Book roundup, part 41

It’s an all-four-star installment of the book roundup, all well worth reading in my opinion. At this point I’m simply not finishing any books that don’t grab me, and there’s no reason to be a dick about it, so the only things that make it into the roundup are books I really enjoyed for one reason or another.

And I’m stingy with the five stars.

A thank you to all the authors who are putting in the work, grinding out works that elevate and educate our lives in these terrible times. We need you more than ever.

Non-fiction

More Everything Forever, by Adam Becker ★★★★☆

I thought I understood just how fascistic and intellectually void the current Silicon Valley elites are, and then I read Adam Becker’s More Everything Forever and it turns out I very much did not comprehend the depths of awfulness.

I’m continually shocked by how a lot of the men leading the AI boosterism read a lot of the same sci-fi as I did back in the day; we read Heinlein, Asimov and Clark, and I apparently took away completely different lessons from those works, but the same lessons it seems Becker did.

Torment Nexus, yadda yadda.

More Everything Forever is an important work that at least for me helped focus my unease. It’s highly recommended.

Cue the Sun!, by Emily Nussbaum ★★★★☆

Subtitled The Invention of Reality TV, Cue the Sun! is an exhaustively reported deep dive into the history of one of the most reviled forms of entertainment ever created, with lots of original reporting and interviews with stories from behind the scenes.

Here’s how Nussbaum defines the genre:

It’s hard to nail down one clear definition for reality programming, but in this book I conceive of the genre as “dirty documentary”: It’s cinéma vérité filmmaking that has been cut with commercial contaminants, like a street drug, in order to slash the price and intensify the effect. Reality programs are shows that merge documentary techniques with some more rigid, easily repeatable approach to storytelling, like the game show or the soap opera, the talent contest or the sports competition—old-school episodic structures that were native to serialized radio and television. Cast real people, in other words—then put a tight frame around them, and squeeze.

Cue the Sun! chronicles the genre all the way from radio audience participation programs at the dawn of that medium to, of course, the current reality TV presidential administration.

My main takeaway is that this is an industry so overloaded with sociopaths it’s mind boggling. If you ask—as Nussbaum did—three people about the same event, you will get four different answers.

Like it or loathe it (I myself am a confirmed hater), reality TV has changed our world, and it’s useful if unpleasant to think about what needs or desires the genre fulfills for vast audiences, including the class and gender coding of the genre.

Fiction

Slow Gods, by Claire North ★★★★☆

Mawukana Respected na-Vdnaze is born into a dystopian civilization called the Shine, and is mostly a hapless victim of circumstance until he becomes, as he himself says, a poor copy of himself.

Wow, this is huge, epic space opera that’s also a sort of meditation on change, loss, and man’s inhumanity to man. And a being or beings that might be a god.

Slow Gods is something to curl up with. Let it take you away.

Also, hey dawg I heard you like pronouns so I got you all the pronouns.

Radiant Star, by Ann Leckie ★★★★☆

Continuing on the theme of pronouns, Radiant Star, as is usual for Leckie’s Imperial Radch universe, has many of them. The novel takes place on the planet Aaa, which is a wandering planet not circling a star, drifting through the dark coldness of space covered in a thick layer of ice. Nevertheless, there are humans in a city dug deep, deep into the ice, humans whose religion worship the titular Radiant Star.

Despite the utter insignificance of Aaa, the Radch, as is their wont, invade and take over the planet, though there are no big battle scenes or epic plots, just people going through their lives best as they can with all their flaws.

And the terrifying Radch ancillaries make an appearance. Those ancillaries really creep me out—a fate worse than death.

Radiant Star feels sort of like a chamber play playing out in the one claustrophobic city on the planet; there are many viewpoints and above all nobody is a villain in their own minds, though there are several characters who certainly exhibit villainous behavior.

So, a small novel, with small people, but written tenderly and humanely.

Radiant Star is really not the place to start if you’re unfamiliar with the Imperial Radch series, but for existing fans it’s a very tasty snack.

The Faith of Beasts, by James S.A. Corey ★★★★☆

The Captive’s War series began with The Mercy of Gods, which was very good but struggled a bit with having to do an absolutely heroic amount of world building. The Mercy of Gods was also a bit of a bummer in that the whole concept is that humanity is being enslaved by intergalactic fascists. But being a fan of The Expanse I had faith that once the world building was done, things would kick off.

And boy howdy do things kick off in The Faith of Beasts. This is huge, smart sci-fi from some of the best in the business. Highly recommended. I can’t wait for the next installment.

Note: The links are Bookshop affiliate links. If you purchase through them I get a tiny kickback, which helps motivate me to keep writing these reviews. Much obliged.