It’s been a little over a year since I last posted, and I figured it was about time to post some kind of update, particularly when the website metrics tell me that some people are indeed stumbling across this little website for some reason. Hello! Yes, miraculously I kept up semi-consistent posts on this site for what might have been about six or seven years. And I would’ve kept it up too, if I hadn’t hit a mental wall in October of 2020. The obvious reason for this was that, between a full-time job, part-time school, a relationship, family, friends, hobbies, not to mention the stress of a global pandemic — that not only did I find the posts taking far too much time away from writing my books, but I was also starting to dislike feeling obliged to write them. Time’s become very finite and there’s already a world of responsibilities and distractions to keep me away from finishing this one book I’m working on (that I’ve been caught up in to some degree since 2014!). I didn’t need me to be one of the things slowing it down, particularly if these posts were just causing me stress as I wracked my brain for ideas and cleared parts of my schedule to commit to it. That’s not to say that I plan to end this blog indefinitely. Just a hiatus from regularly posting until I finish this degree I’m working on so that I’m not feeling strangled by the clock. How does 2023 sound? Not as the next time I’ll post, but simply a time that I feel certain I can post consistently. Otherwise, I’ll continue to stay on stealth-mode for a while longer — wanted to give an update, though, in case anyone finds themselves wondering!
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I don’t normally do book reviews. There was a time when it felt somewhat empowering to express my detailed opinion on a story, but I’ve found that rating systems tend to be so warped from person to person (with me skewing more on the positive side) that it starts to feel pointless to develop metrics. I like reading books. It doesn’t get more complicated than that, except for that I listen to them now as well. And oddly enough, this is just with books. With shows and movies, I have a much easier time explaining how and why something wasn’t up to par, but for some reason books are different. Is it the medium? Is it because I studied literature and not film? Do I get something more out of books in a way that bad shows and movies can feel more like wasted time? I really couldn’t say. All I know is that about a month ago, I began listening on audiobook to a very good story. It was only published in 2019, yet I can’t figure out where exactly I came across it. Something recommended by an algorithm most likely. Regardless, I really liked it, and the story it told felt important. I was buying a couple other books related to the class I’m taking on Utopian and Dystopian literature, and thought, “well, this is a dystopian book. Could possibly make a good paper topic.” It hadn’t yet come out on paperback yet, but there were some cheap used versions of the hardcover for sale, and since the hardcovers I buy are usually 50+ years old, I thought I’d treat myself. Last week, it arrived, and it was more than a hardback. It was a library book. Now, there are a lot of reasons why libraries get rid of their books, and I’m not about to even have you presume I actually know anything about the ins and outs of that process – but it does seem unusual that a library would give up an undamaged, unmarked book that only came out a year ago. Perhaps the pandemic has something to do it, or the wildfires, considering it looks like it came from a county in the Bay Area. Either way, I wanted to talk a bit about Rob Hart’s The Warehouse. However I may have come across it, whatever short description it gave was enough to entice me. I don’t believe it was the description actually given on the back of the book or the Amazon page. It only deepens my curiosity as to where I might’ve come across this book, but if you’d like a fair rundown of what the book is about (without giving too much away), I’d actually recommend checking out Gabino Iglesias’ review. But the short of it is this -- the book essentially imagines a world where an Amazon-like company (called The Cloud, but it’s basically Amazon without being Amazon) continues developing and reaches its logical conclusion: a complete monopoly on anything and everything, including jobs. I don’t want to get into the nitty gritty of how that works in this universe, since I think part of the books charm is its fair ability to balance between nuance and starkness in its messaging, which is helped by its 3 perspectives. You have Paxton, who’s kind of a everyman character who has had to suck up his pride to work for Cloud after his start-up company went under. He constantly wants to do right, but seems to constantly find himself in systems that encourage and reward him for working against his own morals. His wants to eventually leave to start up a new company, but quickly starts to doubt how possible this is. You have Zinnea, who you very quickly find out is a corporate spy sent undercover by an unknown employer (not going to say who since it apparently wasn’t obvious to a lot of Goodreads reviewers) to find out the source of Cloud’s power. She’s kind of everything one generally likes in spy characters: smart, resourceful, dishes out punches – a very independent character all around. And then you occasionally hear from Gibson, the found of Cloud, in the form of polished blog posts he’s writing as he announces to the world that he’s dying (it’s the first line, so, not much of a spoiler). It sometimes feels random to have him jumping in throughout the story, suddenly addressing you by speaking in the 1st person. But his view is central to presenting the themes of the book, and the stark difference between rhetoric (along with the narratives we tell) and reality. It’s all around a well thought out story that had me on the end of my seat in the last quarter as Zinnea finally gets to the bottom of her mission (there’s a Soylent Green-esque bluff that I admittedly didn’t know what to do with, but was undoubtedly hilarious). But the reason why I really recommend the book is this: there are a lot of people drawing candidates for what dystopian novel is “representative” of our current (American) society. Everyone wants to call out 1984 (which makes me think no one has actually read Brave New World); but if it weren’t for the pandemic, I would say it’s this. The Warehouse. Maybe it is even with the pandemic, as Amazon took on more of the role usually provided by stores. Regardless, I’m getting the sense that the book didn’t get the fair chance it might have deserved. It may not be everyone’s cake, but I think this is one to give a shot. It’s not long. It’s not difficult to read. And it feels important.
In a class I’m taking currently, the professor asked us to think about who might be the “parent” of science fiction, and if it was possible that this parent could be Edgar Alan Poe. Not just Poe either, but even Nathanial Hawthorne (the author of Scarlet Letter, the bane of high school English classes) or Kepler (the 16th century astronomer who has a series of major planetary-motion laws named after him). Even the ancient Greeks and Romans told stories with fantastical elements that might nowadays be recognized as science fiction – descriptions of automatons, trips to the moon, and battles with alien spider species. While it’s not mean to completely upheave our notions of the “origins” of science fiction (after all, there are still good reasons Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, and H.G. Wells usually take on the titles as parents of the genre), it’s certainly a reminder about how very loose are our notions of genre and they’re usually named mostly only in hindsight. Genres appear more as reaction to societal events and trends, rather than the foresight given to individual novels themselves. Take the cyberpunk subgenre. My knowledge of it is limited, but from what I understand, a lot of cyberpunk stories came about in the 60s, 70s, 80s due to the social paradigm shift happening in general (in the U.S. anyways), and the beginnings of computer technology becoming an integral part of our everyday lives (I write, as if I was even alive during that time). Obviously a pretty substantial movement as far as modern science fiction goes, but it wasn’t decided to be a distinct subgenre until the trend began dying down. And now, in hindsight, we trace a narrative about who ushured in this cyberpunk trend, what were the major players, and formulate a list of must-reads that will likely continue to change long after anyone could’ve been alive to be involved. I’m reminded in my Barnes & Noble printing of Frankenstein with an introduction by NYU university professor Karen Karbiener that this is the only book of Shelley’s that actually ever really gets taught or continuously printed, and though it was revered since Shelley’s own time, it never really gained any foothold as being “worthy” of academic consideration until the 1960s when if finally started appearing on college syllabi. If that hadn’t happened, would we really be considering her as a “mother” of science fiction? Would she just be considered cheap horror, fodder for Hollywood adaptations? Furthermore, was the sudden interest of academia in Frankenstein somehow linked to the rise of a new kind of technological society, the same one that inspired the cyberpunk authors? Regardless of who or what actually had any influence on a genre, who and what we decide to revere in hindsight might say more about our society than whatever influence the subject actually had. What I’d actually mean to write about in this post (since I never can seem to be straightforward with anything I talk about) is how interesting it is that so many origins for modern conceptions of science fiction actually seem to be based in horror and gothic writing. And yet we don’t think of Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, or Nathaniel Hawthorne as science fiction writers, of course. Even when it is more strictly science fiction, there so often seem to be horror elements in the story. I just finished H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine for my class, and am reminded of the first time I’d read it, in high school, when, despite most of the meat of the story occurring in the horrific revelations of the Eloi and the Morlocks (which is a more thematically frustrating story than I remember it being, not helped at all by the questionable endnotes given in my addition) – the part that had most terrified me at 17 was the last couple chapters with the titular Time Traveler visiting the “end” of the planet: when the sun has stopped spinning, the sun has dulled red, the ocean oily and the air nearly unbreathable, creatures creeping towards him from the shadows, from the seas. It painted a picture more memorable and terrifying even than Morlocks gnawing on Eloi limbs. I recently saw a professor say that the umbrella of Speculative Fiction encapsulates science fiction, utopian/dystopian stories, and horror – and though I was incredulous about that at first, it increasingly makes more and more sense. Of course, not all science fiction elements have some kind of horror element in them. A lot of it is optimistic and adventure-driven. But it’s made me think of how closely tied the two are so often – how so often the real horror, the real fear of the story, is the terrible things that can be done with science and how little control we actually have over it -- and fit so well together when intentionally paired. So can Poe be distinguished as a science fiction writer? I haven’t read any of those collections that have been identified as such, but in hindsight, I really wouldn’t be surprised.
My greater neighborhood is overrun with tiny lending libraries. Or maybe 17 is normal, and comparing to the 0 around the various places I grew up simply seems like an infestation. They spring up everywhere: in front of houses, restaurants, parks, churches, inside my supermarket. And as a consequence, my resistance to adding to my hoard of books is constantly tested. Even though I restrict myself to printings 50+ years, I still often manage to pick something out very once in a while during my walks (and try my best to add replacements when possible). One of my latest acquirement, however, is a unique gem in my collection. One morning, as I was walking by our nearest tiny lending library, and for that reason, the one I most frequently visit, was a yellowed, staple-bound yet heavy, 192 glossy-paged DIY manual: Popular Mechanics’ What to Make and How to Make It, the 1955 issue. I very quickly recognized I’d stumbled upon something fascinating, yet wasn’t actually sure what it was until I got home and took a closer look. Very simply, it’s an annual compilation of amateur to semi-professional woodshop projects, complete with drawings, directions, and dimensions. It evokes a time when many families apparently owned a home that could accommodate a small carpenter’s workshop and where men made tables over the weekend off of a foundation of a secondary education. But what’s truly entertaining are the actual projects. Many of them seem simple enough to come up with: building a lazy susan, a poker-chip rack, a tent… and then there are some odd ones… Enjoy:
After taking a week off to work on my summer class’s final project, I have returned! My break is short-lived on though, with the next semester starting in just another week. It’s hard to know whether to relax or take advantage of the time to do things I otherwise wouldn’t. But one thing I’ve find myself using the time for is listening to audiobooks. People know, I’ve never been one for audiobooks. I’ve never been able to figure out why, and it may not even be for a singular reason – because I don’t like the voice acting of the narrator, or they speak too slow, because I can’t navigate the book as easily, because the text doesn’t stick to my mind as easily. It seemed to be particularly bad to listen to a lot of classics, since the language occasionally needs a few reads over. As these months working from home have continued, though, and I spend more time around the apartment doing chores or walking to the store, my perspective has changed on it somewhat. It might be even be because of the booktube videos I’ve been watching where I occasionally hear an interesting book and realize I’ll never actually get around to getting the physical copy and sitting down to read it. I did that somewhat before my classes began; but now, the time I have to read for fun is sometimes in fleeting minutes taken up by finding the book, getting comfortable, and flipping to the bookmark (my friend Garfield and I have reminisced about how we both used to just know where we left off in a book, without a bookmark – neither of us knows when that stopped, but I couldn’t imagine doing that again!). It finally suddenly occurred to me that I could be listening to audiobooks alongside my usual carrousel of podcasts, and that they could be the modern books that I never even bothered thinking I could get around to. Being on my fifth book now, I can probably say I’m a convert. It’s brought back some of the thrill I used to get from reading as a teenager, when my primary time for reading was in-between classes, when I was done with work, on the bus – I don’t get those same small opportunities anymore, particularly since I walk to most places and use my time before personal appointments calling to catch up with people who might otherwise not make it into my phoning schedule. There’s always something to fill in the gaps of time. But the gaps have shifted. And I’ve realized I can fill them with books. It’s made me realize our relationship with reading isn’t actually changed too much with our shifting tastes for genres and styles. It really changes with our relationship to time – what we feel we do and don’t have time for, and how we find ways to fill in the gaps. I had a bizarre experience a few weeks ago. To take it back to the beginning, a friend of my partner's happened to blurt out during a virtual tour of our apartment that she thinks my partner and I look like we're living out some kind of "cottagecore lesbian" fantasy. Neither my partner or I knew what this could possibly mean, and I found myself quickly going down a shallow rabbit hole looking to it. This (probably inevitably) led me to tik tok compilation of "cottagecore" videos. I saw enough to know that no, my partner and I were not "cottagecore lesbians" -- I don't know if one really can "be" an internet aesthetic, particularly if we don't know about it. But in one of the clips, a song was playing in the background that sounded powerfully familiar, the kind of familiarity that dumps a bag of bricks on your chest, the kind that can only come from nostalgia. I racked my brain for where exactly this 30 second music clip could've come from, and realized I recognized it from a VHS my sister and I used to watch as small kids. With a bit of research, I found it: The World of Peter Rabbit and Friends, a 90s animated British show based on the works of Beatrix Potter -- this was the opening and ending credits song. I hadn't thought about or seen anything about the show in over a decade. I don't know what this means about my relationship to the whole "cottagecore" thing -- it reminds me of how I went through a period of time in my early 20s when various people I met would call me a hipster, "but, like, the kind of hipster that hipsters are trying to be, but naturally," which still seems like a weird thing to tell anybody whether or not it's true. It's probably not worth reading into. But nonetheless, I wanted to share this song, and to try to convey the range of odd emotions I had in rediscovering it. Until next time,
Rain E Drew |
R. E. DrewAmateur Author
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