Hello and welcome to this week’s Melendy Avenue Review! Nothing fancy, just three reviews — a mediocre scifi, a great horror/scifi, and a bad libertarian political book — and a nice picture of Mithra. It’s August! It’s too hot and busy for too much stuff. You’ll see a Birthday Lecture soon!
CONTENTS
Reviews
James S.A. Corey, Babylon’s Ashes
Natalie Ironside, The Last Girl Scout
Murray Rothbard, Power and Market
Lagniappe
Mithra Pic: Mithra… in profile
REVIEWS
James S.A. Corey, “Babylon’s Ashes” (2016) (narrated by Jefferson Mays) - Well, the two Coreys (“James S.A. Corey” is a house name for two dudes) decided they’d do space Tolstoy. They even make it explicit in the last chapter, with one of their characters reading and expounding on the old Russky wife-hating sage. Indeed, they bring back pretty much every viewpoint character from the previous four books who aren’t dead, and a few more besides, to give their take on the goings-on.
And what ARE the goings-on? The Solar System is fucked after the last book, when a coalition of Asteroid Belt extremists and shady Martian-colonist naval officers blast the fuck out of Earth with asteroids. Without Earth, ecological collapse threatens the system. There’s an alien gateway that can get people to other solar systems out by Neptune, but the extremists control it. Like I said, it seems the Coreys got sick of the “Alien”-esque workaday space world last book and decided to apocalypse it. That wasn’t a great move, but was somewhat interesting. Now they need to clean up their toys and get them somewhere else. They spend hundreds of pages doing it! And it’s not that good, or that interesting.
The many viewpoint characters give you a bunch of looks at the world of the Expanse, but that world isn’t interesting enough to sustain the weight. It’s not bad, and it can definitely sustain good action, like in the first three books. But when interest has to come from the details of the world, it’s not enough. The Coreys don’t make anything that original or interesting. The closest is the Belters, which is good as they’re the pivot of the whole thing. A space-bound culture raised on stations, ships, and asteroid, they have kind of a proletarian thing (exploited by Inner Planets) and kind of a nationalist thing and kind of vision of everyone being space-based? It’s fine that the movement is confused. Movements are often confused. But the Belt, it’s people, and it’s politics don’t feel real enough to sustain the action or my interest that much, especially as a movement willing to get behind a genocidaire who also destroyed their lifeline, ie the Earth (the rest of the system has not been meaningfully terraformed). This is because Belter politics are a grab-bag of features of demotic politics and nothing coherent. It doesn’t scan. Martian and Earth politics and society are even less fleshed out.
All of this would be forgivable if the action delivered, but it doesn’t. It’s scattered and confused, and the Coreys take time out to deliver little homilies on “human nature,” how we’re “tribal” — lot to be said about the resurgence of that adjective in recent decades — and greedy but things are still worth it and anyone who tries to radically change things is bad, blah blah the usual. I’m not a big Tolstoy guy to begin with. Pop scifi American space Tolstoy is hard to take. Eventually they go out to the alien gate and there’s a fight in the gate and it’s fine, people are gonna expand into the galaxy but the Belters will get some stuff etc. I’ve been told the one that comes after this is better, and the blurb I read shows some promising surprises, so we’ll see. **’
Natalie Ironside, “The Last Girl Scout” (2020) - This fucking ruled. It’s two hundred years after a mid-21st century nuclear war! Some shit is still fucked — heavily nuked areas are still radioactive and have “roamers,” zombies more or less, products of biowar weapons, roaming around — but civilization has rebuilt in some areas. One such is the Ashland Confederated Republic, a communist federation of survivors in Kentucky, Tennessee, and parts south (until you get to the “exclusion zones” around nuked-out Birmingham and Atlanta… I guess they didn’t bother with Nashville? It’s ok). Across the Ohio River they face off with the Blacklands New Republic, a white supremacist fascist state. You might wonder why survivors of an apocalypse would, a hundred years later, decide to take up early twentieth century ideologies, complete with trappings (the Ashlanders still debate about Trotsky; the fascists have Arditi and often use Italian or German phrases). Well, post-apocalyptic (or generally futuristic) atavism has been a thing in scifi forever, with monarchies, feudalism, the Wild West, and god knows what else coming back after the bombs fall- so why not ideological struggle circa 1937? I dig it!
Natalie Ironside, an IWW organizer, doesn’t mess around, and her main character, Magnolia “Mags” Blackadder, is a commissar, the supposed avatar of communist evil. But this is a state where communism works, more or less, and the commissars are there to ensure the rights of soldiers (keeping those pesky officers in line) and in general be kind of wandering Jedi of the revolution. Mags is young, her family got all fucked up in a famine, she’s a transwoman, and she lives for her work- advancing the Revolution and fighting fascists. She’s sent on an impossible mission- crack The Citadel. Deep in the “Exclusion Zone” in the Acela Corridor, the Citadel shines bright with the sort of technological salvage the communes could really use to up their automation game and advance towards utopia. It also shines with menace- few who have tried to take the Citadel have ever come back. Except for Ohio Nazis (“I fucking hate Ohio Nazis”)- they’re going to the Citadel and coming back. It’s ominous.
First, of course, Mags needs to gather a team. There’s the Prof, her old professor at the academy who knows Old American tech. There’s Connor, whose wife was horribly killed by a vampire (there’s vampires) last time out to the Citadel. There’s TJ, who they kind of pick up at an anarchist bar along the way, but they seem cool? And most importantly, there’s Jules. Jules is a renegade fascist Arditi, a transwoman and survivor of harrowing abuse at the hands of her former co-fascists. She labors under a crushing weight of trauma and guilt. She and Mags meet up and it’s love at first sight. They talk trauma and fuck all the way from the anarchist zone of the communist state (there’s some amusing insults back and forth between anarchists and communists but they work together in the crunch) in the Appalachians to the Baltimore suburbs where the Citadel waits.
There’s a few different kinds of action in the book and Ironside handles them all with aplomb. There’s a lot of fights, both “unbalanced” horror-style violence — her vampires are genuinely scary — and action-movie style fights dealing with unfriendly bandits and fascists. There’s also a lot of emotional relationship talk! Having read a lot of military science fiction due to Reasons lately, I’ve read a lot of both lately — your military scifi always has dudes thinking about love — and I think Ironside ranks with the best of them at military action and beats them all hollow on the relationship stuff. She comes out of the fanfiction scene and this is self-published, and if I’m being honest I think it could have benefited from professional editing — it gets repetitive — but not at the cost of Ironside’s style (hell, you ever listen to people talk relationships? Or politics? It’s repetitive!). It works quite well as stands.
There’s so much more, even in the first part, that I can’t give due consideration to — a friendly early 2000s hipster girl vampire (kind of a Marceline type)! Kaiserine/Nazi vampire experiments brought stateside by Operation Paperclip AND involving a gay WWI vampire romance that goes bad because one vampire becomes a Nazi and the other a Communist! A fascist prison camp/bordello for transwomen! Terrible revenge! Tac nukes! — and it’s just a hell of a lot of fun.
And then there’s the second part! If I’m being honest I think this could have been a separate book. It’s rare when I want more of a novel, but I wanted more of this one. After the Ohio fascist plan revolving around the Citadel goes up in smoke, the fash say “yolo” and try to bulldog the Ohio River anyway, just as a meeting of the Soviets is happening! The Soviets are doing the math and are realizing — except for some lame Stalinoid class reductionists — that they need to take these fash sons of bitches down. They can’t coexist. They’re expanding in the west against the Indigenious portions of the Republic. Who knows when they’ll find some other superweapon? They can’t do “force against force” — there’s more people in the fertile Ohio farmland than in the rocky Appalachia soil — but they can subvert the fash from beneath (which I like because it’s the fascists’ straight up worse nightmare). But the fash strike first! Mags, Jules, a new lover of theirs, and some of the rest of the old crew are sent into enemy territory to help light up the kindling under the fash’s asses.
This is also overstuffed with cool shit — fash vampire long-range raids to take out artillery! Guerrilla action! Inter-fash political bullshit! Commie spies using their control over the illicit cigarette and coffee trade to smuggle arms to the gay underground in fash cities! Forgiveness and revenge! More emotions talk! — to the point where, like I said, I would’ve liked to see it as its own big book. But it’s cool as is.
If I hazard a criticism beyond the editing/structure, I’d say that in the action, she could use to vary up the patterns of setback and victory a little. Ironside has made clear that she is not telling stories of dystopia, even with all the terrible shit that happens in the book and it’s background, she is telling stories of hope. We can build back better, together- we can be who we are and find love and peace. That’s cool! I would say it creates a pattern wherein we are frontloaded with tragedy — setbacks in the action and revelations of terrible trauma for the characters — and backloaded with victories. That’s fine as a first-level pattern. The victories feel earned. But I think she could heighten the tension and drama by having more setbacks and more contradictions — in the process of achieving victory —. She’s got the characters with depth for it, and the knowledge; clearly, she knows her stuff about politics, war (something tells me she’s followed the news out of Syria), ecology, etc. But, hell, when she wrote a book this fun, she can do her own thing. It’s been a long time since I “geeked out” over fiction, but here I am. *****
Murray Rothbard, “Power and Market: Government and the Economy” (1970) - I remember being a baby grad student and setting out to read various important German philosophers: your Kants, your Hegels, your Nietzsches, your Heideggers. My enjoyment and comprehension values varied, but between being a historian and, I figure, being an American, I could never get fully “into” them because it just felt like people saying words out of their mouths. I’m not a scientist, I don’t demand data and scientific method from everything, but I guess I just prefer there to be some more backing to the things people say than that it sounds good. Ironically, given his reputation and some of his other statements, Nietzsche was the one who got closest to being at all empirical, with his early career in classical studies. I’ve gotten something out of all the philosophers I’ve named, especially as I got older and realized that everyone, explicit or not, has some sort of non-empirical basis on which to launch their empirical investigations. I came to think that there’s a degree to which the human capacity for thinking these things at all indicates that such things are worth thinking. Our ability to abstract and imagine the infinite points to something more than empiricism can answer for, even if I generally prefer to make my way with the solid groundings of citations and paper trails.
I thought of this while reading Murray Rothbard, and to a lesser extent other libertarian thinkers recently. Rothbard would probably hate being compared to most of these guys, especially Hegel, cast in Rothbard’s day as the arch-philosopher of the dreaded state. I tend to think Hegel et al would return the favor. To me, this is no “both sides” business. At its worst and most abstruse, the continental philosophical tradition (as opposed to contemporary continental philosophy, more of an industry than anything else) represents people bringing their best lights to difficult and essential aspects of what it is to be human. What Murray Rothbard and his cothinkera represent is a wretched provincial charade of the same thing, taking the portentous stakes, philosophical excuses to not bother with the empirical, and pretentious language of the philosophical enterprise to affirm utter crankery… though it’s somewhat of an insult to cranks, some of whom don’t wind up just saying “whatever I imagine rich people to want” over and over again as though it’s capital-T Truth.
In this book, a portion of his 1962 masterwork “Man Economy, and State,” Rothbard practices what he calls “praxeology.” Have you not heard of that? Well, that’s probably because it’s not a real thing. Austrian School economists dug it out of the corpse of classical learning, isolating a bit of Aristotle here and various others there, to create a basis for understanding the world based on “human action,” defined as purposive, goal-oriented, and if not perfectly-informed than reasonably-informed. From this axiom, you derive other axioms, and go on your merry way. “Power and Market” is axiom after axiom after (strawman) objections to axioms he likes followed up axioms disproving the objections. That’s it. He will occasionally throw in a cherry-picked empirical fact, but not often.
Rothbard is both an outlier and something of a bridge figure in the history of libertarianism (it makes sense that libertarians would have bridges to outliers of thought- if only they’d stay there). He went a lot farther than most libertarians did in terms of denying a government role in pretty much anything, including securing a sound currency or maintaining a common defense. All that can be privatized, too, Rothbard insists, making him the father of “anarchocapitalism.” Of course, we know “ancaps” these days by their tendency to join forces with outright fascists, and we know why- because ancap is feudalism with extra steps, and that’s more or less what a stable fascism would degenerate into, Himmler’s fatuous little rural volks-deutsch daydream. Did Rothbard know that? Did he care? Does it matter? To the extent I understand Rothbard’s trajectory, it was one long process of getting back at his neighborhood- he was a conservative geek, a bowtie dipshit from the beginning, which didn’t make him popular growing up in the thirties and forties in Jewish neighborhoods in New York. He had acolytes but he didn’t seem to have friends- he busted up with Ayn Rand, for instance, when neither one would bend the knee to the other. He wound up plonking himself down with neoconfederates and Holocaust deniers at the Mises Institute in Alabama and there he stayed til he popped his clogs in 1995.
For all he was a weirdo, like I say, Rothbard was also a bridge, specifically between the stormy continental pessimism of much of the original Austrian School economists like von Mises and von Hayek and what would become American libertarianism. It might be hard to remember now that it got its lunch money took by resurgent fascism, but libertarianism used to be an optimistic creed. Sooner or later — probably sooner — everyone would see that the free market was the way to go. It was implicit in everything from technology to pop culture, politics just had to catch up. As for Rothbard’s role in all this, let’s put it this way: at his gauziest and dumbest, von Hayek would never have made the sort of promises Rothbard makes for what would be possible if the government would just cease existing. “Good government” was not an oxymoron for libertarians or many other neoliberals before Rothbard. In characteristic American style, various hustlers like Milton Friedman and Ronald Reagan and whoever else would use aspects of the privatization-mania Rothbard philosophized to pry apart the public sector, without giving away a scintilla of power. Ancaps could screech but they should have cheered- this is what they were for.
In the end, though, I go back to the book itself and it’s structure. What this “praxeology” business reminds me of is a more pretentious version of what you often see in vernacular philosophizing, including the thought patterns of conspiracy theorists and “sovereign citizen” types, some of whom have vaguely anarchocapitalist notions already. You start with a few things you see around you, and apply a set of mental operations to them. If you come into it with a paranoid and/or anti-authority streak, anyone pointing out that your system has some holes in it is just trying to suppress you and your ideas. The reasoning itself that Rothbard followed in his praxeology reminded me of nothing so much as the “lessons” in “Supreme Mathematics” practiced by Nation of Islam offshoot commonly called the Five Percenters. They like to improvise on various axioms and numerological concepts to come up with “science,” a sort of Kabbalah developed by black kids in the depths of the inner city, the playgrounds and the prison yards. To the best of my knowledge, though, praxeology has never inspired music as good as the Wu Tang Clan, and the Gods and Earths haven’t contributed as much as libertarians have to our current mess, nor do they screech like tea kettles about how their method is the only rational method. I know which I prefer. **
LAGNIAPPE
Mithra Pic: Mithra… in profile