Book Notes VII
It's been an unconscionably long time since I last posted. Indeed, the past month has seen the worst stint of writing, or rather of failing to write, in more than three years. My apologies. I'll do better. In the interest of providing you with at least something, here are some notes on, at this point no longer, recent readings.
KTF: Part One - Anspach and Cole (A) - The penultimate volume in the Galaxy's Edge series, which I've written about before. The series remains what it's always been, enjoyable, fairly breezy popcorn reading of the military sci-fi variety. As things wrap up, the biggest issue with the books-namely, their being overstuffed with characters and lore after 17 volumes-is smoothing out a little, and I remain engaged. Overall, I continue to recommend the series to fans of the genre, but you’re not missing all that much if you pass on it.
Soldier of the Mist, Soldier of Arete, and Soldier of Sidon by Gene Wolfe (A, A, B, respectively, high A verging on S for the series) - The first two, collected in a single Volume, Latro in the Mist, were my first exposure to Gene Wolfe many years ago. They also happen to be, in my opinion, the best entrée point into his works more generally, being more accessible than much of his catalog while retaining his signature depth and ambiguity. Here, the latter is driven by the novels' central narrative conceit that the narrator, a Roman mercenary originally serving in the army of Xerxes at Plataea, has been wounded and thus forgets each day what has transpired (think Memento, but with a longer time frame before forgetfulness). It helps also that the eponymous soldier, Latro, is one of Wolfe's most likable and morally good characters.
In case it wasn't clear, I think the series is excellent, suffering only from a slightly weaker third volume and for being unfinished. The ultimate theme is, I believe, the praeparatio evangelica, though this is, typically for Wolfe, somewhat muted. Throughout he has interesting things to say about the nature of ancient religion and divinity, which strike me as increasingly compelling the more I think about them.
I'll Take My Stand by Twelve Southerners (B) - I'm not sure there's anything said here that you can't find in other works, maybe better in its time than today. Well written, but you get the sense that the authors are conjuring up a mythic version of the South that exults their chosen ideals while smoothing over anything that would mark a discrepancy with their vision (one thing that struck me is how they ignore the diversity within both South and North, the presence of the urban in the former and rural in the latter). Might just be better to take up some of the obvious successors to this strand of thought with the most obvious name that comes to mind being Wendall Berry.
The Power of Ritual in Prehistory by Brian Hayden (n/a) - Unrated because I ultimately felt unqualified to judge, as it's an academic book engaged in debates that I'm not particularly conversant with. The designation "prehistory" is interesting here, because the author's argument relies heavily on ethnographic accounts from groups that, of course, exist within history (i.e. at the time of European/American observers who wrote accounts of their practices) for the bulk of the book. When he strays into projecting what is found in these modern groups into the truly prehistoric, the conclusions are intriguing and tantalizing, but ultimately too speculative to be accepted without qualification (at least on my, again, admittedly layman's view).
I also found his view of the motivations of secret societies and the subsequent developments that he charts as arising from them (that this development occurs I found to be one of the more compelling arguments) to be overly cynical. For instance, he argues that the various elaborate ritual paraphernalia, masks, feasts, etc. are signs of pure self-interest among secret society practitioners because these materials weren't required for other groups seeking ecstatic/ritual experiences, such as Australian aboriginals. I find this unconvincing. Different peoples may require different things, might possess different frameworks of belief that arise from something other than self-interest and necessitate different ritual practices. Hayden seems to preclude this from the outset and in general disregards the content of belief (this last was, I thought the biggest weakness of the book). Why not suggest that there are many paths to ecstatic experience, some requiring elaborate rituals and equipment, some not? Simply because some find them unnecessary does not mean that they are truly unnecessary for all.
More explicable, because we can't possibly admit these things in "academic" inquiry (heaven's no!), is the question of the degree to which these experiences pertain to something actual. Hayden gestures to this in the end, again suggesting that it is not in content (why not?) but in the experience that the practices of "prehistoric" secret societies attain to something real, but he takes any further pursuit of the question to be beyond his purview. This is a clear limit of the academy as currently constituted because this is obviously the most important question about the phenomena discussed in the book.
Overly cynical and far too sweeping in the denial of the positive role of religion in the well-being of communities, but I shouldn't be too critical, as there were interesting tidbits throughout, the work seems to be breaking new ground in its field, and the subject itself is interesting.
Warlord of the Air by Michael Moorcock (C ) - One of the books that, perhaps regrettably, established the steampunk aesthetic. I found myself underwhelmed. Not as pulse-pounding as better examples of pulp science fiction, and the engagement with ideas was underdeveloped.
On the latter, the basic frame is a man displaced in time to an alternate future in which WWI never occurred. Here, the world is still dominated by colonial powers who maintain their control through airships. These powers are effectively utopias, but utopias maintained at the expense of exploited colonial subjects (a very soft sort of Omelas). The protagonist becomes disenchanted when confronted with colonial abuses and joins a group of revolutionaries who work to destroy the prevailing order, culminating in a bloody military campaign and an alternative nuclear bombing of Hiroshima. Clearly there's supposed to be some ambiguity here about how we view all of this, and the protagonist is himself torn. Arguments made by the revolutionaries about how peaceful and thriving colonial subjects would be if only the shackles of the great powers were cast off ring false given what we know of the actual history of decolonization and the dark irony of giving birth to a better world through the slaughter of millions is highlighted, but Moorcock seems unwilling to seriously plumb the depths of the question here, even in a subtle fashion (or perhaps he's being so subtle that I failed to pick up on it). Either way, I'm left unsatisfied.