Extracurriculars: Christmas Reading
“Extracurriculars” will be a recurring segment on my page, in which I share my leisure reading and viewing. It occurs to me that the corollary segment should be “Curriculars,” in which I share thoughts on the stuff I’m currently teaching, as well as ongoing research projects. The thing I love about my job is that, were I to chart these two categories on a Venn diagram, the overlap will always be substantial.
A postcard-worthy image of Uxbridge on a winter night.
My wife and I spent Christmas this year with my parents at their home in Uxbridge, Ontario. Uxbridge is one of those small towns you see in movies, but which don’t ever seem to exist in real life. It has a picturesque main street with a series of thriving local businesses, including one of the few remaining independent bookstores (Blue Heron Books). At Christmas time, dusted with a few inches of snow, it looks like a postcard. I call it Bedford Falls when I’m there. A few Christmases ago while browsing in Blue Heron Books, I overheard a conversation between a woman visiting family and a man who lived in town, who had known each other in high school but hadn’t seen each other since. She, it turned out, was now a lawyer in Vancouver, while he was a local farmer.
I fled the scene before it turned into a Hallmark Holiday feature, and I became a minor character against my will.
One of the things I love about being at my parents for the holidays is how much uninterrupted reading time I have. I get up early, make coffee, and sit in the front room beside the gas fireplace for several hours. My mom, also an early riser, always joins me. I brought five novels with me this year, thinking it would be enough.
It wasn’t. I had to supplement my reading with a visit to Blue Heron.
James S.A. Corey, The Mercy of Gods. James S.A. Corey is the pseudonym for Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, and they were responsible for The Expanse, a series of nine novels and a handful of novellas that is one of my favourite series of any genre. (The television adaptation was amazing and is also one of my unequivocal favourites). The Mercy of Gods is the first of a series called Captive’s War. They’ve planned on three instalments. I bought it the moment I saw it, then waited impatiently for classes to end so I could dive in.
I’m not going to say much about it, because (a) there’s a lot there I don’t want to spoil, and (b) I don’t think I can do it justice. Basically, it’s about a planet of humans—not Earth, which is not explained—that is attacked by a super-advanced alien species called the Carryx. The Carryx rule a vast empire whose sole imperative is expansion—upon finding a new intelligent species, they invade and see whether the species will aid and augment the Carryx empire. If so, they’re subjugated; if not, they’re exterminated. The story follows a group of human scientists who are brought to the Carryx home world and must prove their worth and that of humanity.
If you’ve read The Expanse, you know that Abraham and Franck are excellent at balancing the speculative thought-experiment elements of SF with nuanced characters in whom you get deeply invested (even when they’re complete arseholes). This new novel is no exception.
Mick Herron, The Secret Hours. Speaking of series I’ve devoured, Mick Herron is the guy who gave us Slow Horses—also adapted into an excellent TV show (the Slow Horses TV series on AppleTV has the added bonus of starring Gary Oldman). The best description I’ve heard of Herron’s writing is that he’s basically a post-Brexit John Le Carré. Two summers ago, I tore through all eight extant Slow Horses novels and the three novellas. Since then, I’ve been impatient for more.
When I saw The Secret Hours at the bookstore, I was a bit disappointed when the blurb on the back seemed to indicate that, though it was also set in the byzantine world of the British intelligence service, it was distinct from the Slow Horses novels. Not too disappointed, though—Herron’s an excellent writer with a great gift for intricate plotting and surprising (and gratifying) resolutions. But then as I read, I realized—no, wait, it is a Slow Horses novel, or at least it’s set in that world and dealing with some of its main figures … even if only one of them is mentioned by name. Which could have been too coy by half, except that the story is profoundly satisfying.
Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb in Slow Horses.
Robert A. Heinlein, Orphans of the Sky. So, here’s where that Venn diagram overlap between scholarship and leisure reading occurs … I picked up this novel because I got interested in the SF sub-genre of the “generation ship,” i.e. ships travelling at sublight speeds between star systems that, because they take centuries to make the journey, are designed to be worlds unto themselves. Not coincidentally, this is a topic I’m hoping to write something about for this page and produce a video essay as well. I’d read a few novels of this sort, most recently Aurora by the great Kim Stanley Robinson, and The Ferryman by Justin Cronin. But I thought I’d read a bit more extensively into the area, which is where Orphans came in.
And … well, the novel was originally two novellas, “The Universe” and “Common Sense,” both published in 1941, then grafted onto each other as Orphans of the Sky in 1963. I’ve always been a bit ambivalent with Heinlein—not just (or even mainly) because of his more questionable political views, but because I’ve always found his writing a bit juvenile in form and style and tone, something that diminishes but never quite fades as his career went on. Given that the two source texts for Orphans are among his earliest writing, this stylistic glitch is very prominent. I found large parts of it hard to take seriously.
At the same time, I had to marvel at the conceit, which has become a classic SF trope: a generation ship, hundreds of years into its journey, has forgotten that it’s a ship and sees itself as the universe entire—and any thoughts indicating otherwise are heresy. At the same time, there exists a society of outcasts who live in the low gravity of the upper levels. These people are the “Muties,” a term that means at once mutineers and mutants—as generations of low gravity have transformed the bodies of the outcasts. It’s a weird experience to read something so comically bad at points while also appreciating how visionary the premise is and seeing its influence in contemporary SF (the Muties, for instance, anticipate the Ousters from Dan Simmons’s Hyperion novels, as well as the Belters in The Expanse).
Percival Everett, Erasure. Percival Everett’s most recent novel James, a rewriting of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of the enslaved Jim, has been on everybody’s best-of lists … but I missed my chance, as when I went to buy it, it was sold out, and is (still) not available to order. What was on the shelf was Erasure, Everett’s sort-of-satirical 2001 novel, which was recently adapted into the film American Fiction, starring Jeffrey Wright.
Jeffrey Wright in American Fiction.
The novel is about a well-regarded but little-read African-American novelist named Thelonious “Monk” Ellison. Ellison’s novels are presented as highly intellectualized, vaguely avant-garde exercises that most people find unreadable. He has long ignored his agent’s unsubtly coded pleas to be more, well, black in his subject matter and narrative voice. Ellison—the scion of an affluent Black family, whose sister and brother followed in their later father’s footsteps to become doctors—resists the various pressures to center race in his fiction, finding the prospect distasteful. And then, when the seventeenth rejection of his latest manuscript coincides with the meteoric popularity of a debut novel he sees as cynically playing on racial stereotypes, something in him snaps. He responds to the ubiquity of the new bestseller We’s Lives in Da Ghetto by churning out a vicious satire he titles My Pafology under the pseudonym Stagg R. Lee and sends it to his agent.
Long story short, My Pafology is immediately and unironically embraced by a publisher who offers Ellison’s alter ego an obscene amount of money as an advance. Hijinks ensue, not least of which is Ellison finding himself as the sole Black author on the jury for a prestigious literary award, arguing vainly against the others when they want to grant the award to Mr. Stagg R. Lee.
Come for the lacerating commentary on racial politics in publishing but stay for Everett’s beautiful and nuanced writing. Honestly, however brilliant the framing conceit of Ellison’s literary impersonation is, where the novel really sings is in Everett’s granular depiction of Ellison’s relationship to his sister and brother, his mother as she enters the early stages of dementia, and the ghost of his dead father.
Sally Rooney, Conversations With Friends. I’m late to the Sally Rooney party, but I’m glad I made it. I’ve had Normal People and Beautiful World Where Are You sitting on my shelf for a few months now. When I ran out of novels in Uxbridge, I kicked myself for not bringing one of them. Next best thing: walking to Blue Heron Books and picking up Rooney’s debut novel.
I read it in an afternoon. I spent the whole time having to remind myself that this was her first book and that she wrote it in her mid-twenties; at the same time I was tamping down the kind of jealousy I feel at such natural talent realized that early. (This feeling was perhaps exacerbated by the fact that the novel is about two GenZ women getting tangled up with an “older” couple—the older couple being both at least fifteen years younger than me.)
Rooney’s writing has admirable clarity, eschewing anything resembling flourishes or embellishments. Its beauty lies in that simplicity, which has the salutary effect of teasing out the complexities of the characters’ motivations and emotions. Looking very much forward to getting into the two unread novels currently on my shelf.
Hugh Howey, Wool. My wife read this novel several years ago, and this past spring read the two others in the series, Shift and Dust. She’s been bugging me to read it for a while, noting correctly that it’s right in my wheelhouse—a post-apocalyptic work of SF imagining a future in which humanity’s survivors live in an underground silo and must behave in accordance with a very rigid code of conduct. Screens show the silo-dwellers the landscape outside, which is a blasted wasteland. Supreme punishment for crimes is to be sent outside to clean the lenses of the cameras showing the bleak scenery, where they then die from exposure to the toxins pervading the atmosphere.
I finally picked up Wool in part because we’ve been watching the series Silo, which is now almost done its second season. Silo is a fairly faithful adaptation of Howey’s series, and has an impressive cast—most notably Rebecca Ferguson (seen most recently as Lady Jessica Atreides in the Dune films), Common, Iain Glenn, and Tim Robbins. And in season two, Steve Zahn shows up! Not to turn this space into an extended ad for AppleTV, but … well, that’s where you’ll find Silo (Slow Horses, Severance, For All Mankind, Shrinking, Bad Sisters, Silo —of the streaming services, it’s well-represented with really great series, many of which it does a terrible job of publicizing).
One interesting fact about Wool is that it was self-published and became a surprise bestseller. Unfortunately, this shows in certain aspects: there’s an unevenness to some of the storytelling, and large sections are quite overwritten. Some elements, such as the idiosyncratic way the silo-dwellers curse or other modes of expression are inconsistent: some conventions appearing early disappear later or suddenly surface halfway through. It would have benefited from having an editor. The second and third books were picked up by a publisher, so will hopefully have the benefit of an editorial eye.
Rebecca Ferguson in Silo.
That’s it for now! One of my favourite contemporary SF authors is John Scalzi, who is also a prolific blogger, and he has a custom of ending his posts with a picture of one of his cats. I think this is a fine custom and one worth imitating. So with that in mind, here’s a picture of our flooficus domesticus, Catesby.
Yes, she is judging you. What did you expect? She’s a cat.