Book Seller Link (non-affiliate, but I do know the owner): Blood and Treasure a book by Duncan Weldon

Author’s Website: About - Value Added

I waffled about this book. I really wanted to like this book more than I did. The idea of exploring how conflict is shaped by economics and economic activity is interesting to me, because I am a giant nerd. But the book doesn’t really scratch that itch. First, because it seems to think that incentives are a purely economic term, and a lot of what it discusses are incentives that are not really economic in nature. Second, the book covers a lot. And so many times it only touches upon what I thought would be the most interesting aspect surrounding the conflict and then moves on. But the more I sat with the book, the more I think I was being unfair.

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The first complaint is mostly my irritation at the field of economics in general. It has a tendency — highlighted by the almost unconscious assumption that social science mainstays like incentives belong wholly to economics alone and that economic incentives alone are the only incentives that matter — toward certainty that it has never earned. It is not fair, however, to judge a book on my distaste for some of the practices and culture of the field the author comes from. The quirks I mentioned never overwhelm the book, and the discussion of incentives, even if the author occasionally doesn’t seem to realize that what he is discussing is not actually economics, is still very interesting. In general, the stories highlight factors that I have not usually seen brought forward when discussing these conflicts. It does a fine job of making you see history a little differently.

And that highlights my second failing: it is not fair to judge a book on what I would have preferred it to be. This book covers a lot of ground and many conflicts, spanning most of modern history. It therefore does not cover any of them with a lot of depth. And I found myself disappointed several times by the book pulling back from exploring specific topics and situations in a deeper fashion. But that was not what the author, Duncan Weldon, was attempting. The book is an overview, meant to introduce you to a new set of tools for looking at historical events. It does that very well, with an overview that is intriguing enough to make you want to know more and a bibliography that seems, at first glance, well suited to allowing you to explore these topics in much more detail. That it does not provide a lot of depth is not a failure of the book — it is my failure to read it on its own terms.

So, yes. I do think you should read this book. It is a well-written overview (Weldon is an engaging writer who never falls into dry recitation or lecturer's voice) of a way of looking at history that is at least somewhat unusual. It explains the concepts well, even if they are not as economically driven as the hook in the title might imply, makes them intriguing, and provides you with the resources to dig further. It is, in other words, a very good survey book. If you have any interest in history or in why people make decisions, for good or ill, and how institutions both shape and react to incentives in unexpected ways, I would read this. Just understand that it is a first step, not the complete journey.

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1. The novel has a wealth of ideas and parallels to our modern day world, everything from the pervasive sexism, especially in tech, to the power of monopolies, to AI, to resource depletion, to the place of violence and non-violence in protest movements. Your world is also very close to ours -- modern seeming technology, modern economic systems, modern business structures. Why, then, did you choose to create a second world fantasy rather than place the story within our world?

One of the great things about secondary world fantasy is the ability to take a question from our world and explore it in a new setting. In my case, the question was: what if magic was a commodity controlled by a monopolistic capitalist entity? Trying to cover all the real-world history and issues behind our modern form of capitalism in one narrative wouldn’t have done it justice, so choosing a secondary world was really a way to control the scope of the story.

At the same time, the flip side of choosing a secondary world is it creates a gap between the reader and the story. I wanted readers to feel like these were real people and real events, which was why I went with a lot of familiar concepts.

Also, one of the things I learned while writing this book is that a lot of what we consider “modern” technology and ideas were invented a long time ago—the Dutch East India Company, a precursor to modern public companies and one of the first monopolies, was founded in 1602. Yet, no one minds if your fantasy setting is inspired by 1600s Europe!

2. Given the number of ideas, how many of those ideas were central to your concept of the story and how many fell out of the world building, feeling necessary to the world? The sexism seems load bearing for example, while the quasi-AI console alchemy versus hand-crafted alchemy feels like a grace note. Is that an accurate assessment, or did you choose to all of the ideas that populate the books specifically to highlight themes, etc?

One of the seeds that inspired Alchemists of Dawn was a conversation I had with my mother not long before she retired. My mom and I are both women in STEM who work in male-dominated fields, and what struck me was how she was still encountering a lot of the same problems and attitudes I was, even though she was coming to the end of an unquestionably successful career. That was the story I really wanted to tell, so yes, the depiction of sexism in the workplace was crucial.

Most of the other ideas were more or less extrapolated from the concept of magic as a commoditized resource. The comparisons between console alchemy and AI are perhaps unavoidable today, but a lot of those debates go back to the Industrial Revolution and the decline of artisan craftsmanship.

Ultimately, my goal was to write a good story, not a nonfiction book. The narrative was built around a couple of important ideas, and everything else was just there to support the story.

3. There is a running discussion between the leadership of the Dawnbreakers and Arjan about the value and danger of violence in resistance/protest movements. The mechanics of the the story make violence required at some points. That could be read as supporting the necessity of violence to spur change. Was the intentional? How do you see the argument between violence and non-violence?

The mechanics of the story do make violence required at some points, but I also wanted to explore the idea of characters who were uncomfortable with said violence. There’s been a lot of discussion in recent years about the necessity of violence in enacting change in both academic and cultural circles, which I encourage readers to look up. However, one thing that’s always bothered me about these debates, especially on social media—famously not a place where nuance thrives—was how violence is often talked about in an idealized way by people who are unlikely to see its effects first-hand. It was important to me to have characters who thought deeply about these topics and resisted the impulse to inflict violence, and to show the consequences—both good and bad—of those decisions.

4. The book includes a romance between older characters, something not that common in modern media. Why did you choose to add that romance to your work?

I think there is a growing appetite for older protagonists in fantasy, which as an aging millennial I’m thrilled to see! Adventures shouldn’t end when you hit 25. I’m lucky to have a wide circle of friends, and I know plenty of people in their 40s, 50s, and even 60s who are still trying new things, learning new skills, and yes, falling in love! I will say I did not envision that romance arc in the beginning, but as I was writing the story, it sort of came naturally. It was one of those instances where my characters surprised me, but in hindsight I should probably have seen it coming.

5. The novel is largely through the viewpoint of two participants in the system, two beneficiaries (at least to a certain extent) of the existing structure. And while other experiences are present, there is no point of view form someone more directly affected by the worst of the system. Why were your drawn to the at least partially (their gender obviously separates them to some degree from the power structure) insider perspective in your world? What were you hoping to explore and what were you hoping, if anything, the readers would see in that perspective?

I was really interested in exploring the conflict inherent in characters who have overcome real challenges to advance in a system that wasn’t built for them, but also contrasting that against their complicity by participating in the system. In part this came from me thinking about the advances women and minorities have made in STEM. These achievements are worth celebrating and I’d rather live in a world with more diverse representation in STEM fields, not less, but I also personally struggled to reconcile those feelings with how it often ultimately benefits the existing power structures.

6. The world feels very alive, very complete. Can you discuss the process of creating that world? What is, to you, the most important aspects of creating a believable world?

Thank you! Worldbuilding is often a tricky and subjective thing. I’m still figuring out my process, but the way I approach it is I build around a couple of main concepts. In Alchemists of Dawn I focused on two ideas: the existence of a large monopolistic company that controls magic, and magic as a commoditized resource that functions pretty analogously to modern technology. Everything else came out of that: a city with a large and diverse migrant population, the existence of an educated middle class, the tech and supply chains that support the world, etc.

For worldbuilding in general, I subscribe to the “hollow iceberg” approach which I believe is a term coined by Brandon Sanderson. This approach means you build just enough to give the illusion of a fully fleshed-out world. Personally I get more excited about characters and plot than worldbuilding, so I prefer to only do just enough to support the story.

7. Can you talk a little about the process that lead to Alchemists of Dawn being written and then published?

I used to read and write a ton of fantasy as a kid, but like many people I put those dreams away when I went to university and then started my career. During the pandemic, however, I started to read fantasy again and was thrilled to discover how much the genre had changed in the intervening years—instead of the same sword and sorcery and Chosen One tales, we now had a multitude of niches and diverse perspectives.

After a few years of devouring books, I eventually began to toy with the idea of writing my own novel again. I tinkered with a few ideas, but Alchemists of Dawn was really the first one that stuck. When I started writing it in late 2024, I simply wanted to see if I could finish the first draft, which I did in 5 months. I also inhaled a bunch of resources about craft and publishing—anytime I wasn’t at my day job or writing, I was learning. I ended up spending the rest of the year revising the manuscript, which was a painful but ultimately very rewarding learning experience. I think I went through 8 drafts, not including all the additional corrections I caught at the last minute.

In terms of the journey to getting it published, I went back and forth on whether I wanted to try traditional publishing, or if I wanted to publish independently. Ultimately I landed on indie because it was important to me to control whether my books ever saw the light of day, which is something you don’t have control over in trad publishing. It helped that I had enough professional experience to be confident that I could put out a polished, high-quality product that would meet reader expectations.

8. What do you think you gained, and what do you think you lost by having a multi-point of view story as opposed to a single point of view? Do you have a preference, or does the work dictate that choice and if so, how?

I don’t think I lost anything by having multiple POVs, in fact I’m very glad I did it and I think it made the story richer. It did make the storylines MUCH more complicated, and it showed in my word count. All my subsequent projects have been single POV and I can tell you they are a lot simpler and shorter! But in this case, the mother-daughter relationship was important for me to explore, and having both POVs made for a much better story.

9. What is the best and worst craft advice you have ever received?

The best craft advice I’ve received is to just finish the first draft! It’s OK if it sucks, it just has to exist. Most people find editing easier than writing, and you can’t edit words that aren’t there. But also, I’ve noticed that I generally don’t discover a story’s deeper themes until I get quite a ways in, so for me it’s far more important to have a terrible first draft than to spend endless amounts of time perfecting it from the start.

The worst craft advice is probably anything that says you must “always” or “never” do something. I take any black-and-white advice with a huge handful of salt. There is an exception to everything, and a lot of craft advice is highly dependent on a writer’s individual situation.

10. What is the best and worst advice on the publishing industry you have received?

I think the best advice is to write the story you want to tell, not chase trends. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t work to improve the marketability of your ideas, but you should be writing something you enjoy—no one will read your book more than you will, and the process of writing a book can take a long time, so don’t write something you hate just because you think it’ll sell better! By the time you’re ready to publish, chances are trends will have shifted anyway.

The worst advice is that beginner authors should spend a lot of money trying to get published. Don’t get me wrong, some things are fine in moderation (except paying for a vanity press which is never a good idea), but you should carefully vet who the advice is coming from and what they stand to gain from you listening to them. At the end of the day, it’s your book and it’s understandable you’d want to give it the best chance possible, but it’s a good idea to check in with more experienced authors, ideally through a reputable community.

Thanks to Ms. Valiant, and, again, the book was quite enjoyable.

Cross posted to Bookstack

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Book Seller Link (non-affiliate, but I do know the owner): Alchemists of Dawn a book by G S Valiant

Author’s Website: Posts | G.S. Valiant

My headlines not only get dorkier, they get more obscure. Pretty soon I will be the only one who understands them at all.

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Alchemists of Dawn by G.S. Valiant is an entry into what I think of as industrial fantasy. These are books with magic infused into a modern world, but they are not, in my mind, magical realism. These are fully formed second world fantasies — fantasies that have created an entirely new world, like Middle Earth. But these books do not work with the tools and palettes of medieval or medieval adjacent societies, European or otherwise. These books color with the sharper, metallic paint of the modern world. And Alchemists of Dawn is one of the better entries in the field.

It follows two women, mother and daughter, through a world where magic is refined as oil is in ours, as they try and navigate the overt sexism of their employers and their world, which is incredibly unequal and unstable as a result. Protests hound the firm they work for, and losing one’s job can often mean losing one’s life. The split narrative allows for us to follow both the people in power and adjacent to it as well as those forced to endure power, whether the poorest of the poor or mid-level bureaucrats trying to keep their morals in an immoral environment. The story is told with sure handedness, balancing the perspectives generally well, and interesting characters. It is an ambitious book as well.

This book is bursting with ideas. One corporation controls magic — created by refining certain rare minerals into a magic gas, for lack of a better term, that can then be used to enchant items. Everything from transportation to police weapons depends on magic, and it is largely controlled by one corporation. Monopolies, as any of my readers already know, are bad, and this monopoly is the worst. But the book is more than just a critique of private control over public goods — though it is most certainly that. It touches on office politics, AI, sexism, capital exploitation, economic inequality, political power, police abuse, and the corrupting influence of wealth. It even glances at the peak oil conversations from my youth. This embarrassment of ideas might actually be the book’s weakest point — some ideas are well explored and given some depth. But some are almost tossed out as afterthoughts and given their resonance with today, I would have liked more depth than this novel could afford to give them. That is a loss, in my mind, but not a serious one.

The novel is also a really fun read. I could almost sound like an ad for a 1930s action movie — thrills! spills! action! adventure! romance! The novel really does have all of that layered on top of its more intellectual pursuits, and they generally work. At its heart, the book is a story about how people navigate living under power they do not control and the book does not pretend that it has easy answers. People use violence, persuasion, fear, mutual aid, and self-imposed ignorance to fight the sometimes literal monsters that concentrated power produces. Each tactic sometimes works and each tactic sometimes makes things worse. As in the real world, dealing with power is messy and uncertain.

Alchemists of Dawn is the best kind of science fiction/fantasy in my mind. It uses unreal elements to hold a mirror up to the way our real world works, and shows us something interesting and important about it and ourselves. And while this novel has too many ideas to treat all of them with the depth I would like, it does provide a deep and interesting exploration of its core question: how do you live a good life in a world where the power in the world is aligned against that good life? It doesn’t provide easy answers, but it does provide a fun story as you think. Recommended.

Cross-posted at Bookstack

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Book Seller Link (non-affiliate, but I do know the owner): Inside the Box a book by David Epstein

Author’s Website: David Epstein

Two maybes in a row; I must be getting mean in my old age.

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This is going to be the worst kind of book review: I am about to whine that the author didn’t write the book I wanted him or her to write. That is entirely unfair, of course. People write the books that they feel compelled to write. And while Inside the Box by David Epstein is not the book I wanted to read, that does not mean that it is a bad book. But I could never shake the feeling that if he had written the book I wanted to read, then perhaps this book would feel less like a missed opportunity.

Inside the Box is a book about the concept that constraints aid creativity and performance. This is not, I would not have thought, a radical concept, but perhaps my career has been a bit of an outlier in that respect. I work in IT, and there are very, very, very few times when I am allowed to simply make whatever fits the bill, constraints be damned. Constraints are a natural part of my life. Even when we are building a brand new product, that product still lives within the walls of the systems and business practices we already have. Constraints are the mother of invention. Even when writing, constraining the story in some fashion has usually lead to better works (though, you know, failed writer, so take that last with some salt). So I was primed to accept the argument and I was interested in the mechanics. Which is where I think Epstein and I differ.

Epstein does spend time on the science of performance and creativity, and those parts of the book are the best, in my opinion. Epstein has a real talent for explaining complicated subjects clearly, and I never once got the sense that he was short-cutting or writing down to the audience. Unfortunately for me, those sections are not the majority of the book. The rest of the book reads almost like a self-help tome. He spends a lot of time, more than I think necessary, on discussing how people can take the lessons and apply them to their own lives. It lessens the book for me.

First, because I am not a self-help kind of person. The advice in self-help tomes, in my opinion, is usually general enough that the way to implement it is fairly clear. Where it is not, or where there are factors specific to you (medical, legal, financial, general health, etc) you likely need to discuss the matter with a professional who knows you. Taking the advice of a book is either unnecessary or potentially harmful. I am not, then, the right person for that approach.

But I also feel that, by leaning into the self-help aspect, the book misses a chance to really interrogate the science and build a more nuanced approach. The book does not spend any time that I noticed with skeptics of the premise. Now, perhaps this is an area where the scientific consensus is really that solid, but that doesn’t seem entirely likely. How do you explain people who do come up with completely new ideas in a wide open process? He does talk about people who claimed to have done that but were actually working within constraints, but he doesn’t approach the idea that truly expansive imagination has value. Any findings or voices contrary to the book’s premise are certainly not highlighted or wrestled with to any large degree. And that is, I think, a missed opportunity.

The book is making a point, but by leaning into self-help, it limits the more, to me, interesting aspects of the book. It feels as if the science portion of the book could have been a long article, one focused only on the premise and its support. Which is okay, though not perfect, for one article. It feels more salesman-like in a book, especially combined with the focus on self-help. This feels like a book eventually destined for If Books Could Kill. And that simply does not work for me.

Now, within those constraints (no, I am not sorry), the book is well written and a good explainer of the premise and its supporting arguments with a plausibly useful self-help section. Epstein is a good enough writer and reporter, I feel, though, that he could have written a much fuller, more interesting book.

Cross posted at Bookstack

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Book Seller Link (non-affiliate, but I do know the owner): Digital Inc. a book by Richard Curtis

Author’s Website: Richard Curtis – Literary Agent, Author, Playwright and Authors' Advocate​

I do not give out negative reviews, as a rule. (I have in the past, so I am aware that this is not an entirely a hard and fast rule) I don’t feel there is any point. The world is full of books worth reading, and I prefer to point people to ones they would enjoy. As a result, there have been books that I have read, or tried to read, and not reviewed. And this book almost fit into that pattern. Almost, but not quite.

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Digital Inc, by former publisher and still agent Richard Curtis, is a look at the transition the publishing industry made from the back end of the twentieth century into the twenty-first, with an emphasis on the development of ebooks. It is a well written book, but it lacks depth. The author spends a lot of time on the details of the transition, and patting his own back for forming one of the first e book publishers (to be fair, some pats are due. He did anticipate the new market), but hardly takes a position on almost any of the issues surrounding the transition. That history had plenty of controversy, and those controversies not only continue to affect publishing today but many of them are still live questions. Curtis takes almost no position on any of them.

Take the Amazon vs Apple book contracts. Publishers, pushed by Amazon’s market share to adopt pricing and policies for ebooks that were severely disadvantageous to them, conspired with Apple to have standard contracts that would have forced Amazon to raise their prices. A judge found this illegal, but there are questions of anti-trust around Amazon itself and whether it was manipulating the market. Curtis describes these controversies, but never takes a side. He goes so far as to claim that it was plausible Amazon was working on behalf of customers — a level of naivety that would get kindergartners calling you a sucker.

Curtis can take sides if he wants. He spends a lot pixels attacking people who pirate books. It is the most passionate portion of the book. But even there, he pulls punches. He discusses, for example, Corey Doctorow’s defense of destroying intellectual property laws. He doesn’t, however, try to counter those arguments — he merely lists them. He cannot, it seems, even take his own side in an argument he obviously feels passionate about. He also elides what happened to his employees when he sold his publishing firm — crediting them with his success, but hinting that they didn’t get any of the windfall he did when he sold out.

The book does have a lot of interesting information about the early days of ebooks. It does a good job of not only explaining the technology, ut also explaining the market forces and cultural norms that kept e-books a sideshow for so long. Being at the start, Curtis has a good understanding of the situation and storytellers skill in conveying it to us. If only he used some that skill to actually take sides.

Curtis remains an agent, and I wonder if that is the source of his hesitancy. The best books about subjects are often written by outsiders or people willing to burn every bridge they set their eyes upon on the way out. Curtis has remained an agent, and otherwise active in the publishing world. He, unlike many other insiders, still has plenty to lose. And thus, I think, wittingly or not, he pulls his punches. He has too may fscks to give, so to speak, to be a really interesting chronicler.

Having said that, the book is well written, it does cover an interesting and important time in the publishing industry, and Curtis does cover both the chronology and the technology clearly. It is a good, solid overview of an important, interesting time. But that is all it is. the lack of depth, the disinterest or inability to speak to the most interesting, controversial, or pressing questions make the book less than it could be. As an overview, it is very good. As a history, an examination of what made the time important, it is an inch deep.

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Book Seller Link (non-affiliate, but I do know the owner): Mercutio a book by Kate Heartfield - Bookshop.org UK

Author’s Website: Kate Heartfield

As much as enjoy Shakespeare, I do not like Romeo and Juliet.

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I know, I know. But it has never read to me as a tale of romance and star crossed lovers. Even in high school, it read more as a tale of idiots allowing their selfishness and pettiness and lust do harm to the people they loved. They broke the world for a moment’s infatuation and it annoyed me then that the world could be bent to the will of such careless, self-absorbed creatures. It annoys me even more now that we seem to ruled by such creatures. I may, however, have to read the play again now that I have read Mercutio by Kate Heartfield.

Mercutio is a prologue of sorts to Romeo and Juliet, tracing the life of Mercutio before he meets the two ill-fated stars. In this telling, Mercutio, actually born under a cursed star and with a prophecy that his desperate and disgraced parents cling to like drowning men cling to floating wood, lives through both the history of northern Italy and haunting and destructive encounters with the faerie. The book follows him from battlefields, to the politics of Florence, to the Atlantic ocean to the realm of the faerie. Mercutio befriends Dante of the The Divine Comedy and his life is forever altered, setting him on a collision course with Shakespeare’s play.

The book is a discussion of who we love, how our situations determine who we can love and how, and how love can be applied to friends, to family, and to the family we build around ourselves as we make our way, successfully or not, through the world. As he grows from the scorned youth of a forbidden marriage to a central player in the politics of Verona, Mercutio transforms from someone focused only on his family to building, or attempting to build, loving relationships with many different kinds of people. Whether it is his deep friendship with Dante, or his comradeship with his adventuring partners, or the family he is welcomed into in Florence, or the self-sacrificing love he finds for his parents, Mercutio’s story is one about how the right kinds of love and transform us, and the wrong kinds, or the kinds expressed in compulsion rather than mutual respect, can warp us. His story is as much an adventure of romance as it is an adventure across the world.

And it is an adventure. The themes of the book are wrapped in a series of exciting and moving adventures. We see many kinds of battlefields, spend time with the learned of the day, and try to survive the attention of various faeries and their enemies. Murder, mayhem, and destruction lie around every corner. It is a lovely, thoughtful book, taking plenty of time to explore the Italy of Mercutio’s day. We see both how much its inhabitants were like us, and how far apart from them we could be.

It is also a lovely, hauntingly written book. The prose is beautiful, both considered and sharp, languid when it needs to be, cutting when the time calls for us to be cut. Several times the book slipped into what I assumed were tributes to the poetry of Dante and Shakespeare. I am not expert, but Heartfield is a scholar of both writers, and I am confident that her scholarship is reflected in her prose, to great effect.

The fact that Mercutio is a prologue to Romeo and Juliet is not a mere gimmick, either. Deepening the character of Mercutio, better explaining the world the play lives in, and contrasting his deep and sincere love with the shallow counterpart in the play sharpens the impression of the play, give it more weight and thoughtfulness. This book is in deep conversation with Shakespeare’s play, and I think both are the better for the dialogue. I suspect much is true of Dante’s works as well, though I am not nearly well read enough in that area to be certain.

Mercutio is lovely written adventure that will change how you see one of the canonical texts of the English language. I heartily recommend pre-ordering it now.

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Book Seller Link (non-affiliate, but I do know the owner): Oathbreakers a book by Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry - Bookshop.org US

Author’s Website: This is David M. Perry – Author- Journalist – Historian – Speaker and About — Matthew Gabriele

History, it is often said, does not repeat, but it does rhyme. That, probably more than anything, is the message, intentional or not, of Oathbreakers. An excellent history of the end of the Charlemagne empire by David M. Perry (who, it must be said, has the tweest author photograph on his website of any author I have reviewed) and Mathew Gabriele (whose photo is not twee at all), authors of the Bright Ages, well told. The book is both a fascinating history of the time period when the Franks allowed their Empire to fall apart and a resonant story about how societies can and do change.

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The story of the Franks and the collapse of their empire, the most powerful in western Europe since Rome, is fascinating on many levels. The personalities involved, of course, are often outsized (Bernard of Septimania would make a good Game of Thrones villain) , and their choices literally shaped the modern world. The book does an excellent job of telling their stories, and the stories of the people around them. It is a compellingly written, with a nice leavening of dry, sarcastic humor. It reads more like a Game of Thrones script than a textbook.

I keep mentioning Game of Thrones, as the marketing for this book brings that comparison up a lot. And it is a fair comparison — if you threw some dragons on top of the book, you’d have a very good treatment for a successor series. But that, to me, is the least interesting aspect of the book. Oathbreakers, I think, is most interesting when it deals with how the civil war that ended the empire affected the perceptions of the people involved. The Franks had spent much of their political history posturing. Some skirmishes happened, some individuals were executed, sometimes horrifically, but Frankish politics largely consisted of bluffing. The various people would threatened, would march their armies, and then use their apparent force to gain concessions largely without a significant battle. Until, one day, that battle came.

The battle shattered the Frankish world, not so much because of the outcome (the civil war was still very much in doubt after it) but because of what it represented. Until that time, the Franks believed themselves to be the new chosen people, that God had gifted them their Empire because of their virtue. And part of that virtue was the sense of community that held, at least among the elites. They did not fight major battles because God would reveal, through the strength of the armies present and moving the hearts of the major lords to support one ruler or another, who should rule. Conflicts were often as much about the pen and persuasion than they were about actual bloodshed.

Until they weren’t.

The book does an excellent job of showing just how that one battle, and the slaughter that happened after, broke the Frankish conceptions of themselves, and how that broken conception eventually lead to the broken empire. The anguish over families fighting families comes through excruciatingly clear in the sources they quote, as well as the sense of doom and despair in the political and religious writings in the years and decades after. Stories matter, and things can appear to be certain and fixed until they are, suddenly, not. And those sudden changes have as much to do with what becomes possible as any army or general or king.

Which is demonstrated nicely in the impact the dissolution of the Frankish empire had on European conceptions of themselves. The battle that shattered the empire was taken up by both the nascent French and German empires in the nineteenth century as the basis for their own myths of national origin. That the two sides had sometimes widely differing opinions on what the battle actual achieved and that those opinions often changed on either side in the space of a few years, is another testament to the power of stories people tell about themselves. Nationalism is, in a real sense, a story we tell ourselves about ourselves. The same battle that shattered the story the Franks told about themselves built the story that the Germans and French used to construct their own nations on same ground that had once been a united Frankish Empire blessed by God and known and respected throughout the medieval world.

Oathbreakers also does a good showing that the dissolution of the Empire was not brought about solely by the choices of the players involved. While they point out that things could have gone differently if this person had moved more forcefully or that person had been a hair more patient, all of their actions are clearly constrained by the system in which they operated. The Empire might have been extended. It, indeed, had survived similar stresses in its recent past. But the systems that encouraged partition among heirs, that placed power in the hands of nobles and then encouraged them to change sides and be forgiven afterwards, was always one in danger of tripping over the line between pretend combat and slaughter.

The resonances with today are probably obvious. But they are important all the same. People, largely, remain people throughout history. And the story of the Franks and the shock of finding out that their myths were not true, the anguish of people whose crops were destroyed or children held as hostage for good behavior is as raw and real as the pain we feel for our loved ones today. And just like today, the stories and systems matter. People operate within the constraints of their societies, the myths and rules that govern them. And while they can make a difference, they operate constrained by the culture and rules around them. Until, one day, they wake up and find that the rules no longer hold.

The obvious lesson is that if you want things to improve, you need better stories and better systems. Otherwise, you find yourself in the ruins of the way the world used to be with no way back. Oathbreakers understands that fact — and focuses as much on the way that fact played out for the Franks as the play by play of the fall of the Empire. It is an excellent, well written history that I highly recommend.

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Book Seller Link (non-affiliate, but I do know the owner): Scriptnotes a book by John August and Craig Mazin - Bookshop.org US

Author’s Website: Scriptnotes

Scriptnotes by John August and Graig Mazin, two accomplished screenwriters and show runners, is a good book but I cannot help but think that it suffers from my having listened to the podcast. It simply is not as good as the podcast, but I still think if you have an interest in writing, the book is worthwhile.

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The Scriptnotes podcast is one of the best podcasts, never mind writing podcasts, around. Not so much for the quality of the advice (though the quality of the advice is not lacking), but for the relationship between August and Mazin. They play off each other very well, their obvious friendship tempered by their disagreements about issues and their different outlooks on life. The back and forth is both entertaining and enlightening, and listening to them, even when they agree, talk through an issue and arrive at a conclusion is much more enlightening than the advice by itself. The combination also results in excellent interviews, with each person seemingly knitting disparate threads until a complete tapestry has emerged between them and their guests. Unfortunately, that voice is largely missing from the book.

I have developed an odd relationship with craft books. As I have done more and more writing, I find most advice unsatisfying. Now, as I am an absolute failure as a writer, that probably means little to nothing. But I do find that a lot of craft books insist on doing things a specific way and only that way. The problem is that the things I enjoy the most do not do things in that way, whatever that ay may be. Now, we have rules so that we understand why we break them, but any book that thinks Memento is a poorly written script is not a book I want to be taking advice from, for example. And what I do not find unreasoningly prescriptive, I tend to find repetitive or simplistic. The Scriptnotes podcast suffers very little from this problem while the Scriptnotes book suffers from it more.

I suspect this is in part because the book is marketed as an advice book for screenwriters. As such, the process of turning the podcast into a book likely involved highlighting much of the more basic advice in order to serve the likely market better. But, to me, a lot of the advice feels repetitive of things I have seen elsewhere, or not especially helpful. I feel more and more that the best advice is relatively simple — build tension, write in a voice people find compelling. This book doesn’t have that voice, even when it is offering good advice.

And it does offer good advice. Two sections in particular — a discussion about Die Hard and a lecture about writing that Mazin gave — are very good examples of discussing how to build the tension a story needs. The fact that those are two of the few sections where the voice of the podcast comes through highlights how much that voice contributes to the value of the podcast. They made the choice to largely ignore that voice, to take their back and forth in the podcast and synthesize it into a set of advice delivered by both of them. In doing so, I think a lot of what makes them so good at giving advice was lost. When you cannot follow them as they discuss an issues, when you only get the conclusion, I think you lose something important.

This is not, I stress, a bad book. Far from it. I suspect that everyone will find some advice that is useful, depending on what they need at the time they read it. And they deliver that advice not as tablets from on high, but as the perspective of people who have made their way through the writing trenches, with authority but also with the understanding that writing, like all advice, is not always appropriate in all situations. They are not preaching a method to you, they are chatting with you about what’s worked for them, what they see in the industry, and what might work for you. And it is well written, especially when they allow their own voices to shine through the pages. The fault in the book is that such shining is not as present as it should be.

So buy the book if you are interested in good writing advice from professionals. But make sure you listen to the podcast as well. At the risk of having my library card revoked, the podcast is better than the book.

Cross posted at Bookstack.

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Book Seller Link (non-affiliate, but I do know the owner): Every Galaxy a Circle a book by Chloe Clark - Bookshop.org US

Author’s Website: Chloe N. Clark

Disclaimer: I received an ARC (Advanced Review Copy) of this book from the author. I do not know the author personally; I just saw her mentioning she had a new collection coming out in January but, unlike most books reviewed here, I did not pay for this one myself.

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Every Galaxy a Circle by Chloe N Clark is a short story collection largely focused on loss. The stories themselves come in a wide variety of genres, though they almost all have a science fiction flavor. These are not what I think of as plot stories. These stories are focused less on what happened and why it happened than on the impact of what happened. This is not to say that the stories do not have momentum or that nothing happens in any story, only that the important part of the story is almost never the action. The point of the story is almost never illustrated, with one particularly moving exception, by the action. Rather, the weight of the story is carried by the emotions of the characters or the situation they find themselves in. This is a collection very much focused on the interior of our lives, not the actions we take.

Each story has some connection to loss. They are ruminations on how we go forward when we have lost the most important things to us, or whether moving forward is the right choice after all. They ask what we owe the survivors or as compared to what we owe ourselves. They demand to know how we choose to support our community or, in one story, how we choose to not support our community. How we deal with loss or refuse to deal with loss ties all the stories together.

Not every story works, of course. Some of them are horror, a genre I do not like. One of them is so focused on the idea that it forget to do anything interesting with the idea or the characters. But there are far more compelling stories than the one or two misses. More often than not, I found myself caught up in the work and I often found myself thinking about the piece after I had put it down. The author also does a good job of making each character fit the piece. Often in story collections you can see that authors tend to write the same few characters over and over. not here. The characters seemed distinct and appropriate to the stories.

This is a collection worth reading, in my opinion. It is well written with a coherent theme and while all of the stories are not to my taste, most of them moved me or left me thinking or both. And I don’t think that is the sign of good work.

Cross posted at Bookstack

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Book Seller Link (non-affiliate, but I do know the owner): Hole in the Sky a book by Daniel H. Wilson - Bookshop.org US

Author’s Website: Daniel H. Wilson’s Official Website

Okay, based on last week’s review where I stated that I hate mysticism, the title might make people think I would be trashing this book. Actually, I quite enjoyed it. Am I a hypocrite? Probably, but I do think there are some important differences between the two stories.

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Hole in the Sky by Daniel H. Wilson is a mystical story wrapped in the clothing of science fiction. It tells about the discovery of first contact, the immediate aftermath, and how the first contact is anything but. It tells this story in a fairly standard way — through the eyes of civilians in the contact zone, government officials too far away to actually affect the situation directly, and military and government officials on the ground trying desperately to protect against something they have no understand of or tools to deal with. The mysticism is baked into the story from the start, and I think that is why I was okay with it.

Right from the start, as we are introduced to the pre-contact situation, mysticism is present. The way in which the government finds out about the coming contact is mystical. It is is presented, by the narrative, as scientific, but I don’t think that anyone is supposed to think it is anything other than a form of magic, a reading I believe the book later supports. The civilians largely survive by leaning on the their traditions and religion. The solution is pure mysticism, with an ending that occurs largely because the people involved believe in it strongly enough. I am okay with this, unlike last week’s book, because the mysticism is right up front and center from the start. It is clear what kind of story I am getting and that makes the difference. It is the same as accepting, say, faster than light travel. If you are upfront about it, I can overlook the fact that it is not real.

The story built around the mysticism is a lot of fun. It is a legitimate mystery until deep into the book what the end game is likely to be, and the solution comes from well established principles and history that the book has laid out. The characters are all believable and the acts as you believe they would act, not as the plot would have them act. This is mostly a fun romp, but you could also argue that the ending has a small comment on the difference on how Western cultures deal with the unknown and how other cultures do. I am not sure how much is intended, but I think that the text certainly supports that reading.

Overall, Hole in the Sky is a fun read with good characters and a solid mystery. Even if it does revolve around mysticism.

Crossposted soon at Bookstack

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Book Seller Link (non-affiliate, but I do know the owner): The Third Rule of Time Travel a book by Philip Fracassi - Bookshop.org US

Author’s Website: Philip Fracassi - Author and Screenwriter

This is not the book I thought it would be.

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I am a sucker for time travels stories. I will watch any move or television show that has time travel as a premise. I believe that Groundhog Day is the pinnacle of American cinema, and I will fight you over this opinion (fsck Citizen Kane — no time travel at all). I love the mysteries, the ability to play with meaning and determination, and the ways in which they can bend your mind. There is time travel in this book, but it seems to me that the book is less focused on those elements of time travel and more focused on the concept of fate and mysticism.

And I hate both fate and mysticism. But.

The story is fairly simple: scientist Beth who invented a time machine with her now deceased husband juggles trying to keep control of her experiment away from her unscrupulous billionaire boss and raising her young daughter all while grieving. Obviously, things go sideways with the time travel, in ways that threaten Beth and her daughter. Action and adventure and talks about the why of it all happen, leading to an ending that I thought was unsatisfying. But I think I still recommend this book.

The writing is well done, making Beth’s disorientation and emotions clear and compelling. Very often, the book has more of a horror feeling than a science fiction feeling, and those sections are particularly well done. And I say that as someone who dislikes horror. And while I dislike the ending, I do like mush else in the book. Beth’s emotional reaction to the changes she experiences is especially moving. The best of the book is a meditation on how grief and the responsibility of being a parent can weight on us, can bend us and twist us. That alone makes the book worth reading.

So do buy and read this for the excellent character work around Beth. And, hey, if you are not as turned off as I am by mysticism in your time travel, then the ending is likely much more enjoyable and satisfying. Over all, while it is no Primer, it is a well done work with a lot of emotional heft.

Cross posted soon at Bookstack.

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Book Seller Link (non-affiliate, but I do know the owner): The Right of the People a book by Osita Nwanevu - Bookshop.org US

Author’s Website: Nwanevu.

Okay, so I probably gave away the punch line the Should I Read This section, but The Right of the People by Osita Nwanevu is a really well done book. It’s primary, though not only flaw (see below) is that it covers ground that most political obsessives — which many of my readers likely count themselves — already know. But it covers that ground in very entertaining, and enlightening, fashion.

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Nwanevu is an exceptional writer. Reading this was never a chore, unlike many political tomes. he does not get bogged down in jargon, and any terms that he does have to use are explained quickly and completely. He has a knack for making ideas easy to understand without compromising their complexity. More importantly, to me, he never, ever argues against straw men. He does a good job of tackling the best version of the arguments he is debating. That makes the book feel like an honest conversation, and makes Nwanevu earn his conclusions. Which he almost alway’s does.

Nwanevu’s brief is that democracy is fundamentally broken in the United States and that only a complete reimagining of our systems can restore it. As I said, not new ground to anyone who has been paying attention to modern US politics, but also, as I said, a very well done argument for the brief. Nwanevu is complete in his diagnosis, going through how the structure of the Congress, the Supreme Court, how we run elections, and how we fund elections, are all contributing factors to the decline of democracy in this country. Again, not new information but also again, extremely well presented and very convincing.

He also does a nice job of laying out what a democracy actually should be, diving head firs tin the conflicts inherent between allowing majorities to govern, the lure of power, and the need to preserve individual rights in the face of both. Not, as I am sure you saw coming, a new argument. But one that feels more necessary than ever given how far don the rabbit hole of personal authoritarianism we have fallen. It is the clearest argument in defense of the concept of liberal democracy I have seen in a long time.

His solution sections is somewhat weaker, but only in comparison. I agree with many of his proposed solutions, believe that some don’t go far enough, and worry that some require changing the Constitution, something that almost certainly will not happen in my lifetime. Nwanevu does do something near and dear to my heart: discussing the absolute requirement that the economy be placed under democratic control. And he is not only talking about the regulation of the economy at large, but also the empowering of people within firms. After all, if most of us spend most of our waking hours living under a non-democratic power structure, what doers that mean for our attachment and understanding of democracy in our politics?

Overall, this is a well written, thoughtful, and entertaining book about a crisis that most of us are already aware of. It covers very little new, but there is value in having the arguments, problems, and solutions laid out in such a clear and compelling fashion. If you are too much of a political obsessive to feel this is something you need to read right now, give it to one of your more well-adjusted friends or family members. It wIll likely be eye-opening for them, and Nwanevu will almost certainly convert them to the side of defending democracy via institutional change. And we certainly need more people supporting that.

Crossposted soon at Bookstack.

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Book Seller Link (non-affiliate, but I do know the owner): Of Monsters and Mainframes

Author’s Website: Barbara Truelove

My father loved the old monster movies from before the 1960s. I must have seen every kind of goofy, yet somehow terrifying, black and white collection of cliched dialogue and surprisingly effective practical effects. Of Monsters and Mainframes by Barbara Truelove captures that spirit, with much, much, much better writing, of those films.

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Of Monsters and Mainframes is a delight. It tells the story of a series of monster attacks on the same sentient star liner. The story is told from the point of view of three sentient computers, a couple of monsters, and a couple of normal human beings. The joy of the story is the characters bouncing off the preposterous situation of a starship being infested, multiple times, with monsters. The artificial intelligences in particular, a mix of homicidal disregard for individual life, teenage petulance, and shareholder primacy, are a joy to read. But all of the characters have their moments to shine, and they are all well rounded and distinct. Each motivation is believable.

The plot can be a bit stretched in some places, and there some things are “explained” in a science-fiction fashion, a move I felt was unnecessary and felt a touch forced. But Truelove does a good job of tying all the separate vignettes together in the final segments. The ending is both surprising and perfectly foreshadowed by what had happened earlier, the best kinds of ending. Every section is fine by themselves, but the way they come together at the end made me grin. The action is well handled, the plots hold together despite the sometimes ridiculous nature of the situation, and the characters are all fun to spend time with. And while this is mostly a romp, it also had, running underneath it quietly, like a werewolf sneaking up on you in the dark, a little unnerving story about how we do and do not value individual life.

All in all, the book is a fun tribute to the monster movies of the past, well worth your time to read. It even, of you are paying attention, uses the monsters to give the reader something to think about with regards to the value we do or do not place on life. I recommend it, and I think that Bella Lugosi would be proud.

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Book Seller Link (non-affiliate, but I do know the owner): Infinite Archive

Author’s Website: Mur Lafferty

This book is so much fun. Infinite Archive is the third book in the Midsolar Murders series and, like each of the preceding two, well worth the read. It is ostensibly a murder mystery, but while the mystery is satisfying, the real joy is in the characters. The are weird, alien, fun, human, and engaging even when they are being stupid, infuriating, and petty. Fortunately, they are also kind, charming, and exasperated as well. They are the kinds of characters you come back for.

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Mallory Viridian has been followed by murder her entire life, so much so that she fled to an alien space station to avoid contact with other humans. Unfortunately, humans inevitably follow and thus so does murder. It turns out that Mallory is not a Jessica Fletcher style serial killer (look, like ten people live in that town. She definitely lures the victims there and then “solves” their murders. I will hear no argument on this subject.) nor the cause of all that death. She is merely hyper aware of her surroundings due to an accidental bonding with an alien species of bugs. Turns out that all the other races in the galaxy have a symbiotic relationship with another— except humans. Mallory’s connection to these bug aliens makes her more aware of her surroundings and thus really good at solving murders. She makes her living writing about the murders she solves.

The world building is one of the stars here. There are tons of aliens, from the afore-mentioned bugs to sentient almost immortal rocks, to sentient spaceships that bond with other races, to aliens with camouflage so good they might as well be invisible. Each has a distinct culture, even if the main representatives do not act so inscrutably that their motives and personalities are not understandable to readers. Think Star Trek with more murder and less Spock.

The murder in this book is one of the better ones. The solution should feel like. deus ex machina but really doesn’t given how subtly Lafferty builds the world. The motive feels both incredibly petty and completely understandable, which is the best kind of motive in my opinion, and the solution is reasonably in doubt until near the end. It is satisfying if not particularly “wow”. Which is fine, because the rest of the book has enough wow to keep you reading.

As mentioned, the world building is fantastic. This book takes place mostly on a starship that has decided to turn the internet into a physical reality. That is as over the top and fun as it sounds, with the cat room being a particular favorite. Lafferty does a great job blending the world building into the story and the book never bogs down over the exposition. She builds a messed up but understandable stage for her characters to play upon. And her characters are the real fun.

All of the characters, from the protagonist to the side characters, human or alien, feel like fleshed out people. They are all given space to breathe, and they run the gamut from not entirely comic relief robot death machine Queen of a prison planet with the mentality of a twelve-year-old to deadly serious and overly pompous ex-ambassadors. Each one feels like a real person and none of them are cardboard cut outs. They all act as you would believe them to act based on their personalities, even, especially, when they do something you do not expect. It is fun to watch them struggle to be both people, dealing with bad literary agents for example, trying to not find a murder, and dealing with solving a murder while parenting a baby spaceship (and it is as adorable as it sounds, but also its own personality). I finished the book in a day not because of the mystery but because it was fun to hang out with these people again.

Lafferty also treats the characters like adults, so there are subtle comments on how to handle power, what to do when someone who has power should not have it, and how to, well, all get along when you have little to nothing in common. There is also a commentary on the limits of tolerance as well that is probably needed as a reminder in this day and age.

That might be the only downside to coming into the series now. The only place that the books do slow a bit is in the beginning where Lafferty has to re-establish the bits that came before but are important to this story. It is a minor issue, but it is there.

That is a picky nit, however. Overall, this is a fun, fantastic read with more depth than might be apparent at first blush and a cast of characters worth spending your time with.

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Book Seller Link (non-affiliate, but I do know the owner): The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses

Author’s Website: Global Voices · Local perspectives for a global audience

The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses by Dr. Malka Older (that’s right — not only is she an excellent writer, she’s earned a doctorate too. What have you done this week? Yeah, me either.) is the third novella in her Mossa and Pleti Mysteries series. I have enjoyed each one, this one the most.

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The series is set on a Jupiter after it has been colonized because the Earth’s environment has been destroyed. Dr. Older has created a wonderfully slow-paced new world, more reminiscent of the 19th century than our hectic reality. The world building in these books is amazing, as much a character as any of the participants on the page. She does an excellent job of creating this world for us on the fly. The way a character tries to connect to what she thinks her ancestors on Earth would have felt as she lays on the settlement’s only grass hill or the way that people complain about the harshness of electric light versus gas lamps — the book is filled with these small, calm moments that tell us so much about the culture of her new world.

The book’s use of language is also a delight. The characters speak more in a roundabout, meandering, half-formal style that I associate with 19th century novels. That style does a wonderful job not only informing us about the pace of their lives but also reinforces how strange this hyper-technological civilization really is. The use of words from several different languages in common speech does more to impress upon the reader the polyglot nature of the world than any other method of exposition. And, of course, it is a delight to read — a style both sharp and indulgent.

The style also serves the emotional and thematic core of the books. On a mechanical level, these books are about slow revealing mysteries. Thematically, though, each one has been about the different sides of an emotion. This book, as you can probably glean from the title, is about attraction. The way Mossa and Pleti circle, bounce off, and entangle with each other is extremely well done. Mossa codes, to me, as both autistic and depressive but Dr. Older never treats those conditions as things to gawk at or as an excuse for platitudes or mawkishness. The way Pleti deals with both her attraction to Mossa and the frustrations and emotional whiplash of Mossa’s conditions feels very real. Speaking as someone who has family members with these conditions, Dr. Older’s ability to dramatize them in Mossa without making Mossa a Very Special Character, allowing her to be a person with all the good and bad that entails, is a delight.

The mystery, as mentioned, also ties into the theme of the book quite well. This is the best mystery of the three in the series, in my mind, in part because I think this one is the most closely tied to the emotional weight of the rest of the book. In addition to the discourse on various emotions, the three books have a running undercurrent of interrogating how you move on from disaster, how you can possibly make the right choices when all the choices are inadequate. This book does an excellent job of tying that running theme into the main mystery as well, giving it an emotional and intellectual weight that was not as clear, at least to me, in the previous books. And, frankly, the way the final confrontation ends is ludicrous, perfectly setup, and perfectly appropriate.

This book is a joy to read. It combines a marvelous use of language with excellently drawn emotions, a fun adventure mystery, and a lingering intellectual and cultural challenge sadly relevant for the times, all expertly tied together with perhaps the most unique world in recent sci-fi history. I flew through this in one evening and suspect you will do the same.

Cross posted to Bookstack.

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BookShop.org Link (non-affiliate): More Everything Forever a book by Adam Becker

Author’s Website: Dr. Adam Becker

Hey! A book review! Been a while. I must be getting slower in my old age.

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I have already written a little bit about More Everything Forever by Adam Becker, but this is the proper review, or what passes for one in these parts. This book is a little bit hard to review because it is so good. In a non-fiction book, that makes discussion a little light. Simply, this book is an excellent look at the intellectual underpinnings of the techno-authoritarianism and how, as the saying goes, history rhymes.

Beck does an excellent job of walking through not only the more outrageous ideas of the modern tech authoritarian — people like Musk, Andreessen, and Thiel — but he shows how those ideas are tied to and build upon early movements, including deeply racist and eugenic movements. Becker traces how various ideas — such as space colonization, artificial intelligence, and the general concept of technological salvation — have their roots in older intellectual traditions, many of which were eugenic, racist, classist or all three. The tech overlords of today very often do not care about the nitty gritty problems of today because they are focused on the problems of the future. And, in part, because they don’t really value every human being as they value themselves. As a result, they push ideas that focus on improbable or impossible future at the expense of more mundane concerns.

The book itself is an enjoyable read. Becker not only makes the connections clear and easy to follow, but the book is also filled with more ideas per page than most books cover in a chapter. Beckers explains in clear and concise terms the entire intellectual edifice that our current age of tech bro dominance is built upon. You will spend one moment thinking about how effective Altruism is a symptom of late stage capitalism and the next wondering what it mean that our tech overlords are focused on the impossible dream of colonizing rather than the quite achievable dream of stopping climate change.

Becker does not just catalogue the moral failings of the tech oligarchy. He also follows the thread of those failings through the darkness, to demonstrate how a morality of care and inclusiveness can counteract the selfish, exclusionary fantasies that drive too many of our ultra wealthy tech owners. Becker does not preach, but his calm and thoughtful logic is hard to dismiss.

This book is worth reading, not only because it will help you better understand the motives of the people driving the plant toward an ugly future but give you a way to fight out of that darkness. Highly recommended.

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Should I Read This: Yeah. It’s a lot of fun for people who are interested in how everyday people lived their lives.

BookShop.org Link (non-affiliate): Cunning Folk a book by Tabitha Stanmore

Author’s Website: Dr Tabitha Stanmore

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Cunning Folk by Dr. Tabitha Stanmore is a fun little book that highlights how Europeans in the Late Medieval and Early Modern period tried to force a world they didn’t entirely understand, and was often horrible to live in, to be just a little more kind. Anyone who is interested in how normal people lived would probably find this book enjoyable.

Dr. Stanmore walks us through the concepts of cunning folk, people who had a reputation for bending the world, even if just a little bit, in the direction of their clients. These people could find lost goods, help calm an abusive husband, try to get the center of your affections to fall in love, or at least lust, with you and, failing all other options, kill someone who needed killing. The book is organized into chapters by topic, such as love, detection, murder, etc. That organization does a very good job of highlighting the kinds of problems that people wanted solved, and even how the cunning folk, known by a lot of different titles, went about their “magic”.

The book also subtly points out just how miserable these lives could be. Someone who spends more than a day’s wages to retrieve a lost silver spoon shows how much poverty and the threat of poverty hung over normal people. The fact that the punishments for nobles who used these services were so much lighter than those of common people speaks to the capriciousness of life. The matter-of-fact descriptions of women trying to either escape their abusive husbands or tame them are a heartbreaking read. The fact that we lose most of the common people into the mists of history, as we see the cunning folk only in court records and then they fade to obscurity, speaks to the way society simply did not value their lives.

The book, despite the occasional odd nod to how we cannot really know if these practitioners used magic, walks through how people could continue to make money promising magic that did not actually exist. These men and woman (despite my flippant headline, the book gives the impression that this was largely a gender-neutral profession) used a combination of people’s own superstitions and their knowledge of the local people and geography, to essentially encourage people to con themselves into believing magic worked. A cunning person used the threat of a magical charm, coupled with an opportunity to anonymously return the lost good, for example, to get a precious item returned. Many people, when accused by a magician, folded, convinced that the magic and not the knowledge and investigative skills of the cunning person found them out. It is a fascinating look at how psychology convinces both the practitioner and the observers that magic did, in fact, work.

Cunning People is a fun read, written to be enjoyable and understandable by people with no background in the subject. It is a fun read about people trying to force a little bit of happiness and comfort out of a world seemingly designed to provide most people both. Recommended.

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Should I Read This: Probably. It covers some old ground but in a useful, revealing way.

BookShop.org Link (non-affiliate): Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams

Author’s Website: Careless People

There is a certain kind of person, well meaning, open to inspiration, genuinely wants to help the world that I think gets us into more trouble than perhaps any other kind of person. Not because they are bad people — far from it. In fact, they are often the best among us. But they seem to have a certain impatience, a certain frustration with the nuts and bolts of truly democratic that lead them to work for and with truly bad people. Sarah Wynn-Williams strikes me as that kind of person. And let me be clear — I will take a world filled with Sarah Wynn-Williams as compared to the alternatives. But Careless People, while meant to be about the Facebook elite, also shows, unintentionally I think, how decent people make the initial mistake of working for bad people.

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And let us be absolutely clear: the people who run Facebook are bad people. Sheryl Sandberg talked a good game about balancing life and work for women but treated her subordinate, especially her female subordinates, terribly. Facebook itself made it clear that kids had better never, ever come up in a work situation, not even when you happened to be close to dying after childbirth. Sexual harassment was rampant, and HR investigations seemed to be aimed at suppressing the reporters rather than solving the problems. Senior leadership like Joel Kaplan, of Brooks Brothers Riot fame, and Elliot Shrage cared only about growth, and thus profits, at all costs. An attitude insisted on by Mark Zuckerberg.

Zuckerberg, if even half the stories in this book are true and we have no reason to believe any of them are false, is one of the worst human beings on the planet. The book makes clear that Zuckerberg and other senior leadership knew that Facebook was responsible for violence in Myanmar and did nothing. They knew that they were selling to teens at their most vulnerable, ads being tied to “depression” or when they delete a selfie, for example, and were proud of it. They worked hand in hand with the Chinese government to turn over sensitive data to the Chinese authorities, knowing both that people would be hurt because of that action and that data for non-Chinese citizens would also end up in their governments hand because of the way Facebook setup its services. They didn’t care about any of that because growth was all that mattered.

Two incidents highlight, in a small way, why Zuckerberg is such a terrible person. At the end of her tenure, all her fucks given away, Wynn-Williams is on a flight with Zuckerberg. Mark likes to play games, primarily, I suspect, because he is always allowed to win. Wynn-Williams does not let him win. He cannot believe that he could lose, and he probably even more cannot believe he could lose to a woman that didn’t even go to Harvard (it’s very clear that all of the Facebook senior leadership are extremely impressed with their Harvard degrees. Harvard should probably think long and hard about what that means). She must have cheated, he says. She didn’t cheat, and she walks back through the game pointing out all of the stupid shit he did that caused him to lose. She then, having moved past no fucks to give and into the transcendent realm of an arsonist standing in a pool of gas with a lit match, points out that the same stubbornness that cost him the game cost him in real life. Zuckerberg does not apologize or give any indication that he understands. he merely moves the conversation along, content, apparently, in his own wisdom.

More disturbingly, after an employee is arrested in Brazil because of Facebook’s unwillingness to comply with a court order regarding a man who is threatening to assassinate the judge handling the case, Zuckerberg writes a post about how heartwarming it is that the employee would protect the data of Facebook users. the post is written in such a way as to undermine the legal case Facebook was trying to build to get the employee released. Zuckerberg didn’t care. A few months later, when presented with said employee, it was obvious Zuckerberg had no idea who the man was.

Since Wynn-Williams worked on the policy side, created the job, in fact, she had close contact with the most senior leaders in the organization. This allows her to fill the book with stories about their bad behavior and disdain for anyone that was not them. All of that is helpful, but there is also an undercurrent of why Wynn-Williams joined the company in the first place and why it took so long to see that she was working with bad people.

I do not question why she stayed. Money drives everything in the US and asking to give up your source of healthcare and security when you have kids who need help and you yourself are facing a potentially life-threatening condition is a huge ask, bordering in unreasonable. I am even at home to the idea that it took her so long to see what was wrong because people do not want to see what is wrong with people and institutions that they once believed in. Wynn-Williams apparent blindness to what I saw as enormous blinking red flags is probably best ascribed to common human failing. What does interest me, and what concerns me given how she ends the book, is why she joined Facebook in the first place.

Wynn-Williams worked as a diplomat at the United Nations on environmental issues. She was disillusioned by the process and the slow pace and the backwater that the UN had largely become. Facebook was new, exciting, and she could see how it could be a force for good. except that Facebook is a company and no company can be a force for good, not in any meaningful sense. this is not to say that all companies are driven to be evil. the firm I work for is not, no more than anything or anyone else in late capitalism. I work with a lot of smart people and while the expectations are high, they give me the space required to take care of my health and my family. But at the end of the day, they are companies. They are going to push to make money, and publicly traded companies are going to be pushed to grow quarter to quarter. That can be done ethically, and I think most companies try to be ethical, but it does mean that in companies will not, cannot, put what’s good for society over what is good for themselves. That is why we have governments.

When presented with the idea that a movie was more effective than the UN, Wynn-Williams gave up on government. She didn’t try and change the UN. She didn’t try and go to a spot where she could have more influence. She didn’t try and go home to New Zealand and work on government programs there that would have a more immediate impact. She didn’t even get into the movie business to make more movies that would encourage people to save the environment. No — she went work for a private form led by a man with no accountability to anyone but himself, seduced by the idea that a company could improve the world. We all know what happened next.

This idea, that business is a proper receptacle for the desire to improve civil society, is wildly misplaced. When companies move fast and break things they tend to break the important things — civil society, laws, democratic accountability — that restrain their ability to make money. Any firm powerful enough to actually shape events, like Facebook, is almost certainly going to shape events in favor of their bottom line. It is silly to think that extremely wealthy, unaccountable people can be consistently counted upon to put civil society above their own needs. Again, that is what we have governments and non-profits for.

If Wynn-Williams wanted a good Facebook, she should have focused on creating one in the non-profit or governmental space. If she wanted to make the world better, she should have worked for people whose job it is to do so. Perhaps the greatest trick the devil ever played on humanity was convincing people that business was more important, more effective, more meaningful than government and charity work. Wynn-Williams does seem to have learned her lesson, at least a little bit. She appears to be working on AI policy outside of the AI companies. She is still buying the hype a little too much, in my opinion, but she has moved on from the business world into trying to do good in the real world.

That, as much as the understanding that Zuckerberg and other billionaires need to be reined in, is my largest takeaway form the book. We spend too much time glorifying business and not enough time appreciating public service. As a result, otherwise intelligent and dedicated people like Wynn-Williams waste their time and their talents trying to change the world inside a vessel uniquely unsuited to the task.

I do recommend the book. Wynn-Willaims is a very good writer, getting to the heart of the story easily in a style that conveys both her disbelief and the seriousness of the moments. And while it covers a lot of ground politically aware people know, she does an excellent job of showing how that ground makes up a coherent geography, not just individual places.

Plus, it describes how teenage her survived a shark attack despite the New Zealand doctors, her parents, and apparently the entire nation told her to walk it off.

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Should I Read This: Absolutely. Right now.

BookShop.org Link (non-affiliate): Dangerous Fictions by Lyta Gold

Author’s Website: Lyta’s List

I love this book.

That is likely not the way a professional review would start, but I don’t care: I love this book. Not that I agree with everything in it, mind you, but that does nothing to diminish my love.

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Dangerous Fictions by Lyta Gold is a brilliant look at how fiction has been repressed in modern time. But it is also a study of how capitalism shapes what art is available, how the government used to try and use fiction for its Cold War ends and how that shapes what we see and hear today, and whether or not fiction should be useful. The book is fantastically written. Gold speaks to the reader as a person, not as if she was speaking at a symposium, an occupational hazard for non-fiction books. Reading it is like having a beer with your smartest friend.

The fantastic voice does nothing to dimmish the scholarship or arguments of the book. Gold knows her material and makes her points backed by that knowledge and solid logic. She traces the history of modern book banning and other repressions of fiction to the concept that fiction is “useful”. And it if it is useful, it has power. And it if it has power, it needs to be controlled, especially so that it does not infect the weaker minds of children and woman and minorities. And so, inevitably, one part or another of society attempts to control fiction.

She also highlights how much of fiction is limited by the capitalist system it is created under. More astutely, at least to me, she discusses how the performance of cancel culture is often played out amongst minority or otherwise disadvantaged authors, driven by, perhaps unconsciously, the capitalist imperative to outsell others. Writing is not a remunerative profession, and removing others makes your odds of winning the fiction lottery slightly higher. And cancel culture sems to hit minority writers harder than white writers — compare the trajectory of American Dirt, for example, with the trans writer of I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter who abandoned her transition and became suicidal.

As I mentioned, I am not sure I agree with everything that Gold argues. Her notion that thinking of art as useful makes it more susceptible to censorship and replacement by AI is well argued and at least thought provoking. But it is also a bit ragged at the edges. Gold does admit that fiction can move people to action, and that the weight of similar fiction can have an effect— copoganda (copoganda is art that glorifies police and police work and is present in many different forms — like the fact that my spellchecker does not recognize copoganda as a word) is the example she uses, but there’s no reason to think it could not or does not work for other subjects. But overall, she seems to think that people see what they want in art and that art is not a form of action, even if it inspires action occasionally. She worries, not without merit, that creating and consuming art takes the place of organizing and politics.

If art is not useful, then why should we indulge artists in their work? Isn’t it wasteful or indulgent to tell pretty stories while the world burns? Gold falls back on the idea that art is part of what makes humans human, that creativity is a part of the human experience and as such its creation is an inalienable right of all people. Maybe. I find that mostly persuasive, but then, isn’t it just another kind of usefulness? If it is necessary for humans, then by definition isn’t useful to them? And if it’s useful, then doesn’t that lead us back to the censorship question?

Gold doesn’t want to treat art as another commodity, I think, and she doesn’t want to make it easy for people to censor fiction. I am not entirely sure she succeeds, and the book might have benefited from a discussion of why democratic censorship is or is not appropriate. We don’t let kids access porn (or we didn’t before the internet), for example. How does that kind of decision-making advance or repress fiction?

Whatever the faults in her arguments I find, I want to re-emphasize that I love this book. Gold loves fiction, clearly, of all kinds, low and high, and she obviously wants to preserve its place in our lives. She has written the most intelligent, accessible, and thoughtful discussion of the meaning of art, its intersection with capitalism, and ultimately how society should interact with it that I have read in a long time, perhaps forever.

I cannot recommend it enough.

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Fiction: The Shamshine Blind by Paz Pardo

From my review:

This not a traditional noir, however, even if the noir aspects are done very well. In addition to the mystery, the book is almost a rumination on emotions and how people deal with depression, the loss of hope. The pigment police are depressives, because the belief is that they can handle the surge of emotions better than neurotypical people can, and so there is quite a bit about depression and other such conditions. but there is also a very nice rumination on how hope is held onto and how being hopeful does not negate neither the bad things in life nor your justified emotional reaction to said bad things.

Non-fiction: Blood in the Machine by Brian Merchant (link to his excellent newsletter which you should all be reading)

From my review:

Merchant elevates the historical consensus about the Luddites with an almost novelistic, but rigorous, retelling of not only their story, but how their story illustrated problems with the “technology above all” mindset both in their day and in ours. It is an exceptional, important book.

The Luddites were heroes. Their resistance reminds us that technology in and of itself has no value. That growth in and of itself has no value. That an economy should serve the people of a society, not the other way around. They were, if not the start, then a significant driver of the process that eventually made it possible for the benefits of new technology to be broadly shared and for things like a comfortable middle class to exist. Because the Luddites did not entirely lose. Under their pressure, the laws eventually did change. Not as much as they needed, but the start of the creation of the better world we live in began not with the invention of the machines that filled the factories and employed children to run them, but with the Luddites standing up and saying “Enough.”

There you go: the scientifically proven best books I read this year, and ones you should read as well. Because science says so.

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