Books Archive
I am attempting to get back into reading intentionally... I will put some stuff here as I finish it... maybe...
Swords and Deviltry, Fritz Leiber, 1970.
September 2025. ha wow ok this is really Good... this is so much sharper and more beautifully-written than any comparable thing of its tradition that i've read. Really fun and human; nice rhythm, enormous love of language in a way that never feels overbearing. It doesn't feel really revolutionary 'new wavey-revisionist' to me, it is just extremely beautifully done. Characters are so much more clear, articulated, believable than practically any you ever read in this sort of story. am i wrong?!!? This is I gather a fix-up of 3 shorts-- like the Elric stuff, the Fafrhd & the Gray Mouser stuff is embedded in genre magazine publication and percolates down to us decades later in collections of shorts. Holds together pretty well as a contiguous narrative though. Doesn't seem like much of his stuff is reliably in print or much-acknowledged lately!! sad!!! I read this in like 3 days and would like to read More of it
Against Platforms: Surviving Digital Utopia, Mike Pepi, 2025
August 2025. Audiobook. I at first was thinking it suffers a little from NPR voice but there really is a pretty committed and humane ideological picture here; doesn't get too-often stuck in the weeds of liberal proceduralism although I don't know if I agree that public institutions are THAT sanctified of the horrible pressures of capital. Folds in very of-the-moment critique of LLMs, which I suppose is the sort of thing you can do when you write a book from grounding of real ideological commitment: the AI boom is expressive of the same cynical, dehumanizing pressures the rest of the book is about. Some good anecdotal material about weaponized supposed-objectivity, a favorite thing of mine to complain about. I wonder how much basically-antisocial libertarianism is in my own conception of independent comics and the internet; I want to think about this.
The Sailor on the Seas of Fate, Michael Moorcock, 1976
August 2025. I read some of “Death is No Obstacle,” a huge interview with Moorcock with a lot of talk about how he systematized and plowed through writing these pulp stories at incredible rate. Interesting!!! In a way his digestion/postmodernization?? of “fantasy fiction” is kind of opposite Le Guin’s (as contemporaries with whom i am familiar in the same ‘new wave’ tradition I guess): Moorcock is operatic, slapdash, free-associative, and wrestles hugely and recklessly with the ideology of the stuff he inherits— Whereas Le Guin is profoundly more delicate and considered, and works with the ideology of the stuff in a more intentional and precise way?? Something like this. This feels like a sort of continuum I want to think about. Also an interesting angle on my pet issue of “artifacts of serialization being encoded sheepishly in later publication” in the Elric corpus in full. It is hilarious how much of this sequence of novels is composed of fixed-up short stories.
Anyway this is the second Elric book by some reckonings. Fun! Really a bit disjointed, a bunch of contrivance and flimsy melodrama, but I liked reading a lot! Moments of brilliance and unusual atmosphere. There are some occasional big weird ideas I want to see how he follows through on.
Escape from Incel Island, Margaret Killjoy, 2023
August 2025. Audiobook. I liked her 'Country of Ghosts' some years ago; this was a whole lot sillier and more written-at-the-discourse-of-the-moment than that, and I did not like it as much. Gets kind of weird here and there though I liked that about it.
Ada, or Ardor, Vladimir Nabokov, 1969
August 2025. Didn’t finish; probably have abandoned it… I like a lot about it but maybe I try some shorter Nabokov thing. Got from library on a whim after learning there’s an invented-setting / alternate history aspect to it. This is interestingly if haltingly conveyed, and provides a neat way for the densely jokey-referential writing to be a little more abstracted, parodic?? And I guess I am slightly interested in how that angle follows through the whole book. But I dunno is my brain broken by GENRE LITERALISM? I am not really interested in personal dramas and interiority as such, without some LOUD, EXPRESSIVE ELEMENTS at play?!? I like the texture of it all but it is a little exhausting for me right now maybe
A Storm of Wings, M. John Harrison, 1980
August 2025. A more-direct-than-I-expected sequel to Pastel City. What do I even think of this thing. I am frequently absolutely blown away by it; I am a little occasionally exhausted by it. FIRSTLY it is a great and charming and often hilarious move to build upon the more straightforward mythic-adventure material of the previous book in a complexifying way, with hugely more irony and a party of adventuring heroes all collapsing under the weight of their various physical and mental afflictions and enormous age.
Texturally it is so constantly intense, confident, overwhelming, ironic. I really don’t see any cracks in the preposterous metatextualizing archaic Voice of the thing but it does feel a little heavy sometimes… and there is a sense, I think, of texture generally beginning to get in the way of things? With this one way more than Pastel City I realized “Oh this is what China Mieville is going for,” though there are ways that Mieville’s approach feels a little more directed, or rigorous, or intelligible as a whole, maybe?
It is interesting to know about Harrison’s grievances with literalism in secondary-world fiction. He approaches the invented-setting stuff with attention to theme and like poetry and texture… But I am sometimes thinking that maybe it would hold together a little better if there WAS more literalism in it; if there was a sense that the place actually made more sense, that Viriconium existed as more of PLACE instead of just a nebulous visual metaphor for the ideas at hand for example. There is a way that this literalism needn’t CONTRADICT what he’s going for but could like support it? Therein is my entire ambition towards writing this sort of thing I guess. Anyway one could imagine a M. John Harrison / Brandon Sanderson continuum maybe lol. Preposterous, grotesque, enormous; really appreciate having read it
The Pastel City, M. John Harrison, 1971
July 2025. wow great! beautiful!! I was mostly only aware of this guy by his writing against ‘worldbuilding’ as a literalistic practice in genre fiction, an angle I think I mostly agree with. But this book at least does not have a terribly heterodox or metatextual approach to such questions really!! I am interested to read the later ones. It’s ‘roadside picnic conan the barbarian’ if I had to nail it down!!! The LANGUAGE is sometimes really spectacularly beautiful I think; he’s confidently and elegantly 'doing the voice' of this sort of thing. The genre innovation here feels at the same time a little ahead-of-its-time, AND a little dated because the way we talk and think about 'scifi technologies' has changed a lot more in 55 years than the way we think and talk about ‘pseudomedieval adventures.’ Does that make sense. ON THE WHOLE it is basically a perfect book to me and I can’t believe I hadn’t read it, or even really heard it described in a way that feels remotely appropriate. It is a virtuosic pulp thing. Really a smart beautiful and laser-focused way to use an invented setting as a thematic, poetic sort of structure. Really not unlike PANZER DRAGOON SAGA. Also worth mentioning that within the first several pages of this book from 1971 a light saber from star wars is presented to the reader. Also also, some of the best names-of-things I have ever ever encountered in secondary-world fiction.
Dawn, Octavia E. Butler, 1987
July 2025. man pretty wild book!!! I begin to see the outlines of of Butler’s FASCINATIONS, between this and a few other things a few years ago. There is a disorienting, overwhelming array of wild and fascinating ideas thrown at you pretty nonstop… BUT exposition is fairly elegant and focus is always on Lilith’s limited experience of her surroundings, which I think is a great move. It’s basically a succession of limited environments Lilith is living and working through in process of integrating remaining humans into a new uncanny sort of life… and I LIKE the weird sense of claustrophobia each of these sections builds up, but it does wear a little thin tonally in my opinion. Like it’s a little drab, a little TOO claustrophobic or something, a little TOO suffused with preposterous creepy ideation. On the whole though it is really full of POWER MOVES; I am really hit by it; I will read the other 2 sometime
Earth Abides, George R. Stewart, 1949
July 2025. I guess obviously I couldn't get out of comparing this to The Stand; at first it feels like a sort of more emotionally restrained, novel-of-ideas angle on the same sort of story, but it becomes something really huge and totally unlike anything I have read. Really affecting. In the first HALF or so, there's an overt focus on the big-picture ecological fallout of practically every human being immediately dying, which is interesting and I thought pretty well-incorporated into a story told on the level of human characters... Though Ish seems often really unusually abstracted, dispassionate in a way that frustrated me!!! But that I also often felt like I Related to more than maybe any point-of-view character I have read!! Also there's tons of little conservative ideas built-into it, about the role of authority and the state, and certain ideas around inherence etc... BUT THEN it sort of changes into a much bigger and more HUMAN story, and all of those social assumptions become the sorts of things it is interested in picking apart and dismantling just as it was doing with the ecological material from the start. Builds into a really affecting structure; works with ideas around generational knowledge and what civilization and literacy and history even ARE in ways that I haven't seen attempted. Feels like it's about aging, or it's about seeing people grow up younger than you in a different world than your own, or it's about how huge and inscrutable the systems we live in are, or it's about dying! I will be thinking about this book forever
The Twenty Days of Turin, Giorgio de Maria, 1975
June 2025. pretty unsettling; sometimes really funny; the texture of romance-language-translated-into-english always kind of makes everything feel more ironic or something to me. Borges comparison loudly suggests itself but it's a little less uhhh rigorous?? than Borges. Kafka also maybe?? Interesting imagery around violence emerging almost unaccountably out of the generalized malaise of a population... I guess I should know more about the 70s political violence in Turin that this seems to be grown out of... Sometimes this feels really focused, and sometimes it feels like a bunch of practically-disconnected short stories orbiting around ideas of 'collective unconscious,' 'psychogeography,' etc. I think I got something out of it.
Behold, the Man, Michael Moorcock, 1969
June 2025. really compelling... I had only read some Elrics and it's fun to see Moorcock do this. I am totally won-over by a political, pointedly anti-mystical angle on the Jesus story, personally. The big Reveals are a bit dopey and uhh science-fiction-magaziney, and the whole thing ends up being more about identity and myth as such than about the Jesus stuff in particular, BUT I liked it a lot and I want to get really into Moorcock more
The Dragon Masters, Jack Vance, 1963
June 2025. Great! Balances pulpy with otherworldly textures I thought. Detail and sense of place is kind of sparse but it's to its credit that it works extremely well and clearly even so.
