. Her plans are interrupted by Peter, her hated academic rival and the department's golden boy, who insists on coming with her even though his prospects for career advancement are much better than hers.

Anyway this is completely hilarious and painful and only an inconvenient need to work and sleep is keeping me from it at the moment.

Just finished: Girls Against God by Jenny Hval. I really don't know what to make of it. It's one of those very cool concepts—body horror! time travel! art! black metal! feminism!—that fails somewhat in execution but fails in interesting ways. It's divided into three parts, the first being a stream-of-consciousness rant by a girl who joins a Norwegian black metal band/aspiring witches coven a few years too late, after the scene has fallen apart, and her desire to rebel against the patriarchy and religion. By the end of the first section I had gone from "well, this is how teenage girls sound, this is how I sounded when I was a teenager" to vaguely annoyed. But then the second two, which are hallucinogenic body horror fever dreams, absolutely whip. I wanted the whole book to be like that.

Currently reading: The Magic Words: Writing Great Books for Children and Young Adults by Cheryl B. Klein. Why am I reading a book about writing YA when I have no desire to ever write YA, and knowing the thoughts of teenagers is something I strongly feel I should not have to do without financial compensation? Well, because I got into a discussion with another writer about craft books, and how I don't normally read them, and he recommended this and another one to change my mind about craft books. And also because I seem to have written myself into a situation where I have a teenage POV character, and despite being surrounded by kids all day, writing as one is a whole different ballgame.

So far it's pretty good—I rather like the brainstorming exercises at the end of each section, and the respect that the author has for really good children's/YA fiction (which does, of course, exist, and there's probably even more of it than when I was young, but I wasn't particularly interested in reading about teenagers when I was a teenager). It's 2017 though, so there's a lot more praise for a certain Formerly Beloved Children's Author than she deserves, so if you're going to read it, be warned.

Just finished: Gothic Capitalism: Art Evicted from Heaven and Earth by Adam Turl. This was a good, if very dense, look at the intersection between art, the art market, and economic forces, and how we can create an authentically proletarian art. Basically the antidote to AI slop memes. I was just nodding along the whole way through, like, yes, someone said the thing. My one complaint is, as with a lot of small press books, it's not the most physically comfortable to read, with gutter margins that are too narrow, which makes an already challenging read more challenging. So if you're going to read it (and you should) see if there's an ebook.

Currently reading: Genocide Bad: Notes on Palestine, Jewish History, and Collective Liberation by Sim Kern. Sim Kern is a very relatable person to me, although I don't know them personally at all. They're Jewish but like, not closely tied to the Jewish community or faith, and they used to be a teacher, and they've been trying to make it as a sci-fi author. And then our stories diverge because it turns out their real gift is talking about Palestine on TikTok, and along with the death threats, they managed to get a serious platform.

The book starts with a lot of their story and philosophy, and then the bulk of it is devoted to unpacking and dismantling the main claims of hasbara (Israeli propaganda, literally "explaining"). It's all written in very approachable language with tons of footnotes. You can tell they used to be a middle school teacher. I don't know that this would convince someone with the Zionist brainworms, but for the average white American who doesn't want to be an antisemite, hears conflicting claims, and hasn't grown up in this confusing ideological soup, it's hella useful. I'd really recommend it as well for people like me who have to get in dumb Facebook fights with people who are genuinely convinced that Hamas is going to come kill them in some random American city.

 Just finished: Notes From a Regicide by Isaac Fellman. Goddamn this was good. It's one of those dreamy, elegiac works where I'm at a loss to tell you exactly why it affected me that strongly (but honestly, read the plot summary I mentioned two weeks ago) and that's a critical part of its strength, the degree to which Fellman inhabits the story. I've seen a lot of post-apocalyptic, we're back to a lower technology level settings, but very few where the social and cultural changes affect the style (the other one is Ada Palmer, who is writing semi-utopian, higher-technology settings but does a similar thing where the prose evokes a more historical style but is off slightly, because it's the future). He's also doing a lot of work with biography and memory; there is one part where Griffon, reflecting on Etoine, describes him as cold, admits we've seen almost nothing of this, and suggests that he only really talks about his moments of passion in disproportion to how he was in regular life. This is very much a throw-you-into-the-deep-end type of book in terms of its worldbuilding, and even to some degree its characters. We never really find out who Yair was beyond the cross-dressing Jewish guy who took Etoine and Zaffre in when they moved to New York, and that he's dead and they still mourn him, and it doesn't matter, because it's outside of Griffon's scope and his parents don't like to talk about the past.

Okay, I think that actually nails down why it resonated with me so deeply. It reminds me of my grandparents—who, for the record, were not trans, were not revolutionaries or leftists in any way, and were not artistic—in the way that when they told stories, they would evade a great deal. Like a Turner painting where most of it is an ethereal abstract and you get maybe one section of specific detail. It was frustrating as a child, of course, never really knowing your family's story, and I think this is a pretty common experience and why everyone is so obsessed with genealogy and connecting with fifth cousins these days. I imagine even more so if you find out your parents were artist-revolutionaries in a magical city frozen in time. Anyway. I loved this one quite a bit.

It's Okay, Just Set Me On Fire by Billions Against Billionaires. This is a 'zine, which I wouldn't normally log except it's really good and I wanted to draw your attention to it. It's about how fascist billionaires suck. All the writing is quite strong and it includes a single-player Basilisk simulation RPG and you should get it for the cover alone. It was quietly slipped to me by a member of the collective who put it out and now my goal is to write something worthy of the second issue. Here it is.

Currently reading: Antifa Lit Journal Vol. 1: What If We Kissed While Sinking a Billionaire's Yacht?, edited by Chrys Gorman. Well, the first story fuckin' whips. I mean, it's an anthology about how fascists suck. Maybe there's a broader rant I have about author/editor-led anthologies in general, because I keep having the same issues with them (see what I did there?) but it's a project worth doing anyway, and worth buying for the cover alone (so buy it).