The Book of Phoenix

Nnedi Okorafor's The Book of Phoenix fits the mold of her previous writing (Binti, Lagoon) for me: it is vaguely science-fiction/fantasy, with characters whose choices are opaque to me even when the writing reveals their inner monologues. It touches on racism and slavery and human testing and the limits of scientific ethics, for very strong values of "touches on" (in the same way that District 9 "touches on" apartheid).

The protagonist, a woman named Phoenix, is the result of a scientific experiment, and has lived all her life in a large lab complex, surrounded by prodding scientists and the bizarre and puissant other human/animal/robot experimental subjects. She begins as fairly naive and innocent, although very well-read.

Then, of course, she escapes.

The book is her own firsthand (maybe) account of her escape and the ensuing series of revelations (about the extent and horror of human-subject testing by this powerful corporation) and rescues/destructions wrought (of the other human subjects and of the company's physical holdings and employees, respectively). Her reflections on human testing are pretty much as expected: "Human beings make terrible gods." (p. 152)

As always, the conclusion is that Racism Is Bad. All other types of discrimination, too: we should all aspire to just get along, respect each other, be kind, and improve the lives of those around us. ("He accepted what I was as if it were normal. He gazed at me but didn't stare. His world was big and there was room for me." p. 155)

The story was a bit jumbled, or at least, it was not designed for someone with my mindset to comprehend. For example, some event happens several times. Time A it takes 3 days. Time B it takes 1 month. Time C it takes a few minutes. After time C, one onlooking character says that it is getting faster... a conclusion which I think unwarranted, given the available data. But he says it with a certain conviction, and without any second-guessing in the narration, that indicates (to me at least) that the readers should accept this pronouncement as accurate. It is narrative fact. This causes some dissonance in my brain, as the available data might just as well suggest that it is alternatingly fast-and-slow, or just noisy and unpredictable, or really anything.

The entire book is like this: it's not what I expect, I never feel comfortable with what is going on, and it explicitly calls out privileges that benefit me. It's discomforting, but as with Okorafor's other writing, this discomfort is clearly meant to be a feature of the writing for readers like me. And I think that it's good, or right, or at least social-justice-minded, for me to "sit with [my] discomfort" (in the words of Another Round host Heben Nigatu, episode 15).

The final notes of the book are weird --- there is a framestory to wrap up, but then we pop the stack one more time. Somehow. Somehow we pop the empty stack, we jump up another level to a frame story that no one even knew was going on. The fourth wall is broken, which is of course pure Lila-bait, but it's brief and weird and I am still thinking about it and not sure what to make of it: "Once the author wrote the story, the author became irrelevant." (p. 210) and "'I know what you think,' she said. 'You can rewrite a story, ... Think before you do; your story is written too... Who is writing you?' she asked."(p. 211)


This post's theme word is rhizophagous, "feeding on roots". The three-mile-high tree had tremendous rhizophagous needs.

The Concrete Jungle

Charles Stross' overtures to the Laundry universe continue in The Concrete Jungle, joined with The Atrocity Archives (previously) to make book one of the series. Yet again we join Bob Howard, IT monkey and hapless geek-thrown-into-fieldwork-of-a-rugose-and-squamous-nature. The bon mots are frequent, the silliness is pervasive, there are blood-pumping action sequences interspersed with tedious buzzword-filled officespeak.

This novella features:

1. smart, good-aligned nerds who are bad at bureaucratic-politics-navigating skills,
2. technologically inept bureaucrats who shine in the paperwork-'n'-politics realm, and
3. an eldrich explanation for why DRM won't die.

Every story seems to involve some civilians being exposed to the Real Lovecraft Underpinnings of the Universe, and thus being forcibly enrolled in the Laundry, the British government's branch that deals with suppressing and controlling the same. At this rate of expansion, it's no wonder that the bureaucracy is sprawling, inexplicably ramified, and variously inept (applying inappropriate "solutions" to nonexistent problems, or worse, to very serious and existent problems).

The idea of a bureaucracy so thorough, ruthless, and unflinching that it can execute a near-real-time paperclip audit (justifying every use and tracking each deployment) is as frightening as any of the mundane, merely Lovecraftian horrors that feature in this novella.

It is a joyful, sarcastic romp.

In the afterword/author's note, Stross goes into detail about the alignments of various elements that hummed resonantly in his brain and caused him to create this universe and its stories. I want to quote the entire thing, but I'll limit myself to this quip from p. 301:

The metafictional conceit that magic is a science has been used in fantasy --- or science fiction  --- several times. ... There is something about mathematics that makes it seem to beg for this sort of misappropriation: an image problem deeply rooted both in the way that the queen of sciences is taught, and in the way we think about it --- in the philosophy of mathematics.

This post's theme word is mumpsimus, "a view stubbornly held in spite of clear evidence that it's wrong" or "a person who holds such a view." The accountant was such a mumpsimus that he stepped into the summoning circle, even after the runes had started to glow and the scent of brimstone filled the air.