So ends another year of blog writing and book reading, which means it’s time to write another bunch of hundred word micro-reviews of every book I read this year. That is, of course, with the exception of the books I read this year that instead got around a thousand words written about them earlier, including this one, this one, and this one. Boy, I said in the introduction last year that I had written more than I had in a while, but my output this year puts last year’s to shame. I mean, 2018 me really should feel bad.
Find it all below the cut:
Alienation (2019)
Ines Estrada
This thing gets the Internet in a way I haven’t seen before—the overflow of choices, how we inure ourselves to the outside world, the rather pathetic ways we plug into nostalgia even when it’s not our own (including a nostalgia for untainted nature), and the rather insidious ways our dependence on it manifests (it’s never immediate withdrawal.) Estrada draws layouts that accurately depict how I research things while constantly being distracted. It even includes some of the grossest aspects of it, vomit-inducing but also accurate. The polluted future world—part tech, part mutilated environment—is also portrayed in an equally grotesque manner.
An Edge In My Voice (1985)
Harlan Ellison
I sometimes get into a mood where I just want to read old columns, and Harlan Ellison certainly had a lot of them. Like the two Glass Teat books, the big thing I get out of reading these is seeing someone react to history as it happened, in this case the late seventies and early eighties. You can also read Ellison review a bad-sounding Star Wars Atari game, and then get chastised for it (because he badmouthed video games, even though most games from that era are as pointless as he says.) Also, Ed Asner was apparently a real badass.
Bad Gateway (2019)
Simon Hanselmann
These comics take place right after 2014’s Megahex, and starkly depict how pathetic Megg and Mogg’s lives are post-Owl. In particular, the story where the group sells Megg’s beloved childhood skates for drug money and the extended flashback near the end feel very emotionally real, and the whole thing becomes increasingly sad the further it goes along (especially during the brief sequence where Werewolf/Warehouse Jones gets his life together.) For all the gross-out jokes you still find in here, it’s now just as focused on examining the characters and how they got where they are, and never pulls any punches.
Billie the Bee (2019)
Mary Fleener
I don’t want this to sound condescending, but this book definitely reads like a woman in her sixties made it, and I think that’s adorable. The combination of silly humour, stylish layouts, and actual researched ecology facts interlaced into the narrative (if one of the characters hadn’t said “shit”, I’d have thought this was for kids) give this book a very exuberant feel. Someone is clearly very interested in talking about ecology! It has the look and tone of an older alternative comic, with Fleener drawing all the animals with varying levels of naturalism that still somehow work well together.
The Book of Beasts: Being a Translation from a Latin Bestiary of the Twelfth Century (1954)
Trans./Ed.: T. H. White
“This is an animal called CASTOR the Beaver, none more gentle, and his testicles make a capital medicine. For this reason, so Physiologus says, when he notices that he is being pursued by the hunter, he removes his own testicles with a bite, and casts them before the sportsman, and thus escapes by flight. What is more, if he should again happen to be chased by a second hunter, he lifts himself up and shows his members to him. And the latter, when he perceives the testicles to be missing, leaves the beaver alone.” I’d say that covers it.
The Cyberiad (1965, 1974)
Stanislaw Lem (Trans.: Michael Kandel)
This year was one where I tried to read a bunch of stuff I’d always wanted to, such as this collection of Lem’s humorous robot stories. This is a great example of both Lem’s literary and blunt comedic approach (not many SF writers succeed at being funny, but Lem does) and his penchant for wild literary experimentation, such as his sprawling stories-within-stories-within-stories. There’s some stuff in here that must have been a real challenge to translate into English—there’s one part where a character basically starts rapping, and I have no idea how they got that to work in multiple languages.
Deep Future: The Next 100,000 Years of Life on Earth (2011)
Curt Stager
Another one I’d been intending to read for years, and one of a half-dozen natural science books I bought in a single online order. Basically, puts the effects of human activity on this planet (global warming et al.) in actual geological history scale, explaining that what we do now will be felt thousands of years later, and also how those things interact with naturally-occurring changes (global warming putting off one of the planet’s periodic ice ages, for example.) Very interesting, but gets real naive in the conclusion, especially when Stager argues that scientific fact is treated as “neutral” by people.
Drowned Worlds (2016)
Ed. Jonathan Stahan
Obviously, due to the premise, the basic set-up of the world in most of these stories is very similar—we’ve gone from several different bad futures to one with plenty of scientific evidence behind it—so the main thing each author brings to the anthology is what aspect they focus on. Some are personal stories, some are about broad social breakdowns, some are stories about reclaiming the past, and some are about being forced into making something new. There is one about a train. You can definitely see a change in styles between established authors like Kim Stanley Robinson and newer ones.
The Eltingville Club (2016)
Evan Dorkin
What struck me when I read this wasn’t just how accurately Dorkin portrays geek culture at its worst, but how true these depictions remain even though the way that culture works now is different. Fandom used to be a thousand pieces of obscure trivia, usually based on old stuff, and manically looking for things to obsess over—now most fandoms are fairly mainstream and don’t have that intentionally arcane quality. The thing is, the old angry nerds are still here, even as the overall tone has changed, sometimes for the better—the 2015 epilogue demonstrates how the old guard spitefully sticks around.
Everything is Flammable (2017)
Gabrielle Bell
As more of a singular autobiographical piece, this focuses on dealing with a lack of control. Bell’s difficulty with her vegetable garden is a prelude, showing her frustration with things she feels she should be able to fix—something that continues after her mother’s house burns down. It is through the individual scenes of helping her rebuild alongside her mother’s neighbours that she comes to realize how little influence she has over the situation or her mother’s rather isolated lifestyle (even when she actively tries to make it better), and how a lifetime of shared family trauma affects both of them.
The Eye of the Heron (1978)
Ursula K. Le Guin
So, this is a story about resistance and revolution when self-serving, violent, authoritarian thugs are in charge. Can’t see the relevance these days. On one hand, having the ruling class be descended from convicts seems a bit more on the nose than Le Guin usually is. On the other hand, having the workers actively discuss the merits of different methods of negotiation and protest (including just up and leaving, an option that is often overlooked) is really interesting and refreshing for something like this. This is a smaller-scale story than her other novels, but it thoughtfully conveys its political/philosophical point.
The Female Man (1975)
Joanna Russ
Nothing prepared me for just how much of a postmodern novel this is, with its frequent changes in POV, non-linear storytelling, and stream of consciousness narration, but that’s also what makes it compulsively readable. You can call it science fiction, but it’s really something else entirely, maybe something beyond genre. We spend much of the time gradually learning about the different versions of reality (stories within stories) and seeing the protagonist doppelgangers deal with each other, although there is still technically a plot that’s mostly in the final chapters. That is where the ideas cohere, but also become much harsher.
First Men in the Moon (1901)
H.G. Wells
Wells goes all over the place in this, alternating between comedic, adventurous, and contemplative. As usual, this is a journey of discovery taken by bored upper-middle class men, and you get the idea that maybe Wells is one of those, given the very detailed descriptions of the process that allows his protagonists to fly to the moon, the ecosystem up there, and the nature of the Selenites. Always appreciate it when alien bug people are treated with respect and interest rather than just as monsters. The chapter where the narrator has existential crisis in space is unique among Wells’ work.
The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute (2015)
Zac Bissonnette
I mentioned this book before, and also that I still have several Beanie Babies sitting around my apartment. We all remember how dumb the fad was, and Bissonnette goes pretty deep into the insanity of it all, but also shows how collector fads are both stumbled into and then intentionally manipulated by big businesses only thinking in the short term. Also, we see that secondary market prices are essentially arbitrary. Ty Warner is a business sociopath, but his particular form of it is strange and idiosyncratic, and the other major people involved (mostly middle-aged women) also provide oddly compelling stories.
House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films (2012)
Kier-la Janisse
I do enjoy seeing trash art seriously considered. This draws interesting comparisons between the different movies and the way they depict their physically and psychologically tormented female protagonists—what one could see as misogynistic portrayals of hysterics and simple excuses for violence, Janisse sees as poetically true performances of negative emotions and mental illness, things she has spent all her life dealing with. Both the movie analyses and the autobiography tend towards the dark and brutal (some of those movies sound unbelievable), and the author is not shy about sharing horrific details, even when they paint her in a bad light.
I’m Not Here (2017)
GG
This is a quiet, subdued book, guiding you along airily towards small, evocative moments. It really invokes a dream-like atmosphere, one where every panel seems like a frame or a photograph of specific little moments, usually mundane on the surface. The lines and soft colours suggest something that’s not quite complete, events flow in a way that seems logical until you examine them closer, and there are brief pauses that allow the mood to settle. This gives a hint of the protagonist’s sense of remove, as she moves through her day gradually confronting all these fragments of regret and guilt.
In the Mother’s Land (1992)
Élisabeth Vonarburg
A very complex piece of social science fiction, all about history and tradition and gender that keeps folding into new complications at a steady clip. You definitely don’t expect it go in many of the directions it does, and the ways it reflects a society that is forced to reckon with its entire foundation being put into question. Lots of debate and conversation, lots of compelling interpersonal relationships and vaguely defined ESP along the way. But there’s also a chapter where the characters have a goofy casual conversation unlike any other in the book, some sudden levity that I appreciate.
Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files 03 (2011)
John Wagner/Dave Gibbons/Brian Bolland/Ian Gibson/Ron Smith/Garry Leach/Mike McMahon/et al.
I’m still swinging back and forth between older and newer volumes. They hadn’t fully crystallized the tone of the series at this point, but they’re close. There’s some solid stories early on (like “Sob Story”) and some important series concepts introduced, but things kick up a level when you get to sequence of “The Black Plague”, “Christmas Comes to Des O’ Connor Block”, and “Uncle Ump’s Umpty Candy”, containing all the bleak absurdity that makes this series worth reading. Then near the end, you get “Judge Death”, which is an all-time classic and an amazing early showcase for Brian Bolland.
Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files 14 (2017)
John Wagner/Carlos Ezquerra/Will Simpson/Jeff Anderson/et al.
Speaking of Judge Death. The entire book is taken over by the extended “Necropolis” story and its various lead-ins, and almost every page is gripping, every thread of the story gradually developing and dovetailing into this thing of horrific beauty. The colouring on Ezquerra’s artwork brings out the intense grotesqueness of each sequence, and while this story has the expected epic scale, what makes it more important is the way it builds and concludes all these different character arcs and plots that had been simmering in the background. It reads like a culmination and finale for the series’ eighties run.
The Lady From the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick (2019)
Mallory O’ Meara
Partly a biography of a woman with a very interesting life (seriously, living at Hearst Castle gets you connections) whose contributions to an art form or two have been largely overlooked (or, more accurately, written out in all the systematic ways you’d expect), and partly an autobiography about a woman trying to uncover something that keeps her connected to the things she has loved all her life. It’s about learning that no matter how much your supposed peers try to make you feel unwelcome, you have always had a place there. Also, there are movie monsters involved—I like those, too.
Martian Time-Slip (1964)
Philip K. Dick
Really enjoy the recurring theme in PKD’s sixties work that living on Mars would be terrible. This one feels more socially-minded, with its emphasis on the stigma of mental illness, although some of the theories about schizophrenia that are presented are really weird. It’s also very working class in nature (several colonies are controlled by unions, and have a hearty laugh at the idea of unions wielding any sort of power), but most of the POV characters are also pretty unlikable. While one of them is blatantly a bad person, I don’t think the other ones are supposed to be?
The Metamorphosis (1915)
Franz Kafka
Writing about this is overdone, but here I go. Finds an interesting middle ground in portraying the absurdity of the situation and a realistic sense of horror. The reactions of Gregor Samsa’s family are never over-the-top, and actually seem pretty grounded—it feels like a realistically anxious dynamic, and deteriorates in a way that families often do (especially when in a difficult financial situation.) Like The Trial, it’s also about a protagonist that tries to assert agency when it’s clear that he has none, and it taps into the fear of losing all ability to be understood and becoming a burden
No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters (2017)
Ursula K. Le Guin
Remember blogs? Is that what this website is? This book is all posts from Ursula Le Guin’s blog, which cover a wide variety of topics, including personal writing, cats, and thoughts about writing and the publishing industry. Being written by Le Guin, these pieces are meticulously crafted, funny (the one she did about people swearing too much is hilarious), and always fascinating. She puts so much effort into these (while in her eighties, even!), and considering that she was writing a blog at the same time I was, it only makes my stuff look all the more embarrassing by comparison.
One More Year (2017)
Simon Hanselmann
This is also where Hanselmann’s comics really take a turn towards the downbeat and disturbing (although after rereading Megg & Mogg in Amsterdam, I remembered how dark that one gets.) These are still comics that can really sucker punch you with a hilarious line or panel, but some of the antics (especially with Werewolf Jones and his horrible kids) begin crossing a line, and the relationships keep going off the rails in petty and believable ways . This one also has a flashback that explains the messed up dynamics of these characters, but really only makes their situation even sadder.
Paperbacks From Hell: The Twisted History of ’70s and ’80s Horror Fiction (2017)
Grady Hendrix
The reason why this website exists is to talk about obscure pieces of pop culture history, and this book covers something that is even more ephemeral and dauntingly sprawling than anything I’ve done. Seriously, many of the books in this are difficult to look up online, their brief existences on spinner racks leaving barely any mark on the world. But for how goofy these can be (a plot: murder clowns invade town during a blizzard), Hendrix still finds the interesting context behind them, and puts the actual authors and artists at the forefront. Fun while still being respectful and informative.
Science Fiction Monsters (1965)
A.E. Van Vogt
I would say Van Vogt’s best stories specialize in “ingenuity” rather than “inventiveness”—he can come up with an interesting science-y situation, but it’s still written in the style of the pulps, so you’re not getting high literature. The twist ending of “Not Only Dead Men” was clever, and while others like “Enchanted Village” have expected zingers, they still work. I’m not sure who we’re meant to sympathize with in “The Sea Thing.” In some cases, editor Forrest J. Ackerman is really pushing what could be considered a “monster story” just so he can market this to kids reading his magazines.
Selected Stories (2000)
Theodore Sturgeon
The recurring themes throughout Sturgeon’s work is a sympathy for freaks and weirdos and a certain gentle wistfulness that sets it apart from a lot of other Golden Age Sci-Fi writers. Stories like “The Man Who Lost the Sea”, “Slow Sculpture”, and “The Sex Opposite” (which is one of the standouts for me due to the subject matter) all represent Sturgeon at his most philosophical, but even the darkly humorous “Bianca’s Hands” or straight pulp horror of “It” manage to have surprisingly human elements. This collection cycles through many different kinds of fantasy, but that thoughtfulness is a constant throughout.
Shako (2014)
Pat Mills/John Wagner/Ramon Sola/Juan Arancio
Read around the same time I read Hook Jaw, and this is basically the same comic written and drawn by the same people, except with a polar bear instead of a shark. Like a lot of early material from 2000 AD, this is a sloppy one-to-two-note gimmick comic that is still fun to read because it commits to its absolutely ridiculous premise (“the only bear on the CIA’s death list”) and to its mandate for dumb violence in every strip. Like Hook Jaw, its grasp of biology is tenuous at best—unlike Hook Jaw, it actually gets to have an ending.
Sick Little Monkeys: The Unauthorized Ren & Stimpy Story (2013)
Thad Komorowski
I guess the one good thing about all those John K. revelations is that no one needed to kick him out of the animation industry because he’d already done it to himself. Those stories are referenced only obliquely here, as it’s mostly about how an important revolution in the medium came to be—I especially liked learning just how many people who worked on good nineties cartoons originally worked on bad eighties cartoons—and how one of the driving forces behind it was a self-sabotaging psychopath. I also enjoy that the author is such an iconoclastic hard-ass when it comes to cartoons.
Silver Screen (1999)
Justina Robson
More straight-up cyberpunk than the last Justina Robson novel I read, focused on programming, hacking, and AI, but it also has some fairly grounded characters, including one of the few sympathetic portrayals of a near-sociopathic computer genius, a character that is in almost every one of these books. This one is set up like a mystery and is crammed with ideas, including futuristic art, the effects of AI gaining rights when they run most of the corporate world, parasitic bodysuits and mind-melding, and an extended action sequence in the middle of it that feels odd next to all the talking.
Space Academy 123 (2018)
Mickey Zacchilli
Very rarely does a page go by in this where something—a line, a drawing—doesn’t make me laugh. Despite the intentionally rough style of these daily Instagram comics (and yes, there are direct shout-outs to Leaving Richard’s Valley in it), there are places where Zacchilli will draw things smoother and more detailed (invoking very specific manga-style posing), which of course only makes them funnier. Also good: ostensibly a take on school drama, but it’s mostly just silliness. There’s a drawing of a dinosaur sticker(?) in one comic that is so incredibly specific-looking that every time I remember it, I feel happy.
The Stone God Awakens (1970)
Philip José Farmer
I haven’t read much Farmer, but I think this is more part of his “straightforward pulp fiction pastiche” oeuvre than his “experimental meta-fiction” one. It’s pretty much a fairly single-minded SF adventure story with a somewhat inventive premise (normal man is frozen in time by some ridiculous-sounding technology and then comes back to life in the future and is worshipped as a living god by animal people) and a ceaseless momentum. I mean, there are no chapter or paragraph breaks, so it’s just one thing after another until it ends. A little weird, but not enough to become a favourite.
The Stranger (1942)
Albert Camus
Meursault is a bit of a jerk, right? He’s trying to live life in the most rational fashion possible by stunting his emotions, and is annoyed when other people don’t understand why. On the other hand, that so much of his trial is based on him not being particularly emotive—and basically turned into a vehicle for the prosecution to play public moralist—would, in another story, be seen as an indictment of a society obsessed with surface levels. It can still be that, but Meursault himself is such a self-obsessed, lousy human it’s hard to take his side even on this.
Stung!: On Jellyfish Blooms and the Future of the Ocean (2013)
Lisa-Ann Gershwin
Jellyfish are pretty fascinating animals, but this book is as much about how bad we’ve screwed up marine ecosystems worldwide as it is about them. Gershwin demonstrates just how big the population of many species are, how they contribute to the decline of other species, and how many jellyfish are pretty much able to keep themselves going in these environments forever (some of them don’t even need to eat.) This has happened because climate change, ocean acidification, and overfishing has altered these ecosystems down to the most micro of levels. Unlike Deep Future, there’s very little optimism in this book.
Stunt (2019)
Michael DeForge
This is a very short DeForge work, in a book the size and shape of a checkbook, but it’s also deeply troubling, a testament to his short comic story skills. Essentially a discourse on self-annihilation, conflating art and celebrity culture with a desire to be destroyed in a guiltless way. The narrator-protagonist is so into the idea of just acquiescing all control of his life that he disassociates more and more from every aspect of existence, which means nothing can hurt him and he gets to take no responsibility, complete and total disassociation. The last few pages really got me.
Through the Woods (2014)
Emily Carroll
Reading Carroll’s new book made me want to go back to her last horror book, which I didn’t check out before for some reason? I think it was solely because I found her online comics genuinely unnerving. These aren’t as intense, but she is truly a master of old-fashioned scary fables, and of creating these truly, effortlessly disturbing images, paced perfectly in the short form (“The Nesting Place” is A+ monster material.) Lots of variety in setting and style, and you even get to see how effectively she uses colour. The epilogue story deserves commendation for its concisely grim meaning.
The Trial (1925)
Franz Kafka
About as good a portrayal of labyrinthine bureaucracy and the absurd complexity of our social systems as you’re going to get. Sometimes, it really does feel like everything is this arcane and arbitrary, and being caught in the middle of it is a never ending nightmare. You can only seize agency for brief moments, feeling some kind of power or superiority before realizing again that you still are subject to unfathomable processes that won’t stop. What’s particularly memorable, though, are the way Kafka describes the settings, which are often mind-bending in their size and how they fit into other places.
Vampires in the Lemon Grove: Stories (2013)
Karen Russell
I read Russell’s first collection four years ago? Time flies. This one doesn’t get as literary cute as the last book (the “Dougbert Shackleton” story is close, but not too bad), maybe a little less adolescence-focused (although there’s still a few of those stories, and Russell seems especially interested in the awkwardness and cruelty of teen boys), but still based on some high concept ideas that allowed its stories to be described to me years ago in single sentences. Everyone read “Reeling For the Empire” and “The Barn At the End of Our Term”, it seems. They are pretty good.
The War for Late Night (2010)
Bill Carter
Can you believe it’s been ten years since this nonsense happened? Of course, I was part of the conversation, and Team Coco all the way, although even then I recognized that this was a conflict that didn’t really matter (I mean, it mattered to the people working on these shows, but not so much to fans.) Carter only sorta covers just how vociferous the online discussion was, with younger comedy figures laying down vehement anti-Leno lines. The book portrays the whole thing as both life-altering but also small and petty, and the epilogue shows how quickly it was all invalidated.
What I Didn’t See and Other Stories (2010)
Karen Joy Fowler
Out of all the “literary” SF writers I’ve read, Fowler is one of the ones who doesn’t skew towards tweeness or genre pastiche—she just has a knack for finding unique subject matter and writing character studies around it. The first story, “The Pelican Bar”, is a genuine shock, some Victorian cruelty foisted upon a modern teenager (does that make a difference?). The title story is another achievement, showing in microcosm the effects of colonialist mindsets on both nature and people. There are two stories about John Wilkes Booth, so if you love that part of history, it’s a good bargain!
Wild Thoughts From Wild Places (1999)
David Quammen
It’s more David Quammen, writing about nature in all its various configurations (including extreme sports) and the people who interact with it, as well as some other topics that an outdoors-themed publication saw fit to print. What I really started thinking about while reading this was the life and art of writing these sorts of pieces—magazine feature reporting just seems like a weird thing to me now. Jetting all over the place to interview people and see interesting places and writing these genial pieces that look for profundity everywhere you go. It seems like something from a more relaxed age.
You & A Bike & A Road (2017)
Eleanor Davis
I like how the solidness and detail of Davis’ drawing changes depending on how her day went—that’s one of those things that a diary comic can do. The book focuses on close observations of everyday people and occurrences in the American south, the bad as well as the good. She knows exactly how to make all the people come alive with only a page or two. It’s also a narrative about challenging yourself, and that aspect is very intertwined with its social observation in subtle ways—you want to be better just to prove that people in general can be better.
A Scrapbook of Infinite Noise 