Melendy Avenue Review 2023-05-26
Hello! Pretty good review- an election, some reading notes, and my essay this time is about my fiction work in progress. I can’t serialize the story, because I might try to publish it. But I can talk about what I’m doing. Hopefully it’s of some interest!
CONTENTS
Election: Contemporary Literary Fiction Audiobooks, McElroy vs McQueen vs Murakami
Reading Notes: Carpenter, Acheson
Work in Progress Essay: The World of “War Baby” 1 - Future History
ELECTION
Hey all, time for another reading election! This will determine which of a set of books I read or listen to first. Pick your preference! No need for educated takes, we love low-information voters! This particular election is for audiobooks I listen to in order to get an idea of what’s going on in “contemporary” (I guess I’m old, I’ll go back as far as 2008) “literary fiction” (whatever that means these days).
THE CANDIDATES
Alex McElroy, The Atmospherians (2021) - No, they aren’t one of the podcasting McElroys, I don’t think… did we all get sick of those ones yet? This one wrote a novel about cults and gender politics. I feel like that could really go either way!
LaTanya McQueen, When the Reckoning Comes (2021) - Revenants are the order of the day in this novel about a wedding or reunion (both? I can’t remember) that goes horribly awry at a plantation event space!
Haruki Murakami, IQ84 (2009) - Remember when people were carrying this around? I do! I only vaguely know what it’s about. Something dystopian? I’m not the biggest Murakami fan but not the biggest detractor, either.
READING NOTES
Why do I read literary biographies? What do I expect, at this late date? Well, Humphrey Carpenter’s biography of J.R.R. Tolkien is far from the worst. And it was published only two years after the old word-monger died, so, you know. I guess the problem is that I want literary biographies to actually be intellectual histories. Want to know about old Ronny Tolkien’s relationships with his wife, his mom, various priests? Humphrey Carpenter has got you. You can also get insights like “child Tolkien saw signs in Welsh on coal cars as a kid in Birmingham and that’s how he got into languages.” Sure! But what about, say, the intellectual environment that nurtured him, that channeled that interest into the routes it would take? Tolkien’s body of work is so huge, so rich, you’d figure anyone would have a field day tracing back the influences. Nerds do it all the time, right? Well, I guess Carpenter wasn’t necessarily trying to sell strictly to nerds. You also have to figure that he’d have to thread a complicated needle: a lot of the discourses in which Tolkien worked and from which he drew sound sketchy to post-WWII ears, a lot of weird Volkisch stuff there. Tolkien, for all he was a romantic monarchist and democracy-skeptic, was not a Nazi or a fascist- we’ve all seen that great letter he sent to the Nazi censor that gets shared around the internet. In any event, this isn’t a bad book. I guess I don’t get the genre. I also have a copy of Carpenter’s book on Evelyn Waugh’s milieu, The Brideshead Generation, laying around, and I’ll probably read it at some point- you’ve got to figure the material there would at least be better gossip, as opposed to the life of a happily married, successful Oxford don and novelist.
Why do I read Cold War memoirs? Well, they wrote better than political types nowadays. Dean Acheson’s Present at the Creation couldn’t be written and, likely, would not be published in its current state by any politician or bureaucrat today. Acheson served as Secretary of State during a crucial period of Harry Truman’s presidency, and worked at various other State Department roles for most of the FDR-Truman period. He was one of the architects of American Cold War strategy and an avatar of the “best and the brightest” Ivy League WASP elite, right down to the Mid-Atlantic accent, menswear choices, and concomitant borderline-queer-baiting at the hands of Joe McCarthy. He tells the story of his time at State in excruciating detail, seemingly down to the smallest bureaucratic battles, but it’s made bearable, fun even, by his beautiful prose style and bitchy little asides. Of course, he uses this to make himself out as the reasonable man in a world full of political hacks, ideologues left and right, and time-servers, and beyond directing his choice of digs his self-depiction also shapes the structure of the book and its argument. I’m reasonably sympathetic to the argument, in one of the perennial debates in American diplomatic history (my old stomping ground!) that Acheson made Truman out to be the great American leader in this memoirs precisely because Acheson could order Truman around when it came to foreign policy. He couldn’t do that with FDR, and Acheson seldom misses a chance to make FDR out to be be something between a force of nature and a spoiled dilettante child meddling where he shouldn’t. Acheson might very well have genuinely believed that the sine qua non of responsible statesmanship was listening to him, and therefore, Truman was the greater man. As he himself was well aware, Dean Acheson did not lack self-regard: “Present at the Creation” is a reference to a story that some Spanish King said if he had been present at the creation of the world, he’d have some choice suggestions for God. Moreover, Acheson published this in 1971, after his last major statement on American diplomacy: telling JFK that he should get out of Vietnam. Sure, Acheson was a Cold Warrior, is how he positions himself, but not a dummy. He was a tragically noble holder of the line, not some psycho hawk. You might be surprised how many of the old school Cold Warriors at or around State thought that way- I actually have met a few in my travels, or their epigones. Well, that’s as may be. A lot went into the decisions to get into Vietnam and stay there. A major part of Kennedy’s strategic calculus was seeing what happened to the likes of Acheson after his generation of Cold Warriors “lost China,” stalemated in Korea, and never rolled anything back in Europe. The Republicans ate their lunch and, very relevant to the image-conscious Kennedys, humiliated them, emasculated them. With Goldwater waiting in the wings… Acheson, old-school Wilsonian progressive Democrat, didn’t think such concerns should apply. Well, they do, especially to a massive generational ideological warfare project like the Cold War. Acheson, like the best of his WASP-y generation, is equal measures frustrating and fascinating. Let me break the Yalie mood and say this gigantic book almost works best as a bathroom read- short, pithy chapters, often ending on an ironic note, with discrete boundaries.
WORK IN PROGRESS ESSAY: The World of “War Baby” Part 1 - Future History
I thought it might be interesting to talk some about my main fiction writing project. I’ve got a few titles in mind – “Some Who Came After,” “The Minotaur’s Son” – but we’ll stick with the first title I came up with, “War Baby,” for now. Like I said before, this is the story of a young man, Ray McKenzie, trying to come to terms with the world he lives in and his family’s part in making it. It’s a world where a generation of climate-driven disaster and war broke apart nations, led to millions of deaths, and redrew the map of the world. Ray’s father helped found the socialist confederation that rules, peaceably and prosperously, over much of both sides of the Atlantic, including Ontario, where Ray grows up.
However pleasant and equitable things are in the Atlantic Confederation, it is well known that dark, violent things had to happen to make the Confederation, and still do happen to protect it- and Ray’s father was, and is, in the thick of it. Among other things, the Confederation’s security forces were found to have taken children from the families of reactionaries during the revolutionary years, and given them to “reliable” revolutionary families to raise. Against all evidence other than a deep-seated psychological certainty, Ray begins to believe he is one of these “war babies,” and his obsessive following of the implications of this idea lead him to confront his family’s legacy.
Among other things, I figure I can use this newsletter space to let out some of the “world-building” that I sometimes develop to an unhealthy degree in writing projects. I find myself, on my commutes, walking to the grocery store, etc., spinning out details of the worlds in which I set fictional projects. It’s fun, and for a speculative fiction project some worldbuilding is necessary, but it can lard down a work of fiction if you throw in every neat idea you had. I know- I did this with a previous stab at a novel, which I finished a few years back. This draft had other problems, but “too much world” was definitely one of them. But I figure I can maybe tease some of it out here… and maybe get people interested in the novel a little more in the bargain.
You can argue that the Atlantic Confederation constitutes a character in “War Baby” and other story ideas I have, in much the same way the Culture was a character in Iain Banks’ epochal scifi series. I see any government or other large social formation that can come out the other side of the messes we got ourselves into as simultaneously adhering to some strong social vision and maintaining a flexible, pragmatic attitude towards the adaptations it will need to make to survive. So, I don’t see the Atlantic Confederation as a rote reiteration of the Soviet Union, or of Rojava, or whichever other source of revolutionary inspiration people might have.
I will say, like those examples, really like every great historical beginning, the Atlantic Confederation came more from improvisation than from some master plan. In specific, the Confederation emerged from weakness- the increasing weakness of central authority in advanced capitalist countries as the logic of capitalism undermines government effectiveness in a context of spiraling catastrophe. It’s less that states and regions that break away from the US, Canada, and other powers are so strong, but that governments led by clowns, fanatics, time-servers (and sometimes all three at the same time) drive people to support leaders and movements that look to similar movements in neighboring areas to figure out ways to keep civilization intact where they can.
When megastorms hit and central authority refuses to provide aid to affected areas because said areas wouldn’t enforce their culture war mandates, people organize to save lives. When refugees from rising waters take to the oceans of the world in their millions looking for sanctuary, regions already alienated from cruel and unresponsive central governments defy those governments to let desperate people in, often giving them work making the infrastructure that these same governments refuse to build, and often in cooperation across national lines with friendly regions. When these governments lash out in fury, jailing, killing, and encouraging sectarian division further, these regions band together in self-defense. Rebels find that for all of their deranged murderousness, the great powers of the capitalist world are actually quite weak. The difference is, those who would change things, or just survive, have been forced to become strong, not the even-weaker force they had been for generations.
The new polities of climate-ravaged Earth didn’t start with flags, Olympic teams, manifestos and borders. In fact, for a while there – for much of Ray’s childhood, in fact, though he was relatively insulated from it – it looked like such things as Olympic Games or even civilizations capable of producing manifestos might not be long for this Earth. To the extent the rebellious regions did the things they did – greet the refugee, appropriate the plutocrats, build according to human need rather than capitalist class profit, refuse the orders of central authority and defend themselves from it when needs be – in the name of humanity, civilization, even just an expanded sense of self-interest, those invested in the old order and its symbols came to actively despise those very things. The US launched a disastrous foreign wars in an attempt to unify the country the old-fashioned way. While this, arguably, was the greatest blunder of all – among other things, it encouraged massive military defections, some of which provided the breakaway regions with much-needed muscle – the disaster of war paired with the ongoing defiance of the regions to accelerate the ideological fanaticism of what came to be known, by Ray’s day, as the death cults. The destruction of any effort to adapt to the crises of climate change and capitalism – typically by killing those making the efforts and anyone associated with them – became a value, often the sole value, to millions who were willing to kill and die for it.
As terrible as the violence of the death cults and the states increasingly beholden to them was, it also served to make the choice clear: socialism or barbarism. In the end, more people wanted a reliable supply of food, clean water, and electricity, a say in their system of governance, and education for their children than wanted an apocalyptic confrontation. Lines came to be drawn on the map according to what percentage of a given population that was or was not ideologically dedicated to doing actively harmful things in response to the crises. Sovereignty became much less tied to geographical borders, more divisible and negotiable than in eras past, but geography still imposed some of its old political logics. The breakaway regions denied the logic of borders, and the death cults insisted that the old borders were sacrosanct, but between them, they wound up drawing a new set- between the Confederations, the legacy nations, and the rump states.
As American military and financial hegemony collapsed, disorder spread and governments and people throughout the world sought out new patterns of relationships. China was one beneficiary, as had been long predicted. The European Union borrowed some strategies from the emerging socialist confederations (regional cooperation, economic planning) but others from the death cults (anti-immigrant violence, rallying for the defense of privilege masked as traditional identity) to consolidate power. But many parts of the world looked to the Confederations, not just the one growing in the Atlantic, but others responding to similar dynamics – irresponsible central power, rising international cooperation between regions, reactionary backlash leading to revolutionary consolidation – arose in the Indian Ocean and the Eastern Mediterranean. The leaders of these Confederations had learned to be ferociously insistent on function, on the protection of the rights, responsibilities, and uses of human-centered civilization, but flexible on form. The people of parts of the Earth staring at the void found a miracle- the Confederations would not impose more than their people could bear, in terms of infringements on cultural identity, as the cost of admission to a polity that would invite them to build the future. Sometimes, the demands of Confederation Socialism – meaningful local democracy and pluralism, a shift towards worker-managed and owned production systems, etc – were more than a given area’s elites would stand. But these elites weren’t so powerful without a superpower backing them up. If a given region otherwise cooperated with the Confederations but insisted on independence, the Confederations would not push. “Whether we hold hands or stand at arm’s length, those of us who will live with this planet are all together,” is one of the operating mottos.
Small confederations and ally neighbor states of Confederations shade into the legacy nations. The world is much bigger than America, and the dynamics that characterized its collapse, while obtaining in much more of the world than anyone would have liked, did not obtain universally. No nation on Earth survived the crisis years unscathed, but some found ways to survive without radically adapting the form of their nation-state, and only partially reordering their economies. Many of these were already partially-planned economies, most notably that of China. Irked by the pretensions of Americans, Indians, and others insisting they had the path to socialism and provoked by the threat of a trans-Pacific socialist confederation along the lines of the ones spreading across the Atlantic and the Indian oceans, a generation of Chinese leaders made clear they would not be breaking up into regions – “spheres of influence,” as they made a point of calling them – now or ever. And much like the Confederations promoted their model alongside efforts to rescue collapsing regions, China and its allies could do the same, mostly in the comparatively stable nation-states on China’s side of the Pacific. This was what stopped Pacifica, an attempted replication of the Atlantic Confederation model on a potentially much greater scale, when it looked like it might make the jump to the Philippines. In the end, both the leaders of the legacy nations and those of the Confederations have seen – in many causes caused – too much destruction and bloodshed to fight, even if both sides have uneasy feelings about whether peaceful coexistence is possible in the long term.
These same leaders, and the populations they represent, learned over the course of difficult decades that imposing their will and belief systems on populations who well and truly do not want them is not worth it. This has led to the existence of what most Confederation citizens call “rump states.” These range from relatively orderly setups at least as large, coherent, and powerful as some of the small legacy nations (the Mormon republic that rules much of the mountain west, for instance), to ephemeral statelets declared by temporarily successful death cult militias in what have become, in effect, global sacrifice zones such as Florida and Balochistan. What these states have in common is a formal rejection on the part of leadership and/or population of the world order that the Confederations and the legacy nations have created between them. This rejection is often honored in the breach, because most of these rump states are economically dependent, one way or another, on other, more functional powers. Most of the leaders of rump states know full well that it is the hesitation of the greater powers to get stuck in grinding occupation wars that keeps their states in existence, and so walk a fine line between encouraging ideological intransigence – “you, the citizens/subjects of this state, are the only ones keeping (insert religion/ideology/nationalism/whatever) alive, and if you let your guard down, your kids will be (insert local Confederation) before you know it” – and avoiding following through on their grander, less possible ideological schema. It’s not unknown for rump states to experience revolution – with or without Confederation help, or proof of said help, anyway – and either join a Confederation, or become an allied state. The legacy nations generally see the rump states as too unstable, and are too worried about provoking the Confederations, to bring too many of them into their camp, but the logic of Confederation expansion every time someone overthrows a death cult government is worrying strategic planners in China and elsewhere.
Oof! This feels like I’m writing an RPG supplement. Even slipping into grandiose voice, but maybe that’s unavoidable when describing global politics in broad strokes… Which I guess is why I’m doing this… get the goofiness of world-building out here and not in a novel where it could slow things down… it also occurs to me I didn’t get much into how the Confederations work on the ground. Maybe next time! Among other things, I am trying to not write myself into stuff I’ll need to revise for the actual novel, which is the point of all this, but I do have some pretty definite ideas.
And here’s a rare Mithra mlem, really only obtainable as an action photo!