Hey everybody! I’ve got four reviews for you today! Though I need to start thinking if my criticism is maybe standing in the way of producing longer-form nonfiction, and fiction of any kind. Criticism is easy for me, and it builds off itself- the more books I look at that way, the more connections I can make. Fiction, and longer-form work, is harder, more of an imaginative lift, and does not build on itself the same way… anyway. Enjoy!
CONTENTS
Reviews
Davidson, The Mirror and the Phoenix
Thiel, Zero to One
Scalzi, Redshirts
Lewis, The Rabbi Who Prayed With Fire
Lagniappe
Mithra Pic: Toasted Loaf
REVIEWS
Avram Davidson, “The Mirror and the Phoenix” (1969) - This was fun. Apparently, during what I’m told I’m not supposed to call “The Dark Ages” (though honestly, considering all the shit people say about the twentieth century, which say what you want about it, but cured a lot of diseases and put a man on the moon…), many Europeans believed that Virgil, the poet of the Aeneid, was a wizard of some renown! Old SFF hand Avram Davidson took that idea and made this story around it. Not only does he depict Vergil (he uses that spelling, apparently it’s gone back and forth) as a wizard, he depicts the world as a whole as having the confusion and geographical/historical inconsistency that a half-literate scribe scratching away in tenth-century Thuringia might give to it.
Vergil gets a job from a high-end lady: find her daughter, who went missing on the way to becoming an imperial concubine. To sweeten the pot, the lady steals Vergil’s potency! He doesn’t like that. He’s motivated. He has to create a mirror, and not just any mirror- a “virgin speculum.” This bronze mirror needs to be made in such a way that in the very instant of its ability to reflect light, Vergil can cast a spell and see where the daughter went. Mirrors were tricky enough for the ancients, I’m told, but a virgin speculum! That’s a whole thing. Vergil needs to secure tin and copper because normal bronze won’t do it, he needs his own bronze. Tin is a monopoly of Cornish chieftains, copper only comes from weird degenerated Aphrodite-worshiping Cypriots, the “Sea Huns” have given up their horses and taken to terrorizing the Mediterranean, so it’s pretty hard to get all that stuff. Meanwhile, there’s all kinds of mysterious hints as to where the daughter might be, and Vergil’s Phoenician friend who sails him around acts increasingly weird.
This is an agreeably shaggy, ponderous work, especially for a fairly short novel. It’s not hard to tell what’s going on but there’s also not the kind of handholding one gets used to in secondary world fantasies, especially contemporary ones. The world feels not just like there’s magic, but that it runs according to a magical logic. All too many stories with magic – and I can’t help but notice how the turn in this dynamic seems to have come with the popularization of games with magic systems, like Dungeons and Dragons – make magic seem like technology, a set of tools to use like any other, possibly dangerous but not really irrational, the world still works according to rules a Galileo or a Descartes could describe. It’s fun to see a world that isn’t like that, especially based on history. ****’
Peter Thiel, “Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future” (2014) - This is the last book I read of a series of seven unconventional right-wing books, books that in some sense were off the beaten path of conservatism, but reflected or were influential or parallel in some way… or anyway, a projected series. There doesn’t seem to be a good English translation of alleged Chinese state authoritarianism apologist Wang Huning out there, and the Unabomber Manifesto is really more of a pamphlet than a book, no more within my ambit of reviews than any single article.
I say all that to say this: Peter Thiel is probably the slimiest motherfucker out of those seven with which I started, which include a slavery apologist in the person of Thaddeus Russell and an actual murderer in the person of Ted Kaczynski. The depths to which Thiel would sink to accomplish his ends reach far below what a middling scribbler like Russell could manage, and his capacity for destruction is much more real than anything Kaczynski could have dreamt. And yet, I was probably the most on board with Thiel as I was with any of the writers I read in this series… for the first, maybe, quarter of “Zero to One,” his business manifesto, assembled out of notes his catamite and potential Arizona Senator Blake Masters took when Masters sat Thiel’s tech business class at Stanford.
At this point, contrarianism-posturers – and there is arguably no bigger or more historically important claimant to the throne of contrarian-philosopher than Peter Thiel – have to overcome reflexive skepticism from anyone who has noticed how contrived their postures and goofy their claims often are. But Thiel did manage some actually good and, in some ways, genuinely contrarian, in a good way, points, early in the book. The big one is that competition is not the boon to innovation that people think it is. Market competition does not lead to the best products- it leads to the products that can beat others at market, which is not the same thing. “He overstates his case,” I thought, reading it, “I know a lot of nerds and that’s just how they talk,” I reasoned, going over his pro-monopoly arguments. Monopolies can focus on their task, not on competition, and therefore prevent themselves from either pursuing illusory goals or simply competing away their whole profit margin. “If he could get that profit in and of itself is in large part the problem, we’d really be getting somewhere!” I figured.
ANNH! Buzzer noise, around a third or a quarter of the way in. It turns out that market competition is a bad way of assigning value not because of the warping effects of profit-taking, but because it involves the preferences of everybody, i.e., the stupid little people who don’t care enough about space travel and life extension technology. What you need are small, dedicated, elite bodies – like the founding core of a tech startup, Thiel tells us – willing to flout rules and conventions, truly “think different” (about things like “the diversity myth,” the title of another Thiel book, or obeying safety regulations), and achieve monopoly power. Only such people can get us out of our current demoralizing state, with ever-improving gadgetry and entertainment options, but basic needs failing to be met… that is, the basic needs of Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel needs space travel, because he’s a nerd, and he needs life extension, because he’s one of those chickenshit, profoundly hard to respect nerds who are terrified of natural death. What’s the matter, Pete? Death will eliminate the source of all your problems, the irritation you can’t be rid of despite your billions of dollars- it will eliminate you. Once it takes that turn, the book is useless, except as a guide to the thought of a man our society, in its wisdom, has imbued with absurd amounts of power and money. As far as I’m concerned, the closer the day he meets that big fear of his, the better. It certainly won’t leave the written word any poorer. *’
John Scalzi, “Redshirts” (2012) - Fun (?) fact: John Scalzi is one of the last white men to have a work nominated for the Hugo Award for best novel! This was in 2018, and he shares this distinction with Kim Stanley Robinson. From a cynical perspective, you can say the two men represent the two “acceptable” faces a white male writer can present to the SFF world, at least if you want awards. Robinson has the wonk face, the thoughtful digester of papers and reports about space technology and climate change, a leftist but a thoughtful (read: not especially revolutionary) one. You can also call it “the far face” - it almost certainly helps that he’s been in the field since the eighties, hasn’t thrown racial slurs or weird sex stuff around in his books, and is not on twitter. Scalzi has the nerd face, a sort of Joss Whedon figure (but, doing scifi novels instead of TV and films, does not squat atop our culture in quite the same way Whedon does), lots of quips, lots of genre self-awareness, you can map his work, bit by bit, on TVTropes. His is the near face- he’s on twitter, a lot, and seems to have a well-considered idea of where to stick the knife in, on there- into anybody who kicks against the idea that current scifi (that is, the scifi scene that has made him at least somewhat rich and famous) is the best scifi we could hope for, at least those with the temerity to kick on Al Gore’s Internet. I shouldn’t have to say this, but seeing as this is going out notionally public: I don’t think white men are oppressed, or have bad chances in contemporary SFF, I think the SFF scene as it exists now has prescribed roles for everyone, including women, PoC, etc., and for in-the-club white dudes, the above seems to describe the workable roles. Not my fault!
I’m probably making this more about internal SFF scene politics because A. I’m trying to figure what, if anything, it all means myself, as a pretty outside observer and B. the book itself does not bear that much interest. It’s not a bad book, but it suffers in comparison to an earlier work with similar ideas and energy, namely, the movie “Galaxy Quest.” Like in “Galaxy Quest,” a cheesy scifi space-exploration show – like Star Trek at its most pro-forma – intrudes on the real world. In “Galaxy Quest,” there’s a pretty clever explanation as to why: an alien civilization gets our TV signals, sees the cheesy show, and bases its space exploration on it. “Redshirts” starts out with a somewhat more ambitious premise: the characters lives are being written, as they live, on Earth, as a cheesy scifi serial. So the characters – who are the sort of disposable lower-ranking officers who can be disposed of by scifi writers to show the danger of a given planet or other away team mission, the titular “redshirts” – go through some sort of wormhole and wind up in Hollywood, begging a bunch of low-rent network producers for their lives.
Scalzi’s not a bad storyteller, structurally speaking, does decent action scenes, brings the “mystery” of why the ship is so strange and so many people die along pretty well, and obviously knows his tropes. The problem is, he has too many indistinct characters and none of them really land. There are more redshirts in “Redshirts” than are necessary, except maybe insofar as to give them analogs in the real world and therefore cross-dimensional storylines- this one gets swapped out for a producer’s dying son, that one falls (platonically?) in love with the actor who plays him in our world, etc. I suppose it makes sense that only a few of the characters on the ship have any character – the main characters on the show, who survive numerous terrible incidents while the redshirts die all around them. But it’s a bit of a problem when the less fleshed-out characters are the characters in your book! And there’s seemingly at least one, upwards of three too many!
Those dorky little aliens in “Galaxy Quest” weren’t, like, Ibsen characters or something, but they had characteristics. The washed-up TV stars they drafted into helping them were pretty cliche, but they were well-written and funny. This is more than Scalzi manages for any of his characters in “Redshirts.” I’m probably making it sound worse than it is. Like I said, it wasn’t utterly without good characteristics. But if you’re going to work in a story groove that’s already been pretty well-worn – especially by one, well-loved work like “Galaxy Quest” – you really need to distinguish yourself, and “Redshirts” doesn’t do much to do that. But I guess that’s what the SFF public – or anyway, the SFF scene loudmouths who edit, publish, review, and give awards to books – want! ***
Rachel Sharona Lewis, “The Rabbi Who Prayed With Fire” (2021) - This was a pretty fun crime novel about a mystery-solving rabbi! Inspired by a mystery series from the mid-20th century starring a rabbi, we have Vivian Green, who just started at Providence’s Beth Abraham congregation (I think it’s Conservative but not certain). It’s a fairly typical staid Jewish congregation, losing members out of an aging demographic, unsure what to do about it all. Vivian wants her congregants to get more involved in local social justice causes. Her boss, senior rabbi Joseph, supports her in theory but much less so in practice. For instance, it looks like most of the congregation will back the establishment Dem candidate in the next election for mayor, despite there being alternatives in the form of a smart, vaguely Warren-esque policy lady and a firebrand young Dominican-American man out to fight police injustice.
And then some of the temple burns down! No one is hurt but everyone is scared. Among other things, it encourages the congregation to withdraw further into the defensive shell that Vivian (and, one suspects, the author) sees as the characteristic issue in American Jewish life today. Assuming anti-semites are out to get them — knowing, in fact, that some are, despite a lack of evidence that they had anything to do with the fire — the congregation gets closer to the police. This is the same police that brutalized the son of the temple groundskeeper, and who Rabbi Joseph refused to say anything about when they did. The groundskeeper, pretty much the only black person involved with the Beth Abraham community in any capacity, was also the last person seen at the site of the blaze before it went up. To pay for the damage, the congregation eyes selling off some of its real estate to luxury developers, making even worse the gentrification issues that, in turn, enable further police abuses.
It’s a mess! Vivian tries to figure out what’s going on while also fulfilling her clerical duties, and as someone who has known a fair number of people in similar roles, Lewis accurately depicts the endless round of the conscientious mediator between mundane and divine. In the course of trying to figure stuff out, Vivian does have time for the occasional brunch with fellow lady clerics (a Unitarian and an Episcopalian, if anyone is keeping score), and strikes up a romance with the lady who runs the establishment candidate’s establishment-ass, “smart growth” mayoral campaign. Eventually, her poking around gets noticed, and she has to deal with some tense situations before any kind of resolution comes together.
It’s pretty good! Especially considering this is a first novel. The pacing and plotting works well, and while the book wears its politics on its sleeve, it’s never didactic. I will say that for me, one of the most important elements of any crime fiction is compelling villains, and in this one, the villains are not very well fleshed out. I wonder if the author preferred to dwell with more savory characters- other than a few out and out bad guys, most of the characters, even when they’re wrong, are very much human, acting out of credible motivations, and are very much distinguishable. The bad guys here act out of the most credible, as in believable if you know anything about the world, motives imaginable, but don’t have a ton of character or distinguishing features to them. But maybe we can get more of that on Vivian’s next outing, which I hope Lewis will write soon! ****
LAGNIAPPE
Mithra Pic: Toasted Loaf
Sometimes, Mithra looks like a loaf of bread.
re: Redshirts/Scalzi
hot take: Scalzi's books are all fun romps (read: not very heady reads) but marketed as if they're mind-bendingly cool scifi. That's a market niche. Tbh I think his Twitter is more interesting & if I malign anything in my vibe about Scalzi it's his knowing what market niche he's writing in and delivering pretty well what people want. I've read several of Scalzi's books & generally don't think he's like, a good writer's writer. What he is, though, is an absolutely terrific "oh shit I forgot to bring my parents a bottle of wine, better pick them up the latest Scalzi so they can read it before bed, safely tucked into their worldviews & senses of self" writer. His books are absolutely spectacular as a way of connecting with my dad, e.g..
If this comes across as any degree of "leave Scalzi alone!!1" please know that's not where I'm coming from. Appreciate the comparison to Galaxy Quest & the speculative fiction political scene discussion. But I also think it's important to note the commercial pressures Scalzi is conforming to, and which shapes his prominence as a ficiton writer/covers up for his failings as a writer more generally.