Category: Books

Villains I’d Root For Instead of the Protagonists

Another Wednesday Weekly Blog Challenge from Long and Short Reviews. So tempting to choose an anti-hero, who’s “a villain” but also the protagonist. I’m currently enjoying the Dead Boys Detectives from the Neil Gaiman‘s Sandman Universe (which he says he’s “not particularly” interested in creating as a cinematic universe though seems on the slippery slope to do so), so Lucifer comes to mind. 

It was a great series – classic detective/cop buddy show, if one of them was the literal devil. Great comedic edge.

But to choose Lucifer seems like cheating. And rooting for Hector over Achilles in The Iliad doesn’t seem to fit either, because Hector isn’t really a villain (and I’m not convinced Achilles’ is the protagonist).

I know there’s been occasions where I’ve thought the heroes so incompetent that I am a little rooting for them to just get taken out by the villains, but usually those stories are bad enough that I don’t remember them even if I did stick around to finish them.

Now I’m trying to think of stories were the heroes are upholding the social norms we are supposed to root for but I don’t actually do so, so I’d root for the villain. Again, I’m sure I’ve read such, but can’t think of any off hand.

Ugh. I think I’m going to go back to my cheating first thought and stick with the Devil, Lucifer from the Sandman Universe. And Crawley and Adam the Anti-Christ fit in there too. 

Aliveness, Flourishing, and Languishing

I read this article in the WaPo the other day on Aliveness. Well, it was actually a book review of On Giving Up by Adam Philips. It ended up being a fascinating intersection of literature and psychoanalysis. It started with a quote from a young James Joyce:

At the start of 1900, 10 days into the new century, a 17-year-old James Joyce delivered a lecture to the Literary and Historical Society at University College Dublin. His topic: “Drama and Life.” His conclusion: that ordinary experience is sufficient to yield up the stuff of literature: “I think out of the dreary sameness of existence, a measure of dramatic life may be drawn. Even the most commonplace, the deadest among the living, may play a part in a great drama.” It’s a striking phrase, “the deadest among the living.” We know, I think, instinctively what it means, though Joyce provides a gloss, too — “the most commonplace” — and we’ll come back to that. But it asks us to think of aliveness as something more than a biological state.

The literary references continue throughout. The review contains a wide ranging look at the essays within the book and is worth a read. But to draw on one more quote from the review:

Put another way, one way to stave off the deadness of the commonplace is by countering the urge to assimilate people, opinions, experiences into commonplaces in the first place — to be attuned to detail, alert to specificity, curious about difference.

I like that. In a way, it recalls the opening Joyce quote. When we’re alert to the details and differences and curious, suddenly we realize the drama in what could have been glossed over as commonplace.

Joyce is speaking about writing and this is all applicable to that craft, but of course Philips is really concerns with how we live. This combination of alterness, awareness, and curiosity  – engagement at its heart, what the article calls aliveness, seems akin to  flourishing, in the technical sense of “a combination of physical, emotional and mental well-being,” “experience engagement and joy in their lives… characterized by a sense of connectedness to life, relationships, and career.” vs. languishing: “disconnected and disillusioned,” “joyless blah feeling.” To thrive, to flourish, to be alive beyond the biological sense requires us to seek out the details and differences and be curious, not just left things pass us by in a blur of commonplaceness. 

Hugos Give a 2nd Chance

I noted previously that the 2023 Hugos had disallowed certain otherwise eligible authors from the awards competition simply because the ceremony was being held in Chengdu, China and there were concerns about local sensitivities/laws. Nor did this happen in a transparent manner. In response to the outcry, trying to make it right, the Hugos are allowing a couple of the authors a second bite at the apple. Read about it over at the MarySue.

Books on My TBR List the Longest

Oh goodness, my to be read list is very long. E-book readers have helped me keep my bedside table from getting so piled up that it’s in danger of tipping. (especially with cats, who like to jump up there). But what’s been on there longest? Fortunately, readers can also help with this question. Looking at my content from oldest to newest, I spot Kim Stanley Robinson’s  Red Mars, Greg Keyes’s The Briar King , Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (yep, I’m embarrassed to say I’ve not read it, though. I started it; I think I stopped when Victor Frankenstein was reassuring himself the trial of the maid unfairly accused of a murder committed by his monster was all going turn out fine and she’d be acquitted and I felt sure that she wouldn’t), and Stieg Larsson‘s  The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (which I remember starting, but I don’t remember why I never finished).  These take back a good 14 to 15 years. 😳 Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future takes pride of place in the discussion of apocalyptic systems thrillers in the NYTimes (which I discussed yesterday). I’m adding it to my list and hopefully it won’t sit there as long as Red Mars.

Oops – just looked at my digital collection and I have already purchased The Ministry for the Future last September. 😳

I Look forward to reading what is on other peoples TBR lists in this Long and Short Reviews Wednesday weekly challenge.

Apocalyptic Systems Thriller

The NYTimes has a nice essay on a new genre: AST or apocalyptic systems thriller. As it defines AST:

The geopolitical epic is at least as old as “War and Peace,” but there’s a particular kind of novel that came into its own with globalization, taking on new life in recent years. Call it the apocalyptic systems thriller, or, because abbreviations and acronyms are crucial to its aesthetic, the A.S.T.
Multi-stranded, terse, often anchored in character just enough to drive the action forward, these books invite us to take an elevated, panoramic view of events that extend too far in space and time to be grasped by a single narrative consciousness. Conflict, climate change, pandemics and natural disasters offer ways to contemplate our interconnection and interdependence. At its best, this kind of fiction can induce a kind of sublime awe at the complexity of the global networks in which we’re enmeshed: A butterfly flaps its wings in Seoul and the Dow crashes; a hacker steals a password and war breaks out.

The essay includes deeper analysis, multiple examples, and comparanda from predecessor genres. A good read.

AST particularly intrigued me because systemic collapse is one of the explanations for the relatively sudden end to the Greek Bronze Age (and lesser disruptions to other Eastern Mediterranean/North African/Southwest Asian Bronze Age civilizations).  A good read on this is Eric Cline’s 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization  Collapsed. Ironically, perhaps, the NYTimes article starts with AST novels with year titles (2034; 2054). I don’t think we’re on the precipice of systemic collapse (though in the last few years, it has perhaps felt so at times), but it is interesting that the NYTimes notes:

So, while the A.S.T. is a form of entertainment, it’s also meant to enlighten the planners and decision makers who might grab a hardcover off the shelf at an airport bookstore.

This recalled to me Asimov’s Foundation (and sequels), where “psychohistorians tried to react to and shorten a systemic collapse, as if this genre is trying to do something similar: prepare for the best response to system failure of the complex systems upon which our current cultures rely.

A Book Trope I Wish Wouldn’t Happen IRL

Time for Long and Short Review‘s Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge. Ooh, this one seems even harder. Some tropes just don’t (and seem likely to never) happen in real life at all (superpowers, for example). But this challenge seems ask for one that does happen or potentially is looming in the future, but I wish it wouldn’t.

Well, living in the era of generative AI, I guess a good one to go with would be I hope that the Singularity doesn’t happen and an AI/robots don’t destroy human civilization and/or all of humanity (not that we aren’t doing a good job of that ourselves, with pollution, climate change, war, human-instigated famine – yep, we have the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, at least according to the Good Omens version, in which pestilence has retired in favor of pollution).  Of course, the Robot/AI apocalypse would just be another form of human self-destruction. Here’s hoping we do a better job of avoiding that one.🤞

Of course, then, I immediately started wondering when this AI takeover trope first started and turned to Wikipedia. It suggested Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in the 19th century, but that seems more than a little questionable as an example of the trope per se (even if it directly inspired at least one story in this trope, which in turn inspired the World Wide Web). A better contender seems to be Samuel Butler’s 1872 Erewhon (which I had never heard of, but Alan Turing even cites as a warning of Ai takeover). The Wikipedia article also notes the 1920 Czech play R.U.R., which gives us our word robot, has robots revolt and kill most of humanity. So this trope is not new by any stretch of the imagination, but it does seem increasingly possible.

Among this trope, some of my favorites are Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day – Linda Hamilton is one tough mother – Yes, the series of movies, like the terminator itself, keeps coming, but I stop with T2); The Matrix (again, I’d stop there in the series); Battlestar Galactica (not the 1980’s series, but the post-9/11 series; I was sorry the spin off Caprica didn’t make it); and on the lighter side, I loved The Mitchells vs. the Machines.  On a smaller scale, who could forget:

I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.

There are probably others but these are the ones that first jump to mind when I think of the trope. Yep, all movies or t.v. series. I’m sure I’ve read books with these tropes (esp. since the prompt is about book tropes), but the ones that first come to mind are all video.

So it’s my trope I wish wouldn’t happen. 

Persephone v. Big Pharma

Ooh… a new one for my reading list. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter retold with Demeter as the head of an agri-NGO, Hades as the CEO of a Pharma company, Persephone as a listless teen lured to his island, and the pomegranate seeds the Pharma company’s top opioid. And a great cover: 

There is a  great book review in the NYTimes. I love the description of the Hades character when he first meets the Persephone character:

In a span of minutes the older man displays a United Nations’ worth of flags, all of them red.

Adding to my reading lists

The NYTimes occasionally posts thematic books-to-read lists. This time it was YA Greek myth retellings. This is only adding to my reading list. The fifth one on the list, Threads that bind, I started but got side-tracked with other readings. I should get back to it. I enjoyed it as far as I got.

If you haven’t been following it…

If you haven’t been following the news about the 2023 Hugo awards, certain works were deemed ineligible for political reasons (although otherwise eligible) – solely because the awards ceremony was being held in Chengdu, China. A short version of the report can be read here, and this is the full length investigative report and a response from the 2024 Glasgow WorldCon here.