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Reading Wednesday
Nov. 4th, 2020 01:59 pm Just finished: The Iron Heel by Jack London. This book gets a lot right, so I think in *checks watch* 700 years, we're due for a socialist utopia. Also, most abrupt ending since Dead Souls ended mid-sentence.
Despite the parts of it that are very dated, there's a lot of value to be gained by reading old dystopian fiction, particularly the books that are not taught in schools. (1984 and Animal Farm are absolutely worth reading, but they're almost always taught badly, without context, and they really don't give much of an idea of what a dictatorship in an advanced capitalist economy looks like, compared to something like this or It Can't Happen Here, which means that people expect dystopias to go a certain way and miss the warning signs).
Currently reading: The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin. I'm of the opinion that when Jemisin sits down to write a book, you're pretty much assured that it will be the best thing in sci-fi and/or fantasy to come out that year once it's published and there's no real point in holding awards contests anymore. I read the short story that turned into this in her collection How Long 'Til Black Future Month and was impressed by it there and I am even more impressed now that it's a novel.
The central conceit is that when a city is around long enough, it acquires a consciousness, and it's now New York's turn. The avatar of New York, a young, queer, homeless, Black graffiti artist, brings the city to live, but disappears after fighting a mysterious enemy that is not so keen on sentient cities. It's up to the newly created avatars of the five boroughs—a former gangster with amnesia, a pioneering hip hop artist turned politician, an Indigenous lesbian in a WOC-run art gallery, a Tamil student, and an anxious and very racist white girl—to find him and defeat the Woman In White who is hell bent on destroying the city's soul.
It's an awesome concept and I'm only a little jealous because I started a novel on a similar premise that I couldn't finish and wasn't nearly this good, but in classic Jemisin style, it's inventive, poetic, political, and engrossing. Fantastic so far.
Despite the parts of it that are very dated, there's a lot of value to be gained by reading old dystopian fiction, particularly the books that are not taught in schools. (1984 and Animal Farm are absolutely worth reading, but they're almost always taught badly, without context, and they really don't give much of an idea of what a dictatorship in an advanced capitalist economy looks like, compared to something like this or It Can't Happen Here, which means that people expect dystopias to go a certain way and miss the warning signs).
Currently reading: The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin. I'm of the opinion that when Jemisin sits down to write a book, you're pretty much assured that it will be the best thing in sci-fi and/or fantasy to come out that year once it's published and there's no real point in holding awards contests anymore. I read the short story that turned into this in her collection How Long 'Til Black Future Month and was impressed by it there and I am even more impressed now that it's a novel.
The central conceit is that when a city is around long enough, it acquires a consciousness, and it's now New York's turn. The avatar of New York, a young, queer, homeless, Black graffiti artist, brings the city to live, but disappears after fighting a mysterious enemy that is not so keen on sentient cities. It's up to the newly created avatars of the five boroughs—a former gangster with amnesia, a pioneering hip hop artist turned politician, an Indigenous lesbian in a WOC-run art gallery, a Tamil student, and an anxious and very racist white girl—to find him and defeat the Woman In White who is hell bent on destroying the city's soul.
It's an awesome concept and I'm only a little jealous because I started a novel on a similar premise that I couldn't finish and wasn't nearly this good, but in classic Jemisin style, it's inventive, poetic, political, and engrossing. Fantastic so far.
