Ecotopia: The Notebooks and Reports of William Weston by Ernest Callenbach. This short book, published in 1975, imagines a future world in which the Pacific Northwest and northern California have seceded from the United States. It is written in the form of a journalist’s reported articles and private notes as he visits the relatively new country, Ecotopia; thus, it’s a bit didactic and very dense with information as the narrator reports on transportation, energy, and so forth. This book gave me a lot of complicated feelings to work through. On one hand, its vision of a utopic environmentally sustainable society–again, imagined in 1975!–is not too different than the world environmentalist yearn for today. What if goods were well-made and reusable? What if transportation was free and fast and clean? What if everyone lived in walkable urban areas but there were more trees and birds and natural landscapes? It hurts a little to realize how long that vision has been in the world and yet out of reach. On the other hand, the book is very much of its time in other ways; it’s a little too excited about reconnecting with a “primitive” humanity, with rituals for socially sanctioned violence, and the sexual politics are garbage. The main character changes his mind about a lot of things as he experiences Ecotopia, but he never quite sees women as full human beings–maybe they are more like wild animals?–and there are some pretty egregious subserviant fantasies too late in the book to chalk up to the narrator’s naivete. (In Ecotopia, sexy nurses and sexy massages are part of socialized health care!) It did make me ask some interesting questions about the connection between sustainable living and sexual liberation–there’s something correct in there about capitalism forcing us into relationships we don’t choose, with nature or with each other–but woof, it’s not a book I can wholeheartedly recommend.
An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon. A grim, glowering speculative novel that imagines a generation ship organized into rigid hierarchy mirroring slavery in the United States. The main characters are bothered by their dark skin, lower deck domiciles, and agricultural labor; they are subject to suspicion and insult, random searches, casual violence, and cruel working conditions tending the ship’s crops. The author’s flair for capturing the broad spectrum of brutality reminded me of Octavia Butler, although with less optimism. It’s a dark read, but what kept me turning pages is the rich inner life of the protagonist and her deckmates: they are not animated by optimism but by stubbornness, anger, and fierce intellectual hunger that supplies them with special skills in medicine, languages, engineering, etc. I also appreciated the neurodiversity and gender diversity in this novel: everyone suffers in the rigid ship hierarchy except perhaps the most powerful, but the ship poses different dangers to the lower deck healer who cannot read social cues well than to the upper deck surgeon with gender dysphoria.
ocean plastic by Orchid Tierney. This is a slim chapbook containing one poem. The first few pages each feature one or two short phrases per page: some organic and marine-inspired, some decidedly in organic and difficult to parse. As the poem goes on, it accrues additional phrases, and words that were joined on one page may break apart and recombine on another page. Reading the poem aloud, the repetitions and recombinations evoke the sensation of the widening, spiraling cluster of floating trash in the island–the phrase “garbage gyre” is repeated, as is “sympathy”.
I’m about a third of the way through I Want a Better Catastrophe: Navigating the Climate Crisis with Grief, Hope, and Gallows Humor by Andrew Boyd. It was tough going at first. I do think of myself as a climate realist, but I admit that I generally fall much more on the optimistic and hopeful side of the realism spectrum. Boyd looks at the same data and feels far more hopeless and cynical than I do. But in the last section I read, the author went to a workshop that challenged him to confront his unconscious dependence on hope, not unlike how my own dependence on hope is challenged by pessimism…. and that helped me turn a corner and see the whole thing as a useful philosophical and ethical reflection. I look forward to returning to it next month.
Elsewhere
As someone who enjoyed the spectacle of Poor Things but agree with all the criticisms of its story, I really appreciated this thoughtful review by someone else who enjoyed Poor Things but also thinks it completely falls apart if you think about it for more than two seconds.
Fascinating interview with the author of The End of Drum-Time about the strange historical moment captured in that book, how she researched it, and more. I particularly admired the part where she describes realizing that every draft of the manuscript was dumb or wrong in some new way…. I often find myself paralyzed by the fear of getting things wrong, and will research-rabbithole forever instead of just writing, so what I hope to learn from this is to write anyway and then fix it as you go.
Attempting to recreate the titular death in The Sims did not answer my questions about Anatomy of a Fall, but it did satisfy my pleasure in offbeat video gameplay narrative.
‘Ripley’ Turns Black And White To Color
I’ve preferred nonmonogamy for the better part of two decades now, and yet I still dislike the way we-as-a-culture talk about nonmonogamy–it’s smug, or it’s grating, or it’s just annoying. I tend to avoid reading about it, but I like Brandy Jensen’s writing and I like the way she examines the discourse: The Polycrisis
Really interesting glimpse into early-aughts content milling, not to mention a snapshot of life pre-smartphone: Inside My Days as a Content Bot
And, as always, a bit of AI in the news:
Why I wrote an AI transparency statement for my book, and think other authors should too (The Guardian, April 4, 2024)
The Problem of Sustainable AI: A Critical Assessment of an Emerging Phenomenon (The Weizenbaum Journal of the Digital Society, April 5, 2024)
Minutiae
Spring arrived for real this month. My patio garden is bursting with green: I moved my indoor plants outside, and many of my overwintered plants are starting to leaf out and produce buds. I spent a pleasant few hours after work pruning trees in a schoolyard rain garden (we have to keep the branches trimmed out of reach of small hands). One Saturday I peeled myself out of bed to help tidy up my block, then attended a workshop where we meditated and made marks inspired by water. I went on a geology tour of my favorite park. I went to another wetlands park to practice archery, but ended up wandering their trails; I crossed a low bridge where tree swallows were swooping and diving in the lake, and their wings were beating so fast that they blurred, but their blue-splashed bodies seemed to float as weightlessly as butterflies. I staffed a table for a block party celebrating art and environmental sustainability one weekend, and attended a similarly themed event on a pier the following weekend. I visited the Fairmount Waterworks for the first time and looked at watershed-themed art there, then walked all the way home on a glorious sunny day.
Despite the loveliness of the emerging season, April was a glum and low-energy month for me. I watched a lot of television. I really enjoyed all three seasons of Girls5Eva: snappy, breezy 30 Rock-style humor, but about being a 40-something trying to pursue a creative profession (relatable) and reckoning with the toxic sex culture of the early aughts (relatable). I liked Ripley much more than I thought I would. The sun-splashed 90s adaptation will always have a place in my heart, but the slow pace and lack of color of the series allows the viewer to join Tom Ripley in yearning for the material beauty and easy grace that comes with wealth. And obviously I adored the Fallout series. They really nailed the style and tone–everything looked perfect, the balance of humor and gore was just right, and the onscreen journeying really captured the feeling of sandbox exploration in my opinion. I spent a lot of cool and rainy nights blanketed up on my couch, lost in these worlds, not yet ready to come out of winter hibernation.
Sara Davis 