What I've Been Reading

Herewith, some of the more memorable books Your Humble Narrator read this year:

 

The Ballad of Black Tom: Say what you will about Cthulhu, at least he isn’t a damn racist.

 

Between Two Fires: Demonic hordes invade western Europe during the Black Death. Piling on, one might say. This is - no lie - the best fantasy novel I’ve read since N.K. Jemisin’s Fifth Season.

 

Danubia: Essentially, the Habsburgs were all magic-users.

 

The Dawn of Everything: Very long, and not entirely convincing. But Graeber and Wengrow have persuaded me that inequality is not a prerequisite for complex societies.

 

Echogenesis: A crashed-spaceship story infused with eau d’Edge of Tomorrow. All of the parts are derivative, but the execution is original.

 

Invisible Sun: Stross didn’t want to write this novel, but he did so anyway, and did so competently. Yay?

 

Lost Tribes Found: The “Indians are the Ten Lost Tribes” trope was invented by whites but employed by some Native Americans for political reasons.

 

Midwest Futures: The Midwest has always been a Gernsbackian sci-fi story disguised as a self-satisfied just-so story.

 

Ogres: Another “is it sci-fi or fantasy?” mystery. Well plotted and a quick read.

 

The Power Broker: “Baby Screamed; Rat in Crib” should have been Robert Moses’ epitaph.

 

Saga, volume 10: Superbly written; worth the three-year wait.

 

Superman: Red Son: This is the only Superman movie I’d willingly watch.

 

Tobacco Road: Reading this was like spending all night in a cheap brothel, then taking a bath in a pig wallow.

 

Walking to Aldebaran: A science-fictional First Contact story meets Dungeons and Dragons, with lots of bloody body-horror mixed in. Whoever is re-making Alien should film this instead.

 

William Howard Taft: Several American presidents didn’t really want the office. Taft was one. What he really wanted was a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. And so it came to pass.

Any Good News in 2022?

Courtesy of Future Crunch, here is a selection of good-news stories from the past year. Most did not make it into mainstream media (whatever that means nowadays), because good news is generally statistical, while bad news - “powerful people behaving badly,” “something went wrong” - often takes the form of a narrative. We like a good story, even if it makes us feel terrible. These stories are drier, but won’t leave the reader feeling helpless and hopeless.

 

Africa: Morocco expanded paid paternity leave to 15 days. Niger has reclaimed 400,000 hectares of desert land under the multi-national Green Wall project. Benin legalized abortion. Sierra Leone’s president announced the allocation of 22 percent of next year’s budget to education. Togo announced eradication of four tropical diseases, including trachoma and trypanosomiasis. The Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea, and Zambia outlawed the death penalty. Rwandan hospitals used drones to make 250,000 medical deliveries.

Students in Sierra Leone. Credit: The Guardian

 

Asia: As of 2020, 97 percent of India’s households have access to electricity. The Philippines banned child marriage. “You’ll have to go to the United States for that sort of thing,” officials in Manila reportedly said. In China, the city of Chaozhou is planning a 43 GW wind farm in the Taiwan Strait. Thailand legalized medical marijuana.

 

Europe: Several large western European countries have announced plans to replace home gas boilers with heat pumps and boost wind turbine construction. A certain Russian president may have had something to do with this. Poland accepted over two million refugees from the Ukraine war. 92 Saimaa seal pups were born in Finland. Seville, Spain is building underground canals to help cool the city. London turned seven billion lbs. of earth from the Elizabeth Line excavation into a wetland bird sanctuary. British firms announced an increase in productivity from their experimental four-day work week; four out of five plan to continue the experiment voluntarily.

Saimaa seal stamp (Wikimedia)

 

North America: Canada approved psilocybin and MDMA as psychiatric drugs. Canada also announced plans to increase annual immigration to 500,000 by 2025. I don’t know if these stories are related. The following two might be: solar power capacity in the United States has risen 2,000 percent since 2011, and Duke Energy announced it will fully exit coal-fired power generation by 2035. The American Inflation Reduction Act allocated about $40 billion for conservation. The Snoqualmies bought 12,000 acres of ancestral land in Washington state. Five other Native nations partnered with the U.S. to manage Bears Ears National Monument. Colorado, California, and Maine will provide free school meals to all public-school students. California announced plans to manufacture insulin for state residents. In Mexico, same-sex marriage is now legal in all states, and bullfighting is illegal.

Bear's Ears Natl. Monument (Wikimedia)

 

South America: Lula defeated Jair Bolsonaro in the Brazilian presidential election. This is unqualified good news for the whole planet. Also in Brazil, the golden lion tamarin has been saved from extinction. The Rainforest Trust protected one million more acres of tropical forest in Ecuador, Central America, and southeast Asia.

I AIN'T DEAD YET (Wikimedia)

 

The World at Large: Artemis I successfully launched and rounded the Moon in November. Global child mortality reportedly dropped from twelve to five million between 1990 and 2020. The Intl Energy Agency reports that renewable and nuclear power now employ more people globally than fossil fuels. In Australia, ranchers are raising asparagopsis seaweed as an additive to cattle feed. It will reduce methane omissions by up to 95 percent and make cows more comfortable in social situations.

 

Artemis I heads to the Moon (Wikimedia)

 

No Amount of Praise Is Ever Enough

 

Longtime fans of John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight will recall his episode (12 Aug. 2019) on Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov, the incumbent autocrat of Turkmenistan. President Berdimuhamedov’s egotism and eccentricities - including his single-minded love of horses -  and his cavalier attitude (cough) toward civil liberties seem fairly typical of post-Soviet dictators. What Oliver failed to capture in his segment was the modesty and transparency of Mr. Berdimuhamidov’s regime when compared to that of his predecessor, Saparmurat Niyazov, alias Turkmenbashi. At some point in his career, someone must have handed Comrade Niyazov a biography of Caligula and challenged him to outdo the mad emperor in sheer dictatorial excess. Turkmenbashi did so. During his fifteen-year reign (1991-2006), the Autocrat of All the Turkmen made these contributions to the annals of megalomania:

 

1 Added “the Great” to his official name, and claimed descent from Alexander (an early member of the Great family) and Muhammed.

2 Emblazoned his portrait on all the nation’s currency and in the top corner of every state television broadcast.

3 Renamed the months of the year after members of his family.

4 Outlawed all institutions and practices that he considered detrimental to the spiritual health of the Turkmen people, or just offensive to him personally, e.g. circuses, ballet, Internet cafes, long hair on men, and makeup on TV actors.

5 Wrote* a national bestseller, Ruhnama, The Book of Wisdom, an encomium to the Turkmen and their Father, Turkmenbashi. The Ruhnama became the subject of a giant monument in Turkmenistan’s capital, the principal text used in high school and college classes - replacing such inferior subjects as the humanities - and an obligatory text in mosques. Driving tests, too.

6 Financed his expensive remaking of the capital city, Ashgabat, by firing 110,000 teachers and health workers.

 

Turkmenbashi wishes you Bon Voyage!

Most of these policies were ended by Turkmenbashi’s dentist and successor, the aforementioned Gurbanguli Berdimuhamedov. The new president continued Niyazov’s suppression of dissent and imprisonment of political rivals; modern Turkmenistan has won no accolades from Amnesty International, and it rivals North Korea in its attitude toward press freedom. Still, in an age when many of us can only look forward to the next dictator, it is comforting to know that some dictators are less chaotic and vicious than others.

 

* They always write a book, these dictators. Mussolini even wrote a romance novel, The Cardinal's Mistress (1910). I understand its obscurity is not entirely undeserved.

 

 

Source:  Erika Fatland, Sovietistan (Pegasus, 2021), 48-56.

Treasure Type H

As befits an imperial family whose empire at one point stretched from Central Europe to the Andes, whose subject peoples bore little love for the imperator, and whose military record tended in its later centuries toward the sub-par, the Habsburgs were obsessed with their own legitimacy. A succession of emperors devoted their attention not to improving the lives of the common folk (riff-raff, all of them) but to filling them with a sense of supernatural awe and dread. To this end, they turned the Habsburg court and its adjuncts into theaters of ritual, and devoted much of their day to ceremonies, like royal banquets and receptions, designed to aggrandize the imperial person. Adorning these theaters were countless relics and cult objects chosen to demonstrate the dynasty’s age, gravitas, and close relationship with the divine or supernatural realm. The imperial wunderkammer included a mantle  that allegedly belonged to Charlemagne*; a “unicorn” horn, or rather a narwhal tusk, that Ferdinand I had decreed one of the dynasty’s “inalienable heirlooms”; an agate bowl inscribed with the letters “XRISTO,” which the Habsburgs identified as either the Holy Grail or part of the same dinnerware set; an alleged basilisk in a real bottle; an emerald bottle from South America; two bored ostriches and a live dodo; and a lustrous black sword, engraved with eldritch runes that could devour the souls of its victims. I may have made one of these artifacts up.

 

Please specify your name, quest, and favorite color.

Simon Winder, a popular historian of the dynasty, described Habsburg power as “strangely hieratic and spooky.” The adverb doesn’t necessarily apply. Early modern Europeans often ascribed priestlike powers to monarchs, as for example in the English and French royal custom of curing scrofula, the “king’s evil.” The Habsburgs stood out from their western European contemporaries, however, in their association of legitimacy with royal isolation. Queen Anne (the last English monarch to attempt the cure) and Louis XVI used the laying-on of hands to affirm their divine power, but did so, necessarily, via direct contact with the rank-scented multitude. The Austrian emperors’ treasures and rituals, by contrast, demonstrated the great distance between them and the common folk, and even the nobility. During his very long reign the penultimate emperor, Franz Joseph, believed that he could hold his fractious empire together by invoking his subject peoples’ common love for the royal person. That they all chose instead to join a different set of artificial families, offered by the nationalist movements of the early twentieth century, vexed him but remained beyond his comprehension. Why wouldn’t anyone want to remain under the rule of a family that had such wonderful toys?

 

Source: Simon Winder, Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2013), 85-87, 121-125, 156-57

 

* Actually it was the former possession of Roger II of Sicily. He had it embroidered with gold camels.