works of wanderlust

I realize it has been over a month since I posted a review, but it has not been for lack of reading. Oddly enough my biggest struggle has been focussing on one book for long enough to cross the last page finish line.

When I first bought my new ebook reader I had downloaded a trio of books from the library and so I had no issues grinding through the limited selection. But over the last month or two a number of holds have reached the top of my library queue, I discovered an ebook repository for free classics, and my occasional browsing of the deals section on the kobo website has resulted in me accumulating titles faster than I can read them. Here I am with a different big stack of books, it seems.

In other words, I’ve been dabbling and I now have something like a dozen books on the go.

So while lately I have been reading a lot of things, I actually finished reading…

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

There was a time not so long ago when it seemed like a sure bet that biotechnology was merely lagging behind advancements in digital computer tech and that eventually and inevitably it would catch up. That one day humanity would program critters and people and viruses in the same way that we now write apps and databases and AIs was taken as a given. Still quasi-working in a healthcare-adjacent role and daily-ish using my university degree in genetics when this book came out, I seem to remember reading it the first time and feeling as if I was just looking down a futurists timeline of potential society-killing options. Farfetched, maybe, but manipulation of genomes and biohacking as a corpo-dark-era tactic at the hands of lunatic geniuses was not off the table. I think twenty years of uninspired progress towards much of anything in this realm has not taken off the table the doom of society via bioterror, but it has thrown a bit of cold water on the idea that a lone genius prodding DNA in his private lab will unravel the fabric of life and twist it to his own evil designs. Atwood, as usual, paints a stark vision in this the first of the MaddAddam trilogy which I decided to re-read before I plunged into books two and three soon. In a world of AI erosions of our own real society from the bottom up, breaking the world through exponentially accelerating evasion of laws and decency and good taste, it was an interesting voyage back into the simpler times of dystopian fictions that just wanted to kill us outright rather than simply making us obsolete and angry. 

Stupid TV, Be More Funny by Alan Siegel

I will admit: my guilty pleasure these last few years has been rewatching old episodes of The Simpsons along with a fan-tastic weekly show called the Talking Simpsons podcast. The now thirty-six year old cartoon show has been a running theme in my life these past decades, and revisiting the classic eps has been a breath of nostalgia for me in these weird times. And as pedantic as it can sometimes get, diving down the rabbit hole of production minutia and listening to random commentary about the history of television from decades past definitely beats the modern news. The author of this book was a guest on the aforementioned podcast, hawking his book obviously as he chatted along with the retro-nostalgia conversation, and I just happened to be pondering books for my reading list. Of course, with so much scope to cover even a book a hundred times as long could likely still not do the subject matter justice and Siegel chooses to focus on a collection of early production obstacles and paint a story of the little-show-that-could breaking through the norms of a media landscape that was stagnating with wholesome sitcom predictability. As a devotee of the television nostalgia podcast genre I can’t say there were more than a few nuggets of knowledge that I had not stumbled across before, but the book does frame them up and contextualize the story against the backdrop of cultural and political shifts going on at the time. It would definitely make a great entry point into a vast field of knowledge, and a worthwhile read even for us crusty old nerds who are already neck deep in the lore of an aging media form.

Endymion by Dan Simmons

It would be fair for anyone to assume that the third book of a four book saga could be the weakest of the bunch, but somehow that is not the case with this one, the third volume of Simmons Hyperion Cantos. We pick up into the story over two hundred years after the end of the last book which left in a bit of a hanging what-happens-next scenario us as the civilization humanity had built across the stars on the shaky foundations of their AI creations was entering a collapse and fizzling into a new dark age. And once again the style does an about face and we are granted a new (doomed) narrator and new narrative style. Two hundred years is a lot of catching up to do for any story, particularly when the seeds were planted for a daunting religious oligarchy to grab power in the void of the civil collapse, and our narrator strings us through a story of a lone child, the descendent of two of the characters we met in the previous two books, who is facing down insurmountable odds to, we presume, take on the empire. The story is a river tale. That’s trope, I think. The main cast finds itself moving down a river on a raft towards a vague destination and the challenges they face are those of not just the humans chasing them but the natural obstacles they encounter along the way. I can’t think of more than a couple of stories that use this structure, but it definitely feels like a trope… and that’s okay because the science fiction setting and the juxtaposition of natural obstacles and the seeming unlimited power of a fully armed and super-powered military apparatus chasing our protagonists while they float down an interstellar river on a flimsy wooden raft is a kind of magic that keeps one turning pages.