Book follow-up

Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves from the Tyranny of the Automobile, by Sarah Goodyear, Doug Gordon, and Aaron Naparstek

This book didn’t have to convert me—I went to the book tour. That said, it makes a strong argument for reducing car dependency. It’s kind of wild how much we’ve bent our lives around driving everywhere. It’s so costly individually, socially, environmentally, and spatially—think of how much land is turned over to roads and parking. In the 1960s and 70s the city wanted to build a freeway through downtown and tear up the West End for an interchange, and the idea of sacrificing so much valuable land in the city centre to move cars around is bonkers.

The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, by Becky Chambers

Rosemary Harper is trying to get as far away from Mars as possible. Under a false identity, she takes an accounting job with a subspace tunnelling crew in a distant part of the galaxy. Will she adjust to her new life and her new alien crewmates, or will her secrets catch up with her?

The setting was interesting. The Earth became inhospitable and had to be abandoned, and now humanity is divided between those who stayed in the solar system and a diaspora across the galaxy. It’s the opposite of a /r/HYA story: humans are a lesser species and viewed with suspicion, not wonder. I liked the characters and the relationships, and I generally enjoyed spending time in its world. It was a fun book.

But wow, I hated the story. Similar to Legends & Lattes, it was afraid to have conflict between the characters.¹ Rosemary lied to the rest of the crew, but there weren’t any consequences. Not even Corbin—the token asshole—held it against her. Gosh, maybe there could’ve been an interesting character moment between the two of them when Corbin discovers a secret about his parentage that parallels what Rosemary’s dealing with. That would’ve been great.

It’s funny: Corbin ended up being my favourite character, even though he’s barely present for most of the book. He gets to grow and change, and he makes an incredibly interesting decision at the end of the book with huge repercussions that the book doesn’t bother getting into.

This book was frustrating.

Dungeon Crawler Carl, by Matt Dinniman

The LitRPG genre—a fusion of RPGs and fantasy or science fiction—gives me misgivings. The idea of a character having in-story stats, skills, and levels makes me uncomfortable. But I’ve heard from several different people (mostly on discord) that DCC is really good, and it was at Book Warehouse, and the first chapter was crazy enough that I decided to give it a shot.

As I tweeted:

The premise: aliens have come to strip mine the Earth. The initial flattening—all buildings and vehicles around the planet are instantly flattened to the ground—kills the majority of humanity, while the remainder are given the option of eking a life on the surface, or entering a global subterranean dungeon with the possibility of winning the Earth back. The efforts of these dungeon crawlers will be broadcast as part of an intergalactic reality show.

Again: this is the first chapter.

The video game stuff is fun. I loved the relationship between Carl and Princess Donut (his ex-girlfriend’s cat, who quickly gets an upgrade granting her the ability to speak and party member status). There’s plenty of action and escapist fun.

Then the book will tell you that the number of crawlers—the remaining humans fighting through the dungeon—has been whittled down to a few million. Yikes.

Carl’s a decent guy who’s furious at what happened and this game he’s forced into. He meets some of the aliens working at the dungeon—his NPC guide, a producer, some media folk—and it’s clear that they’re also forced to participate in an unjust system. Gee, this sounds almost like social commentary.

Laura Miller wrote a fantastic article on the series so far: “The Unlikely Hit That’s Popularizing a Whole New Type of Novel” (gift link).

Read Team Blues, by Cory Doctorow

Tweet:

This was a lot of fun. It’s a detective novel about money laundering and Silicon Valley, with a dash of murder and blockchain. You can tell that Doctorow is a believer when it comes to privacy and the liberating power of tech, and the disgust for what SV has become is delicious.

Martin Hench (the protagonist) solves the mystery by halfway through the book, and then goes on the run from some not especially nice folk who blame him for what happened. The scope widens from a tech mystery to larger questions of wealth, inequality, and justice. It’s a good book, and devoured it in two or three sittings.

The Anubis Gates, by Tim Powers

Tweet.

If you want to read a book about 1980s time travellers getting embroiled with Egyptian sorcerers in 19th century London, this is it. Come for the street urchins and shady underworld; stay for Samuel Taylor Coleridge saving the day while blitzed on opium.

I was worried it wouldn’t hold up, but no—it’s fantastic.

This book is hard to talk about without sounding crazy.

Brendan Doyle is an English professor specializing in William Ashbless, an obscure Romantic poet. He’s hired as a subject matter expert for a trip back in time (!!!) to 19th century London (!!!), where a group of rich tourists want to attend a poorly documented speech by Coleridge. Unfortunately, he’s kidnapped after the talk by a magician (!!!), and finds himself stranded back in time, under pursuit by unknown groups, and suffering indignity after indignity.

I have some quibbles. The plot of the second half of the book jumps around wildly, and Brendan becomes absurdly lucky. At the same time, my predominant thought was how much I loved the book. It’s great.