Dreamcodes

Another end-of-year bookpost batch; we're down to two remaining books in the queue after this, which of course are some of the harder ones to talk about.

Vajra Chandrasekera — The Saint of Bright Doors

Mar. 24

This book is incredibly flashy and stylish. Dazzling? I think in cover-blurb dialect, you'd say "dazzling." Well, fair enough: I was dazzled.

It does lots of exciting things at the structural level — I'm thinking of things like,

• The massive noisy violence of chapter 1, immediately followed by a chapter 2 that consists of six evasive sentences, followed by a smash-cut to Fetter's new home in the city of Luriat.
• The long strange segment in the late book where it diverts into a surreal and almost allegorical-feeling prison planet milieu.
• The freaky jolt when the narrator finally grabs control of the plot. (And what a strange ending that resulted in; I'm still not completely sure how I feel about it.)

But also the page-to-page prose and momentum are real impressive. And thematically, it feels extremely Now; like yeah, you're an apostate cult assassin and authoritarian shitbirds (including your awful messiah dad) are shredding the city you love, but also your mom's dying and is calling your landline to guilt-trip you, and you're worried that your attraction to this girl you're doing espionage on might be trending in the direction of cheating on your boyfriend, and all the people you go to therapy with seem to be way more committed to the revolution than you are and aren’t including you in the play they’re producing.

I liked this a lot. I think maybe I liked the first 3/5 of it the best, but it kept me extremely engaged all the way through.

Martha Wells — Queen Demon

Oct. 26

All riiiiiight! The sequel to Witch King, another entry in what is now the Rising World Series. This was great.

Like the last volume, this one tells two parallel stories, one past and one present — which is neat, because there was still a lot of missing mileage between the two after Witch King. (Including the source of that title, which we finally get the start of an explanation for this time around.)

Dahin is kind of my favorite, and much of the present-day thread of this book is about him.

Martha Wells — Witch King (reread)

Nov 16

Still good. Hey, here’s something odd I realized about Tahren’s character this time around: she has absolutely no imagination.

So like: from time to time in real life, you’ll run across people who have fucked-up conservative-authoritarian-supremacist politics but who aren’t full chud — they’re actually capable of empathy and compassion, but they’ll still parrot the most twisted bullshit about Black people or immigrants or queer people. I know someone who works at a rural hospital in the US who was interacting with a couple people like this on the regular at work, and we would talk about it and wrack our brains trying to figure out what the hell was going on: how could someone be able to exercise fairly impressive amounts of care and sympathy, but not extend it to anyone on the Republican bogeyman list?

One of the spitballs I threw out once was: what if empathy and imagination are independent, and these people have no imagination? If they have direct extensive personal experience with someone with a marginalized identity, then maybe they can relate that to their inner map of humanity, but they can’t just like hear about or listen to some category of people and then use imagination and analogy to relate to their experience, and so if they’re isolated and living in a homogeneous culture they start watching Fox News and voting for scum.

Back in the ’00s before they all got purged or assimilated and the party went full death-cult, you’d sometimes get high ranking Republicans who would break with the party line and start riding for gay rights when e.g. their daughter came out, and I feel like this model might have explained a bit of that; maybe some people just can’t recognize anyone’s humanity unless their face gets physically rubbed in it, but after that they can sort of manage it. Pretty weird??

Anyway, that’s Tahren, actually. Watch for it, you’ll see what I mean.

Linnea Sterte — A Frog in the Fall, and Later On (comics)

Oct. 27

A quiet and gentle graphic novel about some amphibians who take to the road in rural Japan. I liked this, and also enjoyed just stopping reading for a few minutes to take in a landscape and let my mind wander.

Patrick Miller — From Masher to Master 2

Nov. 7

Published on the author's Itch page.

An unusual little ebook about playing fighting games.

I guess what’s unusual about it is that it’s not really about playing fighting games; it’s more about purposefully turning into the sort of person who plays fighting games.

Much of this ends up being about finding ways to engage with (and ultimately help create) the “fighting game community.” Miller’s constant refrain throughout the text is “if you aren’t playing fighting games for the people, you’re missing the point.”

As it happens, I started playing a little bit of Street Fighter 6 in the past year; I fell off in the summer and then entered my shmup era, but I intend to get back on. I was enjoying online play, but the possibility of joining in-person events felt pretty distant. Miller’s perspective is one I hadn’t heard articulated this directly before, and it was pretty thought-provoking. I’m not entirely sure I want to commit to the lifestyle* per se, but this left me with a more concrete view of what that might actually mean.

* Actually, brief sidenote on a different fightin' thing I read earlier this year. There's this bit in Sumac's Street Fighter 6 novice pamphlet where they're summarizing that game's online ranking tiers, and they say the following:

In some ways, this is the point of no return for building your skill level. Once you hit platinum you’re probably going to be able to comfortably beat anyone who plays the game casually and doesn’t go online. If you keep going on past this point, you’re committing to the lifestyle – nobody is going to enjoy fighting you unless they’re at least as into SF6 as you are.

This has become a surprisingly flexible analogy in our household — if you proceed past Platinum, you are "committing to the lifestyle." Ruth and I do a fair amount of trail running, and both of us have crossed the line where you have to start hanging out with running people instead of running with the people you hang out with. The same thing happens with fighting games, and the point of Miller's book is: that's the point.