Anyone who has followed this blog for a minute knows I am a huge fan of Isabel J Kim's short stories and was hotly anticipating this book. To the point I got scared I wasn't going to like it. Fear not! It's as exciting and strange as her short fiction, with more room to let the characters breathe.
Sublimation is set in a world exactly like ours—except when you step over a border with the intent to emigrate, you are split in two, leaving behind a separate self: an instance. The novel follows two pairs of young Koreans with American instances: Rose, traveling back to South Korea for her grandfather's funeral and speaking to her Korean instance Soyoung for the first time ever, and her childhood friend Yujin and his American instance YJ, who talk to each other like right & left hemispheres of the brain.
The first half of the book is deeply introspective, tracing the space between Soyoung and Rose and the legibility of each woman's desires—to her instance, but also to herself. What makes you you? What part is genetics, upbringing, the people you've surrounded yourself with? Why do you want what you want? Told in second person, it's a funhouse mirror of self-recognition and alienation.* The narrative is interlaced with reimaginings of Korean folk tales, the Odyssey, and the Garden of Eden as they play out in a world of instancing.
The second half pivots to a technothriller plot as Soyoung/Rose and Yujin/YJ's lives collide with the greater political and technological forces trying to control instancing. This part of the book is rapidly paced, complete with a naked knife fight and a big cinematic finish, but it also has some fascinating experimental writing and insights into the characters.
I've texted a dozen people I know about this book—my uncle who loves Dark Matter, my coworker who loves diaspora lit—because it's such an interesting & fresh blend of genres. For anyone interested in doppelgangers, body snatching, women with nothing to lose, the inability to return home, and strange prose.
*There's apparently a percentage of Storygraph users who DNF here, saying it's "slow" and the POV is "confusing." My Harrow the Ninth-loving followers will have no troubles.
Potentially the most disturbing book I've read—not purely because of the content, but because it fully embraces the violence and obsession and sexual becoming of teenage girldom.
Jawbone is non-linear and told from multiple perspectives; the dense prose paired with creepypasta text, snippets of therapy sessions, and teenage girl slang. Incredible language in an incredible translation from Sarah Booker.
The story follows wealthy, privileged girls in a private, bilingual girls' highschool in Ecuador as they create a cult and challenge each other to increasingly dangerous and transgressive stunts. Our primary characters are Anneliese, the ringleader & inventor of the White God, her best friend Fernanda, and their new English teacher Clara, who is terrified of her students and obsessed with her dead mother. It catalogs Annaliese & Fernanda's obsessively close relationship and repressed lesbian identities as their frienship tips into enmity and puts them on a collision course with Clara.
It's about daughters' consumption of their mothers, it's about devotion and obsession, and most of all it's about the bubble of horror that is adolescence.
The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)
Ursula K. Le Guin
★★★★★ February 15 - 19, 2022
I love it. I want to re-read it immediately. I need to read everything UKLG has ever written.
Page numbers from my copy, where the story--excluding Introduction, Author's Note, and Afterword--is 300 pages. Current thoughts (Feb 2022):
1. Pronouns
I was surprised when the default pronouns were he/him/his, regardless of the chapter perspective. I use he/him pronouns in these notes for clarity, but I disagree with it. I rationalized it as the misogyny of Genly Ai (see point 2).
2. Toxic Masculinity
Genly Ai is a misogynist, and he's the Envoy of Ekumenical Society to Gethen. It's the primary reason he's bad at his job as Envoy. He can't see the Gethenians as genderless. He defaults to seeing the Gethenians as male, and when he sees hints of "female" characteristics in them, he becomes repulsed, distrusting, and dismissive of their expertise. He distrusts and refuses to listen to the advice of Estraven, his most devoted ally, because he perceives Estraven as having a "womanly" manner of speaking (see point 4).
Ai is weighed down by toxic masculinity [Pages 218-9, 229]. During his trip with Estraven across the Ice, it comes up as a frequent source of miscommunication (see point 7).
[Page 229, from Estraven’s Journal] Ai was exhausted and enraged. He looked ready to cry, but did not. I believe he considers crying either evil or shameful. Even when he was very ill and weak, the first days of our escape, he hid his face from me when he wept. [...] How can I guess why Ai must not weep? Yet his name is a cry of pain.
Genly's growth in this area was moving.
[Page 232, from Extraven’s Journal] Finally he asked, had he offended me? I explained my silence with some embarrassment. I was afraid he would laugh at me. [...] He did not laugh, of course. Rather he spoke with a gentleness that I did not know was in him. After a while he too came to speak of isolation, of loneliness. [Pages 266-7] "What's up, Genry?" / "I stood there in the middle of nothing. Tears came out and froze my eyelids together. I said, "I'm afraid of falling." [...] "There's nothing wrong with me," I went on, "except acute chronic fear."
3. Gender Politics
Ai initially perceives the Gethenians as being animalistic.
[Page 15] Can one read a cat's face, a seal's, an otter's? Some Gethenians, I thought, are like such animals, with deep bright eyes that do not change expression when you speak.
He can't understand them as they are.
[Page 11-12] Estraven had conversed amiably at table; now, sitting across the hearth from me, he was quiet. Though I had been nearly two years on Winter, I was still far from being able to see the people of the planet through their own eyes. I tried to, but my efforts took the form of self-consciously seeing a Gethenian first as a man, then as a woman, forcing him into those categories so irrelevant to his nature and so essential to my own.
Of course, he was informed by biased science from human investigators who spied on Gethen before him. The report is dehumanizing and infantilizing, as well as repulsed by their gender situation; the report concludes that Gethenians must be a "failed experiment."
[Page 95] On Winter, [men and women] will not exist. One is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience. [...] What would a society of eunuchs achieve?--But of course they are not eunuchs, in somer, but rather more comparable to pre-adolescents: not castrate, but latent.
After forging a friendship with Estraven, Ai reunites with his own race. Ai is almost overwhelmed by their lack of the Gethenian physiology, and the animalistic language is flipped:
[Page 296] It was strange to hear a woman's voice, after so long. The others came out of the ship, on my advice: evidence of any mistrust at this point would humiliate the Karhidish escort, impugning their shifgrethor. Out they came, and met the Karhiders with a beautiful curtsey. But they all looked strange to me, men and women, well as I knew them. Their voices sounded strange: too deep, too shrill. They were like a troupe of great, strange animals, of two different species; great apes with intelligent eyes, all of them in rut, in kemmer.... They took my hand, touched me, held me. [...] The physician from Sassinoth came in. His quiet voice and his face, a young, serious face, not a man's face and not a woman's, a human face. These were a relief to me, familiar, right.
4. Shifgrethor
Shifgrethor is an untranslatable Karhidish concept for a code of conduct and way of life; it deals with honor, power, prestige, respect, politeness, deference to expertise. It is an extension of Harddara faith (see point 5). It necessitates indirect speech, especially in giving advice:
[Page 149-150, from Estraven's Journal] I think we shall have trouble learning how to lie, having for so long practiced the art of going round and round the truth without ever lying about it, or reaching it either.
5. Shadows, Darkness, and Light
Karhide on Shadows
Karhidish culture is influenced by the Harddarata faith of the Foretellers of the Fastnesses. In the Harddarata, balance between all things is required. The Left Hand of Darkness poem summarizes the Harddara view:
[Page 233] Light is the left hand of darkness and darkness the right hand of light. Two are one, life and death, lying together like lovers in kemmer, like hands joined together, like the end and the way.
The Harddara cultivate an awareness of the present moment and acceptance that the future is unknowable; yet the Harddarata can also use a power called Foretelling to accurately answer questions about the future. Ai goes to Otherhord Fastness (temple) to speak with Faxe, a Foreteller, about the practice.
[Page 69] “We in the Harddara don’t want answers. It’s hard to avoid them, but we try to.” “Faxe, I don’t think I understand.” “Well, we come here to the Fastnesses mostly to learn what questions not to ask.” “But you’re the Answerers!” [… We perfected and practice Foretelling] “to exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question.” [Page 70] “The unknown,” said Faxe’s soft voice in the forest, “the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought. Unproof is the ground of action. […] Tell me, Genry, what is known? What is sure, predictable, inevitable—the one certain thing you know concerning your future, and mine?” “That we shall die.” “Yes. There’s really only one question that can be answered, Genry, and we already know the answer… The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.”
Through the Harddarata, Karhide sees shadows as evidence of reality, to the point that “shadows” are a cultural metaphor for personal prestige, power, honor.
[Page 248]"I've made some mistake in shifgrethor. I'm sorry; I can't learn. I've never even really understood the meaning of the word." / "Shifgrethor? It comes from an old word for shadow." [Page 146] [The people of Orgota] were not quite solid. / It was, I thought, as if they did not cast shadows. [...] Even in [the shower] I felt a vague unease, as if the hot water was not altogether real and reliable, and could not be counted upon.
Orgota on Shadows
In contrast, the people of Orgota, who follow the Yomeshta faith, believe that purity of light is the goal. Shadows are your death following you [Page 240].
Yomeshta faith comes from a former Harddarata named Meshe, who experienced an extreme sense of foresight during a Foretelling session gone awry, due to the question being too large, too unanswerable (“What is the meaning of life?”) [Page 60]. The Yomeshta believe Meshe had powers reminiscent of Paul Atreides of Dune:
[Page 67] [Faxe said,] “That’s what the Yomeshta believe of Meshe: that he saw past and future clear, not for a moment, but all during his life after the Question of Shorth. It’s hard to believe. I doubt a man could endure it. But no matter…”
As a result, the Yomeshta faith (and nation of Orgota) are much more concerned with knowing everything; they believe that light alone is good. There is less of a sense of free will, because Meshe saw all events and all times.
[Page 161] In the moment of the Seeing, Meshe saw all the sky as if it were all one sun. Above the earth and under the earth all the sphere of sky was bright as the sun’s surface, and there was no darkness. For he saw not what was, nor what will be, but what is. The stars that flee and take away their light all were present in his Eye, and all their light shone presently. Darkness is only in the mortal eye, that thinks it sees, but sees not. In the Sight of Meshe there is no darkness. Therefore those that call upon the darkness [the Harddarata] are made fools of and spat out from the mouth of Meshe, for they name what is not, calling it Source and End. There is neither darkness nor death, for all things are, in the light of the Moment, and their end and their beginning are one.
Naturally, according to the Orgota creation myth, shadows and darkness are sources of danger.
[Page 239] Each of the children born to [the original couple] had a piece of darkness that followed him about wherever he went by daylight. Edondurath said, “Why are my sons followed thus by darkness?” His kemmering said, “Because they were born in the house of flesh, therefore death follows at their heels. They are in the middle of time. In the beginning there was the sun and the ice, and there was no shadow. In the end when we are done, the sun will devour itself and shadow will eat light, and there will be nothing left but the ice and darkness.
Because of the lack of free will and the fear of darkness/shadows inherent to Orgota culture that stems from their Yomeshta faith, Orgota culture is more dangerous/oppressive than Karhide:
[Pages 108-121] A police state [Pages 167-183] Work/death camps for experimentation on criminals for “knowledge” [Pages 134-146] Total trust from the people of the government being correct; lack of transparency; strict sense of rank [Page 173] “People [are] disciplined from birth for obedience.” [Page 232, from Estraven’s Journal] “The Yomeshta would say that man’s singularity is his divinity.” / “Lords of the Earth, yes. Other cults on other worlds have come to the same conclusion. They tend to be the cults of dynamic, aggressive, ecology-breaking cultures. Orgota is in the pattern, in its way.”
6. Shadows on the Ice
A section near the beginning of Ai and Estraven’s trek across the Gobrin Ice Sheet evokes the Orgota creation myth. There’s a sense that they are, in a way, going back in time: to a time/place where there is nothing but ice and sunlight.
[Page 235] All day we went light and fast over the level ice-plain, dead white under a gray-blue sky, unbroken except for the few black nunatak-peaks now far behind us, and a smudge of darkness, Drumner’s breath, behind them. Nothing else: the veiled sun, the ice.
However, during the trek of across the Ice, shadows are a source of life. The narrative reinforces the Harddarata belief system over the Yomeshta system.
[Page 260] We came into quiet weather for many days. […] At first the overcast was thin, so that the air was vaguely radiant with an even, sourceless sunlight reflected from both clouds and snow, from above and below. Overnight the weather thickened somewhat. All brightness was gone, leaving nothing. We stepped out of the tent onto nothing. Sledge and tent were there, Estraven stood beside me, but neither her nor I cast any shadow. There was dull light all around, everywhere. [Page 267] “Fear’s very useful. Like darkness; like shadows.” Estraven’s smile was an ugly split in a peeling, cracked brown mask, thatched with black fur and set with two flecks of black rock. “It’s queer that daylight’s not enough. We need the shadows, in order to walk.”
7. Failures to Communicate
A central theme, best summarized by a passage from Estraven's journal:
[Page 149] Is it possible that all along in Erhenrang he was seeking my advice, not knowing how to tell me he sought it? If so, then he must have misunderstood half and not understood the rest of what I told him by my fireside in the Palace, the night after the Ceremony of the Keystone. His shifgrethor must be founded, and composed, and sustained, altogether differently from ours; and when I thought myself most blunt and frank with him he may have found me most subtle and unclear.
And here, during the moments when Estraven and Ai finally see eye-to-eye, so to speak:
[Page 197] "Mr. Ai, we've seen the same events with different eyes; I wrongly thought they'd seem the same to us. [...] I thought you understood, and in that I erred. I took too much for granted; I didn't wish to offend you, to advise you; I thought you understood the danger." [Page 199] "I don't mean to be unjust, Estraven--" "Yet you are. It is strange. I am the only man in all Gethen that has trusted you entirely, and I am the only man in Gethen that you have refused to trust." He put his head in his hands. He said at last, "I'm sorry, Estraven." It was both apology and admission.
8. Understanding, Trust, Love
After the turning point of Pages 197-199, Ai and Estraven begin to build a trusting relationship during their trek across the Ice. During their trek, Estraven and Ai both begin to note and internally compliment the strengths and character traits of their companion (Pages 204, 211, 232, 242, 250). As Estraven and Ai become friends, they begin to understand and respect each other as they are.
It culminates in the final shift in perspective on Ai's part necessary for understanding:
[Pages 248-249] And I saw then again, and for good, what I had always been afraid to see, and had pretended not to see in him: that he was a woman as well as a man. Any need to explain the sources of that fear vanished with the fear; what I was left with was, at last, acceptance of him as he was. Until then I had rejected him, refused him his own reality. [...] I had been afraid to give it. I had not wanted to give my trust, my friendship to a man who was a woman, a woman who was a man. [...] The great and sudden assurance of friendship between us rose: [...] that it might as well be called, now as later, love. But it was from the difference between us, not from the affinities and likenesses, but from the difference, that that love came: and it was itself the bridge, the only bridge, across what divided us.
And suddenly, to Ai, "the limitations… in our understanding seemed intolerable to me," [Page 250] and he immediately begins to train Estraven in the ways of Mindspeech. What was Ai's first successful mental message? "Therem, my friend, there's nothing to fear between us." [Page 253] Ai comes to understand that "Alone, I cannot change your world. But I can be changed by it. Alone, I must listen, as well as speak. Alone, the relationship I finally make, if I make one, is not impersonal and not only political: it is individual, it is personal, it is both more and less than political." [Page 259] He's finally communicating, listening, building a bridge and a personal relationship of trust.
9. Therem Harth Estraven’s Vows
Therem Harth Estraven vowed kemmering twice. It’s not addressed directly, but instead scattered throughout the text in implication. According to Gethenian cultural norms, both of Therem’s kemmering vows were illegitimate.
[Page 21] In those days, as now, full brothers were permitted to keep kemmer until one of them should bear a child, but after that they must separate; so it was never permitted them to vow kemmering for life. [Page 92] I am not sure of divorce rules in general; […] there is divorce, but no remarriage after either divorce or the partner’s death: one can only vow kemmering once.
First Vow: Arek Harth Estraven
He first vowed kemmering with his full brother, Arek Harth Estraven, 20+ years ago. Arek and Therem had one son together, Sorve Harth Estraven. It seems Arek and Therem did not break kemmering as required by Gethenian custom; they vowed kemmering for life.
Arek died 14 years ago (around age 30), through means ambiguous. It’s possible but unlikely he died of natural causes. Arek may have committed suicide (as in “The Place Inside the Blizzard”) or been murdered (as in “Estraven the Traitor”) when the illegitimate kemmering vow was discovered. The myths suggest a cyclical history, with Therem Estraven and Arek Estraven's vows mirroring the stories of their ancestors.
Second Vow: Ashe Harth Osborth
After the death of his brother, Therem Harth Estraven went on to vow kemmering with Ashe Harth Osborth. Ashe broke the vow to become a Foreteller. They both admit they knew it was a “false” vow, according to Gethenian customs:
[Page 74] “I never broke the vow we swore, Therem.” / “True. There was none to break. It was a false vow, a second vow. You know it; you knew it then. The only true vow of faithfulness I ever swore was not spoken, nor could it be spoken, and the man I swore it to is dead and the promise broken, long ago. You owe me nothing, nor I you. Let me go.” [...] I went on, and he did not follow me. But my brother’s shadow followed me. I had done ill to speak of him.
Estraven's shame feeds his consistent negative self-talk. It may also explain his unwillingness to initiate kemmer with Ai, even when there is potential for a relationship, which even Ai recognizes [Page 249]. But Ai reminds him too much of his brother to pursue it; in Mindspeech, Estraven hears Ai as Arek’s voice [Page 255].
10. Culture Arising from Environment
Quick notes:
Suicide as the greatest taboo (21-26, 282-3, 286-7)
I was so hesitant to re-read tlhod, but I’m really glad I did! On first read, I felt like it was so perfectly satisfying that I didn’t feel the itch of “incompleteness” that drives me to obsessively re-read. I had also built it up in my head as one of my favorite books, so I was afraid it wouldn’t live up to my memory of it. Fortunately, it was exactly as good as I remembered, and I’ve changed and experienced a lot since I read it last, so new elements resonated with me that didn’t before. A re-read only enriched my experience.
Reversed Color Symbolism
In Euro-American fiction, the colors white, black, red, and blue are often symbolic of life/righteousness, death/sin, violence (blood), and life/change (water), respectively. Le Guin flips those symbols on their heads: white is death/stagnation, black is life/soul, red is life/change, and blue is death/danger.
I noted the white/black motif on my first read, particularly the flip in standard meanings because of the myth of chapter two: the brother-kemmering who dies by suicide is all white, a freezing spectre calling his brother into death; the brother-kemmering who mourns him and lives to old age is black-skinned, with a long name-shadow.
I didn’t notice it at all the first time, but on second read I was really struck by the red color motif. The needles of the ubiquitous hemmen conifers on Gethen are red; the colors of clothing, architecture, and fences in Karhide are red; buildings are lit by fire; the moon itself is red (dusty red, “rufous”, “dull as dry blood”), not just lit by reflected red light; their path onto the Gobrin Ice is walled in with volcanic mountains spewing fire and lava, turning the sky red and black. Possible interpretations:
The red is often paired with icons of life and change, and the life-color of tlhod, black. The volcanoes are evidence of the living earth: “We creep infmitesimally northward through the dirty chaos of a world in the process of making itself. Praise then Creation unfinished!” (p. 227) Fire is symbolic of life and vigor; a counterweight to the icy death of cold.
Most of the red architecture/clothing (as far as I recall) was only called out when it was related to institutions and people of power: Karhide’s king and throne room; the prime minister’s palace (the Corner Red Dwelling); Faxe the Weaver’s clothing once he becomes part of the Council (kyorremy), ascending to prime minister; the fenceposts between Orgota and Karhide in the disputed territory.
A symbol of the natural world and/or alienness: Red-needled hemmen trees, the red moon.
I’d love to see some art playing with that color motif, but everything I’ve seen is very blue/white focused (understandable, given the snow/ice).
Kevin Lucbert, Une Rencontre
Blue is typically a motif associated with life, on earth, because water is the life-giver; but on Gethen, blue is an omen of death and danger, associated with the death-color of tlhod, white/light.
p. 231: “The new ice is tricky, slick blue stuff just hidden by a white glaze.”
p. 265: “[After Ai pulled Estraven up out of the crevasse,] I knelt by him trying to unbuckle his harness, alarmed by the way he sprawled there, passive except for the great gasping rise and fall of his chest. His lips were cyanotic… He sat up unsteadily and said in a whistling whisper, ‘Blue—all blue—Towers in the depths—[…]In the crevasse. All blue—full of light.”
Blue omens repeatedly appear in the moments leading up to Estraven’s murder.
Duality and Integration
Obviously duality is the core theme, symbolized by light and darkness, which is based in Le Guin’s Daoist beliefs.
p. 151: “To oppose something is to maintain it.”
p. 233: “Duality is an essential, isn’t it? So long as there is myself and the other.”
p. 261: “[While in the Unshadow on the Ice:] No sun, no sky, no horizon, no world. A whitish-grey void, in which we appeared to hang… My inner ears were used to confirmation from my eyes as to how I stood; they got none; I might as well be blind… with nothing ahead, nothing to look at, nothing for the eye to touch, as it were…”
Every person and thing and force must have something different from it to define itself against, to notice and set the borders of what it is. Without being able to touch something different, it’s impossible to say if you exist at all. When a duality exists, existence is made up of both, integrated into a whole; hence the life-giving shadows, made of where light and darkness meet. Hence the masculinity and femininity of the Gethenians, made of where the two genders meet. Light is the left hand of darkness… The Gethenian creation myth states that life and the world came into being out of the combination of light and darkness.
The repeated cycles, in which myths resemble past events, which resemble current events, which resemble possible future events, are part of Le Guin’s Daoist beliefs, too. Cycles on cycles, and “the wheel turns”.
Uncertainty is Life
After reading Hope in the Dark and Parable of the Sower, I really resonated with Le Guin’s argument that uncertainty is necessary to live. We need uncertainty to have hope and the ability to keep on living, to stay out of despair.
p. 70: “The unknown, the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought. Unproof is the ground of action. If it were proven there is no god, there would be no religion. But also if it were proben that there is a god, there would be no religion… Tell me, Genry, what is known? What is sure, predictable, inevitable—the one certain thing you know concerning your future, and mine? That we shall die. … There’s really only one question that can be answered Genry, and we already know the answer… The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.”
p. 120: “The unexpected is what makes life possible.”
p. 151: “To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.”
p. 247: “On [some] nights it was still, with such a stillness as one imagines as existing before the stars began to form, or after everything has perished… Praise then darkness and Creation unfinished.”
On first read I attributed the taboo against suicide to the sociological implications of surviving a hostile ecosystem, but this time I think the theme of uncertainty as the life-well is the actual reason.
p. 286: “[Suicide] is not to them, as to us, an option. It is the abdication from option, the act of betrayal itself.”
p. 287: “To a Karhider reading our canons, the crime of Judas lies not in his betrayal if Christ but in the act that, sealing despair, denies the chance of forgiveness, change, life: his suicide.”
A related idea: Accepting what is and adapting, moving with the change rather than against it, like the Parables’ “God is change.” On page 204: “I never knew a person who reacted so wholly and rapidly to a changed situation as Estraven… He was never rash or hurried, but he was always ready.”
Estraven’s Love as Loyalty
On this read I had a much deeper appreciation for Estraven’s moral character, and his intersection of the symbolic precursors of Estraven in myth. He shows his love through total, absolute loyalty to the people and causes he cares about, at the expense of his pride, personal honor/shifgrethor, and national allegiance. (See Estraven the Traitor: he betrayed national pride in favor of loyalty to love, and the wellbeing of his people; so too does the Estraven we know.)
This gave me the foothold necessary to understand Therem’s sense of betrayal by Ashe, and Genry’s later sense of betrayal by Therem, neither of which I understood on first read. Therem becomes heartbroken and enraged when he sees someone he loves as betraying his loyalty/love—when Ashe “broke” their kemmering vow by joining a Fastness; when Arek (presumably) committed suicide; when Ai treated him as an untrustworthy traitor, bc he misunderstood Therem’s motives—each time, Therem saw it as a denial of his loyalty and therefore as a refusal of his love.
The irony is that Therem later makes Genry feel that same betrayal of love/heartbreak when Therem commits suicide by border cop. Genly says, “He was a traitor. He had gone on by himself, deserting us, deserting me. I would wake up full of rage, a feeble shaky rage that turned into feeble tears” (p. 286). He’s saying, “he betrayed me: he loved me, and then he left me.”
Therem is also obviously haunted by his brother’s suicide—he thinks of himself as a failure, sees everything as his responsibility. He feels guilt even when he shouldn’t, and some of his journal entries display a deep sense of self loathing. I don’t know how I missed that before. It’s so heartbreaking.
Misc Notes
On first read, I chalked up the description of communal child rearing and shared parental responsibility to the core gender politics of the novel, but this time I had the context of having read most of UKLG’s other work. I think it’s also indicative of her anarchist political values, which also shows up in the social organization of Karhide’s Domains, in a way that mirrors Anarres in The Dispossessed.
The sections on nationalism and the slide of Karhide into a dangerous sort of patriotism under Counselor Tibe hit much harder on this read bc of current events in the U.S.
The reason Genly feels “unreal” and “shadowless” in Orgota when he first arrives is because (1) the Orgota ruling class are hiding him from the public, so he literally doesn’t exist in the eyes of the Orgota public; and (2) because the Orgota ruling class are hiding/denying the truth of the nature of their government system — they portray themselves as high society with many comforts, but in reality it is the same government that failed to care for the raid victims in Sassinoth Valley and for the prisoners on the penal farms.
The description of Orgota’s penal farms from page 171 - 183 hits harder after having read Grey is the Color of Hope, by Irina Ratushinskaya, because it is so accurate to real penal colonies and mass incarceration conditions on Earth. “They do not kill people on their Farms: they let hunger and winter and despair do their murders for them” (p. 189). “It is a terrible thing, this kindness that human beings do not lose. Terrible, because when we are finally naked in the dark and cold, it is all we have… We have nothing else to give” (p. 170).
The Starving Saints (2025)
Caitlin Starling
★★★☆☆ March 7 - 8, 2026
Interesting and vivid visuals that mix gore with sanctity; lesbian cannibalism as worship. A fae bacchanalia that reminds me of The Silt Verses. I enjoyed it, and fans of TLT’s Gideon/Harrow/Ianthe toxic triangle will love it; unfortunately, it feels to me like it was created specifically for fandom spaces, in a way I find difficult to articulate and irritating. A quick read that I don’t expect to be thinking about for long.
Walking Practice (2022)
Dolki Min, Victoria Caudle (Translator)
★★★☆☆ February 18 – 20, 2026
Spec fiction with prominent queer, disability, & chronic illness themes.
Plays with the physical structure of the text in a fun way (e.g., a hint of the flavor of HoL) that varies from but mirrors the original Korean approach. Gory and visceral as a way of expressing its themes. Repetitious. Not really my personal favorite flavor of fiction.
Reminds me a lot of “The Rude Things Monsters Say”:
"All monsters must die bloody, and by a hero's hands, and soon," he says over brunch.
He doesn't think it's a rude thing to say in front of a monster. There are no rude things to say to monsters, only rude things monsters say.
"Don't worry," she says between bites, "You're one of the good ones."
"But I am still a monster," I do not say. I do not say that I love my claws and teeth, my prehensile shadow and my glowing eyes. That I cannot imagine giving them up even for survival, that to hide my shadow and trim my claws for them makes me feel diminished. In public I cannot say that I do not wish to be human.
They're progressives, this bunch, even if he carries a hero's banner with its proud history and none of them ask him to put it away. They know there are good monsters, monsters who can speak eloquently and hold the fork right, monsters you can be seen with in public. Some of their best friends are monsters.
They do not know the monster who is invited to brunch knows solidarity with the monster who is not. Believes and understands the monster who is not invited more than the human who does the inviting.
"Isn't that a little harsh?" says a third human, and I have not forgotten I am outnumbered. "We have ways of killing monsters without blood now, painlessly. And, of course, a monster should be allowed to live if it never growls."
He has never seen me growl. Yet how loudly and endlessly I will, when I'm out of earshot. He's talking about killing monsters who cannot stoop to civility, about mother and brother and lover who were never able to mute themselves like me, and does he not know how small a child who can only growl is?
"To growl is not to kill," I say, and all heads turn toward me. It is one of those rude things monsters say.
We (1924)
Yevgeny Zamyatin, Bela Shayevich (Translator)
★★★★★ January 25 – 28, 2026
Beautifully imagined and occasionally hilarious Utopian satire, written in 1920 by a Bolshevik exile of Soviet Russia during the October Revolution and Russian Civil War. Predated and inspired 1984, Brave New World, and The Dispossessed. Like a lot of later dystopian fiction, it has a dark ending, but Zamyatin’s faith in the human revolutionary spirit infuses it with an enduring hope.
Summary
In We, humanity achieved “Utopia” a thousand years ago with the establishment of the totalitarian One State. There is no concept of individuality in the One State; individuals have numbers instead of names, and personal pronouns don’t exist. Now, the One State wants to share it’s perfection with the cosmos:
YOU WILL ENCOUNTER UNFAMILIAR BEINGS ON ALIEN PLANETS WHO MAY YET LIVE IN SAVAGE STATES OF FREEDOM, AND YOU WILL SUBJUGATE THEM TO THE BENEFICENT YOKE OF REASON. IF THEY DON’T UNDERSTAND THAT WHAT WE BRING THEM IS MATHEMATICALLY INFALLIBLE HAPPINESS, WE WILL BE IMPELLED TO FORCE THEM TO BE HAPPY. BUT WE WILL TRY WORDS BEFORE RESORTING TO WEAPONS.
Their value system is an extreme form of utilitarianism, where the “utility” they aim to maximize is not human wellbeing but the functioning of the One State. They express their philosophy through mathematics, using logical proofs to argue morality. (In other words: they worship at the altar of neoliberal macroeconomics.) They treat people as disposable tools, with every part of their biology and psychology accounted for, controlled, and optimized:
(p. 24): [The Ancients’] state (out of “humaneness”) forbade the killing of individuals yet it allowed the half-killing of millions of people at once [through allowing unhealthy lifestyles]. Killing one person, that is, decreasing the length of one human life by fifty years, was considered a crime, but decreasing the length of all human lives by 50 million years was not. … Luckily, [irrational, selfish behavior now occurs] only rarely. Luckily, these are just tiny breakdowns of minor parts: easy to fix without stalling the great, perpetual progress of the entire Machine. We have the nimble, heavy hand of the Benefactor and the experienced eyes of the Guardians to scrap any bolts that get bent out of shape…
(p. 123): A dozen numbers [i.e., workers] from our hangar got caught gawking directly under the barrel of the engine during the first attempt (=blast)—there was literally nothing left of them, just dust and residue. I am proud to report that the rhythm of our work was not thrown off by this for a second—no one batted an eye; and we, and our machines, went on with our linear and circular motions with the same precision as ever, as though nothing had happened. A dozen numbers are barely one hundred-millionth of the mass of the One State, in practical calculations—an infinitesimal of the third order. Only the Ancients knew arithmetically incorrect pity: we laugh at it.
Their faith is based on the idea that mankind can predict, calculate, and know everything, in direct contrast to the concept of the divine mysteries. (It’s also demonstrably false, even in mathematics: see, for example, the concept of infinity, chaotic systems, and imaginary numbers used to describe real world phenomena.) Their dogma ignores inconvenient/inconsistent mathematics that would break the logic of their system (just like dogma of any religion). According to the One State, freedom and happiness are opposites; citizens of the One State happily abandon freedom to maximize happiness.
(p. 15): I was suddenly overtaken by the beauty of the grand mechanical ballet [of manufacturing machines at work,] glittering in the weightless, pale blue sunlight. Then I asked myself: why is this beautiful? Why is this dance beautiful? Answer: because the movements are unfree. The deeper teaching of this dance lies in its absolute aesthetic bondage, its ideal unfreedom.
(p. 78): Tomorrow… everything will be simple, correct, and delimited, like a circle. I am not afraid of the word “limit.” The task of man’s loftiest faculty, reason, is precisely to ceaselessly limit the infinite, breaking infinity down into convenient, easily digestible portions. Differentials. This is the sacred duty of my domain, mathematics.
(p. 131): Quietly, metallically, distinctly, the thoughts keep plinking; an invisible aero carries me up to the azure heights of my favorite abstractions. I see how up here, in this pure and rarified air, all my thoughts about “rights” gently go pop, like a tire going flat. I clearly see that they’re just the dregs of the Ancients’ ridiculous superstition—their concept of “rights.” … Even among the Ancients, the more adult ones knew that the wellspring of rights is power—that rights are a function of power. So, on two sides of the scale, we have: a gram and a ton, “I” on one, and “We,” the One State, on the other. Isn’t it already clear? The presumption that “I” can have any “rights” with respect to the State is exactly like thinking a gram can equal a ton. From this, we have our regular distribution: the ton gets the power and the gram gets duties. And the most natural path from obscurity to greatness: forget you’re a gram and feel the power of being one-millionth if a ton…
Uniformity, stasis, and predictability are their ideals; any rogue, changing, or chaotic element is a danger to the State. Unfortunately for the State, human nature tends toward chaos, creative energy, variability, growth, and freedom. We is the story of one man’s radicalization and waking-up into awareness of his soul, and how that influences him to join an underground revolutionary movement. The revolutionary elements reminded me of both Hope in the Dark and The Dispossessed.
[We, Zamyatin] (p. 132): Human history moves up in circles, just like an aero. Each cycle is different—some golden, some bloody—but all of them have 360 degrees. They all start at zero and then go up through 10, 20, 200, 360 degrees—then back to zero again. And yes, we’ve come back to zero: yes. But, to my mathematical mind, it is clear: our zero is brand new and totally different. We went right from zero but came back around to it from the left. Therefore: instead of positive zero, we have arrived at negative zero. You see?
(p. 163): “What happens tomorrow?”
She greedily gulped the air through her clenched, sparkling, sharp teeth. “Nobody knows! Don’t you see? I don’t know and neither does anyone else—no one knows anything! Don’t you understand? Everything known is over! Everything is new now, it’s all unimaginable and unforeseen!” … I didn’t. But I silently nodded. I had dissolved, I was infinitesimally small, I was only a point…
After all, being a point has it’s own logic (today’s logic): a point contains the greatest magnitude of unknowns; if it moves—if it even quivers—it might turn into thousands of different curves, hundreds of solids. I am afraid to stir—what will I turn into?
[Hope in the Dark, Solnit] (p. 60): A lot of activists seem to... expect finality, definitiveness, straightforward cause-and-effect relationships, instant returns, and as a result they specialize in disappointment, which sinks in as bitterness, cynicism, defeatism... History is made out of common dreams, groundswells, turning points, watersheds--it's a landscape more complicated than commensurate cause and effect... History is like weather, not like checkers... A game of checkers ends. The weather never does. That's why you can't save anything. Saving is the wrong word, one invoked over and over again, for almost every cause. Jesus saves and so do banks: they set things aside from the flux of earthly change. Saving suggests a laying up where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt; it imagines an extraction from the dangerous, unstable, ever-changing process called life on earth. But life is never so tidy and final.
(p. xxiii): Those who doubt that [moments of revolution] matter should not how terrified the authorities and elites are when they erupt. That fear signifies their recognition that popular power is real enough to overturn regimes and rewrite the social contract. And it often has. Sometimes your enemies know what your friends can’t believe.
(p. xxiv): Change is rarely straightforward… Sometimes it’s as complex as chaos theory and as slow as evolution. Even things that seem to happen suddenly arise from deep roots in the past or from long-dormant seeds.
[The Dispossessed, Le Guin] (p. 301): You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.
The leader of the revolutionary movement is a woman named I-330, and she has allies in every part of their society, including the secret service. The push/pull between the freedom of the revolutionary movement and the “happiness”/stasis of the One State is framed as demons tempting citizens to freedom/sin and away from the eternal joy/ignorance of Eden. Zamyatin expressly states that the One State are descendants of Christians, and their beliefs are influenced by the Christian theological impulse to flatten and freeze culture, to set a “correct” way to be, and State paternalism. The revolutionary movement uses Mephistopheles as their icon/mascot, though they seem more in line with Prometheus, to me: They believe that chaos is a necessary pain to access freedom and the diversity of life’s experiences; the fire of creation and growth.
Gender Politics
I have complex feelings about Zamyatin’s portrayal of women. Unlike Orwell & Huxley’s dystopias, We has more than one “named” female character (O-90, I-330, and U), and I-330 even has complex motives unrelated to men. (The bar is the floor, but still. I appreciated the variety.) They each follow one of the classic female archetypes, though slightly subverted: O-90 is the Mother (kept from her calling by the State), U is the Crone (her power weakened by her desire for a sexual relationship with the protagonist, D-503), and I-330 is the Vixen/Temptress (using her role/appeal as a facade to hide her revolutionary activities).
I always bristle when women are portrayed by men primarily as sexual interests or potential mothers, so O-90 being a cute, vapid, baby-obsessed lover was destined to piss me off. BUT… in the context of We, O-90’s role is a demonstration of primal human urges, the desire to have agency over your life, and the desire to care for others of your choosing. It still bothers me because she’s portrayed almost as a fetish object by Zamyatin’s language, but I can kind of forgive it because he wrote more than one woman into his story.
Meanwhile, the Crone is typically an older, wiser woman with some kind of power (social, magical), who may be a spiritual guide or a sinister/malevolent force to the protagonist. U is all of those things at once (minus the magical power), but her power and efficacy as a spiritual guide to and a spy upon D-503 is betrayed by her sexual desire for him. Again, a woman’s character centering around sexual desire for the protagonist annoys me… BUT it’s emblematic of Zamyatin’s theme of human beings unable to perfectly fit into assigned, machine-like roles; they have natural urges.
Similarly, I-330 (Mephistopheles, Prometheus) is the Vixen - but she uses her wiles to awaken people’s souls, get access to controlled systems, and obscure her involvement in the revolution. She’s a leader and a strategist, inspires people, and most importantly, is framed as morally CORRECT, despite (because of) being the Devil to the State’s Church. I-330 is by far the most complex and compelling female character I’ve encountered in sci-fi written by men.
I-330 and D-503 also form a dyad of Jungian archetypes: I-330 represents the anima (masculine energy in a woman) and D-503 the animus (feminine energy in a man). Jung’s no feminist, but I think it’s an interesting framing for a queer theory reading of the text. I-330 is an emotional woman, but she’s also a tactician, and she’s clearly the controlling party in their affair; D-503 is a mathematician driven to phantasmagoria from the passion of his obsession with her, and he frequently cedes all control (and even physical dominance positions) to her. Jung thought that syzygy (union of opposites, like the balance between yin/yang) could be achieved by a man accepting his animus and cultivating his desire for connection, and a woman accepting her anima and cultivating reason/rationality. The One State is able to quash I-330’s revolution because she and D-503 are at odds, unable to integrate their energies and work together. D-503 breaks away from I-330 because he’s jealous of her and feels betrayed by her lack of monogamy, which again puts each of them in sexism-atypical roles in the relationship.
Racial Politics
Zamyatin’s text features period-typical racial stereotypes. Zamyatin includes a black revolutionary poet named R-13, who appears to be meant to represent black Russian poet Alexander Pushkin. Alexander Pushkin was—then and now—often considered by Russians to be the “greatest Russian poet of all time.” Though Pushkin had only one African ancestor, three generations back, and would appear to be white-passing by modern standards, he was considered black by Russians of his time. Though it seems like Zamyatin intended his portrayal of R-13 to be flattering, he frequently describes R-13 with offensive racial stereotypes (e.g., large lips, loud/passionate voice, spitting). In comparison, Alexander Pushkin doesn’t seem, based on contemporaneous portraits, to have had any of the stereotyped characteristics Zamyatin gives to R-13, which means Zamyatin’s choice to incorporate them in his Pushkin stand-in character was deliberate, or influenced by unconscious racism. There’s also a moment near the end where honorable, revolutionary R-13 is shown as a dead in the street, killed by the State, with his body in a position described “like a woman” (i.e., legs spread open, as if being raped). Which, like, yikes. I think it’s meant to represent the violence that the state will impose in it’s rush to maintain order, but it could have been any other character — the choice to emasculate and violate the only black character in that way was unnecessary.
Inspiration for Future Authors
The version I read contained essays about We written by Margaret Atwood, George Orwell, and Ursula K. Le Guin. Atwood and Le Guin's reviews were glowing, while Orwell's was critical and self-important. Orwell essay, written three years before he wrote 1984, claims We isn’t that good and that Huxley's Brave New World is an obvious, subpar ripoff -- which is hilarious, given that Orwell’s 1984 is even more obviously inspired by We than BNW was. Zamyatin's conclusion is dark but clearly allows for future revolutions that may defeat/destroy the One State, whereas Orwell's conclusion is dark because it implies that any individual that resists the state will encounter the same fate as his protagonist. It's likely that these perspectives were shaped by their authors' experiences with revolutionary periods: Zamyatin wrote his during the early stages of the October Revolution, before Stalin calcified the USSR into as much of an oppressive state as it became. Orwell wrote his after World War II and in the early stages of the Cold War.
Le Guin's essay (written in the same period where she was writing The Dispossessed) lauds We as a meaningful philosophical and artistic work on the revolutionary spirit. Though Le Guin was more impressed with We than I am, there are obvious echoes and synergies in We with The Dispossessed, so I don’t blame her: she found a novel that called to some of the themes she spent her whole career working at and developing.
Other Notes
Dream sequences - dissociation & uncertain reality; because of imagination, which the State identifies as the cause of the development of a soul
COLOR MOTIFS! pink! acid green! blue - clear and stormy! sun! natural green, mirror green!
Are the pronoun/name puns present in the original text (cyrillic alphabet)? “u”/you, “i”/I? (Was the original actually in Russian? The essays in the 2020 version I read confuse the issue somewhat.) Do the Russian alphabet analogues to U and I have the same pronoun meanings?
The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
John Steinbeck
★★★★★ January 2 – 12, 2026
Grim. There is a thread of hope but oh boy, is it thin. Ends on a thematically appropriate but wild note.
Quotes
p. 162: “… The great owners, who had become through their holdings both more and less than men, ran to their destruction, and used every means that in the long run would destroy them. Every little means, every violence, every raid on a[n itinerant worker camp], every deputy swaggering through a ragged camp, put off the day a little and cemented the inevitability of the day.”
72%: “No—the stars are close and dear and I have joined the brotherhood of the worlds. And everything’s holy—everything, even me.”
76%: “The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of [malnutrition] must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. […] In the eyes of the people there is a failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”
This Has Always Been a War: The Radicalization of a Working Class Queer (2022)
Lori Fox
★★★★★ October 29 – November 20, 2025
Intense. A working-class queer’s memoir—including itinerant day labor, homelessness, abusive relationships, alcoholism, intergenerational trauma, micro- (and macro-)aggressions against gender nonconformity, and more—that never loses sight of the structural causes of working class suffering. A demonstration of Audre Lorde’s analysis that “the personal is political”, and a reminder that we always have the choice to direct our rage away from our communities toward root causes. Through all the darkness and suffering, manages to highlight the moments of love and relationships that lift us up.
“Both poverty and mental health are about lack—lack of money, lack of dignity, lack of work, lack of meaning, lack of stability, lack of love. Treating them as separate issues ignores the fact that something is wrong with the way our system currently functions to create these social, economic, and environmental problems in the first place.”
Loved every chapter except “Where The Fuck Are We In Your Dystopia,” which I found frustrating bc the author ignores the existence of Octavia Butler, NK Jemisin, Nnedi Okorafor, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Nicola Griffith, Emily Tesh, etc. until near the end, because their existence refutes the point of the entire essay.
Content warnings for sexual assault, incest, animal abuse, queerphobia, substance abuse, mental illness, and suicidality at a minimum.
Quotes
p. 30: “Capitalism teaches us that working-class people are not as important as the businesses their labour creates goods and services for. Likewise, capitalism tells us that if you are working class, you deserve to be working class—and so, by extension, you deserve however it is you are treated, because the people treating you that way are not only your economic superiors, they’re also your moral superiors.”
p. 32: “attention, I quickly learned, was an unforgivable rudeness to refuse. It is as if little girls are somehow the common property of everyone but themselves.”
p. 34: “Long before I had the words for it—and let us be honest, in the queer community, we hold our words over heads as talismans of fate or fortune which we believe might somehow save or absolve us—I was a non-binary person. When I eschewed girl things, it was not because I found them inherently more objectionable than so-called boy things, but because I was repulsed by the idea of being viewed as something I was not. I was not a little girl, and I was also not a little boy. I was a little person.”
p. 51: “A Happy Family is not simply a contented family unit, but a social institution and, more importantly, an object of capitalist desire. […] the idea of the Happy Family has more value (and signals more about the owner) than the actual function of the object itself. It’s a consumer good and, like all modern consumer goods, […] it can be bought. If you are willing to pay the right price. To make the right sacrifices. To stand in the right lines and sign the right papers. To turn your head and look away at the right times. If you are willing, as it were, to play the game.”
p. 78: “How culpable are we for the ways we behave when we are unwell? How responsible are we for the ways our trauma hurts us? For the ways that hurt can make us hurt other people? I don’t know.”
p. 85: “All this secrecy and misery, all this abuse and suffering and loneliness, was allowed to continue with one thought in mind: to protect my father, not from himself, which actually would have been useful, but from losing face in the eyes of the world. Why? Because my father was a straight white man in a straight white neighbourhood where you did not question the things straight white men did in their own homes. A king in his castle. […] This kind of father-knows-best mentality of obeying the person at the top of the socio-economic structure purely because he must, by virtue of having been placed there, deserve to be there, is the backbone of the class struggle. […] There are certain systems that benefit when you suffer. There are certain systems that function better when you—when working-class people—are suffering. Patriarchy is one of those systems. Happy people and productive consumers are not the same thing and, in fact, each may need very different conditions in order to thrive.”
p. 116: “after briefly moving back to Belleville to live (disastrously) with an older woman with whom I was having quasi-romantic, quasi-platonic love affair (I believe this to be a specifically lesbian rite of passage), I moved to Ottawa in the fall of 2006 to attend university.”
p. 133: “Basically, if you lived wanted to live on Salt Spring and were not rich, you had to work for someone who was. They’d give you a place to stay so that they could make money from you, either by your direct labour, or by renting something to you that, elsewhere, would not be thought fit to live in. You didn’t have a place to live unless you lived to take care of other people’s property, paid for other people’s mortgages. It was an island of the rich and their servants.”
p. 140: “Not all shipwrecks are physical; there are things that can swallow up what’s inside you as easily as the sea.”
p. 145: “I was sick, so I was poor. I was poor, so I was sick. I was deeply, deeply ashamed of being both. The cycle felt inescapable. […] A good life, in which a person has enough to eat and a warm place to sleep and work that is meaningful, in which a person has the leisure to love and be loved, is such a small dream. […] I was so lucky, through all this, to have been blessed with so many good friends who loved me and stood with me through so much, even when I did not deserve it. I was not a good friend at that time, selfish and needy. To give to others a dollar or a minute of yourself, you need surpluses, and I had none. I am humbled that my friends saw this and forgave me. I would like to write that it was this great love that saved me, but that’s not true. In the hour you are most alone, all the love in the world is not enough.”
p. 152: “Now that I’m recovered, now that I have stable work, a place to live, enough to eat, friends, a regular doctor, I feel incredibly grateful for things many people take for granted. I always—still, even now—experience a moment of disbelief at night, when I lie down in my bed with my clean sheets and think, Jesus Christ, this is my bed. […] And yet, with each small satisfaction and each small pleasure, there is the first-hand knowledge that it could all be taken away again. A missed assignment, a misstep in financial planning, an accident, or, worst of all, another mental health episode leaving me unable to work as hard as I’m working now—any one of these could be the end of this respite.
And that’s what it feels like. A brief respite. A grace period. A chinook wind. Something not meant to last. Something to distrust. Something I maybe don’t deserve. Now that I have my life back, losing it again is a fear I may never shake.”
p. 156: “If, as the old adage says, “health is wealth,” then in this country, health—a full mind-body picture of health, in which care for the mentally ill is treated with the same seriousness as care for the physically ill—is for the wealthy only.”
p. 157: “It’s worth noting, too, that in order to get care I’ve had to be mentally stable enough to advocate for it; I’ve had to be well enough to make follow-up phone calls, arrange appointments, and discuss my own care objectively, something that very unwell people can’t reasonably do and that I certainly couldn’t have done at certain points in my life. […] Both poverty and mental health are about lack—lack of money, lack of dignity, lack of work, lack of meaning, lack of stability, lack of love. Treating them as separate issues ignores the fact that something is wrong with the way our system currently functions to create these social, economic, and environmental problems in the first place. […] I’m always going to be afraid of losing what I’ve gained, economically and mentally. The hungry days are never really over.”
p. 161: “sometimes people do things when they are hurt and hurting and afraid that are not about you at all—sometimes people hurt other people just because they are in pain and afraid and don’t have any other language, any other words, with which to express it.”
p. 172: “I didn’t realize one of the privileges patriarchy gives men is the right to pick and choose what they do and do not want to know.”
p. 173: “I still do that, you know. Forgive people I shouldn’t forgive. I believe people when they say they’re sorry. I believe them when they say they won’t do it again and then I forgive them and try to move on. I do this because I’m stupid, because I don’t want other people to hurt, because not forgiving people sometimes means losing them forever. I do this, I did this with you, because I always want to believe I mean enough to someone that I’m worth not only saying sorry to, but acting on that regret.”
p. 182: “In the spring, when everything had first gone wrong, I had tried to run. Now it was fall, and I found that I had not left the things I was running from out in the backcountry. They were there all along, loping behind me, silent and dogged as a coyote, waiting for me to limp to a stop. And now I had.”
p. 235: “All this to say that, although he was a capitalist and a landowner, the farmer was not an asshole. The farmer was, in fact, very nice. It’s just that he was nice in the only way that rich people who don’t understand the advantages of their richness—and who assume, in some way, that wealth is their right—can be. They can be kind, but their kindness has holes in it.”
p. 262: “Today, as I write this, the fires are burning again. Ontario is on fire, and British Columbia is on fire. California is on fire and Washington is on fire and Oregon is on fire.
There are fires, now, even now, burning south of Penticton, eating up the grass, eating up the trees. The smoke drifts through cities and chokes people. It hangs like a haze in the air, toxic and miserable. It chokes out the sun.
And I think about those houses high on the sage hills, those houses with their cool marble countertops, with their fridges full of food and wine chilling on ice, with their owners as just as cool and bloodless as their houses. I think about them drinking that wine and gazing down on the valley, impassive, unmoved, as the people who live in that valley suffer in the heat, cough on the smoke, and die. Staring down on the valley as if the fire were not tearing across the earth, swift and angry, moving through the undergrowth, across the fields, along the roads, roaring with the sound of a thousand hungry dogs all baying together in the night.
As if the fire were not moving steadily toward them.”
p. 274: “I could choose compassion—compassion and wrath. I could be angry, but that anger could be just, and productive. I could do good things with it. I could turn it not on myself, nor even the specific people who had hurt me, but on the reasons had been hurt. […] It would be nice to say I came to this conclusion—that I could choose compassion and wrath over rage and bitterness—and then everything immediately got better overnight, but that’s not how things work. There were many more months of healing ahead of me, of getting up and falling down, of uncertainty and pain and failure. The difference was, though, that now I knew the choice was there: I could break the lock on my own cage at any time. And when I was ready, I did.”
Grey is the Color of Hope (1988)
Irina Ratushinskaya
★★★★★ September 29 – November 7, 2025
Fascinating, moving, and interesting to dissect.
Basic Context
The prison memoir of Irina Ratushinskaya (1954-2017), a Soviet poet who was arrested in 1982 for her allegedly subversive poetry. She was convicted in March 1983 of "agitation carried on for the purpose of subverting or weakening the Soviet regime" and received the maximum sentence of seven years in a strict regime labor camp, followed by five years of internal exile. "Strict regime" is analogous to "high security" prisons in the United States. "Internal exile" is the forcible assignment of a released prisoner to a frontier settlement with other exiles, where they live semi-normal lives on something akin to parole. She was released in October 1986 due to international pressure, particularly from the United States.
Her memoir illuminates the everyday experience of prisoners ("zeks") in the USSR in the 1980s. All zeks in labor camps are required to perform contracted industrial labor for the State, as in the United States under the 13th Amendment. All prisoners suffer routine abuses including perpetual starvation (diets of 1500 kcal or significantly less); exposure to the elements, filth, and vermin, with no tools or ability to ameliorate those conditions; constant uncertainty about their own status, the safety of their peers, and the rules, because of the administration's nearly constant lies and failures to uphold promises; deliberately and/or carelessly withheld access to medical care; and solitary confinement in isolation/"punishment cells" ("SHIZO"). Ratushinskaya and her peers conducted frequent hunger and/or work strikes to protest the inhumane and undignified prison conditions. The prison management retaliated through additional punishments: force feeding, a necessity that doubles as a form of torture (e.g., this video of Mos Def voluntarily submitting to it in 2013 to raise awareness about the torture of Guantanamo Bay detainees); a deliberate atmosphere of paranoia cultivated through the use of spies, frequent searches, and mail censorship; restricted access to loved ones (heavily censored correspondence, cancellations of legally-mandated family visits on flimsy pretexts, etc.); and re-education ("PKT") by the KGB wherein promises, threats, and violence were used to extract recantations of deeply-held beliefs. These punitive tactics are all familiar to Americans who are well versed in the United States carceral system, CIA torture manuals, and 21st century detention centers pursuant to both the War on Terror and war on immigration.
Themes
Ratushinskaya draws a distinction between political prisoners and criminal prisoners. Political prisoners, in her telling, are universally moral paragons, though they may stumble occasionally. Criminal prisoners, on the other hand, give into their basest desires of rage, lust, and perversity. Ratushinskaya's narration is interesting because she simultaneously has immediate solidarity with the criminal prisoners ("We continue to exchange smiles. They are zeks, and so am I.") and has some compassion for them (e.g., the forces that cause recidivism), but there are also many moments where she revels in her sense of moral superiority over them. As in the "human test" in Dune, she seems to view them as animals compared to the political prisoners’ human-ness. For example, she recounts the cultural lesbianism in the women's criminal prisons as if it's a perverse fluke that arises from their base nature and the pressures of the system. She uses their lesbianism as a tool to denigrate them. Similarly, she later refers to a mentally ill woman in SHIZO as if she is some kind of beast - she uses language that strips her of her womanness. I find it interesting who she deigns to extend compassion to, and who she doesn't... particularly because she repeatedly demonstrates that she has a structural understanding of the evils of the Soviet system.
She shows how many of the indignities and cruelties zeks suffered in the carceral system were the result of structural incentives, not necessarily individual sadism. The prisons starved zeks because every guard responsible for feeding them skimmed layers of calories from their guaranteed daily allocation for their own use. Guards and male prisoners had leverage for sexual coercion of female prisoners because pregnant women and new mothers were granted clemency every few years (therefore, becoming pregnant was a bargaining chip for early release). Soviet recidivism was fueled by many of the same structural problems as in the United States today (poverty, felony records, etc.).
Similarly, she shows how individuals can and do shovel sand into the gears of the unjust machinery of the State. Many guards attempted to alleviate their suffering by turning a blind eye to rule violations and even smuggling vegetable seeds, forbidden communiques with the outside world, and other supplies for the zeks. The political prisoners upheld their beliefs through hunger strikes, work stoppages, official written complaints to the Procuracy, refusal to obey or even acknowledge tyrannical and inhumane gaolers, and living as deliciously as they could under the circumstances. (Predictably, I really enjoyed the focus on resilience and maintaining hope/joy while living in an unjust system: the illicit garden; the babushki’s rags.) All their efforts (both obstructive and creative) slowed down the destructive machinery of the State and won them some concessions to better living conditions.
A central throughline of Ratushinskaya’s narrative was the political prisoners’ stalwart defense of their personal principles in the face of the State’s attempts to coerce them. The State lied to and gaslit them, starved them, denied them basic human decencies (cleanliness, warmth, clothing, health care), isolated them from their families on contrived pretexts, spied on them and searched their materials, attempted to humiliate them daily, and ham-fistedly brutalized them. Each zek refused to violate their own personal principles, even when extraordinarily minor concessions could (theoretically) secure them substantial material and psychological benefits from the State.
In their moments of greatest psychological or physical weakness (e.g., after having their carefully cultivated illicit vegetable garden ripped up by the roots; after being denied their once-a-year visit with their husband on a pretext), some collapsed/gave in to Soviet pressure to recant their deeply held beliefs — only to be bolstered back up and forgiven immediately by their comrades.
Sometimes, their resistance to the pressures of the State seemed incredibly shrewd and brave (when the regime constantly lies to you and fails to deliver on its promises, any promise is as medicine poured on sand); but sometimes it seemed like idiocy to me. There were moments in which capitulation on a minor issue might have saved them months of suffering, but they refused — on the basis of the slippery slope argument, or their martyr complex, or their religious conviction that all would be judged by god after their death. To someone who doesn’t believe in god, I fail to see the moral utility of stubbornness to the point of self-injury. She has a point that maintaining their principles and suffering punishments gives them enormous moral leverage in pressuring the outside world to intercede on their behalf — but she seems to maintain that all zeks should behave as the politicals did, even if they don’t have an international audience watching how they’re treated. I can’t recall where I read this, but it’s true: hunger strikes are only a useful method of protest if you have a platform/audience.
Translation
Some readers have complaints about the Russian to English translation (e.g., Meredith Holley's review). Based on what little information I can find online, translator Alyona Kojevnikov uses British or Australian English, not American English, which is immediately evident in her translations of zek slang. In my opinion, it's pretty easy to get past, but I agree with other reviewers that the poetry wasn't translated well. Almost all the poetry was forgettable, which doesn't do justice to her apparent fame in the USSR at the time and the positive reception fellow prisoners gave her recitations (at least, according to her narrative). The prose is translated beautifully though (excepting the slang). I'll edit this review later to add some passages that I adored.
Xenogenesis (#1-2): Dawn (1987) and Adulthood Rights (1988)
Octavia Butler
★★★★☆ September 22 – October 27, 2025
Disturbing. Poses a difficult question: Would you rather die out as a species, or rapidly evolve into a different one? (A conundrum that faces every species alive right now, due to the accelerating pressures of climate change.)
Consistent with Butler’s perspective in the Parables, she lands on the side of adaptation to survive, at whatever cost — though she recognizes that adaptation is painful. It feels to me (as a cis white woman) like her perspective is informed by her lived experience as a Black American woman: surviving through painful adaptation has been part of the Black American heritage since 1619.
Similarly, Xenogenesis deals extensively with motherhood and the ways in which women are systematically exploited through it. This also feels informed by her identity: Black women have always been the test subjects of population-level maternal abuse in America (see, e.g., Say Anarcha). Reminds me of horror novels whose central premise is inflicting the oppressions white people have perpetrated on others on white people thru supernatural means; these are usually some of the scariest novels/films to white audiences.
Katabasis (2025)
R.F. Kuang
★★★☆☆ September 14 – October 24, 2025
tl;dr: Grad students would literally rather go to hell than therapy.
Slightly longer version: Occasionally clever and/or funny. Twice as long as it needed to be. Pretentious and predictable. Not for me, but there are elements that might appeal to my romantasy-enthused friends… but I’m not sure if those elements would be worth dealing with the rest.
Mean (2017)
Myriam Gurba
★★★★☆ September 17 – September 19, 2025
There’s nothing I can say about this horror/memoir/reflection on our culture of sexual violence that hasn’t already been said better by other folks. See, for example, Parul Seghal’s 2017 review in the NYT, titled “An Account of Surviving Assault Mixes Horror and Humor”:
“Mean” calls for a fat, fluorescent trigger warning start to finish — and I say this admiringly. Gurba likes the feel of radioactive substances on her bare hands. She wants to find new angles from which to report on this most ancient of stories, to zap you into feeling. She hunts for new language, her own language, to evoke the horror and obscene intimacy of sexual violence. “Somewhere on this planet, a man is touching a woman to death,” she writes. “Somewhere on this planet, a man is about to touch a woman to death.”
Reminds me of Roxanne Gay’s Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture, but in the style of a poem. An experience. Like Audre Lorde’s poems, it captures something holistically that isn’t possible to communicate cleanly in prose... Except it IS prose—electrified, chaotic, metronomic. Portions are deeply offensive, and that’s the point. “Gurba likes the feel of radioactive substances on her bare hands.”
Neuromancer (1984)
William Gibson
☆☆☆☆☆ September 7 – September 15, 2025
Features the incredibly frustrating trope combination of Action Girl training the Chosen One by Giving the Sword to a Noob instead of just wielding it her damn self. Relevant media: Pop Culture Detective's Born Sexy Yesterday and Isabel J. Kim's Termination Stories for the Cyberpunk Dystopia Protagonist.
Translation State (2023)
Ann Leckie
★★★☆☆ August 5 – 8, 2025
This novel feels like a clear response from Leckie to the worsening anti-immigrant position of the U.S. government in the period leading up to its publication in 2019 -- it deals with belonging, identity, and imperialist violence against immigrant communities. The main action of the novel is basically a legal drama, though, which bogs it down, and it reads like a fable, given how it brow-beats you with the moral lessons it’s trying to impart. It also centers the Preseger Translators of Ancillary Justice, which I didn't find to be that interesting or convincingly constructed as an alien species. (I was hesitant to read this one for a long time after reading Ancillary Justice because the Preseger Translators were one of the least compelling elements of the series to me. I decided to give it a go anyway because the audiobook was free.) On net: It's fine, just not for me.
Blindsight (2006)
Peter Watts
★★★★★ July 30 – August 2, 2025
Despite the fact that I disagree with 90% of Watts’s argument, I have to give Blindsight five stars because of how much fun I had reading and dissecting it. Your mileage will vary.
Consciousness is a Fluke
Unlike the exploration of what constitutes consciousness in The Mountain in the Sea, Blindsight instead asks: What is consciousness for? Is it evolutionarily adaptive in some way? Watts asserts consciousness is not adaptive and that natural selection will eventually eliminate it.
Page 300: “Evolution has no foresight. Complex machinery develops its own agendas. Brains—cheat. Feedback loops evolve to promote stable heartbeats and then tumble upon the temptation of rhythm and music. The rush evoked by fractal imagery, the algorithms used for habitat selection, metastasize into art. Thrills that once had to be earned in increments of fitness can now be had from pointless introspection. Aesthetics rise unbidden from a trillion dopamine receptors, and the system moves beyond modeling the organism. It begins to model the very process of modeling. It consumes every more computational resources, bogs itself down with endless recursion and irrelevant simulations. Like the parasitic DNA that accretes in every natural genome, it persists and proliferates and produces nothing but itself. Metaprocesses bloom like cancer, and awaken, and call themselves I.”
Page 324: “If Sarasti was right[…] Evolution across the universe was nothing but the endless proliferation of automatic, organized complexity, a vast arid Turing machine full of self-replicating machinery forever unaware of its own existence. And we—we were the flukes and the fossils.”
To make his argument, Watts predicts a future where humanity has (1) developed a digital “Heaven” (a la The Matrix), (2) eliminated the need or desire for sex through virtually-mediated sexual encounters, and (3) ceased to explore outside the solar system due to achieving Heaven on Earth. Watts’s worldbuilding argues that consciousness—the drive for introspection, pleasure, and beauty instead of biological fitness, expanding of territory, and domination of all available resources—is an evolutionary fluke that has decreased the biological fitness of the species. Because people no longer feel the need or desire for “in-person” sex, humanity is experiencing a population crash. Because people no longer feel the drive to explore the universe because of their curiosity being sated by Heaven, humanity is self-constrained to its home system. Because of humanity’s conscious desire to better understand ourselves, we designed our own predators, using gene editing to de-extinct vampires. Because vampires are not sapient, they are efficient predators and will therefore apply such strong selection pressure that humanity will lose sapience to survive.
I fundamentally disagree with all the projections Watts has made regarding consciousness and the progression of human culture. Consciousness fuels curiosity about the world, not just the self, and curiosity is highly adaptive. The imperative to explore and try new things provides opportunities to find and utilize new resources that might have been otherwise inaccessible. Personally, I believe curiosity is fundamental to human nature and consciousness (see also Humans Wanted), and I seriously doubt Watts’s cynical argument that humanity will eventually stop exploring space because of complacency/all needs being met in the home system.
Watts portrays consciousness as an on/off switch that flips as an emergent property of sufficiently complex intelligent systems. This is in conflict with our current scientific understanding of sapience: it is an emergent property, but it’s much more of a spectrum. For just one example of many, see Review of the evidence of sentience in cephalopod molluscs and decapod crustaceans (2024). Based on an online recommendation, I might read Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time next.
“Technology Implies Belligerence”
Watts’s uses evolutionary theory to posit that Dark Forest is the most likely Fermi Paradox theory.
Page 81: If there are any [intelligent, spacefaring extraterrestrials], they’re not just going to be smart. They’re going to be mean. It might seem almost too obvious a conclusion. What is Human history, if not an ongoing succession of greater technologies grinding lesser ones beneath their boots?
To [this mindset,] tools existed for only one reason: to force the universe into unnatural shapes. They treated nature as an enemy, they were by definition a rebellion against the way things were. Technology is a stunted thing in benign environments, it never thrived in any culture gripped by belief in natural harmony. Why invent fusion reactors if your climate is comfortable, if your food is abundant? Why build fortresses if you have no enemies? Why force change upon a world that poses no threat? […] And if the best toys do end up in the hands of those who’ve never forgotten that life itself is an act of war against intelligent opponents, what does that say about a race whose machines travel between the stars?
Why endure the cramped and smelly confines of real-life space travel to go visit pond scum on Europa?
Watts’s argument relies on the assumption that if there is no evolutionary pressure to do so, then species would not become spacefaring. It disregards curiosity as a reason, which I find to be incredibly cynical.
It also assumes altruism is a fluke, not a dominant evolutionary trait. “So many things constrain us, from so many directions. The most altruistic and sustainable philosophies fail before the brute brain stem imperative of self-interest” (p. 52). However, recent science suggests that altruism is evolutionarily adaptive; it’s not just a “higher” brain function available to humans – it’s been observed in a variety of species (elephants, corvids, ants, etc.), typically those species that also show evidence of sapience. See, for example, Adaptive evolution of social traits: Origin, trajectories, and correlations of altruism and mobility (2005); A simple and general explanation for the evolution of altruism (2008); The roots of human altruism (2009).
His argument is also based on an unsound understanding of history. Hostile interactions between competing cultures do not always end with “superior” technologies crushing “lesser” technologies, but a popular imperialist myth assumes they do. The myth that superior technologies always win culture clashes has been spread by imperial cultures for centuries to justify genocides/occupations. For example, the technologies/cultures of Native North American peoples were superior in many ways for survival in the ecosystems of North America, but Euro-Americans were able to perpetrate genocide because of a population crash caused by the unlikely confluence of several natural disasters and the introduction of European plagues. There is a growing area of research in Native technologies for survival, which are becoming increasingly useful as climate-change influenced natural disasters become more prevalent. For more, see Understanding how Indigenous knowledge contributes to climate change adaptation and resilience: A systematic literature review (Environmental Management, 2024); Indigenous knowledge is crucial in the fight against climate change—here’s why (U.N. Development Program, 2024); Native climate: Building climate resilience across cultures (U.S. Department of Agriculture, 2023).
Life is an Emergent Property
Blindsight is a hard sci-fi First Contact novel written by a guy with a doctorate in marine biology/ecology. This is the first time I've read hard sci-fi on ecological themes where the author had the background to make it work (for contrast, see Project Hail Mary, Solaris). For me, this was an enormously entertaining read -- nearly* everything in this novel that reads as fantastical to non-biologists comes from real ecological, evolutionary, and physiological science. (The exception, of course, is the vampires.) It was SO fun to see that reflected in and applied to xenobiology.
Watts plays with one of my favorite freaky concepts from my courses in developmental biology, genetics, and biochemistry: Life as an emergent property from non-living parts. The more you zoom in, the more everything is just physics. All life is increasingly complicated meat machines.
Page 43: Imagine you are a machine. Yes, I know. But imagine you’re a different kind of machine, one built from metal and plastic and designed not by blind, haphazard natural selection but by engineers and astrophysicists with their eyes fixed firmly on specific goals.
Page 249: “Maybe they’re just biomechanical machines.” // “That’s what life is, Keaton. That’s what you are. […] Life isn’t either/or. It’s a matter of degree.”
Page 265: “A lot of biology doesn’t use genes. Sunflowers look the way they do because of purely physical buckling stress. You get Fibonacci sequences and golden ratios everywhere in nature, and there’s no gene that codes for them; it’s all just mechanical interactions. Take a developing embryo—the genes say start growing or stop growing, but the number of digits and vertebrae result from the mechanics of cells bumping against other cells. Those mitotic spindles I mentioned? Absolutely essential for replication in every eukaryotic cell, and they accrete like crystals without any genetic involvement. You’d be surprised how much of life is like that.”
For more resources on this, see Are viruses alive?; ATP synthase; Protein folding and mechanisms of proteostasis (Molecular Science, 2015); ViHart's videos on Fibonacci sequence in nature; The continuum of Drosophila embryonic development at single-cell resolution (Science, 2022); Normal table of Xenopus development: a new graphical resource. (Development, 2022).
Living Mechanical Organisms
Watts based many of the characteristics of scramblers and Rorschach on real Earth organisms.
The scramblers have a “calcareous exoskeleton, keratinized plastic cuticle” (p. 222). This is “nothing special” because mussels/clams accrete calcareous exoskeletons, sharks have keratinized skin, and the scramblers are using the plastics native to their atmosphere.
Scrambler “tissues are saturated with magnetite.” See Magnetoreception in lobsters and Magnetite nano-particles in information processing: From bacteria to the human brain cortex (2010).
Scramblers have a whole-body brain: “There’s nothing central about [their nervous system], as it transpires. No cephalization, not even clustered sense organs. The body’s covered with something like eye-spots, or chromatophores, or both. There are setae everywhere. And as far as I can tell—if all those little cooked filaments I’ve been able to put back together after your malfunction really are nerves and not something completely different—every one of those structures is under independent control” (p. 223). See What scallops’ many eyes can teach us about the evolution of vision (Smithsonian Magazine, 2019); How do octopuses change color? (LiveScience, 2022); UChicago scientists reveal nervous system secrets that give octopus arms their incredible dexterity (2025); and Nine brains are better than one: An octopus’ nervous system (University of Notre Dame, 2021).
Scramblers do not have blood (p. 239). Starfish with no brain, no blood – and incredible regeneration skills (2025).
Captured scramblers “had wrapped their arms around themselves, around each other, curled into a shivering and unresponsive ball” (p. 239). How fire ants form giant rafts to survive floods (Scientific American, 2017)
Rorschach grows scramblers “in stacks. They have two navels each” (p. 244), like the cnidarian reproductive lifecycle, which involves sessile polyps and swimming medusae.
“Form follows function” – the bodyplan/behaviors of Rorschach and the scramblers mirror one another. Page 215: “the tunnel we emerged into was about three meters wide and lit by rows of raised glowing dashes--the size and approximate shape of dismembered Human fingers—wound in a loose triple helix around the walls.” Page 246: “[The captive scramblers] were still at it[…], slithering across one wall, then another, then another, a slow screw-thread track that would leave no square centimeter uncovered.” Page 281: “The paradoxical neural architecture of [the captive scramblers] glistened on the main window, flensed and labeled and overlaid by circuit diagrams a dozen layers thick. A dense, annotated forest of alien trunks and brambles. It looked a little like Rorschach itself.”
Other Notes
Scramblers likely communicate at least partially with chromatophores (p. 224 and 244), as the sapient octopuses do in The Mountain in the Sea.
Watts has period-typical biases, resulting in some unpleasant “yikes” moments. Especially notable re: autism, race, sexuality, women, and the belief that torture works to produce accurate intelligence.
Neat Writing
During the drone exploration of Rorschach’s tunnels, the crew saw “walls move, slow lazy waves of peristalsis rippling along its gut. We’d seen treacly invaginations in progress, painstaking constrictions that would presumably, given time, seal off a passageway. Our grunts had sailed through some quarters, staggered through others where the magnetic ambience threw them off balance. They’d passed through strange throats lined with razor-thin teeth, thousands of triangular blades in parallel rows, helically twisted.” Reminds me of descriptions from Solaris and kittyhorrorshow’s 2016 video game Anatomy.
Page 33: “I[…] found myself back in the crypt, mirror-bright and less than two meters deep.”
Page 34: “More likely [Theseus] hadn’t been running away from anything but to something else, something that hadn’t been discovered until we’d already died and gone from Heaven.”
Page 74: “The image blurred, then steadied as the probe pitched its voice higher up the [emission] spectrum. Unable to make itself heard above the longwave din, now it spoke down a laser.”
Page 204: “Far below, the artifact’s magnetic field pressed into Ben’s atmosphere like God’s little finger. Great dark thunderheads converged behind it; turbulent moon-sized curlicues collided in its wake.”
Page 210: “[Chelsea]’d shut down the chromatophores in her cheek; the tattoo, transplanted, fluttered now on her shoulder.”
Page 213: “We fell [towards Rorschach in our shuttle]. Ridged spires and gnarled limbs sectioned the sky wherever I looked, cut the distant starscape and the imminent super-Jovian into a jagged mosaic veined in black. Three kilometers away or thirty, the tip of some swollen extremity burst in a silent explosion of charged particles, a distant fog of ruptured, freezing atmosphere. Even as it faded I could make out wisps and streamers swirling into complex spirals: Rorschach’s magnetic field, sculpting the artifact’s very breath into radioactive sleet. / I’d never seen it with naked eyes before. I felt like an insect on a starry midwinter’s night, falling through the aftermath of a forest fire.”
Page 236: “The scrambler seemed to have thrown off whatever cobwebs our entrance had spun; it surged along the walls now at full speed, its arms shooting ahead like a succession of striking snakes, slinging the body forward so fast the drones could barely keep it in sight, a writing silhouette in the fog.”
Page 237: “Siri Keaton, note-taker, mole, professional uncomprehender.”
Page 330: “Rorschach reared up behind the [habitat] in the near distance, vast and malign. Dim green auroras writhed across its twisted surface like sheet lightning. Mouths opened and closed by the hundreds, viscous as bubbling volcanic mud, any one of them large enough to swallow Theseus whole. I barely noticed the flicker of motion just ahead of me, the silent eruption of dark mass from the collapsed inflatable [hab]. By the time Cunningham caught my eye he was already on his way, backlit against the ghastly corpselight flickering on Rorschach’s skin. / I thought I saw him waving, but I was wrong. It was only the scrambler wrapped around his body like a desperate lover, moving his arm back and forth while it ran the thrust pistol tethered to his wrist.”
Klara and the Sun (2021)
Kazuo Ishiguro
★★★☆☆ July 25 – 29, 2025
I’m not sure how I feel about this one. It didn’t move me to tears, but I felt compelled to finish reading it in days. Ishiguro’s obvious technical skill builds the horrifying tension of his dystopian world in gradual, sidelong glances. Klara feels like a person with an alien way of thinking, which I enjoy, but she also exhibits human instincts that I’m not convinced would be natural to machine intelligences (i.e., the instinct to pray). There are a lot of interesting ideas that Ishiguro is playing with here, but for some reason it didn’t resonate with me emotionally. It’s especially weird because the similar ending of Exhalation’s “Lifecycle of Software Objects”, DID stick with me. Maybe Klara will hide in the back of my brain like books sometimes do, and I’ll need to re-read and re-assess.
