Let Yourself Cook

Recent and Not-so-recent Reads Around the Internet

Readercon: it was wonderful! What a rush to see so many people; a renewal of conversations interrupted, in some cases, by years. Thanks to all who made it out. Here are a few essays that have been on my mind recently:

Lincoln Michel’s “The Forever Dying and the Always Dead; or, Literary Fiction and the Novel” was a balm to read, addressing with depth and understanding a range of (contradictory) complaints in the republic of letters about the state of Literature These Days. I also winced a bit in recognition of my teenage self—I was never altogether of BR Myers’ mind about writing, but I’ve remarked on my weakness for a piece of strong invective, and A Reader’s Manifesto certainly was one. (Myers is also skilled at the particularly dangerous dark art, finding pull quotes that make a book you’re trying to pillory seem absurd.) I generally agree with Lincoln’s conclusions here—about the importance of supporting writers’ careers vs. trend-chasing, and about how important it is to understand the material conditions under which books are sold—and shifts in those conditions—if you want to talk about how books change over time.

I empathize with the condition Chuck Wendig describes in “A Small but Vital Thing, Taken”—the image of the news and its social media footprint as a sort of toxic groundwater, accumulating in the low places of attention where we usually grow our idle thoughts and stories, is particularly fine. I don’t have a clear internal monologue of the sort Chuck describes, so I’m rarely aware of turning over plot questions while I walk, but that downtime is nonetheless vital—what happens to me is that I’ll grind on a particular problem for hours, then go on a walk, and find when I get back to the page that my default mode network has churned out, if not a solution, then at least a big step forward. Idle times, bored times, may seem fillable (with podcasts, with a ‘quick check on socials’, whatever), but they are valuable unfilled. Think of fallow fields—or those empty spaces in brush ink painting, full of possible form.

Lincoln Michel’s more recent essay Why Boredom is Good (for Writers) elaborates on a related point at some depth. There’s a fun little neuroscience explanation for the value of “fallow time”, to the limited extent I understand the neuroscience. The brain has two “thinking” systems (at least): the systems responsible for active and directed cogitation, and a state in which something called the “Default Mode Network” operates. To the best of our current understanding (& mine), the DMN is responsible for making connections between ideas, forming memories, ruminating over problems in a dreamlike, associative way while the conscious mind is otherwise directed. When it’s working, you’re not aware that it’s working. And it’s vital for creative problem solving! We often think of writing (or any other form of creation) with a breathing metaphor: inhale (consume), exhale (produce). Those are the (semi)conscious actions of respiration—but in between, the lungs take in oxygen, the blood circulates it, the body uses it. Or, to use the more crude/Freudian consumption metaphor: it’s not just eat-excrete, it’s eat-digest-excrete. So: Get bored! Lie on the couch! Take a walk! Hang out with your kids! Let yourself cook.

This guest of honor speech that Tochi Onyebuchi, brilliant and always clarifying, delivered at the Locus Awards is great, an important corrective to and expansion of some themes in not only writing but talking about genre in the last decade or so: Some remarks on representation.

As for books—

I recently finished Peter F Hamilton’s Salvation series, which—between that and Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Final Architecture I’ve read two excellent space opera trilogies by British authors this year, a bit out of the ordinary for me. A compare/contrast on the two would be worth the time it took to write, which I don’t have now.

I will say that Salvation is an interesting twist in context with the author’s other work. Hamilton’s series (of which I’ve read and rocked out to Nightsdawn, the Judas Unchained duology, and now Salvation) have a general form, and it’s one of the all time greats. We start with a book-length elaboration of a fun space opera setting (who says the slow open is dead?), replete with hidden mysteries, neat tech, and backroom drama. Then some wacky, overwhelming out of context problem intrudes, resolving some of those hidden mysteries while utterly shattering the setting. Then the real fun begins, as the people we’ve come to know and love band together and face the Problem, in a sequence of increasingly desperate and last-ditch maneuvers to confront ever-wackier high-stakes scenarios. There’s a bit in the Nightsdawn trilogy where the antagonists of the moment are (iirc) a 24th-Century Beyonce equivalent who’s teamed up with the literal demon ghost of Al Capone to steal a star-destroying superweapon, for example.

Salvation remains pretty much true to form here, with the exception that, at least for this reader, the “fun space opera setting” with which we open is a downer. In the parts set in the 23rd century, we get precious little of the joy and weirdness of future civil society that glows through Nightsdawn or the Commonwealth, though we are assured there’s fun stuff happening offscreen; we spend a lot of time with weirdos and mercs and gang members and private security operators and megatrillionaires, though human society is supposed to be largely post-scarcity; all institutions have suffered extreme oligarchic capture, and we get a decent amount of the oligarchs and their staff talking about how this is a good thing really and of course any functioning society needs to be able to use quantum teleporters to extraordinary-rendition people to hell-worlds without any due process or oversight. And I think this is the point! It feels like a good-case outcome from the early 21st century in that environmental degradation is being reversed, but it’s not a place I would want to spend a lot of time, at least not the parts of it that are on the page.

So, when the (spoiler alert) catastrophically awful alien invasion starts, you’re stuck, not with people you really want to root for, but with… people, not even particularly good people, rather compromised people in fact, people who have fundamental disagreements and profound weaknesses, people who don’t even really like each other. But they have to be heroes. It struck a chord.

That’s what I’ve got for this week. Happy reading!