This is Otherland!
This is Halloween, this is Halloween
Pumpkins scream in the dead of night
This is Halloween, everybody make a scene
Trick or treat 'til the neighbors gonna die of fright
It's our town, everybody scream
In this town of Halloween
*evil grinning* hehehe I guess y’all have a catchy tune now, that’ll keep you humming through our whole spooky October newsletter! Finally, the time has come, the favorite night of ghouls, witches, killer clowns and werewolves is peeking around the corner, and (as you can see from our, often quite horror-heavy newsletters) there are some members of the Otherland crew who like nothing better than scary stories. On the night of October 31st to November 1st, the veil between the worlds is particularly thin, so why go out into the wild autumn night and accidentally get sacrificed in an ancient ritual, when you can make yourself really comfortable at home... equipped with all kinds of limited-edition extra creepy food, a hot bathtub with an orange bath bomb or even in your cozy bed - complete with bat/pumpkin fairy lights. And, of course, a damn good book to really celebrate the evening.
You’ll face so many exciting tips today that your fake vampire teeth will fly out of your mouth in shock. By the way, if you're not in the mood for black-orange or purple-green, just keep scrolling, this newsletter has a lot more to offer, this time with extra meta, thanks to review machine Tom. The rest: Take my Thing T. (Since when is my hand detached from my body??) and watch out, there’s an open grave on our way into the haunted fair:
Let's start with the all-time favorite, “Nightmare Before Christmas”. Not only do we offer the Tim Burton-illustrated edition, but we have also a nice tarot deck with all the characters. So if you do want to challenge this special night, please do it in style. If you're already sufficiently stocked up, did you know that an official sequel was released in 2022? "Long Live the Pumpkin Queen", written by Shea Shaw, takes us back to Halloween Town and puts Sally at the center of the story. Somewhat old school are the more sinister works of the famous Ray Bradbury, who was apparently also particularly fond of Halloween, as it is central to "The Halloween Tree", "Something wicked this way comes" and "The October Country". Other classic Halloween books include Washington Irwin's "Sleepy Hollow" from 1820, "Scary Stories to tell in the Dark" by Alvin Schwartz (including disturbing drawings, which will haunt you forever) and Agatha Christie's "Halloween Party". If you want more culture, I recommend the poetry collection "Poems bewitched and haunted" by John Hollander, which spans three thousand years of literary history from Homer and Poe to Baudelaire and Emily Dickinson. Another colorful anthology is "This is Halloween" by James A. Moore, appropriately with an evil grinning pumpkin on the cover. But there are also a few other books in which the festival is not the main character, but provides a spooky setting: "Kill Creek" by Scott Thomas and "Pine" by Francine Toon are both set on this night, but are also otherwise great autumn reads that will make your skin crawl on any other day as well.
By the way, if you're one of the lucky ones who dresses up and goes to a party: a book fits in every handbag and sweetens your way through the underground labyrinth of the subways......
Have a nice holiday, dance around the fire or cozy evening,
Werewolf-Esther and the Zombies, Astronauts and Wizards of the Otherland.
Science Fiction
The Mark
Faber & Faber: €23
The Icelandic Psychological Society has developed a test. It is called a sensitivity assessment: a simple method of working out a person's empathy levels and identifying the potential for antisocial behaviour. Now the people of Iceland will vote on whether to make the test mandatory for every citizen.
Supporters say it will make the country safer; opponents call it a violation. With only a few days to go before the referendum, four people from across society find themselves drawn into the debate. Is the test really going to improve everyone's lives, or is it a dystopian timebomb?
Anyone familiar with the murky history of IQ tests (newsflash - they are unscientific and racist) will know how this plays out, and Fríða's book presents a possible near-future where data transparency trumps individual privacy. Maybe we are already there. As someone who has sat through several parent-teacher meetings on both sides of the table, I found the scene where Vetur's school is strongarmed by the parent reps into releasing the results on all students disturbingly believable. Been there. This tale offers no easy answers on the debate between social security and personal privacy, but it sure makes you think about it. The four main characters - Eyja, Ólafur, Tristan and Vetur - cover the poles of class, wealth, vocation, and opinion, and seeing them all trying to work out the intricacies of this political, philosophical question is fascinating. Work-swamped teachers, career politicians, out-of-work drugrunners, and heart-broken singles, the vote hits every memeber of society in a different way. I cannot think of a sci-fi novel from the last couple of years that has had such a great core idea while being so, so close to our own time. This could happen tomorrow. In any modern European country. And the more people who have thought about the consequences before it comes to a referendum the better. (Oh, and for UK readers there are some low punches on the cleverness of having a 50% pass target for a referendum that will fundamentally change the way a country is run...)
Fríða Ísberg's The Mark (Merking) won several awards on its 2021 publication and now appears translated into English by Larissa Kyzer. (Kyzer also runs "Jill!", a women+ in translation reading series.) The content might sound bleak from the description above, but I really, really recommend getting your teeth into this one. I can't stress how much this book ticked all my boxes. Firstly, because it tackles a genuinely interesting problem through a genuinely interesting cast of characters. Secondly, because when was the last time you read any Icelandic science fiction? Thirdly, because among its many accolades, The Mark won Fríða "The Optimist Award", which is a prize given out annually by the president of Iceland since 1981. Just the fact that such an award exists gives me the warm satisfaction of a cup of tea and a biscuit.
[Tom]
Ness
Penguin Books Ltd: €15
Inside the ruinous Green Chapel, on a windswept island devoid of civilization, a sinister figure called The Armourer gathers his dark scientist followers to perform a terrible ceremony. They think themselves unstoppable, but something is coming for them.
Five otherworldly forms speed toward the island over wind and wave, converging to become Ness, the unbridled fury of water and air and root and moss and detritus and deep time. Ness knows no mercy, has hagstones for eyes, and speaks only in birds.
In Ness, Robert Macfarlane and Stanley Donwood have put together a poem, play, and mystery novel that asks what it would take for us to incur the wrath of the Earth, and what retribution would look like. It is a heady mix of medievalism and eco-criticism, gothic and weird. The slip of a book is beautifully illustrated throughout by Donwood's black and white artwork, while Macfarlane plies his signiture mix of a biologist's knowledge and a poet's ear.
This was a great customer recommendation and one of the most striking books I have read this year. Short. Powerful. Timely. I guarantee Ness will hang around in the back of your mind long after you have finished it.
[Tom]
Fantasy
How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying
Little, Brown Book Group: €15
( Audiobook from libro.fm )
Davi wakes in a rancid pool atop a hill. Again. Life #238. This time she had to be tortured for two weeks before she could slit her wrist with the fang of a snake-woman and be reborn once again. She has tried everything. 237 times she has joined the Guild under the patient hand of wizard Tserigern, worked her way through the ranks of fighters, formed a fellowship, and led the armies of the free people on the final assault of the Dark Lord’s fortress.
Sometimes she takes an arrow in the throat in the first five minutes. Sometimes she is slowly roasted, drowned, poisoned, or eaten. But she always loses.
Not this time. Davi is sick and tired of being the loser. If the Dark Lord always ends up winning, then maybe the answer is to use the enemy’s own tactics. As the old saying goes: if you can’t beat ‘em…
Welcome to book one of the Dark Lord Davi series, where Django Wexler picks apart the stereotypes of traditional fantasy culture with irreverent malice. Here you’ll find lots of in-jokes at the expense of the classics. Anyone who slogged their teenage years through Morrowind, Oblivion, or Skyrim will find plenty to smirk at, and in general those familiar with the sub-culture of the 90s and 00s will be on solid ground here. Essentially it is like your uncle has decided to write a book with a cool, young, female protagonist, and for research they have rewatched The Matrix, all of Peter Jackson’s films, and every male-gaze computer game under the sun. So you have Davi, sexy pixie-cut-rocking TrinityLaraCroftBlackWidowTauriel mash-up who is a totally rad twenty-something-year-old with the personality of a thirty-something-year-old male IT specialist. I had weird flashbacks to reading Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore where the eclectic background knowledge of the protagonist in no way matches the fact that he is supposedly a 15-year-old boy (albeit a bookish one). Oh, and did I mention your uncle thinks the way to make a character cool is to drop the f-word eight times a page? Or to constantly mention the fact that she is naked, horny, and murderous? Like a fantasy rewrite of Fleabag but for men. (It's what everyone wanted, right?)
Still, the book is (unintentionally?) an interesting study of the fantasy video game industry’s right-wing bias. There is something quite disturbing about a set up where after 237 respawns the only response the character can think of is fighting on the other side. Nnedi Okorafor has an interview where she bemoans the habit of male Western writers imagining a character coming face to face with an Other lifeform and the only option being drawing a sword/laser pistol/fireball. Hot tip: there are other options. Ask Becky Chambers.
If you have any relatives aged 15 to 17 whose only cultural input at the moment is Elden Ring and who have fewer books than thumbs, this might just encourage them to put down the controller and pick up a paperback. It is fun, fast, foul-mouthed and frivolous. On the other hand, if you really want cool, opinionated female protagonists go read Octavia Butler, or Terry Pratchett, or Leigh Bardugo, or M. R. Carey, or Naomi Novik, or Shannon Chakraborty, or Margeret Atwood, or Suzanne Collins, or Tomi Adeyemi, or N. K. Jemisin, or David Wong, or…
[Tom]
The Seaborn Cycle #1
Seaborn
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC: €23
Bela is a child of the Seaborn, one of seven sea-bound clans whose territory stretches the length of the Fair Isles. As daughter of the highest authority in the lands and a childhood heroine to boot she is a respected figure, but when events promote her to leader of a small desperate band of sailors she finds living up to her name a challenge.
Shae is second in command to the feared Bone Pirate, the scourge of the seas and arch enemy to the Seaborn. That is until the airships come, raining fiery death on sailor and pirate alike. Shae and Bela find themselves thrown together in an impossible war, and the technologically-advanced Windborn may be the least of their troubles.
Michael Livingston's new series takes its core idea - a society of matriarchal seafarers competing for a mysterious element called Furywood - from a presentation by N. K. Jemisin on how to craft imaginary worlds. He developed the idea through his own university creative-writing courses to make part one of the Seaborn cycle. Under Livingstone's watchful eye, Jemisin's concept becomes a fun exercise in world-building. (Livingstone's day job is professor of military history, and his past books have been fantasy leaning toward historical fiction as well as several award-winning non-fiction books.)
Imagine the clans from Moana but with the average character lifespan of the Game of Thrones cast. Much like GoT, Seaborn also uses a good deal of jumping from one character's perspective to another, leaving you in the dark on motives, subplots, conspiracies, and secret happenings. (In fact, it basically is maritime GoT minus the sex and swearing.) I found the extensive roster of characters tricky - try keeping track of Mandisa, Mabaya, Tukaya, Julara, Hamamwa, Zakiya, Alira, Renia, and Nala when most of them have the same personality - but the core figures grow on you, and I happily sailed through and by the end I felt intrigued as to what part two will hold for the Fair Isles.
[Tom]
Horror
North American Lake Monsters
Small Beer Press: €17
Happy Halloween, Otherlanders. Since last summer, I have been manically working my way through Sadie Hartmann’s 101 Horror Books to Read Before You’re Murdered. (If you are a regular in this section and don’t have it by your bed you are missing out.)
This is one of her suggestions: a Shirley Jackson Award-winning debut collection of short stories from Nathan Ballingrud. North American Lake Monsters gives us nine masterfully-crafted tales from contemporary American life, complete with a healthy helping of eco-werewolves, skin-collecting aliens, Christian vampires, elderly cannibals, fallen angels and war-maddened medics. This is a world of single parents and grieving widowers, unemployed labourers and underage fascists, ex-cons and those soon to be, the left behind, the lonely, and the longing. Hurricane-wrecked oil rigs, entire cities that haunt people, unearthly beings washed up on the shore – Ballingrud’s US is a patchwork of everyday and otherday woes.
There are side comments in these stories with more creeping depth to them than many horror novels muster over 300 pages. These are stories that throw last-minute twists at you like they are the easiest thing in world. Thematically, the book reminded me of Ted Chiang’s sci-fi short stories: like Chiang, Ballingrud takes long-worn-out tropes of the genre and then injects them with so much new vitality. Just when you thought you couldn't read an original zombie story... It really is an impressive quality for a first collection, and it has everyone including Datlow, Link, and Doctorow on side.
I don’t want to give too much away about the tales themselves, but I lapped up the brutal, heart-aching layers of modern life’s complexity in “Wild Acre”, a tale about a foreman’s life unravelling after he witnesses something horrific on his building site late one night. “The Crevasse” makes "Who Goes There?" (that’s The Thing, for any Kurt Russell fans out there) and At the Mountains of Madness look like pleasant polar getaways. And as for the deliciously dark “Sunbleached”, it has made a beeline to the top of my Best Vampire Stories list. Not a bad grape in the bunch.
[Tom]
Cranberry Cove
Bad Hand Books: €18
The haunted hotel Cranberry Cove is surrounded by a mystery: Eerie occurrences have been taking place here, weird noises and assaults on men for decades... But these are about to be unveiled by investigators Emberly and Conner who were tasked by a criminal boss who wants to find out who attacked his son in the ancient hotel.
Hailey Piper's writing is as beautiful and unique as ever. Even though Cranberry Cove has the overall air and main characters straight from the X-Files, compelling villains in the shape of entities in a shabby and evil hotel which makes cracking, groaning, knocking sounds and a presence that assaults only men should be everything I ever wanted, this read was not an amazing, but rather a good enough read for me.
I loved the humor, the dynamic between its protagonists, but I'm generally not interested in magic, although I see its literary attraction, the background story didn't really grab me. Still very worthwhile read.
[Inci]
The Boatman's Daughter
Farrar, Straus & Giroux Inc: €18
Southern Gothic: Shimmering heat. Drugs, nasty priests and swamp dwellers. The scenes sometimes so viciously violent, reminiscent of the Preacher comics (only without the humor). Complicated characters with guilt and secrets
Miranda lost her parents when she was little and grew up into a hard, strong woman boating around the Bayou and keeping secrets. But something sinister is lurking at the end of a bargain and she’s getting sucked into a web of violence to save the only thing special to her. On my hunts for Southern Gothic, I discovered similar stories many times before, but Davidson has his own ace up his sleeve….
Slavic folklore! Yeah, the author reaches deep into his bag of tricks and presents us with a mismatched pair of violently American background and Slavic gods and witches lurking in the mangrove thicket. He interweaves all of this with a way of describing settings and characters that is often poetic, but sometimes over the top and melodramatic. Yes, it's an incredibly lush, atmospheric narrative nightmare that beautifully evokes the dank horror of malevolent people and ancient religion. And if you look more closely, it's noticeable that Davidson's theme isn't actually hate that he's working through...but love and family.
However, I found it a shame that the book lost some of its impact along the way. The pacing should have been better, especially in the violent scenes, as I sometimes got confused by the sheer desire of Davidson to weave flowery sentences, which made it very hard to actually follow the story. In addition, there were a few logical errors and pointless decisions made by the main characters in the story that really took me out of the flow of reading and that a good editor could probably have ironed out. But no matter, if you love poetic language and dank atmospheres, you should grab this book and let yourself be carried away into the maw of the bayou, it's worth it and definitely an original read.
[Esther]
American Narcissus
Dead Sky Publishing: €25
Dark, darker, American Narcissus...
Chandler Morrison surprises with an unusually grim novel about the vapid, vile, self-serving, chain
smoking rich people of Los Angeles.
Against the backdrop of the wildfires that consume the city, we follow four people who are both part of this empty, shallow, cruel social system but also struggle to fit in: Arden Coover, rich junkie and proud owner of a useless philosophy degree from Berkeley; his sister Tess who tries to figure out if her affair with a narcissistic writer (“the” Writer , mind you) is worth it; Ryland Richter, an insurance executive, addicted to coke, to work, and the new employee in his company who turns out to be unhinged and dangerous. And finally sweet Baxter Kent, surfer boy addicted to porn and afraid of real women, who meets an unlikely person to soothe his loneliness.
Every character is a caricature in American Narcissus, which is nothing new for a Morrison book, it’s his normal to plunge into the shallows of empty eyes behind mirrored sunglasses to show us there’s nothing there. His characters usually binge into some kind of excessive perversity to numb themselves against the absurdity of the world they live in. That “excessive” part is what draws me to Morrison’s books, he can show how ridiculous this world is by making his narrative ridiculously over the top, making it funny, making it comedy. There’s not much funny in American Narcissus, the only thing excessive is the mind- bogglingly lavish amount of drugs they all do. The only person who reminds of former Morrison books such as Dead Inside in which this excessiveness takes control, is Baxter, who falls for his father’s sex-AI, Mechahooker. She can offer him everything the world around him can’t – she has no imperfections that distract him, in a confusing world, she is clear and precise in the way she expresses herself (well, because all she can talk is dirty sex talk). The crassness of her talking is hilarious when placed in random situations, like when Baxter tries to take her to a romantic beach walk among people or he tries to genuinely talk about his feelings and she answers with a suggestion of him doing things to her.
All four characters are dealing with an obsession they think will save them in a way or another, but to the reader who can see the bigger picture it is clear they are all basically doomed and can’t be saved; Baxter and his sex doll, Arden and his drug use, Tess and her idealized feelings for the author and Ryland and his new romance. When finally some sincerity shimmers through and they are confronted with the cruelty of the world they have been enjoying, it is too late, they have already been ruined, and the flames have taken over Los Angeles. A couple of scenes in this book are dedicated to the poorer, the “uglier” side of LA, showcasing an understanding on the author’s part that we always suspected is there, but was never spoken out loud. Yes, the mere existence of his vain, narcissistic, vapid characters is an affront, but now we are also shown the cost at which this system rolls – a documentary-maker filming the homeless in LA, a woman refusing to succumb to the beauty industry, a young girl not being able to go to college because she needs to take care of her sick mother, an ex-girlfriend who got infected with HIV and now lives in a trailer, one of the characters waking up in bed with a ten year old girl after a wild night out... These characters are disgusting at the cost of these people and deep down they know it – Arden’s selective memory and his forgetting things he wants to forget, things that have nothing to do with the lifestyle of the rich and famous is a telling symptom of their repulsiveness. Of course, there are the drugs who help. A careful dissection of the society he lives in, Morrison shows an unusually serious and dark side of himself, maybe a side he was hiding behind freakish exaggerations that prompt a laugh in his previous books, but were none the less there all along. I think I will chew on this book for some time.
[Inci]
The Underhistory
Profile Books: €21.5
Pera Sinclair has spent most of her life reconstructing her family
house, which was demolished by a plane crash when she was a child.
Everyone died except her. Now in her sixties, she offers so-called
haunted-house tours for interested people to earn her bread.
And it's going pretty well until one night, during the final tour of the season, when a group of escaped convicts discover the secluded house and decide to rob Pera. But she is not the old frail woman they think she is.
Each chapter is divided into different slices of Pera's life (the plane crash, her murdered sister, her marriage, etc.), alternating with the present, which is 1993 in the book. While we move from room to room (and the rooms are interesting in this house as they all have their own names and tragic stories), Pera adds a little supernatural haunting into the stories, and readily shares them with her visitors.
A wonderful concept which is unfortunately a little wasted on long, draggy, tragic back stories, during which even Pera herself dozes off. For the umpteenth time this year a book marketed as horror falls victim to the categorization, as it would have been ideal for readers of contemporary/regular novels, but falls short in suspense and dread for horror. Admittedly, the story picks up some pace when the focus shifts to the convicts in the last chapter, but even that, unfortunately, didn't do it for me personally. Still recommendable for readers who enjoy a quieter book and haunted house tours by elderly women who spin a yarn or two.
[Inci]
Non-Fiction
J.R.R. Tolkien: A Very Short Introduction
Oxford University Press: €13.5
One more entry in the Oxford “Very Short Introductions” series for fantasy fans. This autumn sees J. R. R. Tolkien join the ranks of the world’s most interesting academic topics. Tolkien being up with the greats is obvious for many of us, but his fame was questioned since the beginning – even by himself
Tolkien didn’t even try to publish The Hobbit. It accidentally fell into the hands of a former student who worked for George Allen and Unwin. Forty years on and the word “hobbit” was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in the book’s honour. Tolkien’s publishers were similarly sceptical: they didn’t think The Lord of the Rings would break even. One of its early reviewers famously said no one would finish reading it, let alone re-reading it. They were all wrong. Its success was a public-led, word-of-mouth upheaval of the literary world. Flash forward to the year 2000 and Tolkien was voted “author of the century”.
Matthew Townend joins a long line of academics – from Tom Shippey to Dimitra Fimi – in celebrating the “life-changing writer” of two of the twentieth-century’s most influential books: The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954-55). Tolkien, Townend argues, is responsible for the re-enchantment of the modern world, as well as for monumental effects on our modern culture, and not just in the field of fantasy literature. For me, The Hobbit was the book that made me fall in love with reading – often secretly, after bedtime, with a torch. And I know I am not the only one. The late Christopher Lee famously reread The Lord of the Rings every single year. But even if you are a first-time reader (or an eleventy-first), Townend does a great job of drawing you into the depth of Tolkien’s creations: from a short biography and bibliography, to the writer’s role as a storyteller; from his interest in languages and the world of Faërie, to his extensive and creative use of sources, whether Old English, Norse, Finnish, or contemporary adventure novels and classic folk tale collections.
The beauty of the book is how it starts simple in order to layer more and more complex analysis on top, taking the reader by the hand and leading you off down the road. If nothing else, it made me want to go and revisit Bilbo and Gandalf and Gollum and the great untrodden tracts of Middle-earth.
[Tom]
Loki Variations
404 Ink: €11,50
Loki is one of the most intriguing figures of Norse Mythology and yet we know surprisingly little about what the first people to come across the god actually thought of him. There is no cult of Loki (well, prior to Tom Hiddleston’s fanbase) and the fragmented material we have on the figure is told from a Christian perspective. Academics have suggested reading Loki as a flame, the force of chaos, a daddy long-legs, or Lucifer himself.
Johnson’s reading collects all variant Lokis, from Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda through Marvel’s comic books to Diane Wynne Jones’ Eight Days of Luke and Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. Along the way we will take in the show Supernatural, Dungeons and Dragons, Ragnarok, and, disturbingly, the 2005 cinematic crime Son of the Mask. In this mess of Loki readings, Johnson singles out one shining similarity: variation. Loki, it seems, is many. Loki is the god of knots (and daddy-longlegs), the god of mischief, of outcasts, stories, cunning, emotion, and, and, and… If nothing else, Loki becomes a springboard for thinking about power, belonging, discrimination, loyalty, morality, and subjugation. Is there more to say? Sure, I think there are gaps in the evidence (Snorri is all well and good but where is the Poetic Edda? Where are the many archaeologists and literary scholars who have written on Loki?) but I grant there is only so much you can get into an eighty-page essay. Enthused. Emotive. And full of glorious purpose.
P.S. Proposterously nerdy Old Norse fact: If you ever meet Loki, their name is pronounced "loh-keh", not "low-key". So now you've no excuse.
[Tom]
Embracing Alienation
Watkins Media Limited: €20
Alienation, isolation, estrangement, othering. We’re all agreed it is a bad thing, right? Not according to Todd McGowan. His new book Embracing Alienation: Why We Shouldn’t Try to Find Ourselves argues that the concept of alienation is misunderstood, and that we would all be better off if we embraced our personal weirdness. As the plot of E.T. shows, a little alien could be a good thing. (Sorry.)
I think this book has a lot of good ideas at its core, and from the blurb you expect it to do something interesting with these ideas. I like the idea that alienation is universally presented as a negative process, where in fact it might not be. I like the idea that our fear of alienation comes from us aiming for impossible, Edenic ideals. I like the idea that realising the futility of this goal could be a form of liberation, enabling us to enjoy other things. There is a little philosophical reading required, so you may want to brush up on your Hegel, Kant, and Marx, but Todd is an entertaining guide. The chosen primary sources (Hamlet et al) are old ground in terms of philosophical theory (covered by Descartes and Fisher and Freud among many others). McGowan mixes abstract thoughts and everyday life. With the register, too, he can’t stand still. There were a lot of modern non-fiction paragraphs where he stacks up popular culture references and loosely connected ideas before slamming you in face with two sentences of impenetrable Academese at the end.
The text also does not really know what it wants, swinging between abstract thought and socio-political realities. What’s more, I don’t think it ever really steps back and grapples with any of these realities. Alienation is more often than not something done to us, less about the choice of the individual than the group. It is all well and good to say that alienation is actually our identity and that we should embrace it, but tell that to the one foreign kid getting bullied in a school class full of racist natives. Tell it to the lower-class student struggling to understand university seminars full of private-schooled peers. Or to the job applicant rejected on account of their sex, gender, sexuality, or beliefs. Todd offers no real explanation of how alienation could be practically redirected for such cases.
All this I could sort of forgive if the content was good, but I felt a cheated by the end of the book, like I was promised one thing and given another. I spent the summary wishing he had written the book he was describing there, not the one I just read. Don't get me wrong, it's still worth an explore. I think if you are interested in the history of philosophy, and particularly the works of Hegel or Descartes, this will interest you. And if you are looking for inspiration, I do think there is a good book out there waiting to be written about these ideas.
[Tom]
Everyday Utopia
Random House UK: €14.5
Dystopian worlds are all the rage in the science fiction canon. 1984, Fahrenheit 451, The Handmaid’s Tale, Parable of the Sower… tell an author to write a screwed-up society and they will run with it. Utopias, on the other hand, not so much.
Even where authors do imagine future alternatives, they tend to be solely about the political sphere rather than the private. The few that touch on our private lives have had it rough. Looking around my room I can only see Moore’s Utopia (he was executed for his utopian views) and Morris’s News from Nowhere (mercilessly satirised in Butler’s Erewhon). Yet there are those who have tried to imagine alternatives – like Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia, which features a sexually-liberated anarchist community.Kristen Ghodsee argues that utopias are not there to scare us. They are neither fanciful nor dangerous (unless you are the current top 1%). Her book Everyday Utopia looks into examples of real-life communities that have tried and do try to change the way we live – taking down the three big P’s of conservative narrative: Patriarchy, and its sub-categories Patrilineality and Patrilocality. And there are good reasons to change how we live. In 2020 LA’s Homeless Services Authority reported more than 66,000 people living on the streets. That same year Mr Bezos bought a 13,600 square foot mansion there for $165 million. Governments all want women to get married and have kids, but public-funded kindergartens was a concept too radical even for the Communist Manifesto. We all want our kids to attend the best universities, yet in 2021 US student debt surpassed $1.7 trillion. Our current way of living sucks.
What a stunning piece of research. I can only skim the surface here, but there is so much to Ghodsee’s wonderful study. She covers everything, from how we design housing or organize communal childcare, to how we run our schools, get rid of our possessions, and move past the nuclear family. (Honestly, you have to read this just to find out why Star Trek was Martin Luther King Jr.’s favourite TV show.) The last chapter, on the repressive ideologies ingrained in our popular readings of 1984 and Brave New World, totally flipped my view of these two sci-fi classics. All in all a well-researched and passionately-delivered feminist argument for changing the way we live – for the better.
If all this sounds like it would get you fired up, you should also check out Ghodsee’s 2018 book Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence, where she demonstrates that historical experiments in socialist societal models improved the material conditions of women’s lives more than their capitalist counterparts.
[Tom]
No comments:
Post a Comment