Sometime between buying my 27-year-old self an ergonomic keyboard and my boss forgetting how long I’ve worked for him, I realized 2023 doesn’t have a lot going for it. Luckily, it’s been an exceptionally high-quality year of reading, and so I’ve looked forward to writing this one for months.
Superlative Fiction
The Masquerade by Seth Dickinson is the best fiction I’ve read of the year. The series, which begins with The Traitor Baru Cormorant, follows a young girl as foreigners arrive on her shores and sweep her up into the vast, ravenous machinery of empire. Shimmering prose, keen and empathetic psychological portraits, vengeful indictments of colonialism… and a surgical instinct for dismembering the reader’s expectations with no anesthesia. Simply immaculate.
Like everything by George Saunders, Liberation Day can be painful to read. Not because the heroes are bitter and dumb and generally kinda selfish, but because even when they manage to do the right thing for once, it’s only because their selfish desires happened to align with something halfway noble. In other words, Liberation Day just depicts reality, distilled to only the truthful bits. Painful, but wonderful.
A human and an android discover a species of hyperintelligent octopus… will Homo sapiens extinguish this species as we did all our older cousins, or will something new emerge? That is the central question of Ray Nayler’s A Mountain in the Sea, part hard sci-fi thriller and part philosophical meditation on mind, consciousness, and decency.
Dishonorable Mention (because it’s fun to watch a trainwreck)
Somehow my spouse was subjected by the gods of torment and meaninglessness to something called “bookTok,” and so yes, I ended up reading Sarah J. Maas’ A Court of Thorns and Roses. If one reads it the way one sits down in front of a Marvel movie, then its protagonist, Feyre, is almost relatable. But eventually, I realized that Feyre kept being placed in what I’ve been calling “Slave Leia” circumstances — settings where the hero is subjected to sexual power dynamics or a lack of consent, but the audience is meant to find it arousing.
This works as a steamy device because the audience consents to have their proxy, the point-of-view character, placed in that situation. If you’re me, though, Slave Leia is really a monkey wrench to suspension of disbelief, because Feyre doesn’t know she’s a fictional character, and therefore experiences the lack of consent as such. So, when Feyre’s inner dialog tells us she’s starting to like being Slave Leia (i.e., Maas is giving the audience permission to be aroused by this), I am repulsed at what this implies in-universe: “no means yes”. It’s okay if these books are just vehicles for audience desires… but no amount of bookTok hype can make that into self-consistent fiction.
Not Quite Books But Still Great
I watched a couple of good movies this year, including The Host (Bong Joon-ho), Sorry to Bother You (Boots Riley), and The Matrix (the Wachowskis).
I also listened to some good podcasts, foremost among them Blowback and Your Undivided Attention. Other consistently excellent shows include Intercepted, Jacobin Radio, Tech Won’t Save Us, and Upstream.
Superlative Nonfiction
This year I read nonfiction near-exclusively about Science. Not little-s science of test tubes and formulas (boring), but Science as a human enterprise and a historical process and a repository of know-how. Like all books I love, these changed me; unlike most books I love, this change is one of fire, lifeless things transmuted into energy and incandescence.
Ofer Gal’s The Origins of Modern Science started out innocently enough, tracing the development of Western science as it emerged from the historical realities of Europe and its surroundings. Gal’s central metaphor is Science as cathedral: a cathedral is only possible due to cultural-material circumstances (agrarian societies that support dense cities), and its features emerge from culture (the cruciform plan and the lux nova windows). So too with Science: Henry the Navigator needed his ships to reliably reach the Azores for resupply, lest his sailors starve in the transatlantic crossing; and lo, there was research funding for astronomy and map-making. But Science also imports cultural values, from the fervent alchemy of Bacon and Newton to the eugenics of Galton and the technofascism of von Braun. Thus was the fire kindled.
American Genesis, by Thomas P Hughes, spreads the fire to America, illustrating how science morphed from an Edisonian hero worship of the genius inventor to the “monopoly of monopolies” of the kind granted to duPont, Eastman Kodak, General Electric, and other corporate R&D science enterprises. The means: war (of course), particularly the need to compete with German synthesis of ammonia for use in high explosives. The logic of corporate, collective control of Science reached its terminus with the Manhattan Project, a nationwide network of talent and natural resources siphoned into three explosions in 1945 and one global empire ever afterwards.
(I also watched Oppenheimer this year. It was good once I realized that J. Robert was the film’s protagonist, but not its hero.)
Enter the smoldering Dark Carnivals of W Scott Poole. Using the deeply fascinating lens of horror films, Poole traces the shadows of America through the 20th century. The waking nightmares of an empire were reflected in the things pop culture found horrible — at first, the “Mongol hordes” of Fu Manchu and the zombie-raising voodoo of liberated Haiti, but later the Black-coded “superpredator” and the home invader. But, through it all, an undercurrent: films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Starship Troopers ripped through suburbia with the troubling assertion that “the worst possible thing is true.” Yes, America did eviscerate his own manufacturing towns, abandoning his immiserated citizens to drugs and despair. Yes, America did pardon Nazis to build technofascist dreams, annihilation cast down from orbit. And horror will not let him, or us, forget.
The American Dream is already singed by now, but The Trouble With Passion and Misconceiving Merit by Erin A. Cech engulf it completely. This pair of academic reports shows that those most passionate about their jobs are more likely to be overworked and underpaid (as a grad student, I sympathize). We justify these sacrifices at the altar of Science because we are still judged against the lone genius Einstein, but this schema weighs most heavily on women, people of color, and other minorities.
Has the fire reached a limit, a threshold that expends its energy in one explosive burst? Don’t let the title of Andreas Malm’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline fool you. This book does assert property destruction as a balm to the climate crisis (that first and most terrible son of Science and Greed), but is more oriented around how to find and keep an active hope, how to tend our flames in the face of the greater inferno.
Perhaps the best tender of the flame, though, is Lulu Miller’s Why Fish Don’t Exist. She traces a scientist’s lifelong battle to bring order to the universe. The suffering in his wake, both existential and literal, is too shocking to spoil here, but this is the book I devoured in one sitting, the book whose pages are warped from my tears of catharsis. When it was finished, I shielded my flame from the wind and saw the new year ahead, lit with determined possibility.
Thanks for reading. My wish for you in 2024 is that you will hear a story that changes you.