The Tusks of Extinction

Ray Nayler's novella The Tusks of Extinction follows the consciousness of a scientist fighting elephant poaching, in her life before and after getting her brain scanned, archived, and eventually downloaded into an un-extincted mammoth. She is given the task of imparting mammoth culture to lab-grown mammoths cultured from recovered ancient DNA.

This was short and fairly bitter in outlook. The humans in the story are driven by capitalism, by environmental and social collapse, and by a lack of options. I'd describe this as a dark near-future science fiction, and I wouldn't recommend this to myself, although I can see why this joined my reading queue: the author also wrote a book about conscious cephalopods, The Mountain in the Sea.

The novella contained many tightly-written and resonant observations on the human condition. This excerpt (pages 95-96) reminded me of the kind of academic navel-gazing involved in grad school:

When Damira had been here last, she had simply been herself. But now, it felt like there were two of her---one sitting with her mother, eating in silence. And another watching them eat. As if she had stepped out of her own life. ... 

Damira realized what it was in that moment, as her fork scraped the bottom of her bowl. It was an effect of education. She was looking at everything. Analyzing it. Processing it. Her life wasn't just how things were anymore---it was only one possible way for things to be. And there were other possibilities, now. She had ceased to be trapped here, in this stuffy room. Ceased to be trapped inside her life, yes, but she had also ceased to be able to live her life without analyzing it. Without taking everything apart to look inside. 

Education had taken something from her. She could not just be anymore.

This post's theme word is abulia (n), "the inability to make decisions." The goal of an education is to encourage both outward curiosity and introspection, but to stop short of intellectualized abulia. 

Plain Bad Heroines

Emily M. Danforth's Plain Bad Heroines  tells a deliciously convoluted and self-referential set of nested stories. The first layer of story takes place in 1902, on the site of a girls' boarding school. Subsequent layers happen in the same location but in modern times, when the property seems cursed as several people (historical and modern) have died mysterious deaths. Are they explicable? Is this a novel where magic is real? The author plays coyly with the reader about this in a very clever way.

The author also winks at the modern reader throughout. On page 111,

In the language of the day, Mrs. Brookhants was a young widow and Miss Trills was her devoted companion. Her very, very dear friend. Her confidante. 

Her bestie.* 

*But, like, with benefits.

Bonus layers come from the modern plotline, which features a modern novelist writing about the girls of 1902, and then some modern actors caught up in their own re-enactment of pieces of the novel's retelling of history, while also ensnared in their own mysteries in the old building and on the grounds, and caught up in the layers of storytelling and fabrication that they are subject to and producing themselves. There is a historical book associated with the original deaths, a modern book retelling the historical deaths, and the very book you hold in your hands. The brain spins. The modern actors are caught up in performing the historical actions, often even off-camera as they hand off the book and tell each other secrets and sneak around the boarding school buildings. This is a mystery book where the characters have cell phones with battery life, internet connection, and live social media, and the mystery manages to persist!

The creepiness and uncertainty about danger elevated this novel from a cleverly-constructed meta-question-raising book, to an unstoppable single-sitting-read. It's 617 pages long, so this consumed an entire day. I probably couldn't read it again, because I'm not a fan of creepiness and also now I know how the novel chooses to resolve the various mysteries, weird occurrences, deaths, and bizarre behavior.

Weird and recommended.

This post's theme word is "gifnotized", as on page 82:

That's the GIF, the whole thing--- Harper grinning and tucking and being mic'd, grinning and tucking and being mic'd, grinning and tucking and... forever. This particular incarnation had 23,266 notes. It also had a string of attached commentary. 

"Hello?" Harper said.

Merrit had been momentarily gifnotized. She pulled out of it and said...