Richard R John’s “Network Nation”

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THIS SATURDAY (July 20), I’m appearing in CHICAGO at Exile in Bookville.

The telegraph and the telephone have a special place in the history and future of competition and Big Tech. After all, they were the original tech monopolists. Every discussion of tech and monopoly takes place in their shadow.

Back in 2010, Tim Wu published The Master Switch, his bestselling, wildly influential history of “The Bell System” and the struggle to de-monopolize America from its first telecoms barons:

https://memex.craphound.com/2010/11/01/the-master-switch-tim-net-neutrality-wu-explains-whats-at-stake-in-the-battle-for-net-freedom/

Wu is a brilliant writer and theoretician. Best known for coining the term “Net Neutrality,” Wu went on to serve in both the Obama and Biden administrations as a tech trustbuster. He accomplished much in those years. Most notably, Wu wrote the 2021 executive order on competition, laying out a 72-point program for using existing powers vested in the administrative agencies to break up corporate power and get the monopolist’s boot off Americans’ necks:

https://www.eff.org/de/deeplinks/2021/08/party-its-1979-og-antitrust-back-baby

The Competition EO is basically a checklist, and Biden’s agency heads have been racing down it, ticking off box after box on or ahead of schedule, making meaningful technical changes in how companies are allowed to operate, each one designed to make material improvements to the lives of Americans.

A decade and a half after its initial publication, Wu’s Master Switch is still considered a canonical account of how the phone monopoly was built – and dismantled.

But somewhat lost in the shadow of The Master Switch is another book, written by the accomplished telecoms historian Richard R John: “Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications,” published a year after The Master Switch:

https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674088139

Network Nation flew under my radar until earlier this year, when I found myself speaking at an antitrust conference where both John and Wu were also on the bill:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VNivXjrU3A

During John’s panel – “Case Studies: AT&T & IBM” – he took a good-natured dig at Wu’s book, claiming that Wu, not being an historian, had been taken in by AT&T’s own self-serving lies about its history. Wu – also on the panel – didn’t dispute it, either. That was enough to prick my interest. I ordered a copy of Network Nation and put it on my suitcase during my vacation earlier this month.

Network Nation is an extremely important, brilliantly researched, deep history of America’s love/hate affair with not just the telephone, but also the telegraph. It is unmistakably as history book, one that aims at a definitive takedown of various neat stories about the history of American telecommunications. As Wu writes in his New Republic review of John’s book:

Generally he describes the failure of competition not so much as a failure of a theory, but rather as the more concrete failure of the men running the competitors, many of whom turned out to be incompetent or unlucky. His story is more like a blow-by-blow account of why Germany lost World War II than a grand theory of why democracy is better than fascism.

https://newrepublic.com/article/88640/review-network-nation-richard-john-tim-wu

In other words, John thinks that the monopolies that emerged in the telegraph and then the telephone weren’t down to grand forces that made them inevitable, but rather, to the errors made by regulators and the successful gambits of the telecoms barons. At many junctures, things could have gone another way.

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Bowen McCurdy and Jordan Morris’s “Youth Group”

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NEXT SATURDAY (July 20), I’m appearing in CHICAGO at Exile in Bookville.

Youth Group is Bowen McCurdy and Jordan Morris’s new and delightful graphic novel from Firstsecond. It’s a charming tale of 1990s ennui, cringe Sunday School – and demon hunting.

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250789235/youthgroup

Kay is a bitter, cynical teenager who’s doing her best to help her mother cope with an ugly divorce that has seen her dad check out on his former family. Mom is going back to church, and she talks Kay into coming along with her to attend the church youth group.

This is set in the 1990s, and the word “cringe” hasn’t yet entered our lexicon as an adjective, but boy is the youth group cringe. The pastor is a guitar-strumming bearded dad who demonstrates how down he is with the kids by singing top 40 songs rewritten with evangelical lyrics (think Weird Al meets the 700 Club). Kay gamely struggles through a session and even makes a friend or two, and agrees to keep attending in deference to her mother’s pleas.

But this is no ordinary youth group. Kay’s ultra-boring suburban hometown is actually infested with demons who routinely possess the townspeople, and that baseline of demonic activity has suddenly gone critical, with a new wave of possessions. Suddenly, the possessed are everywhere – even Kay’s shitty dad ends up with a demon inside of him.

That’s when Kay discovers that the youth group and its corny pastor are also demon hunters par excellence. Their rec-rooms sport secret cubbies filled with holy weapons, and the words of exorcism come as readily to them as any embarrassing rewritten devotional pop song. Kay’s discovery of this secret world convinces her that youth group isn’t so bad after all, and soon she is initiated into its mysteries, including the existence of rival demon-hunting kids from the local synagogue, Catholic church, and Wiccan coven.

As the nature of the new demonic incursion becomes clearer, it falls on Kay and her pals to overcome these sectarian divisions over the protests of their guitar-strumming, magic-wielding leader. That takes on a special urgency when Kay learns why the demons are interested in her, personally, and a handful of other kids in town who all share a secret trait.

I confess that as someone who lived through the 1990s as a young man, there is something disorienting about experiencing the decade of my young adulthood through the kind of retro lens I associate with the 1950s or 1960s. But while the experience is disorienting, it’s not unpleasant. McCurdy’s artwork and Morris’s snappy dialog conjure up that bygone decade in a way that is simultaneously affectionate and critical, exposing the hollowness of its performative ennui and the brave face that performance represented even as the world was being swept up in corporate gigantism.

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Foxx Nolte’s “Hidden History of Walt Disney World”

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NEXT SATURDAY (July 20), I’m appearing in CHICAGO at Exile in Bookville.

No one writes about Disney theme parks like Foxx Nolte; no one rises above the trivia and goes beyond the mere sleuthing of historical facts, no one nails the essence of what makes these parks work – and fail.

I first encountered Nolte through her blog, Passport to Dreams Old and New, where her writing transformed the way I viewed the project of these giant, elaborate built environments. It was through articles like this one – about the sightlines from bathrooms! – that I came to truly understand what design criticism means:

https://passport2dreams.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-awkward-transitions-of-disneyland.html

While her work on queue design transformed how I thought about waiting, scarce-goods allocation, and the psychology of anticipation and desire:

https://passport2dreams.blogspot.com/2010/12/third-queue.html

But I really knew her for a kindred spirit when I read her masterful analysis of the historical context and enduring power of the Haunted Mansion:

https://passport2dreams.blogspot.com/2010/05/history-and-haunted-mansion.html

A decade after that Haunted Mansion post, Nolte published the definitive history of the Haunted Mansions, Boundless Realm, the very best book ever written on the subject:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/09/boundless-realm/#fuxxfur

This year, Nolte came back with another short, smart, endlessly fascinating history of Disney World, Hidden History of Walt Disney World:

https://www.arcadiapublishing.com/products/9781467156189

There are many histories of Walt Disney World, but none are quite like this. Nolte – who worked at the park for many years – combines her insider’s view with her deep historical knowledge and yields up a “hidden history” that will forever change how I look at the built environment and the natural landscape it sits atop.

The path to Walt Disney World – an entertainment juggernaut that occupies a landmass twice the size of Manhattan – was anything but smooth. Its original design – Walt’s design – barely survived groundbreaking, dying with Walt himself. Walt’s successor, his brother Roy, used the occasion of Walt’s death to assert his long-contested dominance over the park, drastically scaling back Walt’s ambition for a bizarre residential/utopian community and replacing it with a kind of deluxe Disneyland with the idea of limiting the company’s financial risk by re-creating a pre-existing, sure thing money-maker.

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Austin Grossman’s ‘Fight Me’

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On July 14, I’m giving the closing keynote for the fifteenth HACKERS ON PLANET EARTH, in QUEENS, NY. Happy Bastille Day! On July 20, I’m appearing in CHICAGO at Exile in Bookville.

In Fight Me, the novelist and game developer Austin Grossman uses aging ex-teen superheroes to weigh the legacy of Generation X, in a work that enrobes its savage critique with sweet melancholia, all under a coating of delicious snark:

http://www.austingrossman.com/fight-me

It is, in other words, a very Gen X kinda novel. Prodigy (AKA Alex Beekman) is a washed-up superhero. As a nerdy high-schooler, he was given super powers by a mysterious wizard (posing as a mediocre teacher), who gave him an amulet and a duty. Whenever Alex touches the amulet and speaks the word of power, reaclun (which he insists is not “nuclear” backwards) he transforms into Prodigy, a nigh-invulnerable, outrageously handsome living god who is impervious to bullets, runs a one-minute mile, and fights like a champ. Prodigy, he is told, has a destiny: to fight the ultimate evil when it emerges and save the world.

Now, Alex is 40, and it’s been a decade since he retired both Prodigy and his Alex identity, moving into a kind of witness protection program the federal government set up for him. He poses as a mediocre university professor, living a lonely and unexceptional life.

But then, Alex is summoned back to the superhero lair he shared with his old squad, “The Newcomers,” a long-vacant building that is one quarter Eero Saarinen, three quarters Mussolini. There, he is reunited with his estranged fellow ex-Newcomers, and sent on a new quest: to solve the riddle of the murder of the mysterious wizard who gave him his powers, so long ago.

The Newcomers – an amped-up ninja warrior, a supergenius whose future self keeps sending him encouragement and technical schematics backwards through time, and an exiled magical princess turned preppie supermodel – have spent more than a decade scattered to the winds. While some have fared better than Alex/Prodigy, none of them have lived up to their potential or realized the dreams that seemed so inevitable when they were world famous supers with an entourage of fellow powered teens who worshipped them as the planet’s greatest heroes.

As they set out to solve the mystery, they are reunited and must take stock of who they are and how they got there (cue Talking Heads’ “Once In a Lifetime”). With flashbacks, flashforwards, and often hilarious asides, Prodigy brings us up to speed on how supers fail, and what it’s like to live as a failed super.

The publisher’s strapline for this book is “The Avengers Meets the Breakfast Club,” which is clever, but extremely wrong. The real comp for this book isn’t “The Breakfast Club,” it’s “The Big Chill.”

When I realized this, I got briefly mad, because I’ve only had two good movie high concept pitches in my life and one of them was “Gen X Big Chill.” Rather than veterans of the Summer of 68 confronting the Reagan years, you could have veterans of the Battle of Seattle living through the Trump years. One would be on PeEP, one would be an insufferable Andrew Tate-quoting bitcoiner, one would be a redpilled reactionary with a genderqueer teen, one would be a squishy lib, one a firebreathing leftist, etc. The soundtrack would just be top 40 tracks from artists who have songs on “Schoolhouse Rock Rocks”:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schoolhouse_Rock!_Rocks

Every generation has some way in which they seek to overthrow the status quo and build a new, allegedly better one, after all. “Big Chill”’s impact comes from its postmortem on a generation where it was easy to feel like you were riding destiny’s rails to greatness thanks to the sheer size of the Boomer cohort and the postwar prosperity they lived through. A Gen X Big Chill would be a stocktaking of a generation that defined itself as a lost generation reared in the Boomers’ shadows, armored against the looming corpo-climate apocalypse with the sword of irony and the shield of sincerity.

Which is basically what Grossman is doing here. What’s more, doing this as a superhero story is a genius move – what could be a better metaphor for a teen’s unrealistic certainty of destined greatness than a superhero? Superhero fantasies are irreducibly grandiose and unrealistic, but all the more beautiful and brave and compelling for it.

You know, like teens.

At 52, I’m a middle-aged Gen Xer. I’ve got two artificial hips and I just scheduled a double cataract surgery. My hairline is receding. I’m an alta kaker. But I wasn’t always: I was a bright and promising kid, usually the youngest person in the room where we were planning big protests, ambitious digital art projects, or the future of science fiction. I had amazing friends: creative and funny and sweet, loyal and talented and just fun.

We’re mostly doing okay (the ones that lived; fuck cancer and fuck heroin and fuck fentanyl). Some of us are doing pretty good. On a good day, I think I’m doing pretty good. I had a night in 2018 where I got to hang out, as a peer, with my favorite musician and my favorite novelist, both in the same evening. These were artists I’d all but worshipped as a teen. I remember looking at the two selfies I took than night and thinking, Man, if 15 year old me could see these, he’d say that it all worked out.

But you don’t get to be 52 without having a long list of regrets and failures that your stupid brain is only too eager to show you a highlight reel from. No one gets to middle age without a haunting loss that is always trying to push its way to the fore in order to incinerate every triumph great and small and leave ashes behind.

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Mirion Malle’s “So Long Sad Love”

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On July 14, I’m giving the closing keynote for the fifteenth HACKERS ON PLANET EARTH, in QUEENS, NY. Happy Bastille Day! On July 20, I’m appearing in CHICAGO at Exile in Bookville.

In Mirion Malle’s So Long Sad Love, a graphic novel from Drawn and Quarterly, we get an all-too-real mystery story: when do you trust the whisper network that carries the fragmentary, elliptical word of shitty men?

https://drawnandquarterly.com/books/so-long-sad-love/

Cleo is a French comics creator who’s moved to Montreal, in part to be with Charles, a Quebecois creator who helps her find a place in the city’s tight-knit artistic scene. The relationship feels like a good one, with the normal ups and downs, but then Cleo travels to a festival, where she meets Farah, a vivacious and talented fellow artist. They’re getting along great…until Farah discovers who Cleo’s boyfriend is. Though Farah doesn’t say anything, she is visibly flustered and makes her excuses before hurriedly departing.

This kicks off Cleo’s hunt for the truth about her boyfriend, a hunt that is complicated by the fact that she’s so far from home, that her friends are largely his friends, that he flies off the handle every time she raises the matter, and by her love for him.

There’s a term for men like Charles: a “missing stair.” “Missing stair” is a metaphor for someone in a social circle who presents some kind of persistent risk to the people around them, who is accommodated rather than confronted:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_stair

The metaphor goes like this: you’re at a party and every time someone asks where the bathroom is, another partygoer directs them to the upper floor and warns them that one of the stairs is missing, and if they don’t avoid that tread, they will fall through and be gravely injured. In this metaphor, a whole community of people have tacitly decided to simply accept the risk that someone who is forgetful or new to the scene will fall through the stair – no one has come forward to just fix that stair.

The origins of this term are in BDSM circles, and the canonical “missing stair” is a sexual predator, but from the outset, it’s referred to all kinds of people with failings that present some source of frustration or unhappiness to those around them, from shouters to bigots to just someone who won’t help do the dishes after a dinner party:

https://pervocracy.blogspot.com/2012/06/missing-stair.html

We all know a few missing stairs, and anyone who’s got even a little self-reflexivity must wonder from time to time if they’re not also a missing stair, at least to some people in their lives. After all, friendship always entails some accommodation, and doubly so love – as Dan Savage is fond of saying, “There is no person who is ‘The One’ for you – the best you can hope for is the '0.6’ that you can round up to 'The One,’ with a lot of work.”

And at least some missing stairs aren’t born – they’re made. Everyone screws up, everyone’s got some bad habits, everyone’s got some blind spots about what others expect of them and how others perceive us. When the people around us make bad calls about whether to let us skate on our faults and when to confront us, those faults fester and multiply and calcify. This is compounded in long-tenured relationships that begin in our youth, when we are still figuring out our boundaries – the people who we give a pass to when we’re young and naive can become a fixture in our lives despite characteristics that, as adults, we wouldn’t tolerate in someone who is new to our social scene.

To make all this even more complicated, there’s the role that power plays in all this. Many missing stairs are keenly attuned to power dynamics and present a different face to people who have some authority – whether formal or tacit – to sanction them. This is why so many of the outings of #MeToo predators provoked mystified men to say, “Gosh, they never acted that way around me – I had no idea.”

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Weinersmith and Boulet’s “Bea Wolf”

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On July 14, I’m giving the closing keynote for the fifteenth HACKERS ON PLANET EARTH, in QUEENS, NY. Happy Bastille Day! On July 20, I’m appearing in CHICAGO at Exile in Bookville.

Bea Wolf is Zach Weinersmith and Boulet’s ferociously amazingly great illustrated kids’ graphic novel adaptation of the Old English epic poem, which inspired Tolkien, who helped bring it to popularity after it had languished in obscurity for centuries:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250776297/beawolf

Boy is this a wildly improbable artifact. Weinersmith and Boulet set themselves the task of bringing Germanic heroic saga from more than a thousand years ago to modern children, while preserving the meter and the linguistic and literary tropes of the original. And they did it!

There are some changes, of course. Grendel – the boss monster that both Beowulf and Bea Wulf must defeat – is no longer obsessed with decapitating his foes and stealing their heads. In Bea Wulf, Grendel is a monstrously grown up and boring adult who watches cable news and flosses twice per day, and when he defeats the kids whose destruction he is bent upon, he does so by turning them into boring adults, too.

And Bea Wulf – and the kings that do battle with Grendel – are not interested in the gold and jewels that the kings of Beowulf hoard. In Bea Wulf, the treasure is toys, chocolate, soda, candy, food without fiber, television shows without redeeming educational content, water balloons, nerf swords and spears, and other stuff beloved of kids and hated by parents.

That substitution is key to transposing the thousand-year-old adult epic Beowulf for enjoyment by small children in the 21st century. After all, what makes Beowulf so epic is the sense that it is set in a time in which a primal valor still reigned, but it is narrated for an audience that has been tamed and domesticated. Beowulf makes you long for a never-was time of fierce and unwavering bravery. Bea Wulf beautifully conjures the years of early childhood when you and the kids in your group had your own little sealed-off world, which grownups could barely perceive and never understand.

Growing up, after all, is a process of repeating things that are brave the first time you do them, over and over again, until they become banal. That’s what “coming of age” really boils down to: the slow and relentless transformation of the mythic, the epic, and the unknowable and unknown into the tame, the explained, the mastered. When you’re just mastering balance and coordination, the playground climber is a challenge out of legend. A couple years later, it’s just something you climb.

The correspondences between the leeching away of magic lamented in Beowulf and experienced by all of us as we grow out of childhood are obvious in hindsight and surprising and beautiful and bittersweet when you encounter them in Bea Wolf.

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Robin Sloan’s “Moonbound”

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On June 20, I’m keynoting the LOCUS AWARDS in OAKLAND.

Robin Sloan has a well-deserved reputation as a sparkly, fizzy writer, the kind of person who can tell a smart/smartass story infused with fantasy-genre whimsy but grounded in high-tech, contemporary settings (think here of Charlie Jane Anders’ gorgeous All the Birds In the Sky):

https://memex.craphound.com/2016/01/26/charlie-jane-anderss-all-the-birds-in-the-sky-smartass-soulful-novel/

In Moonbound, a new, wildly ambitious solarpunk novel published today by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, Sloan moves out of his usual, daffy, high-tech/high-weird Bay Area milieu and catapults us 11,000 years into the future, to a world utterly transformed and utterly fascinating:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374610609/moonbound

Moonbound’s protagonist is a “chronicler,” a symbiotic fungus engineered to nestle in a human’s nervous system, where it serves as a kind of recording angel, storing up the memories, experiences and personalities of its host. When we meet the chronicler, it has just made a successful leap from its old host – a 10,000-years-dead warrior who had been preserved in an anaerobic crashpod ever since her ship was shot out of the sky – into the body of Ariel, a 12-year-old boy who had just invaded the long-lost tomb.

This is quite a move. This long-dormant, intelligent fungus originates a thousand years into our own future, long after the climate emergency had been (miraculously, joyously) averted and has arrived in a world ten millennia years even further down the line. It must orient itself from its position inside the nervous system of a 12-year-old, and we have to orient ourselves to having an 11,000-year-distant future explained by an intelligent fungus from 1,000 years into our own future.

This is doing fiction in hard mode, and Sloan nails it. The unraveling strangeness of Ariel’s world is counterpointed with the amazing tale of the world the chronicler hails from, even as the chonicler consults with the preserved personalities of the heroes and warriors it had previous resided in and recorded.

And in this curious way, we learn of the history of the chronicler’s world, and of the strange world so far into the future that Ariel lives in – and becomes incredible consequential to.

Start with the chronicler’s world: on the way to solving the climate emergency, the human race figured out how to cooperate on unimaginably massive projects (for example, addressing the world’s runaway carbon problem). This pays huge dividends, ushering in a period of thrilling innovation, as humans and the nonhuman intelligences they have constructed collaborate to explore out planet, our solar system, and – thanks to a faster-than-light breakthrough – our galaxy.

A crew of seven are dispatched to the ends of space with great fanfare – but when they return, they are terrified and full of grim purpose. Something they met out there in the galaxy has convinced them that humanity must never look to the stars again. They blanket the planet in a cloak of dust and establish a garrison on the moon from which they destroy any attempts to leave the Earth.

This triggers a savage war against these seven “dragons” and their moonbase. The chronicler’s warrior – the one who was entombed for 10,000 years before being discovered by Ariel – was shot down on a last-ditch attempt to destroy the dragons and their base on the moon.

Flash forward 10,000 years. Ariel lives in a weird, medieval-type village, albeit one in which the peasant-types all wear high-tech performance all-weather gear…and the animals all talk. It’s a very strange place – there’s a sword in a stone, a wizard in a tower…and an airstrip.

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Joseph Cox’s “Dark Wire”

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NEXT WEEKEND (June 7–9), I’m in AMHERST, NEW YORK to keynote the 25th Annual Media Ecology Association Convention and accept the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity.

No one was better positioned to tell the tale of the largest sting operation in world history than veteran tech reporter Joseph Cox, and tell it he did, in Dark Wire, released today:

https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/joseph-cox/dark-wire/9781541702691/

Cox – who was one of Motherboard’s star cybersecurity reporters before leaving to co-found 404 Media – has spent years on the crimephone beat, tracking vendors who sold modded phones (first Blackberries, then Android phones) to criminal syndicates with the promise that they couldn’t be wiretapped by law-enforcement.

It’s possible that some of these phones were secure over long timescales, but all the ones we know about are ones that law enforcement eventually caught up with, usually by capturing the company’s top founders explicitly stating that the phones were sold to assist in the commission of crimes, and admitting to remote-wiping phones to obstruct law-enforcement options. It’s hard to prove intent but it gets a lot easier when the criminal puts that intent into writing (that’s true of tech executives, too!):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/03/big-tech-cant-stop-telling-on-itself/

But after a particularly spectacular bust landed one of the top crimephone sales reps in the FBI’s power, they got a genuinely weird idea: why not start their own crimephone company?

The plan was to build an incredibly secure, best-of-breed crimephone, one with every feature that a criminal would want to truly insulate themselves from law enforcement while still offering everything a criminal could need to plan and execute crimes.

They would tap into the network of crimephone distributors around the world, not telling them who they were truly selling for – nor that every one of these phones had a back-door that allowed law-enforcement to access every single message, photo and file.

This is the beginning of an incredible tale that is really two incredible tales. The first is the story of the FBI and its partners as they scaled up Anom, their best-of-breed crimephone business. This is a (nearly) classic startup tale, full of all-nighters, heroic battles against the odds, and the terror and exhilaration of “hockey-stick” growth.

The difference between this startup and the others we’re already familiar with is obvious: the FBI and its global partners are acting under a totally different set of constraints to normal startup founders. For one thing, their true mission and identity must be kept totally secret. For another, they have to navigate the bureaucratic barriers of not one, but many governments and their courts, constitutions and procedures.

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Emil Ferris’s long-awaited “My Favorite Thing Is Monsters Book Two”

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NEXT WEEKEND (June 7–9), I’m in AMHERST, NEW YORK to keynote the 25th Annual Media Ecology Association Convention and accept the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity.

Seven years ago, I was absolutely floored by My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, a wildly original, stunningly gorgeous, haunting and brilliant debut graphic novel from Emil Ferris. Every single thing about this book was amazing:

https://memex.craphound.com/2017/06/20/my-favorite-thing-is-monsters-a-haunting-diary-of-a-young-girl-as-a-dazzling-graphic-novel/

The more I found out about the book, the more amazed I became. I met Ferris at that summer’s San Diego Comic Con, where I learned that she had drawn it over a while recovering from paralysis of her right – dominant – hand after a West Nile Virus infection. Each meticulously drawn and cross-hatched page had taken days of work with a pen duct-taped to her hand, a project of seven years.

The wild backstory of the book’s creation was matched with a wild production story: first, Ferris’s initial publisher bailed on her because the book was too long; then her new publisher’s first shipment of the book was seized by the South Korean state bank, from the Panama Canal, when the shipper went bankrupt and its creditors held all its cargo to ransom.

My Favorite Thing Is Monsters told the story of Karen Reyes, a 10 year old, monster-obsessed queer girl in 1968 Chicago who lives with her working-class single mother and her older brother, Deeze, in an apartment house full of mysterious, haunted adults. There’s the landlord – a gangster and his girlfriend – the one-eyed ventriloquist, and the beautiful Holocaust survivor and her jazz-drummer husband.

Karen narrates and draws the story, depicting herself as a werewolf in a detective’s trenchcoat and fedora, as she tries to unravel the secrets kept by the grownups around her. Karen’s life is filled with mysteries, from the identity of her father (her brother, a talented illustrator, has removed him from all the family photos and redrawn him as the Invisible Man) to the purpose of a mysterious locked door in the building’s cellar.

But the most pressing mystery of all is the death of her upstairs neighbor, the beautiful Annika Silverberg, a troubled Holocaust survivor whose alleged suicide just doesn’t add up, and Karen – who loved and worshiped Annika – is determined to get to the bottom of it.

Karen is tormented by the adults in her life keeping too much from her – and by their failure to shield her from life’s hardest truths. The flip side of Karen’s frustration with adult secrecy is her exposure to adult activity she’s too young to understand. From Annika’s cassette-taped oral history of her girlhood in an Weimar brothel and her escape from a Nazi concentration camp, to the sex workers she sees turning tricks in cars and alleys in her neighborhood, to the horrors of the Vietnam war, Karen’s struggle to understand is characterized by too much information, and too little.

Ferris’s storytelling style is dazzling, and it’s matched and exceeded by her illustration style, which is grounded in the classic horror comics of the 1950s and 1960s. Characters in Karen’s life – including Karen herself – are sometimes depicted in the EC horror style, and that same sinister darkness crowds around the edges of her depictions of real-world Chicago.

These monster-comic throwbacks are absolute catnip for me. I, too, was a monster-obsessed kid, and spent endless hours watching, drawing, and dreaming about this kind of monster.

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But Ferris isn’t just a monster-obsessive; she’s also a formally trained fine artist, and she infuses her love of great painters into Deeze, Karen’s womanizing petty criminal of an older brother. Deeze and Karen’s visits to the Art Institute of Chicago are commemorated with loving recreations of famous paintings, which are skillfully connected to pulp monster art with a combination of Deeze’s commentary and Ferris’s meticulous pen-strokes.

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Rebecca Roque’s “Till Human Voices Wake Us”

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I’m touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in TOMORROW (Apr 17) in CHICAGO, then Torino (Apr 21) Marin County (Apr 27), Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!

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“Till Human Voices Wake Us” is Rebecca Roque’s debut novel: it’s a superb teen thriller, intricately plotted and brilliantly executed, packed with imaginative technological turns that amp up the tension and suspense:

https://www.blackstonepublishing.com/till-human-voices-wake-us-gn3a.html#541=2790108

Modern technology presents a serious problem for a thriller writer. Once characters can call or text one another, a whole portfolio of suspense-building gimmicks – like the high-speed race across town – just stop working. For years, thriller writers contrived implausible – but narratively convenient – ways to go on using these tropes. Think of the shopworn “damn, my phone is out of battery/range just when I need it the most”:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIZVcRccCx0

When that fails, often writers just lean into the “idiot plot” – a plot that only works because the characters are acting like idiots:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiot_plot

But even as technology was sawing a hole in the suspense writer’s bag of tricks, shrewd suspense writers were cooking up a whole new menu of clever ways to build suspense in ways that turn on the limitations and capabilities of technology. One pioneer of this was Iain M Banks (RIP), whose 2003 novel Dead Air was jammed with wildly ingenious ways to use cellphones to raise the stakes and heighten the tension:

https://web.archive.org/web/20030302073539/http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.03/play.html?pg=8

This is “techno-realism” at its best. It’s my favorite mode of storytelling, the thing I lean into with my Little Brother and Martin Hench books – stories that treat the things that technology can and can’t do as features, not bugs. Rather than having the hacker “crack the mainframe’s cryptography in 20 minutes when everyone swears it can’t be done in less than 25,” the techno-realist introduces something gnarlier, like a supply-chain attack that inserts a back-door, or a hardware keylogger, or a Remote Access Trojan.

Back to Roque’s debut novel: it’s a teen murder mystery told in the most technorealist way. Cia’s best friend Alice has been trying to find her missing boyfriend for months, and in her investigation, she’s discovered their small town’s dark secret – a string of disappearances, deaths and fires that are the hidden backdrop to the town’s out-of-control addiction problem.

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Steven Brust’s “Lyorn”

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I’m touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me TOMORROW (Apr 11) at UCLA, then Chicago (Apr 17), Torino (Apr 21) Marin County (Apr 27), Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!

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Today marks the publication of Lyorn, the seventeenth book in Steven Brust’s long-running Vlad Taltos series. While this is definitely not where you should start reading this series, I hope I can convince you that this book is so delicious that you should go read the other sixteen books right now:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780765382863/lyorn

I have been reading these books since I was 12. I’ve literally grown up with them. Brust has said all along that there will be nineteen Vlad novels. Once again, Lyorn is number seventeen. It is no hyperbole to say that i) I have been waiting for this moment all my life and ii) it is nearly upon us.

The Vlad books are set on Dragaera, a fantasy world dominated by a race of long-lived elven-types called Dragaerans; wedged into the corners of Dragaeran society are humans (“Easterners”) who speak a kind of pidgin Hungarian, practice Hungarian witchcraft, and cook delicious Hungarian food (the meals in the Vlad books are the best part, except for all the other best parts, which are even better).

We meet Vlad Taltos as a teenaged tough whose father, a restaurateur, scrimped and saved to buy them membership in House Jhereg, the noble house that supplies the empire with its organized criminals: killers, thieves, money-launderers, and other important social lubricants. Vlad likes being a Jhereg thug, because at last someone is paying him to beat up Dragareans, something he used to do for sport and as revenge for all the racist taunting and violence he and his father endure.

Over the next sixteen (!) books, we follow Vlad as he rises within the Jhereg to be a serious crime boss, but also a key figure in the skullduggery of imperial succession, and also the affairs of the fates, the gods, and the Jenoine, who may or may not be aliens who created this whole Dragaera business as part of an unknowable experiment.

Brust – a literary heir to Roger Zelazny and Fritz Lieber – is doing a kind of noir sword-and-sorcery thing here, filled with evil-snort-provoking snappy dialog (I emitted three evil snorts within the first ten minutes of reading Lyorn), fantastic fight scenes, intricate capers, epic romances and gigantic, Return-Of-the-King-grade set-piece battles.

But Brust is a clever motherfucker. These books don’t just range up and down thousands of years of history (there’s a whole related series set millennia before Vlad was born, written in the style of Alexandre “Three Musketeers” Dumas), but they also have all these wonderful, delightful, absurdly clever framing devices.

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Paul Di Filippo on THE BEZZLE

Robert Heinlein was always known—and always came across in his writings—as The Man Who Knew How the World Worked. Doctorow delivers the same sense of putting yourself in the hands of a fellow who has peered behind Oz’s curtain. When he fills you in lucidly about some arcane bit of economics or computer tech or social media scam, you feel, first, that you understand it completely and, second, that you can trust Doctorow’s analysis and insights. That makes for a great reading experience.

-Locus Magazine

Kelly Link’s “Book of Love”

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If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/13/the-kissing-song/#wrack-and-roll

Kelly Link is one of science fiction’s most important writers, a master of the short story to rank with the likes of Ted Chiang. For a decade, Kelly’s friends have traded whispers that she was working on a novel – a giant novel – and the rumors were true and the novel is glorious and you will love it:

https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/book-of-love-9781804548455/

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/239722/the-book-of-love-by-kelly-link/

It’s called The Book of Love and it’s massive – 650 pages! It is glorious. It is tricky.

If you’ve read Link’s short stories (which honestly, you must read), you know her signature move: a bone-dry witty delivery, used to spin tales of deceptive whimsy and quirkiness, disarming you with daffiness while she sets the hook and yanks. That’s the unmistakeable, inimitable texture of a Kelly Link story: deft literary brushstrokes, painting a picture so charming and silly that you don’t even notice when she cuts you without mercy.

Turns out that she can quite handily do this for hundreds of pages, and the effect only gets better when it’s given space to unfold.

Hard to tell you about this one without spoilers! But I’ll tell you this much. It’s a story about three teenaged friends who return from death and find themselves in the music room at their high school, face to face with their mild-mannered music teacher, Mr Anabin. Anabin explains what’s happened in frustratingly cryptic – and very emphatic – terms, but is interrupted when a sinister shape-shifting wolf enters the music room.

This is Bogomil, and whenever he speaks, Mr Anabin turns his back – and vice versa. Anabin and Bogomil appear to be rivals, and Bogomil may or may not have been the keeper of the land of the dead from which the three have escaped. There’s also a forth, a tattered shade who’s been dead so long they don’t remember who they are or anything about themselves. Bogomil would like to take the four back to the deadlands, but Anabin proposes a contest and Bogomil agrees – but no one explains the contest or its rules (or even its stakes) to the four dead teenagers.

That’s the wind up. The pitch that follows is flawless, a long and twisting mystery about friendship, love, queerness, rock-and-roll, stardom, parenthood, loyalty, lust and duty. There’s a terrifying elder god of Lovecraftian proportions. There are ghosts upon ghosts. There are ancient grudges. There are sudden revelations that come from unexpected angles but are, in retrospect, perfectly set up.

More than anything, there are characters. It’s impossible not to love Link’s characters, despite (because of) their self-destructive choices and their impossible dilemmas. They are so sweet, but they are also by turns mean and spiteful and resentful, like the pinch of salt that transforms a caramel from inedible spun sugar into something that bites even as it delights.

These characters, so very likable, are often dead or at death’s door, and that peril propels the story like an unstoppable locomotive. From the very start, it’s clear that some of them can’t survive to the end, and Link is merciless in making you root for all of them, even though this means rooting against them all. This, in turn, creates moments of toe-curling, sublime horror.

Link has built a complex machine with more moving parts than anyone has any business being able to keep track of. And yet, each of these parts meshes flawlessly with all the others. The book ends with such triumphant perfection that it lingers long after you put it down. I can’t wait to read this one again.

Dave Maass and Patrick Lay’s “Death Strikes: The Emperor of Atlantis”

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Berliners: Otherland has added a second date (Jan 28) for my book-talk after the first one sold out - book now!

“The Emperor of Atlantis,” is an opera written by two Nazi concentration camp inmates, the librettist Peter Kien and the composer Viktor Ullmann, while they were interned in Terezin, a show-camp in Czechoslovakia that housed numerous Jewish artists, who were encouraged to make and display their work as a way of proving to the rest of the world that Nazi camps were humane places.

Of course, it was all a sham. Like nearly all of Terezin’s inmates, Kein and Ullmann were eventually shipped to Auschwitz to be murdered. “The Emperor” was never performed during their life, but the manuscript, written on scrounged paper (including the backs of other inmates Auschwitz transfer papers) survived.

In the decades since, “The Emperor” has been mounted a few times, with varying degrees of faithfulness. But those live performances were limited to the people who could attend them during their limited run. Now, a new graphic novel called Death Strikes: The Emperor of Atlantis, brings the work to us all:

https://www.darkhorse.com/Blog/3726/berger-books-and-dark-horse-comics-present-death-s

Death Strikes was adapted by my EFF colleague Dave Maass, an investigator and muckraker and brilliant writer, who teamed up with illustrator Patrick Lay and character designer Ezra Rose (who worked from the Kein and Ullmann’s original designs, which survived along with the score and libretto).

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Kelly and Zach Weinersmith’s “A City On Mars”

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In A City On Mars, biologist Kelly Weinersmith and cartoonist Zach Weinersmith set out to investigate the governance challenges of the impending space settlements they were told were just over the horizon. Instead, they discovered that humans aren’t going to be settling space for a very long time, and so they wrote a book about that instead:

https://www.acityonmars.com/

The Weinersmiths make the (convincing) case that ever aspect of space settlement is vastly beyond our current or reasonably foreseeable technical capability. What’s more, every argument in favor of pursuing space settlement is errant nonsense. And finally: all the energy we are putting into space settlement actually holds back real space science, which offers numerous benefits to our species and planet (and is just darned cool).

Every place we might settle in space – giant rotating rings, the Moon, Mars – is vastly more hostile than Earth. Not just more hostile than Earth as it stands today – the most degraded, climate-wracked, nuke-blasted Earth you can imagine is a paradise of habitability compared to anything else. Mars is covered in poison and the sky disappears under planet-sized storms that go on and on. The Moon is covered in black-lung-causing, razor-sharp, electrostatically charged dust. Everything is radioactive. There’s virtually no water. There are temperature swings of hundreds of degrees every couple of hours or weeks. You’re completely out of range of resupply, emergency help, or, you know, air.

There’s Helium 3 on the Moon, but not much of it, and there is no universe in which is it cheaper to mine for Helium 3 on the Moon than it is to mine for it on Earth. That’s generally true of anything we might bring back from space, up to and including continent-sized chunks of asteroid platinum.

Going to space doesn’t end war. The countries that have gone to space are among the most militarily belligerent in human history. The people who’ve been to space have come back perfectly prepared to wage war.

Going to space won’t save us from the climate emergency. The unimaginably vast trove of material and the energy and advanced technology needed to lift it off Earth and get it to Mars is orders of magnitude more material and energy than we would need to resolve the actual climate emergency here.

We aren’t anywhere near being a “multiplanetary species.” The number of humans you need in a colony to establish a new population is hard to estimate, but it’s very large. Larger than we can foreseeably establish on the Moon, on Mars, or on a space-station. But even if we could establish such a colony, there’s little evidence that it could sustain itself – not only are we a very, very long way off from such a population being able to satisfy its material needs off-planet, but we have little reason to believe that children could gestate, be born, and grow to adulthood off-planet.

To top it all off, there’s space law – the inciting subject matter for this excellent book. There’s a lot of space law, and while there are some areas of ambiguity, the claims of would-be space entrepreneurs about how their plans are permissible under the settled parts of space law don’t hold up. But those claims are robust compared to claims that space law will simply sublimate into its constituent molecules when exposed to the reality of space travel, space settlement, and (most importantly) space extraction.

Space law doesn’t exist in a vacuum (rimshot). It is parallel to – and shares history with – laws regarding Antarctica, the ocean’s surface, and the ocean’s floor. These laws relate to territories that are both vastly easier to access and far more densely populated by valuable natural resources. The fact that they remain operative in the face of economic imperatives demands that space settlement advocates offer a more convincing account than “money talks, bullshit walks, space law is toast the minute we land on a $14 quadrillion platinum asteroid.”

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