Category Archives: Books

New tag: dystopia

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Given my fondness for speculative/science fiction, I was a little surprised I didn’t have a tag for ‘dystopia.’ Many of my favorite novels are set in “an imagined state or society in which there is great suffering or injustice, typically one that is totalitarian or post-apocalyptic.”

Snow Crash, Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse, Twenty Thirty, The Handmaid’s Tale, Mockingbird, and –of course– much/most of William Gibson’s work (The Peripheral, Agency, the Bridge Trilogy, and pretty much all the early stuff).

“The country had cracked”

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“It had never occurred to the lords of the consumer society that consumerism as a political philosophy might one day manifest the grave systemic instabilities that Communism had. But as those instabilities multiplied, the country had cracked. Civil society shriveled in the pitiless reign of cash. As the last public spaces were privatized, it became harder and harder for American culture to breathe. Not only were people broke, but they were taunted to madness by commercials, and pitilessly surveilled by privacy-invading hucksters. An ever more aggressive consumer-outreach apparatus caused large numbers of people to simply abandon their official identities. It was no longer any fun to be an American citizen. Bankruptcies multiplied beyond all reason, becoming a kind of commercial apostasy. Tax dodging became a spectator sport. The American people simply ceased to behave.”

— Distraction by Bruce Sterling (1998)

The Bangkok Asset

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If you like your crime fiction with a big dollop of Buddhism, you can’t do any better than John Burdett’s Bangkok series. Just finished The Bangkok Asset and share a few excerpts here:

“Buddhism is too difficult for most people and Christianity is an incoherent jumble of largely Roman superstition that has nothing to do with the Jew called Jesus.”

“Sorcery works. Human sacrifice is behind all great powers. Look at the U.S.: Twelve million native Americans slaughtered, that’s more than Hitler or Stalin—and look how well they’ve done. The entire nation is testimony to the efficacy of the practice.”

“Computing power among the masses is already extraordinary—there was a degree of paranoia about that in the (Chinese Communist) Party, but it turns out the little people prefer to share porn, gossip, and insults and listen to junk music. Its a fantastic way of shutting them up, like a voluntary electronic gulag. No danger at all except from organized Islamists.”

“The West is bankrupt in every sense, on every level,” she said. “Money is out of control and so are people’s heads. Over the next decade technologically empowered civil unrest will force most countries to militarize their police forces even more—much more—than they have already. And when the West goes, the myth of democracy goes with it. It will be dictatorship or chaos, and humans prefer order to freedom when it comes to the crunch.”

“The Earth still looks beautiful on a map. I knew, though, that if one were to zoom in on any town or city and switch to camera view, the gorgeous electronic colors would disappear and the screen would show dormitory towns, pollution, shopping malls, and traffic jams no matter which country you chose; our planet these days is best viewed from space.”

Bangkok Haunts

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“(You) think the Western mind is some Frankensteinian product of a botched religion and a bunch of ancient Greek pedophiles, the same unholy combination of schoolboy logic, lust for blood and glory, we-know-best, and destroy-to-save that slaughtered three million in Vietnam, most of them women and children, all in the name of freedom and democracy, before we ran away because it got too expensive.”

“Modernism is largely a form of entertainment, and a superficial one at that. It doesn’t survive environmental disasters or oil shortages. It doesn’t even survive terrorist attacks. It certainly doesn’t survive poverty, which is the lot of most of us. One flick of a switch, and the images fade from the screen. […] Confusion seeks relief in bigotry, which leads to conflict. One high-tech war, and we’re back to the Stone Age.”

— Bangkok Haunts (2007) by John Burdett

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

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(Wikipedia) “The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows is a website and YouTube channel, created by John Koenig, that coins and defines neologisms for emotions that do not have a descriptive term. The dictionary includes verbal entries on the website with paragraph-length descriptions and videos on YouTube for individual entries. The neologisms, while completely created by Koenig, are based on his research on etymologies and meanings of used prefixes, suffixes, and word roots.”

I shared a few of these five years ago and must have gotten them from the website. Don’t think I knew about the YouTube channel. I purchased the book recently and find myself highlighting about every third entry. Have to give that up.

“It’s strange how little of the world you actually get to see. No matter where on Earth you happen to be standing, the horizon you see in the distance is only ever about three miles away from you, a bit less than five kilometers. Which means that at any given time, you’re barely more than an hour’s walk from a completely different world.”

“ But if someone were to ask you on your deathbed what it was like to live here on Earth, perhaps the only honest answer would be: “I don’t know. I passed through it once, but I’ve never really been there.”

“In philosophy, monism is the belief that a wide variety of things can be explained in terms of a single reality, substance, or source. Onism is a kind of monism—your life is indeed limited to a single reality by virtue of being restricted to a single body—but something is clearly missing.”

“sonder: the realization that each random passerby is the main character of their own story, in which you are just an extra in the background.”

Men in masses, and of causes

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“I have had such a sickening of men in masses, and of causes, that I would not cross this room to reform parliament or prevent the union or to bring about the millennium. […] And I have nothing to do with nations, or nationalism. The only feelings I have – for what they are – are for men as individuals; my loyalties, such as they may be, are to private persons alone.”

— Master and Commander (Patrick O’Brian)

Knowledge

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“Knowledge will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no knowledge.”

“Knowledge is inherently precious even if you can’t sell it,” Greta said. “Even if you can’t use it. Knowledge is an absolute good. The search for truth is vital. It’s central to civilization. You need knowledge even when your economy and government are absolutely shot to hell.”

— Bruce Sterling’s Distraction (1998)

It is the Tao

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“He, like everyone else, […] is exactly where, exactly what, exactly when he is meant to be. It is the Tao.”

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve read William Gibson’s All Tomorrow’s Parties but that line didn’t hit me until I came across it today. Timing, right? American democracy on the ropes. Millions dead/dying from a global pandemic. The planet gasping for breath. And here I am, exactly where/what/when I was meant to be. Seriously, this is the most peaceful I’ve felt in months.

Termination Shock

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Set in the near-ish future, Neal Stephenson’s latest novel (Termination Shock) charts a world gone haywire with the aftereffects of human-driven climate calamity. Like the last couple of novels I’ve read, it incorporated COVID into the storyline as well as the January 6th insurrection.

“…before you knew it there was a white guy in red-white-and blue war paint sacking the U.S. Capitol in what the media described as some kind of Viking getup but Rufus knew perfectly well was a Plains Indian-style bison headdress. And just like Comanches with their raids, those people didn’t stick around and try to plant their yellow rattlesnake flags on the Capitol dome. They just wandered off, having counted coup on democracy and taken a few cop scalps, and melted back into their nomadic trailer park encampments.

This excerpt reminded me of some of his descriptions in Snow Crash.