MORE SENSELESS ACTS OF BLOGGERY

Well, look, you get what you pay for.

War with the Newts by Karel Čapek

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Though I’ve known for some time that Karel Čapek is credited with coining the term ‘robot’, I’ve never read him before, mainly because I’ve never come across any copies of his books – until I found this, arguably his other famous SF book that doesn’t involve robots. War With The Newts is a dystopian satire centred around the discovery of an intelligent, evolved breed of sea-dwelling salamander in Indonesia.

The newts are discovered by Captain J. van Toch, who finds a capitalist backer, G.H. Bondy, to exploit the newts’ talent for pearl-diving and their ability to learn speech and use tools. As the newts multiply exponentially and absorb human culture, Bondy eventually expands the operation into the “Salamander Syndicate” that turns the newts into a global hydroengineering workforce for hire – or, in plain terms, slaves. The newts are simultaneously exploited, exoticized and fetishized, until finally the newts decide to push back.

Along the way, Čapek uses this as a platform to satirise racist colonialism and rampant, exploitative capitalism and the politicians, media pundits and academics that facilitate and justify both. And he does it well – to the point that much of the novel still resonates today, particularly the ending, which (without giving anything away) postulates that at the end of the day, when the world is hurtling itself towards a global catastrophe of its own making, sooner or later, it’s going to be your problem, and you’ll have to pick a side.

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This means war,

This is dF

And so much for 2024.

Read 23 books this year, which is enough to complete my Goodreads Reading Challenge, and you know, I’ll take it. Plus I went out on a relative high note, which is nice.

And so:

The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde by Norman Spinrad

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’ve been reading and (mostly) enjoying Norman Spinrad’s novels, but the only short fiction of his I’ve read is “Carcinoma Angels”, his excellent contribution to Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions anthology. That story also appears in this volume, which is also Spinrad’s first collection of short stories, and of course I had to pick it up.

One striking thing about this collection is that even within the SF wheelhouse, it’s strikingly diverse. Spinrad covers a lot of ground – space opera, space madness, corporate caveman satire, alien honeypots, alien wars, alien invasions, dystopian utopias, immortality, avant garde psychotherapy, time-travel tourism and (of course) experimental drugs.

Another striking thing about this collection is how accessible most of it is. The title track is one of the few stories here that points toward the experimental, Kerouacian lyrical writing style Spinrad would embrace for some of his more famous novels. But most of these are relatively more conventional, style-wise, which is not a bad thing. Anyway, a few stories don’t quite work for me, but overall this is a solid collection.


Babel by R.F. Kuang

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is my first time reading R.F. Kuang, and I confess my interest was piqued at least in part by the kerfluffle over the World Science Fiction Society declaring it ineligible for the 2023 Hugo Awards, despite having enough nominations, because that year’s awards were being held in China, and the jury head apparently wanted to avoid any authors that Beijing might not like. Which is odd, since this book – an alt-history set in the 1830s just before the Opium War between Britain and China – clearly portrays the British Empire as the villain of the story.

In Kuang’s alt-history, the British Empire is thriving thanks to its use of silver bars with magical properties that leverage “match pairs” of translated words – the idea being that all translations are imperfect, and what gets lost in translation between words with similar but not identical meanings can be harnessed by the bars to, say, increase crop yields or make warships move faster. Britain is also using its economic and military power to corner the silver market by exploiting poorer nations. The story follows Robin Swift, a poor boy in Canton who is adopted by Professor Lovell and brought to England to raise him as a translator to study at the Royal Institute of Translation in Oxford (a.k.a. Babel), where silver-bar technology is being developed and refined.

Robin eventually enters Oxford with a first-year cohort that includes Indian Muslim Ramy, Haitian Victoire, and Letty, the white daughter of an admiral who sent her to Babel as a grudging replacement for her recently deceased brother. Despite the overt racism of Oxford society, Robin is happy at Babel until he is contacted by half-brother Griffin, who wants to recruit him into the Hermes Society, a global underground organisation that wants to undermine Britain’s silver supremacy. Once Robin realises Babel is exploiting non-white foreigners like Robin, Ramy and Victoire on the grounds that translations using their native languages have more power than European ones – and will enable Britain to plunder their home countries – he waffles over which side to take until his hand is forced.

There’s a lot to chew on here, from Kuang’s deep-dive explanations of how translation works (which I found fascinating) to her fairly blatant critique of the white supremacist mindset of British colonialism told from the POV of the colonised. And then of course there’s the debate over whether violence is necessary to change systemic injustice, and if so, how far should it be taken. While Kuang covers the arguments on both sides fairly thoroughly, it’s tricky to evaluate them in a modern context vs the context of the 1830s, when attitudes towards justified violence were somewhat different than they are today. That said, Kuang seems more interested in provoking discussion rather than answering questions (apart from her clear assertion that colonialism is evil), but it’s arguably a discussion worth having. What’s really remarkable is that she makes all of this quite readable – which is a good thing for a doorstop book like this.

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Babel on,

This is dF

Well, I’m trying, anyway.

What Are Biblical Values?: What the Bible Says on Key Ethical Issues by John J. Collins

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Another reading assignment, so even though I’ve read John J. Collins before (also for a class, and that was a textbook), that’s probably irrelevant to my decision to read him again. But this one, while academically inclined, is not a textbook, but rather a critique of politicians and other people who justify their positions and policies on hot-button ethical and social issues (gender, gay marriage, abortion, climate change, etc) by claiming they’re based on “Biblical values”. The problem, argues Collins, is that the people who say this sort of thing either cherry-pick their “values”, or apparently haven’t studied the Bible very deeply. Or possibly both.

Collins looks at what the text of the Bible has to say about the above topics, plus things like violence, social justice and slavery, with the caveat that his objective isn’t to declare which side is right, but to highlight the problem of relying on what is in essence a complex and often contradictory anthology of writings – what Collins describes as less of a unified, cohesive treatise and more of a running argument written and edited by dozens of different people over the span of a few thousand years – to justify a given modern-day position.

Overall, Collins makes a good case that (1) anyone who wants to talk about Biblical values in any meaningful way must at the very least engage with that text in depth with a reasonably open mind to identify consistent and objective “values” from the text, and (2) anyone who does so may find themselves surprised to find how little support the Bible may provide. Obviously, what the reader makes of this will largely depend on how literally they take the Bible in the first place. Others may be put off by Collins declining to settle scores for them. For me, I got a lot out of it, but then I’m not a fundamentalist, and I also agree with one of his key points: “To treat the Bible as a magic book of answers to modern problems amounts to refusing to grapple with it seriously.”


Among the Braves: Hope, Struggle, and Exile in the Battle for Hong Kong and the Future of Global Democracy by Shibani Mahtani

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

English-language books about the 2019 Hong Kong protests tend to have a specific hook or angle based on the personal experience or expertise of the author, so while each volume may not be comprehensive, they do add up to a broader picture when you put them together. This one illustrates the complex history of the pro-democracy movement in HK and how it evolved over time before 1997 (when Britain gave the city back to China under the “One Country Two Systems” principle that promised to preserve HK’s freedoms and common-law system for 50 years, and allow it to become a proper democracy) and after, until the National Security Law 0f 2020 crushed it.

Shibani Mahtani and Timothy McLaughlin – who covered the 2019 protests at street level – tell that story by focusing on four key people – Rev. Chu Yiu-ming, one of the pioneers of the pro-democracy movement; “Tommy”, an art student on the front lines of the 2019 protests; Finn Lau, who played a key role in the decentralised, online side of the protests; and Gwyneth Ho, a journalist who gave up her career to run for election and went to jail for it. Each of their stories serve to ground the overarching narrative of the pro-democracy movement at the human level – it’s not just about the politics, but what drives people to take a stand against creeping authoritarianism, and the human cost of doing so.

As always, it feels weird to read about events I’ve only recently lived through, but it’s good to be reminded of what really happened – not least because the HK govt has already recast the 2019 protests as a violent, foreign-funded terrorist revolution that came out of nowhere and was masterminded by newspaper publisher Jimmy Lai, rather than what it actually was: a decentralised grassroots movement 30+ years in the making that was finally pushed too far by Chief Executive Carrie Lam, whose cold, harsh handling of protests against a controversial extradition bill made everything progressively worse. Mahtani and McLaughlin tell the real story, and they tell it well. It's by no means comprehensive (which would require it to be at least twice as long), but they cover all the necessary bases to understand what happened and why.

NOTE: Ironically, I actually managed to buy a copy of this in Hong Kong, which one could take as a sign that we still have freedoms, etc. That said, the store I bought it from, Book Punch, is one of a shrinking number of independent bookstores who sell books like this as well as other political books, and are constantly harassed by the govt over technically unrelated minor things like building, health and fire safety codes. So it's hard to say how much longer books like this will be available here.

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Be water, my friends,

This is dF

Momentum – I has it! More or less. Anyway, books, yo.

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I’ve seen this book in the classics section for decades, and probably would have tried it sooner if I’d realised it was a ghost story. Okay, I didn’t look that closely, and you should never judge a book by its cover etc and so on, but honestly to me it looked like your average late-19th century novel, more Bronte sisters than Edgar Allan Poe. It was only maybe six years ago that I found out it was a ghost story, and it was only after watching The Haunting of Bly Manor on Netflix (and finding out afterwards it was based on this book) that I finally decided to give it a go.

As you may know, the narrative is framed as a manuscript written by a woman who served as a governess at Bly Manor for two young children, Miles and Flora. It’s all idyllic and wonderful until she starts seeing strange people wandering about, who resemble two former employees at Bly who the housekeeper, Mrs Grose, knows to be dead. The governess’ terror grows as she senses a connection between the ghosts and the children. But are the ghosts real? Or just in her head?

I must confess that this didn’t really work for me at all, for while the basic story is okay, it’s also liberally festooned, to the point of being encumbered, I dare say, with the sort of overblown emotional melodrama that is somewhat typical of Victorian-era fiction, which I’ve always found too cheesy to take seriously, the disagreeable effect of which is arguably exacerbated by James’ demonstrable penchant for writing really long and complex sentences, with lots and lots of commas, as if to jam as much information, both relevant and tangential, as possible into one complete, and grammatically correct, sentence, not unlike the one I’m writing now. Which is okay if you’re into that kind of thing. I am not.


Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I tried Octavia Butler once a long time ago with Mind of My Mind, and for whatever reason, it really didn’t click with me. But it wouldn’t be the first time I wasn’t ready for a particular book or author when I first tried them, and in recent years this book and its sequel Parable of the Talents have been getting namedropped as an increasingly relevant and prescient vision of dystopian America (i.e. the book – published in 1993 – is set in 2024 in an America that is splintering apart under the effects of climate change and an authoritarian Christian nationalist Presidency, where the police and fire depts are corrupt, and slavery has returned in the form of indentured servitude to corporations that are privatising cities). So when I came across this copy during my last trip stateside, I decided that was enough of a hook for me to try Butler again.

The story is the diary of Lauren Olamina, a teenage girl suffering from hyperempathy (the ability to literally experience the pain and suffering of others) who lives in a gated community near Los Angeles that is by no means wealthy, but has enough resources to be a target for the gangs, pyromaniac drug addicts and desperate homeless people outside. Disillusioned by the Biblical teachings of her Baptist pastor father, Lauren develops her own theological concept of God that she calls “Earthseed”, which she believes is humanity’s only hope for survival. Lauren also educates herself on how to survive in the wild, as she also believes her community will inevitably be overrun. Which it is, after which she heads north with a handful of survivors in hope of finding refuge and work.

To get the obvious out of the way, while I think the comparisons of Butler’s dystopian 2024 to real-life 2024 are somewhat overblown, her vision certainly seems a lot more plausible now than it probably did in 1993 – we may not be there yet, but we do seem to be headed in that direction. Which is why, as dystopian novels go, it’s one of the bleakest I’ve ever read, and yet one of the most powerful. As with most SF, it’s not really about prediction – it’s about how humans respond to the breakdown of society, the moral/ethical choices we’re forced to make to survive, and how much of our humanity we can retain in the process. In this regard, Parable of the Sower is brutally honest and mostly realistic. Anyway, I’m sold on the sequel and will be hunting down a copy of that.

(PS: I’m not big on trigger warnings, but if you like dogs, this may be an especially tough read for you.)



Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I haven’t seen the TV series, but I have read Matt Ruff before (Bad Monkeys) and found him entertaining enough, and I have read some HP Lovecraft as well, so I figured this was worth a try. I also like the basic conceit here, which is to essentially write an episodic homage to Lovecraftian horror that also acknowledges Lovecraft’s notorious racism by setting the story in Jim Crow-era America and asking the question: which is scarier – tentacled horrors or being stopped by racist cops? Ask a white person and a black person in America, and you may well get two different answers.

The story focuses on the family of Atticus Turner, who returns to Chicago from the Korean War to find that his father Montrose has gone missing in Ardham, MA while investigating a family secret. Atticus goes to find him with sister Letitia and uncle George (publisher of The Safe Negro Travel Guide, a fictional version of the Green Book), which leads to an encounter with Caleb Braithwaite, an ambitious member of a secret sorcerer society called The Order of the Ancient Dawn, who manipulates the Turners throughout the book. Along the way the various members of the Turner family encounter a haunted house, a gateway to parallel universes, cursed books and devil dolls. And of course, plenty of racists.

Ruff’s writing is accessible and reasonably well paced, and makes the most of his universe by using an episodic structure to support a broader story arc (indeed, he originally conceived Lovecraft Country as a TV series). And while the horror stuff is good, it’s the parallels with racism that make it more interesting, as well as the fact that Atticus and George are science-fiction fans who have also read Lovecraft, which gives them something of an edge in navigating the supernatural landscape. And while the climax seemed a bit far-fetched, it does deliver a satisfying ending. There’s a sequel, and it’s in the to-read pile, so there you go.

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Are you ready for the country,

This is dF

And so:



A Short Introduction to the Hebrew Bible by John J. Collins

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is the textbook for a class I’m taking on the Old Testament, so I’m not sure how to rate it fairly, but it counts towards my Reading Challenge – not least because I was reading this when I could have been reading other books in the To Read pile – so here we are. Anyway, as the title suggests, it’s a short overview of every book in the Hebrew Bible, to include some key writings from the Apocrypha. The overview includes the historical background and context for each book, who wrote and edited what, and what various theologians and scholars have said about them in terms of historical accuracy (or lack thereof), spiritual meaning, literary value and truthiness.

So in that sense, it’s been very educational. I do like history, and it’s interesting to see how many of these stories parallel myths and legends from nearby cultures, and how Hebrew theology was shaped over time. If nothing else, it shows how the Hebrew Bible was edited and cobbled together over the centuries, which explains why a lot of it is repetitive and inconsistent from a strictly narrative point of view. There is also some basic commentary about the nastier parts of the OT (you know, genocide, misogyny, etc) and how they don’t read well in 2024. Anyway, I came away with a far better understanding of the OT and how it relates to the New Testament.


The Day the Revolution Began: Rethinking The Meaning of Jesus' Crucifixion by Tom Wright

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’ve never read Tom Wright (a.k.a. N.T. Wright) before, apart from a weeklong daily meditation on The Lord’s Prayer, which I found interesting. But anyway, he comes highly recommended in the circles I currently cavort in. I was gifted this book by a good friend of mine, and the title alone made it look like something that could get me stopped by the police if I read it in public here in Hong Kong, so I couldn’t really ask for a better starting point. To be clear, it’s not that kind of revolution – although, near the end of the book, Wright almost makes it sound like it is, in a way. In any case, the “revolution” he has in mind is the revolution of love that began with Jesus’ death on the cross. More than that, though, Wright is also essentially calling for a revolution in the Christian church in how we think about the true meaning of the cross, what actually happened, how it changed everything and why it’s so important – because, in his view, mainstream Christianity has gotten it horribly wrong.

It's a complex argument to sum up in a paragraph, but in essence, Wright argues that the standard atonement theology we’ve all grown up with (i.e. Christ died for our sins so we could all go to Heaven) is a gross distortion of how the original Christians understood what happened when Jesus was crucified. Wright pushes back against the “penal substitution” theory that seems to portray Jesus’ death as pacifying an angry God to save us – which doesn’t fit well with the belief that Jesus also fully embodied God’s love for us and wants us to do likewise. Wright goes through the gospels, Paul’s writings and key parts of the Old Testament in massive detail to explain how the Church needs to rethink what sin actually is, and how the cross freed us from it, which he believes can radically change how the Church engages with the world in a positive way.

I’m drastically oversimplifying it, but that’s the basic gist. And the fact that it took me a few months to get through it speaks both to the fascinating ideas Wright throws in here and the detailed complexity of his argument. Which is amazing, since this is one of Wright’s general audience books, rather than his academic theology books. I don’t have the theological knowledge to critique his theology here (and plenty of people have done that online), but I do think he's on the right track. For me, it mainly goes a bit off the rails at the end when he starts suggesting how the modern Church can actively live out our intended vocation as image bearers of God’s love, which makes a few assumptions I don’t agree with and could, despite Wright’s best intentions, very easily be as abused as the atonement theology Wright wants to correct. If nothing else, it’s livened up my Bible study class, which is always a good thing, as is anything that makes the orthodoxy rethink its assumptions. Bring on the revolution, then.

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Talkin’ ‘bout a revolution,

This is dF

Well, not that fast, maybe.

Death with Interruptions by José Saramago

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’ve never read Jose Saramago before, and I’ve been told more than once that if I dig Gabriel Garcia Marquez (which I do), I should read Saramago. Somehow I’ve never got around to it until now, when I came across a cheap copy of this 2005 novel, which is fairly late in his career, so I don’t know if it’s the best place to start. But it’s a place to start. And it’s a pretty good hook: in an unnamed country, one day people just stop dying. Which may sound like good news – until you realize that this has consequences.

On the one hand, people with terminal illnesses stay on the brink of death permanently. Secondly, you now have a growing elderly population problem. This also means hospitals and nursing homes are now overloaded. Meanwhile, the undertakers and insurance companies are in big trouble, and the Catholic Church has an existential crisis on its hands (i.e. how do people get to Heaven now, and does the Resurrection mean anything if there is no longer death, which is a prerequisite?). You get the idea.

Saramago spends the first two thirds of the book focused on this, as well as why death has decided to stop killing people, and – once she realizes this isn’t going as she planned – she devises a solution that makes things worse (and yes, the gender and lowercase ‘d’ are intentional). The last third features death taking the form of a human woman to find out why a cellist who is scheduled to die is still very much alive. My main complaint is that – unless the Kindle version is badly formatted – Saramago is one of those authors who writes really long paragraphs whilst ignoring the conventions of proper punctuation. Which makes it a chore to read, even once you get the hang of it. Anyway, It’s quite surreal and strangely amusing. Will explore Saramago further.

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Millions now living will never die,

This is dF

No, truly, I am. See?

The Beginning Place by Ursula K. Le Guin

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Continuing my exploration of the works of Ursula K. Le Guin, this 1980 novel gets compared to C.S. Lewis' Narnia and Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, though the only similarity I can see is average young people finding access to a parallel world where time behaves differently. In this case, the parallel world is the idyllic woodland of Tembreabrezi, where it is always twilight and people live simple, peaceful lives. Or at least they did. But fear has gripped the land, and the people of Mountain Town find the paths are closing and they cannot leave.

The story kicks off with Hugh Rogers, a grocery clerk who lives with his mom and accidentally stumbles across a gateway to Tembreabrezi. After discovering that a day in Tembreabrezi is a minute here, he starts making frequent camping trips at the 'beginning place' by a river, feeling more at home there than in the real world. Inevitably, he meets Irena, a girl who has been coming to Tembreabrezi for years, and sees Hugh as an unwelcome interloper. But to her annoyance, the people of Mountain Town believe he may be the key to helping Tembreabrezi overcome its mysterious fear.

To be honest, I didn’t really connect with this one. I felt that Tembreabrezi was too underdeveloped as both a location and as a conceptual sanctuary for Hugh and Irena. Similarly, the eventual reveal of the source of the fear felt underwhelming. I’m told that it’s all meant to be Jungian metaphors and symbols – i.e. Tembreabrezi is more of a state of mind than a physical place, and Le Guin deliberately doesn’t explain anything so that you can puzzle over it. Well, okay, and I don’t think that authors have to spell everything out for you or get into the kind of hyperdetailed worldbuilding you get with Tolkien or George RR Martin, say. But if that’s what Le Guin was going for here, it was lost on a simple rube like me, for which I take full responsibility.


The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is my second time reading Becky Chambers after starting with her solarpunk novella A Psalm for the Wild-Built. This is her debut novel that, somewhat famously, she funded via Kickstarter and self-published, after which it got the attention of book publishers. It’s ostensibly a space opera set in the Galactic Commons, following the adventures of the crew of the Wayfarer, a galactic tunneling ship whose job is to create wormhole pathways enabling the various members of the GC to zip around space more quickly.

The story starts off with Rosemary Harper, a resident of Mars who joins the Wayfarer as a clerk, just as the ship gets a really big job – building a wormhole to connect Central Space with a distant planet now controlled by an unpredictable alien race called the Toremi whose clans are constantly embroiled in civil wars. Rosemary has a secret she doesn’t want anyone to learn. However, her plotline is just one of several, as just about everyone else in the crew (including the ship’s AI) gets a subplot, often having to do with personal relationships or family secrets. In fact, the book is mainly about that, rather than the actual job they’ve just accepted (which doesn’t even happen until around 200 pages into the story).

Indeed, Chambers spends most of the book building up the characters and their respective alien cultures, and exploring issues like alien sex, gender fluidity and multiculturalism that a universe populated by alien races would likely exhibit, and which most space operas tend to sidestep – so, points for that. On the downside, Chambers also populates the Wayfarer with characters that (with one exception) get along really well and are very kind-hearted, supportive and understanding of each other’s problems. Which is nice, I guess, but maybe a little too emo for me. Chambers took a similar charming, cosy approach to A Psalm for the Wild-Built, but that worked better for me – maybe because I find it more believable between two main characters rather than nine. I will say the final act is pure page-turning adrenaline and worth the price of admission, even if we have to take the long way to get to it. But then maybe that’s the point?

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Take the long way home,

This is dF

And that’s that for 2023.

I got my Christmas miracle, so the 2023 Reading Challenge (30 books/year) is complete. You can see that here if you’re really that interested. However, I’m likely to set a lower bar next year, if only for my peace of mind. (For the truly hardcore, you can see my yearly statistics here.)

Anyway, I managed to end the year on a high note, quality-wise (apart from a the first book here), so there’s always that.

And so:

Supernatural Noir by Ellen Datlow

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Someone flagged this 2011 collection to me at some point, and I was interested – partly because I do like the noir and the supernatural genres, so why not an anthology mashup, and partly because I remember that the better anthologies I came across when I was younger were edited by Ellen Datlow. So I figured this was worth a try, despite only being familiar with two of the writers here (Joe R. Lansdale and Caitlin R. Kiernan).

As the title suggests, the stories here are mainly noir tales with a supernatural angle, though it’s worth mentioning upfront that Datlow casts a pretty wide net when it comes to what counts as noir – which is fine, as noir has always been more than just hardboiled PIs and femme fatales cracking wise and whatnot – basically anything involving losers, low-lifes and crime. And here you have a lot of that – an ex-boxer trying to find out who (or what) killed his friend and a room full of gangsters, a detective hired to find out who is desecrating his client’s sister’s grave every night, a couple on the lam check into a weird hotel, etc.

However, many of these are really just straight horror or urban fantasy, even when allowing for the expanded criteria for what counts as noir, so in my opinion the title is a little misleading. Which may be my problem, and that’s fair, but the other thing is that, as straight horror/urban fantasy, most of the stories here didn’t work for me – apparently there’s only so much gruesome violence or drug/sex abuse I can stand these days. Which, again, is my problem. I’m just saying, a few of these stories are quite good, but most aren’t my cup of tea. Fans of horror/urban fantasy may dig it – and maybe noir fans, depending on how they define the genre.


Flux by Ron Goulart

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Continuing my occasional quest to re-read the works of Ron Goulart, this 1974 novel is what you could call the second instalment of the Chameleon Corps, a branch of the intergalactic Political Espionage Office that employs shape-changers as agents. The CC first appeared in Goulart’s short story collection The Chameleon Corps and Other Shape Changers. The protagonist in those CC stories, Ben Jolson, returns here for his first novel-length adventure.

This time he’s sent to the planet Jasper, where a mysterious person called Sunflower is recruiting teenagers to become suicide bombers for his revolution. Jolson’s mission is simple enough: track down Sunflower and stop him. He’s also tasked with locating Bronzini, another CC agent who disappeared after accepting the same mission. As it happens, the districts of Jasper are all divided into themes – for example, one district is designed like the Old American West, where everyone dresses as cowboys, while another is based on 1920s Manhattan, etc. This gives Jolson plenty of opportunity to run through a number of different personas as he goes along.

It's pretty standard stuff for Goulart – the plot is basically a platform for a reluctant agent to play the straight man to all the oddball characters and satirical situations he encounters as he follows each lead. Which is fine, though this one is a little dark in the sense that it’s hard to make light of teenage suicide bombers here in 2023. Also, like a lot of Goulart’s work, his realistic takes on racism, sexism and homophobia will challenge some readers – they don’t dominate the story, but they haven’t aged well, either, to say nothing of his use of love interests, even if he’s being true to the genre he’s satirizing. Anyway, it’s okay for what it is, but Goulart has done it better elsewhere.


SIMONE WEIL THE POWER OF WORDS /ANGLAIS by Weil Simone

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’ve never read Simone Weil before, but a lot of people I respect tend to quote her a lot, so naturally when I saw this in a local indie bookstore, I decided to give it a try – not least since (as part of Penguin’s “Great Ideas” series) it’s basically a taster of two of her books: The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties towards Mankind and Selected Essays 1934-43. So I figured it was an easy commitment and a short read. As it turns out, “short” in this case doesn’t equal “easy”. Weil was a serious intellectual and she wrote like one. Moreover, her “great ideas” essentially called for a radical rethink and overhaul of accepted conventions, concepts and institutions by getting to the true heart of the fundamental problem of the human condition.

For example, in the title track, Weil argues that words have power when they are empty of meaning – as they so often are in political discourse – so that words like “fascism”, “Communism” and “democracy” become vacuous labels that men will kill and die for without understanding what those words actually mean, which also prevents us from seeing the true nature of the issue at hand. The second essay, “Human Personality”, is related in that Weil says the term “human rights” in popular discourse fails to capture the essence of what we think of as rights, as opposed to words like “justice” and “truth”. Finally, “The Needs of the Soul” looks at rights in the broader context of the human “obligations” to respect each other and ensure everyone’s physical and spiritual needs are met – which involves not just obvious things like equality, liberty and freedom of opinion, but also order, obedience and punishment.

So yeah, it’s challenging stuff. And that’s a good thing. I won’t say I agree with all of Weil’s ideas, and some of her ideal suggestions for correcting the problems she points out are complex and seem less practical or workable in this crazy mixed up world of 2023 than it did when she wrote these essays in the 1930s-40s. On the other hand, she also sounds like a prophet when she writes stuff like: “A democracy where public life is made up of strife between political parties is incapable of preventing the formation of a party whose avowed aim is the overthrow of that democracy.” What you make of if will obviously depend on your current political outlook and your openness to having your sociopolitical ideologies seriously challenged. For me, I got a lot out of this, and I’ll probably try to find some other writings by Weil.


The Power of the Powerless by Václav Havel

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I read Vaclav Havel’s Disturbing the Peace: A Conversation with Karel Hvížďala in grad school, partly because I knew a little of his role in the Velvet Revolution, and partly because I’d heard he’d smuggled Velvet Underground records into Czechoslovakia in the 60s, which impressed me, being a VU/Lou Reed fan and all. Anyway, it was alright, but I didn’t look for other Havel books. However, almost 30 years later, I’m living in Hong Kong which is fast becoming an authoritarian regime, and a lot of people in the pro-democracy camp have been referencing The Power of the Powerless, which the few remaining indie bookstores in HK still carry. And with those bookstores being harassed by the govt, I decided it was high time I read it. As an act of resistance, you might say.

It's a long essay that Havel wrote in the wake of the creation of Charter 77 to explore how one goes about resisting oppression in a "post-totalitarian" regime – a term Havel coined to distinguish Communist totalitarianism from classical strongman dictatorships, because the power relations work differently. This matters because the key to resistance is in first understanding how authoritarian power actually works in such a system, which in turn is key to understanding what power the people incorporated into that system can exercise to not only resist state authority but undermine it and eventually render it powerless. In essence, Havel argues, it starts with realizing that one does not have play along with the state’s fictional ideological orthodoxy, and taking steps to “live in truth” that eventually leads to “small works” of resistance to that orthodoxy at the community/grassroots level.

It's a great book with a lot of big ideas on how to think about not only peaceful resistance to authoritarianism, but also power structures in general, to include parliamentary democracy, which Havel didn’t feel was the polar opposite of totalitarianism. Havel was also realistic enough to warn that there is risk involved with “living in truth” – indeed, he was eventually jailed by the secret police after this essay was published. There is probably a great debate to be had as to how much any of this would work in HK or mainland China, and I’m sure some find his ideas inapplicable, unworkable or unsatisfying (if only because it's a long game that requires patience and sacrifice). For me, I do agree that “small works” are meaningful, and that it’s better to “live in truth” than blindly accept the lie peddled by the state. If nothing else, the book gives me hope that HK’s slide into mainland-style post-totalitarianism is neither inevitable nor permanent.


Just Out of Jupiter's Reach by Nnedi Okorafor

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Earlier this year, Amazon Original Stories e-published a collection of six new short SF stories by reasonably big-name SF authors under the umbrella title The Far Reaches Stories to Take You Out of This World – free if you subscribe to Prime or Kindle Unlimited (which I don’t), otherwise you can buy them for cheap. They’re unified by the loose theme of interstellar travel, but are otherwise standalone stories, which means they can be read in any order. I’ve read three of the six authors before (Nnedi Okorafor, John Scalzi and James S.A. Corey), and since I needed a quick read to ace my 2023 Reading Challenge at the last minute, I decided to start with familiar territory and opted for Okorafor’s “Just Out Of Jupiter’s Reach” – not least because it's set in the same universe as her Binti stories, which I enjoyed. Specifically, it features interstellar ships that are organic, living and sentient, and the only people who can fly them must be compatible with the ship’s DNA so that they can form a bond with them.

Kármán (the company that designed the ships) offers eligible pilots 20 million euros to help test its first seven ships and collect research data as the ships grow and evolve. The catch: the contract is for ten years in deep space with no human contact, not even with other pilots, except for one pre-arranged week-long get-together at the five-year mark at a docking station near Jupiter. The story opens as the narrator, Nigerian native Tornado Onwubiko, prepares to arrive at the meeting. Okorafor focuses largely on the dynamics of interpersonal relations between people of different ages, cultures and backgrounds, meeting each other for the first time, after spending five years in complete isolation, with another five to go, as well as how their individual ships (which started off looking mostly like prawns) have evolved.

And it generally works, although a couple of the key plot twists would have had more impact on me if Okorafor had more room to build up to them. Similarly, the use of organic ships, while imaginative, could use more explanation – not in terms of scientific plausibility so much as (1) why Kármán decided living ships were better than mechanical ones (apart from it being a cool idea, which it is), and (2) who would greenlight a billion-dollar project to build starships that require pilots with very specific genetic codes – so much so that Kármán wasn’t sure they could even find one match. So it takes a lot of suspension of disbelief to look past that. Anyway, it’s a decent story, but perhaps might work better as a novella.

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Far from home,

This is dF

I actually forgot to post last month’s update, and almost forgot this month’s update, and considering how much reading I got done, it’s probably just as well. But you’re all here for the book reviews, I know, so here you go.

Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time: The Historical Jesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith by Marcus J. Borg by Marcus J. Borg

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Ten years ago, I read The Jesus I Never Knew, in which Christian journalist Philip Yancey revisited the Gospels to reconcile the “real” Jesus with the various versions that churches and religious leaders tend to present circa 1995 when the book was published – i.e. the perfect Anglo-Saxon one you see in paintings, or the All-American one often invoked by the Christian Coalition, etc. Recently I came across this book (published a year earlier) that covers similar ground from a different angle.

Marcus Borg was a scholar who studied Jesus from a historical, secular point of view. But he was also a Christian who, like many Christians, found that the traditional religious image of Jesus he learned as a kid didn’t make much sense as he got older. It was through his research of the historical (which is to say human) Jesus – plus a few revelatory moments – that everything fell into place for him, and he was able to connect the historical Jesus with the “Christ of faith” – which is to say, the Christian traditions that proclaim Jesus as the Son of God.

Obviously, what readers make of Borg’s portrait of Jesus will depend on who Jesus is to them and how open-minded they are to consider other POVs. For me, it adds a new dimension to the human side of Jesus, which I’ve always found more interesting, and more relatable, than the divine side. I also like Borg’s take on Jesus as a “spirit person” [i.e. someone deeply in touch with the spirit of God], subversive sage, radical social prophet and movement founder who truly understood the human condition and offered the most viable solution, albeit one that’s neither easy nor fast.


Materiality as Resistance: Five Elements for Moral Action in the Real World by Walter Brueggemann

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I haven’t read that much of Walter Brueggemann, but I’ve gotten a lot out of what little I’ve read so far. I picked up this one along with his book Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now based mainly on the titles. And while Sabbath as Resistance focused (at the risk of oversimplifying) on the role of Sabbath as a circuit-breaker from the endless work cycles of late-stage capitalism that prevents us from loving each other as Jesus commanded, this book focuses on how materiality (not to be confused with materialism) plays a similar role, and how churches should embrace it as part of their ministry.

The problem is that the church has focused more exclusively on the spiritual at the expense of the material realities of our earthly existence since around the 6th Century (not coincidentally, around the time that wealthy people began to dominate churches) on the grounds that – from God’s POV – the material world doesn’t matter as much as the spiritual afterlife. Brueggemann contends that the material world jolly well does matter, and that the Bible makes this clear repeatedly. In essence, God created the physical world for us to live in, while Jesus took physical form on Earth and spent most of his ministry attending to the material needs of people (healing the sick, feeding the hungry, etc). So how then can the material aspect of our existence not be important to God?

Brueggemann breaks this materiality down into five categories – food, money, the body, time, and place – and shows how the Bible tells us the church should be making use of all five as the basis for moral action to reject the consumerist junk-food materialism and endless work cycles that dominate our lives today. Obviously, opinions (and interpretations) will differ, and I’m no theologian. But I found it to be a provocative work that challenges churches – especially wealthy ones – to be more active in alleviating poverty, injustice, oppression, inequality, etc, rather than just telling everyone it’ll be better in heaven. His proposed solutions may seem impractical, but only if you view them as short-term solutions than a long-term goal.


Warm Worlds and Otherwise: James Tiptree by James Tiptree Jr.

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is my second time reading James Tiptree, Jr (a.k.a. Alice Sheldon) after Ten Thousand Light-Years from Home, her debut short-story collection which duly impressed me for the scope of its imagination alone. This collection was published two years later, and seems even more experimental than the first batch, with a number stories featuring a more stream-of-consciousness lyrical approach that I usually associate with the New Wave of SF in the 1960s.

Lead-off story “All The Kinds of Yes” is a good example, in which a telepathic shape-shifting alien lands in California and canoodles with a group of hippie anti-war protesters. An even greater example is "Love Is the Plan, the Plan Is Death" (winner of the Nebula Award for short story in 1974), narrated by Mogadeet, some kind of alien insect trying to comprehend his own life cycle and reminiscing about his mate and their short time together while she is eating him alive.

This collection was more of a mixed bag for me than the previous one, with more stories not really making an impression on me. On the other hand, the stories that do work are as brilliantly inventive as anyone could hope for. They also happen to be the more famous stories here, such as "The Women Men Don't See", in which a govt agent is stranded on a remote island with a woman who – much to his confusion – doesn’t seem to need comforting or protecting, not even when aliens suddenly show up. Also, extra points for "The Girl Who Was Plugged In" (winner of the Hugo Award for novella in 1974) more or less predicting the rise of influencer culture.

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Getting warmer,

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Picking up speed!

Only When I Laugh by Len Deighton

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I’ve read and enjoyed all of Len Deighton’s Harry Palmer novels and Bernard Samson novels, but this is my first time reading a Deighton novel that’s not a spy novel of some kind. This one is a crime comedy from 1968 featuring three con artists – veteran Silas, his lover Liz and young Bob – who work as a team to stage elaborate cons, typically in the form of fake business investment deals. All three characters take turns as narrators, and unreliable ones at that (as you might expect con artists to be).

The story follows a fairly standard template – Silas, Liz and Bob take on a new con that doesn’t go as planned and the team starts to fracture as young Bob gets impatient with Silas running the show, and has designs on Liz, etc. But it’s also an exploration of the generation gap of the late 1960s – Silas is a WW2 vet who (his criminal aspirations aside) embodies the disciplined, stiff-upper-lip values of that generation, while Bob is an impulsive working class yob who has done time and resents the older generation telling him what to do. Liz is somewhere in between as a not-so-neutral observer.

Despite all that, I confess I didn’t get much out of it. The basic story is okay, but Deighton’s characters get sidetracked by unannounced flashbacks (which in Silas’ case are rather lengthy, possibly because WW2 scenarios are Deighton’s comfort zone). The multiple-narration device also makes it hard to get a grip on who these people really are, especially when Silas and Bob start improvising scenes just to see how long they can stay in that character. Maybe that’s the point, but still, I found myself skipping a lot. Anyway, there’s a lot to like here, but for me is just never really gelled into a likeable whole.


The Wind's Twelve Quarters by Ursula K. Le Guin

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I tend to enjoy Ursula Le Guin’s novels, but this is my first time reading her short stories. This 1975 anthology was the first collection of her short stories, and of the 17 tales here, I’d read only one before. The opener, “Sembley’s Necklace”, also serves as a prologue to her debut novel Rocannon's World, and is an early display of her tendency to blend SF and fantasy tropes in her work.

In fact, a number of stories here are connected to her more famous novels, if only by location. For example, "The Word of Unbinding" and "The Rule of Names" are stories set in Earthsea. "Winter's King" takes place on Gethen, the planet that became the setting for The Left Hand of Darkness. And "The Day Before the Revolution" is a prequel of sorts to The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia. However, there are plenty of other stories here: A banished astronomer seeks the stars in a silver mine; a planetary survey team receives ambiguous telepathic signals on a world without animal life; the sole survivor of a clone-group weathers the loss of his other "selves."

For whatever reason, I found that the stories linked to the novels worked the best for me – I suppose because they were wonderfully familiar territory for me, and reminded me why I loved those books. "The Day Before the Revolution" is especially good, not least for its concise exploration of the fate of ageing revolutionaries. But the others are also worthwhile, particularly her famous story "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas", which describes a summer festival in a utopian city of whose prosperity depends on the perpetual misery of a single child. Like with any collection, a few don’t clear the bar set by her best work, but then it’s a pretty high bar.


Mondo Barbie: An Anthology of Fiction & Poetry by Lucinda Ebersole

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

All the current kerfluffle over Barbieheimer and the conservative meltdown over Barbie’s alleged wokeness reminded me that somewhere buried in my bookshelves is this 1993 anthology that collects short stories and poems about Barbie in some form or fashion. The whole point of the book is that Barbie is (and has always been) so much more than a toy. Just as there has been many iterations of Barbie (Malibu Barbie, Flight Attendant Barbie, etc), she’s also a feminist icon, a pop-culture phenomenon, a coming-of-age catalyst of sexual discovery and so much more. So of course I had to re-read it.

I’ve heard of a few of the contributors, but most are new to me. The stories and poems here cover a wide range of Barbie experiences and opinions, though a common theme is the contrast between her “perfect” plasticine status-symbol life and the messy complicated real world. There’s also lots of dismemberment, sexual drama (both hetero and LGBTQ) and “Ken has no dick” jokes. Sometimes Barbie is the character, sometimes she speaks to her owners, sometimes she is merely a catalyst for the plot. One SF story is a murder mystery on the moon that takes place amid a religious cult where members transform into Barbie-like people. Another recalls a traumatic childhood visit to a Mattel factory.

As with any anthology, the quality varies, but it’s one of those rare collections where the sum is more interesting than its parts. It all adds up to the inescapable truth that Barbie has been central to so many childhoods and sexual awakenings (whether you had a Barbie or not). Plenty of non-fiction books have been written about the Barbie pop-culture phenomenon, but these fictional stories get to the heart of the matter by taking us to the front lines with the people who came of age in a Barbie world. It also highlights how she has always been something of a sociopolitical lightning rod, especially as American society underwent its own sociopolitical upheavals – which also means the current hoo-ha over the Barbie film is neither new nor original.

DISCLAIMER: I haven’t seen the Barbie movie, and I have no plans to do so anytime soon.

BONUS TRACK: : My sister had some Barbies, and we usually combined them with my Steve Austin, GI Joe and Big Jim action figures. When she decided she’d outgrown them around age 14, my friend Steve and I took the townhouse, the camper van, the surf buggy, Big Jim’s Jeep and all the dolls, and staged an elaborate action sequence in the backyard that also involved fireworks and a can of gasoline. There were no survivors.

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Put another shrimp on the Barbie,

This is dF