by on

I wanted to be sure and review a romance book for Valentine’s Day. But—and I don’t mean to hurt any feelings when I say this—most romance books just put me right off. They’re either too cutesy or else too hot and heavy for my taste. The latter type are what my mother calls “bodice-rippers” and Kevin Brennan calls “naked torso” books, after the typical cover art. We will discuss this more later.

There’s nothing “wrong” with either type of book, of course. But I like to seek out the strange, the esoteric, the bizarre… something that defies easy categorization by genre.

In Love With Eleanor Rigby was exactly what I was looking for. One way I could tell this was from the reviews on Amazon, most of which are from baffled fans of “normal” romance books who aren’t sure what they just read.

Well, I can see why. It’s ostensibly about a romance between a man named Joe and a woman named Tabitha. Already, you can see where the confusion sets in. “Eleanor Rigby” is not a character, but is a reference to a song of that name by the Beatles. If you know the song, it gives some idea of the tone of the book. I didn’t know the song and only listened to it as part of my research for this review.

Anyhow, Joe loves Tabitha, and hopes that Tabitha loves him back. But Joe has a secret: he’s a recovering alcoholic, and for some time he’s reluctant to tell Tabitha this, and when he finally works up the courage to do so, it is a tense moment in their blossoming relationship.

And that, in a nutshell, is the story. It’s a short story, and you might even suggest that not much happens. That’s because it’s really all about how the story is told. In other words, it’s literary fiction. The phrasing is intricate, philosophical and rambling. Joe, the narrator, is given to over-intellectualizing, as his AA therapist frequently reminds him. At times, he calls the nature of reality into question.

This is probably why a lot of the reviewers were flummoxed. And then there is the matter of the cover, which you’ll notice I didn’t post at the top like I normally do. Well, that’s because I think it’s important to know what the book is before seeing the cover. But now we need to talk about this:

So, it’s not exactly one of the “naked torso” books, but as you can see, a more southerly portion of the anatomy is highlighted. And given that there is only a passing reference to a beach in the book, it’s fair to say that this cover, while in some sense eye-catching, does not accurately reflect what kind of book it is. It’s rather like this early poster for Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

On one hand, it’s probably not a good idea to market a work of literary fiction about struggles with addiction and loneliness with a cover that looks like a sexy romp. On the other hand, everyone I know who writes literary fiction tells me it’s basically impossible to sell it, so it’s hard to blame someone for resorting to such methods. Better to have a thought-provoking book marketed like tawdry pulp than a trashy story marketed like it’s something profound, don’t you think?

Well, I think so. But, it may be that the Venn diagram of people who read serious literary fiction and people who read books with swimsuit-clad posteriors on the cover are simply two non-intersecting circles. Which can lead to misunderstandings. For example, some reviewers claimed the book is full of typos. Believe me, I have read books that were full of typos. In fact, I may have even written books that were full of typos! And I don’t think most of the oddities in this text are typos. Rather, they are deliberate attempts by the author to convey a stream-of-consciousness.

Personally, I enjoyed the book, and I sympathized with the protagonist. This may come as a shock, but I too tend to over-think things. I think anyone else who does that will be likely to enjoy this story as well. I recommend checking it out. Whether you also choose to check out the models on the cover, I leave to your discretion.

by on

To recap the previous episode: when we left our hero, Daniel J. Boorstin, he had just discovered that the foundations of the U.S. government were under threat from competing narratives of pseudo-events, which flood the public discourse and make getting a true understanding of political reality from the news effectively impossible.

A lesser man might have turned away at this point, unable to face any further horrors. But not Boorstin! No, he had to know it all.

Having defined the pseudo-event, Boorstin proceeds to document how every aspect of life is becoming more and more dominated by images, facsimiles, reproductions and imitations. Travel, once truly an adventurous activity, is reduced to tourist packages that offer pre-planned experiences. Celebrities have taken the place of heroes; instead of being famous for great deeds, they are famous because they are famous. Images have replaced ideals as the ultimate goal of people, organizations, and nations.

Among the many aspects of American culture that Boorstin analyzes, I want to highlight some of his thoughts on the literary industry that may be of interest to my fellow authors. For example, this remarkable passage on machine translation:

What Thomas J. Watson Jr., president of International Business Machines Corporation, calls the ‘Information Explosion’ is having an ever wider and deeper effect on the form in which we are willing to have our ideas expressed. And incidentally, it cannot fail to affect the respect we show for literary or any other kind of form. Translation, until recently, has been among the subtlest, most difficult and most respected of literary arts…

Now, in order to make available the increasing printed resources in other languages, the new data processing industry has perfected a machine translator. The Mark II machine, developed jointly by IBM and the Air Force, can take a passage of Russian and translate it into what IBM calls ‘rough but meaningful English.’ Here is a sample product of the machine when applied to a passage of Russian literary criticism:

United States appeared new translation immortal novel L.N. Tolstago ‘war and world / peace’ Truth, not all novel, buttony several fragments out of it, even so few / little, that they occupy all one typewritten page. But nonetheless this achievement. Nevertheless culture not stands / costs on place. Something translate. Something print. Truth, by opinion certain literature sceptics, translation made enough / fairly ‘oak.’

This goes on, but you get the idea. Basically, they have been working on AI literature for way longer than you thought.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg as far as what Boorstin sees going wrong with the literary industry:

The expression ‘best-seller’ is, of course, another by-product of the Graphic Revolution. It is an Americanism (still not found in some of the best English dictionaries) which first came into use in the United States at the beginning of the present century… the word ‘seller’ in England had originally meant a person who sold; only around 1900 did the word come to mean a book (later any other item) that sold well. This subtle transference of ideas was itself interesting, for the very expression ‘best seller’ or ‘seller’ now implied that a book somehow sold itself: that sales bred more sales.

And so:

Best-sellerism has thus come to dominate the book world. Leaders in the book trade themselves often attacked it. In his Economic Survey of the Book Industry in 1931, O.H. Cheney called best-sellerism ‘an intolerable curse on the industry.’ But, he explained, there was (and there remains) a substantial commercial basis for the institution: one way to make a book a best seller is to call it one. Then many potential book buyers ‘want to join the thousands—or hundreds of thousands—of the inner circle of the readers of the book.’… A buyer going into a bookstore is apt to ask for a best-seller; even if he doesn’t, he is apt to be urged to buy a book because it is one…

…One of the most interesting features of the institution is how flimsy is the factual basis for calling any particular book a best seller. To speak of a best seller—to use the superlative to apply not to one item but to a score of items—is, of course, a logical contradiction. But the bookstores are full of ‘best sellers.’

In Boorstin’s view, basically everything is like this; manufactured and carefully-curated simulacra replacing real experiences. And how desperate are we for something that seems genuine to cut through all the public relations verbiage and artificial hype of pseudo-events?

Our hunger for crime news and sports news, then, far from showing we have lost our sense of reality, actually suggests that even in a world so flooded by pseudo-events and images of all kinds, we still know (and are intrigued by) a spontaneous event when we see one.

I’m convinced that part of the reason for the celebration of Luigi Mangione is that his crime was something unexpected and unplanned, and thus instantly attention-grabbing in a world of ads and social media memes.

There’s more—much more—but I can’t quote the whole book, now can I? After all, it would be particularly ironic to confuse the map with the territory in this, of all cases!

Suffice it to say, Boorstin saw the post-Graphic Revolution world as full of images that loom larger than the things they are meant to represent. And just as pseudo-events beget more pseudo-events, so do images beget other images, endlessly refracting until the underlying reality is a distant memory.

In other words, to paraphrase J.B.S. Haldane, the modern world is not only faker than we suppose, it is faker than we can suppose. Everything is a shadow of a shadow of a shadow, to where even what we think of as “real” is actually only a really thick shadow.

There is only one sphere of life that Boorstin does not excoriate for its replacement of reality with image. Not because he didn’t see it—it is inconceivable that he did not—but probably just because he was too classy to mention it. Well, I like to think I run a family-friendly blog, even if that family is the Addams Family, but I simply can’t ignore this particular issue.

The topic I am thinking of is, of course, sex. Now, even in Boorstin’s day, sex and media had already intermingled to quite an extent, and it is no doubt only the good librarian’s conservative sense of propriety that kept him from mentioning Playboy etc. But modern life has seen the Sexual and Graphic Revolutions combine to bring forth some real monstrosities.

The examples are endless, but I am thinking of one particular social media controversy from last year. Someone on Twitter modified this poster for the Amazon Prime series Fallout, probably using AI to do so. The modified poster gave the central figure tighter pants and a more toned backside. The person who modified it believed the woman wasn’t eye-catching enough in the original depiction. Naturally, there was a backlash, and a resulting discussion about sexism, male gaze, etc. etc. etc.

Now, what part of this whole sad episode is fake? Haha, trick question: it’s fakery all the way down! It is a poster for a television show adapted from a video game, further modified by machine to resemble a more visually striking conception of the female form. Literally everything about it is fake, and to become emotionally invested in arguing about any aspect of it is to lose oneself in shadows to the nth power.

Indeed, image so dominates modern concepts of sex that it poses a real danger to human reproduction. Does this seem impossible? Did you ever hear the tragedy of Julodimorpha bakewelli, a species of Australian beetle whose males are so attracted to discarded beer bottles that they mate with them instead of the females of their kind? Could a similar fate befall humanity, with the proliferation of things like AI romantic partners and virtual reality erotica? I don’t know, but I think we’re trying to find out.

None of this would come as a surprise to Boorstin, who in 1962 saw a world awash in shadows and illusions. To the extent it has changed, it has been a change in degree, not in kind. Influencers may have replaced movie stars, and social media may have replaced the nightly news, but it is just a more refined version of the same problem.

So what, then, is the solution? It may be impressive that Boorstin saw and understood the danger of trends that now permeate the society you and I inhabit. But that is of no help to us, unless he can offer us some way out, some hope of finding something real to grasp.

Here is Boorstin’s closing statement. It wasn’t enough to save us in 1962, but maybe, just maybe, we can for once harness the power of the internet to promote something true. Marshall McLuhan, whom Boorstin references more than once, said that “the medium is the message.” I am praying he was wrong. We’ve got the medium, now Dr. Boorstin supplies the message:

Each of us must disenchant himself, must moderate his expectations, must prepare himself to receive messages coming in from the outside. The first step is to begin to suspect that there may be a world out there, beyond our present or future power to image or imagine. We should not worry over how to export more of the American images among which we live. We should not try to persuade others to share our illusions. We should try to reach outside our images. We should seek new ways of letting messages reach us; from our own past, from God, from the world which we may hate or think we hate. To give visas to strange and alien and outside notions… One of our grand illusions is the belief in a ‘cure’. There is no cure. There is only the opportunity for discovery. For this the New World gave us a grand, unique beginning. 

We must first awake before we can walk in the right direction. We must discover our illusions before we can even realize that we have been sleepwalking. The least and the most we can hope for is that each of us may penetrate the unknown jungle of images in which we live our daily lives. That we may discover anew where dreams end and where illusions begin. This is enough. Then we may know where we are, and each of us may decide for himself where he wants to go.

by on

In case you forgot, according to the Gambrel/Schoch Treaty of 2022, January 31 is Second Halloween. And since it falls on a Friday this year, I have to review something appropriate to the season.

But what would that be? I already reviewed plenty of Halloween and Halloween-adjacent books back in October. For this, I felt that something slightly different was in order. So, after some searching, I was able to scare up (ha!) this curious little volume.

If you’ve read much Lovecraft, you know he had a distinctive writing style. A style sometimes described as, “why use fewer words when more will do?” More charitably, we might say he liked to employ unusual adjectives to convey how strange and horrible many of the creatures and places he imagined were. So for instance, despite his own atheism, he would use “blasphemous” as an intensifier to describe just how thoroughly out of line with our normal rules of reality something might be. And of course, he more or less singlehandedly kept alive the use of the word “eldritch”, to the point that it is now almost synonymous with his style of horror.

The Lovecraftian mode is surprisingly seductive. Once you’ve read a couple of his stories, even if you smirk a little at how overwrought they are, you’ll likely find some of his literary mannerisms seeping into your own writing, like unhallowed shadows from the penumbra of unlighted corridors beyond time; nameless abysms swaying horribly to the piping of a damnable flute held in cacodaemoniacal claws…

See what I mean?

Osvaldo Felipe Agorarte clearly does, and has become so enchanted with HPL’s anti-lyrical prose that he has adapted famous historical documents in this manner. So for instance, the Declaration of Independence is rendered:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, but that there are dark powers beyond our understanding that seek to destroy our free will and replace it by a tyrannical rule.

And the Gettysburg Address is rewritten as:

It is for us to continue the fight against the terrors that threaten our world, to resist the madness that grips our enemies, and to ensure that our nation, under God, and that a government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish.

(For the sake of politeness, let’s just ignore what Lovecraft’s opinions on the actual versions of either of these texts would likely have been, okay?)

Is this rewriting amusing? Yes, it is, at least to me. It’s not quite as catchy as “I pledge allegiance to Queen Fragg and her mighty state of hysteria,” but still, it makes me chuckle.

On the other hand, it doesn’t necessarily continue to be amusing after the first five or six times. It reminded me of a typical Saturday Night Live skit (at least from the days when I watched SNL, which I really haven’t done since Tina Fey stopped appearing regularly), in that it takes a mildly funny joke and carries it on way too long.

As with SNL skits, to fully flesh it out to feature length, the joke needs some sort of development. What I would have liked to see would have been something where the documents start out more or less like we know them, but keep hinting, with increasing urgency as time progresses, at the terrible forces which threaten our world. Like a good Lovecraft story, or even better, an M.R. James story, the horror needs to creep up on you gradually. If we got the feeling that Jefferson was getting vague premonitions of cosmic horror, and by the time we get to say, Calvin Coolidge, he’s really staring down the barrel of a Nyarlathotep-style apocalypse, that would be interesting. (Although it’s tough to imagine “Silent Cal” talking like Lovecraft, no matter what was going on.)

But as it is, it’s kind of a one-trick pony. Admittedly, some of the historical documents are interesting in their own right, and I’d never even heard of some of them, so it was educational in that respect. And it is illustrated with some appropriately grotesque artwork, like that seen on the cover. On the other hand, it’s set in a font that I guess is meant to be Gothic, but frankly looked like a baroque, serifed equivalent of Comic Sans, which makes it a bit of a chore to read.

All in all, it’s an interesting concept, and could be the basis for something promising, but probably isn’t worth buying at its current price, unless you are madly in love with HPL’s prose and simply can’t get enough of it.

by on

This is a classic novel about an envoy to a planet known as Winter, a world as cold as the name suggests and populated by ambisexual humanoids. Naturally, this results in quite a culture shock for the envoy, Genly Ai, who has to deal with understanding their alien nature as well as the intricate political machinations that take place between the various nations of the planet. His primary guide to understanding this is a politician named Estraven. (Hilariously, auto-correct wants to change this to “estrogen.”)

The first half of the book is lyrical, mystical, and well-nigh incomprehensible, at least to me. I had trouble keeping track of who was who, what was what, and generally following what was going on. Which is not to say that I didn’t enjoy it. Actually, I enjoyed it quite a lot, in the way one can enjoy a beautiful piece of music.

But then in the second half, things started to coalesce. Estraven, in particular, becomes a phenomenally well-developed character who starts dispensing pearls of wisdom like this:

“To oppose something is to maintain it. They say here ‘all roads lead to Mishnory.’ To be sure, if you turn your back on Mishnory and walk away from it, you are still on the Mishnory road. To oppose vulgarity is inevitably to be vulgar. You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road…

To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.”

What an absolutely killer insight! It’s the sort of gem that makes me so glad I read the book, and make it a perfect entry for Vintage Science-Fiction Month. This is why we observe it every January; it’s an opportunity to look up classic books like this and find what it was that made the foundational works of the genre so striking to generations of readers.

Estraven and Genly are eventually forced to work together to make a nightmarish 80 day trek across a frozen wasteland. (I highly recommend reading this book on a snowy winter night if possible.)

These scenes, while maybe a little repetitive, were still very effective. The two characters, having nothing else to do, learn a lot about each other and themselves. By the end of the journey, I absolutely loved Estraven, who is really one of the most fully-realized ‘alien’ characters I can recall. Which makes the way the story ends all the more powerful.

The book is remarkable for the way it depicts a truly alien world. I only know of a few modern authors–A.C. Flory and Lorinda Taylor, to name names–who have attempted anything like this. And no wonder, because it’s very hard to do, but done well, it makes for a remarkable, dream-like experience to read. They say the value of reading is that it lets you walk a mile in someone else’s shoes. Well, in this case, it’s more like 800 miles in an androgynous alien’s skis. And that, my friends, is what science-fiction is all about.

by on

Look at that cover! It’s sharp, and scary, and eye-catching. I knew I had to read this the minute I saw it. The title is intriguing too, calling to mind Brutal Doom, the mod that made the infamously gory and violent video game Doom even more gory and violent. I found the whole composition so arresting that I decided to buy it on the spot.

As it turns out, this is a “Choose Your Own Adventure” style of book, and (again evoking Doom, albeit with considerably less gratuitous carnage) it is largely set on an abandoned moon base which has been overrun by creatures known as Saturmeks: alien entities highly reminiscent of Daleks with chainsaws.

But, I’m getting ahead of myself! The protagonist of the book is Hilary Hils, a research assistant to Prof. Vyvian Wylie. Hils is accidentally teleported forward in time to the moon, where a research base has been taken over by the aforementioned Saturmeks.

And that’s where you come in: from there, it’s up to you to decide how Hils will proceed. Will you simply sit quietly and wait for Prof. Wylie to fix the machine and rescue you? Or will you start exploring the moonbase, and even try to stop the hideous aliens? The choice is yours, and which ending you get depends on how many points you have, which are acquired periodically at certain critical moments in the story. As a hint: risk-taking and boldness are rewarded. I mean, who takes part in an adventure story just so they can make the “safe” choice?

It’s a fun and surprisingly gripping experience, and I found myself chuckling as I eagerly hopped from page to page to see what the consequences of my decisions would be. It combines the interactivity of a video game with the added demands on the imagination required for reading. It wouldn’t be a bad choice as a gift for a kid in the 10-12 age range who doesn’t typically enjoy reading the books assigned in school. From what I’ve heard, there are a lot of them these days.

by on

One of the rules for writers, laid down somewhere in the fragments of an ancient Instagram post by the mad literary agent Abdul Al-Hazred, is that a writer should give their audience what they expect. A steady hand at the tiller and no surprises, that’s what readers want! And if a writer must venture outside their typical comfort zone, at least they should do it under a pseudonym, so people don’t accidentally get exposed to something they didn’t expect.

How powerful is this rule? So powerful that even the richest and perhaps most (in)famous living author conforms to it.

Naturally, because I am a rebel without a clue, I like it when people break this rule. So I was delighted when one of my favorite authors decided to do exactly that in this book.

Travailing Through Time is a very un-Bertoccian book. Usually, his stories are about millennials trying to navigate modernity, usually with a heavy dose of ironic detachment and witty pop-cultural references.

Travailing Through Time is different: it’s about hardworking farmers in colonial New England. Simple, God-fearing people, who have no time to spare for ironic detachment. As for cultural references, well, they basically begin and end with the Bible.

In short, it’s a picture of a people and a place totally different from us and ours. Having established this, Bertocci then proceeds to introduce, in a clever way, a glimpse of a more modern sensibility. Only a hint, nothing more.

Both the drama and the humor of the story come from the obvious questions: what would people of the past make of us? When we look back in history, it’s too easy for the people to appear to us as caricatures. Which of course is also how we would appear to them. It takes work to really know and understand a person, or a people, or a place.

And since the New Year is always a time for reflection, this seems like a good time to ponder the questions raised in Bertocci’s ingenious little story. What do we really know about the past? And what would the past make of us? Leopold von Ranke said “All ages are equidistant from eternity.” We mustn’t think of ourselves as somehow “better” than the people of another time just because we are more recent. It’s 2025, after all.

All these big ideas, Bertocci packs into a witty and entertaining short story. A perfect choice for starting the new year off the right way.

by on

Ah, US Presidential elections! An opportunity for citizens to civilly debate their differences and then settle on a candidate who best reflects the values of the nation, all in the spirit of good fellowship and totally without inflaming irreconcilable ideological and cultural divisions.

So, if you’re sad that the fun of a presidential election has just passed, and won’t come round again for another four years, have I got good news for you! The book we are reviewing today is about the 2036 election. The premise: one of the candidates for the Democratic nomination is an MIT-designed Artificial Intelligence named AIDAN.

AIDAN, the creation of one Dr. Isaac Shipley, has already established itself as a competent CEO, now aims to unseat the favorite for the nomination, the temperamental Senator Quinn Albrecht, and position itself as the top challenger to incumbent president Sarah Mincetti.

Naturally, while AIDAN is a bit awkward at first, it quickly gains ground due to the fact that it is a distributed intelligence network that can literally start raising money to address a problem within minutes of being told it exists. Typical politicians’ “I feel your pain”-style bromides can hardly compete with that.

But the world of politics isn’t so straightforward as that. There are all sorts of behind-the-scenes plots, conspiracies, blackmail threats and double-crosses going on that make the campaign far more difficult. And the vulnerabilities of human and machine alike come into play: where exactly is the machine drawing its data from? And as for the human candidates; why are they continuing to fight never-ending political battles when all they really want to do is go home to their loved ones?

The book reminded me of some of the better Hitchcock films, in that it’s a fast-paced thriller, yet also seems to have a certain wink-to-the-audience quality that gives it a lighthearted tone. I mean, virtually every dialogue between the Republican president and her wife is laden with cheesy sexual innuendos. Maybe you disagree, but I can’t help feeling like that’s supposed to be funny.

That said, the book raises some very profound and interesting questions politics and AI, and while this might be controversial, I think it is quite probable that something like this will happen in the future. (“God help us, in the future.”) I doubt they’ll bother to actually give the AI a body, though. The debates will just look like when Watson was on Jeopardy! Why, the very fact this book exists tells you that the idea is in the air. Science fiction is so often the precursor of science fact…

It’s an entertaining, thought-provoking, mildly disturbing, and often campy take on politics. Rather like The McLaughlin Group.

by on

This is a post-apocalyptic survival story with supernatural romance elements. Neither of these are genres I particularly like, but this book pleasantly surprised me. Part of what makes it work is that not a lot of time is spent on explaining why the apocalypse occurs. One minute everything is fine, then bam! It’s… not fine. Everything is destroyed and monsters are coming out of the Earth to kill everyone.

The story follows a woman named Sairha, and a man named Sven whom she had just met prior to the apocalypse. The couple, as well as Sairha’s friend Cassandra, start out on a trek across the wasteland. Along the way, they meet other survivors, as well as plenty of monsters and other dangers.

It’s pretty much what you would expect from a post-apocalyptic story, but what makes it work is how the monsters are kept out of sight for much of the time. They are most threatening as a lurking menace, hinted at without knowing exactly what they are.

What also makes the story effective is how the tension is built. More than once, the party goes to some sinister location, such as an abandoned store, and, after a nerve-racking buildup, nothing particularly bad happens. This has the effect of ratcheting up the fear so that when something does finally happen, it’s like an explosion of energy. “Hours of boredom punctuated by a few seconds of terror” as the saying goes. Not that the story is boring, of course, but you can see how the endless hiking across a wasteland is going to wear down the characters’ patience.

There are a few decisions the characters make that I questioned, but as I have said before, it wouldn’t be a horror story if everybody made the right choices. All told, if you like dark supernatural fiction with just a bit of romance, this is an excellent choice.

by on

The setup: it’s Thanksgiving Break, and two students, Claudia and Marnie, are the only ones in the dorm. They decide to watch the traditional TV airing of It’s a Wonderful Life together to pass the time. As they watch the classic film (and the commercials) they do a bit of bonding, as well as reflecting on their own lives.

As is typical of Bertocci, he uses his deft knack for dialogue and his ability to blend cynicism and sincerity, often in the same sentence, to paint a vivid picture of two young women both starting out in life. It’s a very short sketch, but it’s effective all the same.

It’s probably even more effective if you’ve actually seen the movie. But, I confess, I, er, haven’t. I suppose I should fix that one of these days. Especially since the whole point of Bertocci’s story is how the film has the power to bring people together. Which is of course one of the great things about fiction generally, not just that specific movie. Although I suppose sweet, uplifting stories are the best for this sort of thing.

Anyhow, this book is a quick and pleasant way to get into the spirit of post-Thanksgiving. i.e. sitting around having eaten too much and watching whatever is on TV. Which may not sound all that interesting, but in the hands of a true king of the craft like Bertocci, it can be the basis for strong literary fiction.

by on

I don’t often review non-fiction books, let alone books that touch on that dread menace “current events.” I figure very few people, after a long day at the outrage factory, want to pull up my book review blog and read yet more kvetching about politics.

And don’t worry! This book was published in 1998, so perforce it doesn’t say anything about the 2000 election, 9/11, the Global War on Terror, the 2008 recession, Benghazi, the 2016 election, Covid-19, the invasion of Ukraine, or anything else that we millennials can remember being traumatized by. Gen Xers and older, I can’t vouch for you, but I understand you’re made of sterner stuff than we snowflakes. You drank from garden hoses, after all. As for Gen Z? I’m pretty sure they can’t read, so we’re safe unless one of you makes a TikTok about this. Onward!

So what is this book about? Well, to begin with, it’s about legibility.

A State, defined broadly as an entity which governs some group or territory, needs to know what is contained within that territory. Every sovereign State needs to have its equivalent of a Domesday Book. After all, how can you claim to govern a place if you don’t know what’s in it?

However, any administrator will tell you that it’s much easier to administer something when it is well-defined, clear cut, and uniform. In Scott’s word, legible. So, for instance, when the German Forestry Department was trying to get a handle on their stock of trees in the 1700s, they found it was expedient to chop down all those untidy, irregular bunches of plants that had grown up over the centuries and replace them with nice, regimented, evenly-spaced spruces. Much simpler to know how many trees per acre, right?

Except… it turns out a forest is actually a complex ecosystem, with many different elements that all affect each other. So trying to make it a neatly-organized farm for growing wood destroys the network of organisms which make it a healthy forest. Something the German administrators discovered the hard way.

Scott goes on to demonstrate how this mindset leads to the same mistake in a variety of circumstances; whether it’s planning a forest, a city, a farm, or even a nation. In each case, people whom Scott calls “high modernists” believe they can make a primitive and backward system run along modern, scientific lines; only to find that in fact the organic systems that evolved over generations, while on the surface appearing messy and chaotic, actually run according to a highly-developed order.

As a result, technocratic efforts at reform often don’t go as planned. But this doesn’t stop technocrats from trying! Their faith is the faith of Ulysses Everett McGill. I know I just referenced this scene a few weeks ago, but really, it cannot be quoted too often:

(It’s worth pointing out that the Age of Reason they had in France was shortly followed, not coincidentally, by a period known as “The Reign of Terror.”)

That speech is just too perfect for the mindset Scott describes, right down to the bit about electricity, regarding which Scott observes:

Electricity had for [Lenin] and most other high modernists an almost mythical appeal. That appeal had to do, I think, with the unique qualities of electricity as a form of power. Unlike the mechanisms of steam power, direct waterpower, and the internal combustion engine, electricity was silent, precise, and well-nigh invisible. For Lenin and many others, electricity was magical.

And as he explains, despite their professions of science and rationality, it sometimes seems to be the planners who are the zealous adherents of dogma:

If the proverbial man from Mars were to stumble on the facts here, he could be forgiven if he were confused about exactly who was the empiricist and who was the true believer. Tanzanian peasants had, for example, been readjusting their settlement patterns and  and farming practices in accordance with climate changes, new crops, and new markets with notable success in the two decades before villagization… By contrast, specialists and politicians seemed to be in the unshakable grip of a quasi-religious enthusiasm made even more potent in being backed by the state. 

So, what are all these planners, administrators, designers, technocrats, politicians, and bureaucrats failing to do? While Scott (and I) poke a great deal of fun at them, there can be no doubt they are very smart people, and often well-intentioned. So what are they getting wrong?

Scott’s answer is metis, which is a Greek word that means something like “skill,” “cunning,” or “wisdom,” although according to him, none of these quite perfectly capture the meaning. It is essentially the expert knowledge of a craft which can be gained only through experience, and not easily transferred through words. Scott uses the analogy of riding a bicycle. It’s virtually impossible to learn on the first try only by reading instructions. You just have to practice it.

Complex systems evolve patterns of operation which grow naturally over time, and which are often more efficient than they at first appear. Attempts to modernize or streamline such systems destroy these intricate patterns, leaving a cold, sterile form intended to make its function follow it, in an inversion of Sullivan’s maxim. 

I feel pretty confident that anyone who has ever been involved with some large organization has seen this pattern play out. I myself have, more than a few times. In that sense, nothing in Seeing Like a State is truly a revelation. It’s something everyone has observed at one time or another. But Scott articulates the problem so eloquently that it feels like a breath of fresh air.

Not, of course, that it has done much good. Some of the worst examples of the kind of errors he describes have happened since this book was published. Some of them are ongoing. The financialization and commercialization of the world economy have, if anything, accelerated the destruction of metis, and replaced the organic flourishing of generationally accrued wisdom with bureaucracy, AI, and cryptocurrency. One cannot help but think of Treebeard’s description of Saruman in Lord of the Rings: “He has a mind of metal and wheels; and he does not care for growing things, except as far as they serve him for the moment.”

There are three books I’ve read that I’ve put down, staring into space with slack-jawed amazement, saying to myself, “Whoa, now I understand!” One is The Seasons of a Man’s Life, the second is The Meme Machine, and this is the third. I highly recommend it to anyone who has to deal with complex systems on a daily basis, which is pretty much all of us. Unfortunately.