2024 read #157: Emperor of Rome by Mary Beard.

Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient Roman World by Mary Beard

479 pages

Published 2023

Read from December 21 to December 25

Rating: 4 out of 5

The follow-up to Beard’s SPQR, Emperor is an examination of the office of Roman emperor, and the popular perceptions of the autocratic edifice, more than it is a biography of any particular caesar, or (worse still) a recitation of names and dates. This is Beard’s familiar approach, and a solid example why she’s one of the few popular historians I would trust to write a book on Rome. This is no “Big Man” history. As Beard writes in her prologue:

Working on the Roman empire for so long, I have come increasingly to detest autocracy as a political system, but to be more sympathetic, not just to its victims, but to all those caught up in it from bottom to top….

Accordingly, she works to populate the palace with glimpses of the women, slaves, laborers, functionaries, poets, doctors, diviners, entertainers, children, and the other essential-but-ignored foundations of the Roman state. The office of emperor is a lens, bending the apparatus of ancient society into our line of sight. Ancient propaganda regarding “good” and “bad” emperors is treated not as historical fact, but as a means of assessing attitudes and fears held by the elite (or, when we can access them, the ordinary people) toward the autocrats above them.

Beard’s thesis could be summed up with a line in chapter five: “Can we ever see a human being through the spin, the propaganda, the praise and denunciations?” It’s a salutary perspective, especially in our contemporary culture, where the loudest voices are paid shills for authority, and mediocre white men think about “the Roman Empire” multiple times a day.

Like the rest of us, Beard sounds more exhausted than she did in 2015. Emperor lacks some of the sparkle and dry wit of SPQR, but remains a thoroughly engrossing history, with something important to say about our own era of looming autocracy.

2024 read #156: Hexagon Speculative Fiction Magazine, Winter 2024 issue.

Hexagon Speculative Fiction Magazine, Winter 2024 issue (19)

Edited by JW Stebner 

49 pages

Published 2024

Read December 22

Rating: 3 out of 5

Rounding out the year with another current issue of Hexagon. This one is labor and workplace themed, which my socialist heart can appreciate in the abstract, but it doesn’t exactly excite me as a reader. If past issues of Hexagon are any guide, though, most of the stories should be solid enough.

“Let the Bright Woods Glow” by Colin O’ Mahoney. This one is a charming repudiation of white collar capitalism in favor of spilling blood for the Bright Witches of the Woods. Quite enjoyable.

“Incorporation” by Raina Joines. The current wave of capitalist-mandated “AI” — which usually turns out to be an energy-sucking, carbon-spewing autocomplete, augmented by underpaid and unacknowledged labor in the Global South — has nearly killed the classic AI subgenre of science fiction. This story is an exception, an optimistic tale of truly intelligent AI that emerges and evolves and surpasses its capitalist origins. I liked it.

“This Job Is Turning Me into Something I Don’t Like…” by J Wallace. The uncanny nature of the job turns a realtor into a vampire. It’s a clever enough conceit for a story, and a solid metaphor, using the tools of speculative fiction to say something about our society. Naturally enough I enjoyed the prolonged middle finger to developers and real estate speculators and the whole class-based hierarchy. Unfortunately, I felt the story itself was a bit flat. Not bad by any means, it just didn’t do much for me beyond its central allegory.

“Recruitment Drive” by Aurelien Gayet. This story applies delightfully dated cyberpunk tropes — our protagonist JSON goes into “virtual” to inject code into the cyberspace environment — to our own, much less sexy cyberpunk dystopia of AI-filtered job applications. Cheeky and fun, with a burn-it-all-down ethos that we all can appreciate.

“Paid Time Off” by L.M. Guay. Vividly written exploration of corporate dystopia, a satisfying arc full of grotesque allegorical detail. Excellent.

And that’s it! This is perhaps the most consistent issue of Hexagon I’ve read yet. Solid!

2024 read #155: And Chaos Died by Joanna Russ.

And Chaos Died by Joanna Russ

189 pages

Published 1970

Read from December 18 to December 20

Rating: 2-ish out of 5

This book is a strange, often off-putting experiment of a sophomore novel. What opens as a fairly standard space opera gets filtered through the literary affectations of the New Wave. The text revolves from impression to impression with all the logic of an acid trip. An old man eating plums in the moonlight leaps into somersaults at the lightest touch, flames at his heels. Russ’s prose is sweeping and ambitious, but even after I’ve read the whole thing, I’m still not sure whether it was supposed to make sense or not, or if it was meant as a suite of vibes.

I momentarily got excited when Russ revealed that main character Jai Vedh is gay — rarity of rarities in 1970 sci-fi! — but then on page 23 he muses, “I wish I knew what it feels like to be a man who loves a woman,” and by page 51 he’s dream-fucking one of the women from a putative “lost colony.” Later, “homosex” is lumped in with the “exports” of a decadent, sickly dystopia, while Jai ruts through various heterosexual encounters, many of dubious consent. All of which is in keeping with the mores of this era, but it feels like a particular letdown. (You mean to tell me this is the same Russ who would later publish We Who Are About to…?) There are also some deeply uncomfortable passages that I assume (or rather, that I hope) are a feminist critique of the pedophilia at the root of patriarchal heterosexuality.

If you persevere through Chaos’ deliberate opacity and its unfortunately antique construction of sexuality and gender, it turns out to be just another Social Statement sci-fi novel making a contrast between the “natural,” vaguely Taoist society of the colony’s outer space telepaths, and the polluted, listless, technocratic dystopia of future Earth. The book’s main effect was to make me wish I were rereading The Dispossessed instead. Every now and then, though, Russ turned a phrase that made me concede it was worth reading:

Evne, like a woman of salt, fled into the walls in metal crystalhood, where he followed her, turned into a bee (all eyes), a fountain (all mouth), wrapped herself around her own bones inside out, spread herself one molecule thick along all the lines in the ship: the two of them, pulsing miles across, breathing with the lungs of incurious strangers, seeing through other eyes, petrifying in flashes, pursuing each other in the shapes of walls, floors, volumes of contained air. He followed her.

2024 read #154: Empire Star by Samuel R. Delany.

Empire Star by Samuel R. Delany

92 pages

Published 1966

Read from December 17 to December 18

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

This novella is about perspectives, about growth and the understanding that there is no single point of view, but rather a plethora of perspectives on every action. This is brilliantly orchestrated right from the first page, a bravura introduction of character and POV. The rest of the novel is a somewhat picaresque Bildungsroman following the education — and, separately, the learning — of Comet Jo, a young farm worker from a backwater “simplex” community, as he leaves home and journeys across the wider universe.

Delany uses Jo’s credulous perspective to ironically explore institutions built upon slavery. A rich “multiplex” benefactor impresses Jo with the necessity of enslaving the Lll, the sacrifice required to own them, and the protections the Lll enjoy, while the narrative slowly builds a picture of how the galactic powers that be destroy any Lll who dare to defy their own “protection” in order to be free.

I love Delany’s blue collar space milieu from this era of his career, full of barefoot and mildly homoerotic “shuttlebums” and poets. Empire Star isn’t as compelling as its companion novel, Babel-17, possibly because of the novella’s brevity, possibly because its picaresque aspect didn’t click with me quite so well. But Star is a must-read all the same.

2024 read #153: Sphere by Michael Crichton.*

Sphere by Michael Crichton*

378 pages

Published 1987

Read from December 15 to December 16

Rating: 1.5 out of 5 (though it probably deserves 1)

* Denotes a reread.

I’m somewhat familiar with the writing habits of more literary authors, but I have no idea how an automatic bestseller conveyor belt like Crichton would have worked on his books. Sphere was the immediate predecessor to Jurassic Park; are their similarities the result of Crichton working on them at the same time, or is it because he had so little creative depth? On one hand, grumpy mathematician Harry Adams reads like a first draft of Ian Malcolm. On the other, Beth Halpern is just another iteration of Crichton’s standard Strong Female Character, which his limited imagination translates to “woman literally bulging with muscles.” And, unsurprisingly, Sphere is riddled with fulminations against some monolithic idea of “scientists” and their collective irresponsibility.

When I was a tween, Sphere was my third favorite Crichton novel, behind only Jurassic Park and The Lost World. It’s competently constructed for an airport thriller, dispensing with unnecessary setup and doling out technobabble as required. I don’t carry the same nostalgia for Sphere that I hold for Jurassic Park, but what little I found to recommend rereading it now is undoubtedly tinged with tweenage fondness.

The book hasn’t aged well. Our normative white dude POV — literally named Norman — withstands minority perspectives in the form of Harry (Black genius from the inner city slums) and Beth (man-hating feminist who longs to manipulate men), both of whom muck up the undersea situation for poor old sensible Norman. It’s that classic “senior white man explores social tensions from the clarity of his own neutrality” motif of the 1980s and ’90s, elevated to a central role in the plot.

Especially in its final third, the book becomes a flagrant example of the conservative truism: “There are two genders, male and political. There are two races, white and political.” It’s all rather vile, really. No surprise that this is the guy who would go on to write Disclosure, Rising Sun, and State of Fear.

2024 read #152: Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany.

Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany

219 pages

Published 1966

Read from December 11 to December 15

Rating: 4 out of 5

Once again, we have a Delany number that feels two decades ahead of its time. At its core, Babel-17 is entirely 1960s: a dramatization of the Sapir-Worf hypothesis set in space, centered on the titular language, which offers world-altering clarity to those who understand it. Yet the book’s sympathies and language, its perception and maturity, all feel far removed from its contemporaries.

Delany throws everything into the creative mix, from body-modded furries to discorporated ghost crew members, from clone assassins to polyamorous navigators. He plays with language, prose, and format in ways I wouldn't expect from sci-fi of this era. This is, in short, a novel that would have felt cutting-edge even in 1986. Or at least it does right up until the end, which climaxes with a scene of logical paradox that would have been right at home on the original Star Trek.

2024 read #151: High Times in the Low Parliament by Kelly Robson.

High Times in the Low Parliament by Kelly Robson

157 pages

Published 2022

Read from December 4 to December 11

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

In my little corner of the writing world, a lot of people have become besotted with the trope of disaster gays. The trend didn't begin with Lana Baker, scribe and protagonist of Low Parliament, but she could be cited as a prime specimen of this archetype. She's a drunk and a flirt who can be relied upon to make a foolish choice for a pretty face. She lets some kissing cloud her judgment and winds up exiled to Parliament, a sort of Doggerland EU chamber of human and fairy politics, where she faces drowning (along with the rest of people who reside there) should the politicians remain deadlocked.

High Times is a delightfully horny number that builds its world with an admirably light touch. Unfortunately, about halfway through, the narrative loses some of its initial momentum and gets lost (like its protagonist) in a repetitive series of rooms and botched liaisons that don't add much to the story. I expected the meat of the story to involve backroom talks and roguish scheming, as Lana figures out how to use her charisma to avert catastrophe. Instead, we get an unusual amount of what felt like filler for a book this short, only settling back into a solid groove again for the final third of the book. 

All in all, though, High Times is an enjoyable romp and a fine allegory of class solidarity in the face of supernatural Brexit.