What I’ll Be Reading, and other updates

18 July 202517 July 2025 Francis BassLeave a comment

This post is mostly to introduce a reading list that I’m embarking on, but also to provide updates on a couple things.

First, DC 33 is no longer on strike. At the time I’m writing this, members are voting at the union hall on whether or not to ratify the tentative agreement that DC 33 and the city have reached. It will most likely be ratified. I’m very optimistic about the future of DC 33. “If workers end up divided and disorganised after the struggle, this is a defeat, even if something has been gained. If workers come out of the struggle more united and organised, this is a victory, even if some demands remain unmet.” (From We Want Everything by Nanni Balestrini, trans. Matt Holden)

Another update on something I previously announced here: my story “I Remember a One-Sided Die” is now available to read online, free! It was previously only available to subscribers or people who bought the issue, but now anyone can read it. You can also read the interview which Marissa Van Uden conducted with me about the story.

Now, to the main point of the post!

What I’ll Be Reading

I am setting out on a little reading list that I’ve put together. It’s a very specific niche, but a surprisingly populous one: science fiction books by women in which the main character travels between two or more realms governed by contrasting economic and political regimes. These are not books where the two realms are at war (not necessarily, at least), or where one regime must supplant the other. The protagonists are not leaders or warriors, they are travelers, diplomats, emissaries. Some of the books feature anarchism, some communism. I expect to have more thoughts on why this specific treatment of this specific subject has occurred more than once, and why it has always been women writing this*, as I work through the list.

*I didn’t exclude books by male writers from this list, I just didn’t have any! Of books that I’ve read, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy comes closest to qualifying, though those books take place almost entirely within the political realm of Mars, and one regime is supplanted by another there.

These are the books, in the order I plan to read them:

Daughter of Earth by Agnes Smedley (1929)
Battle Hymn of China by Agnes Smedley (1943)
The Dispossessed by Ursula K Le Guin (1974)
Floating Worlds by Cecelia Holland (1976)
China Mountain Zhang by Maureen McHugh (1992)
Vagabonds by Hao Jingfang, trans. Ken Liu (2016)

The first book is actually not science fiction, it’s an autobiographical novel about a working poor woman growing up, and growing into political consciousness, at the start of the 20^th century. And although she moves around a lot, she is always in early 1900s America, a uniformly dystopian capitalist setting. So why is it on this list? Well, the author herself was much like one of the main characters of these novels—shortly after finishing Daughter of Earth, Agnes Smedley moved to China, where she spent the next decade reporting on the nascent Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese Civil War. Honestly, the book is on this list because I wanted to read the book, and I incorrectly thought it would cover some of her time in China.

And now it’s been so long since I first drafted this post, I’ve actually finished Daughter of Earth! I really enjoyed it, but it has quite an abrupt ending, so I’ve decided to just go ahead and read Battle Hymn of China, which as I understand it is a mix of autobiography and reportage covering most of Smedley’s time in China.

It would be cool if I posted a review for each of these books as I finished them, wouldn’t it? Yeah. Maybe I will. Probably not. But I will definitely periodically update the “Reading” section on my homepage as I move from one book to another.

If you have read any of these books, or want to suggest any additions that fit my narrow parameters, or if you want to read along (??), please write to me or comment below!

Review: Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler

29 July 20232 August 2023 Francis Bass15 Comments

EDIT: This post previously misattributed quotes to the Camden mayor, which were in fact made by the Director of the Camden County Board of Commissioners.

Negative review time! It’s time for a negative review!

I never write negative reviews—I mean fully negative, not just a mixed bag—because I rarely finish books that I really dislike. And then if I do, I don’t want to waste even more energy writing about it. But Parable of the Sower is beloved and lauded, and Octavia Butler is basically canonized by the current crop of SFF writers, so I think a full review is worth my while and yours. Maybe it will shed some light on common failings in dystopian lit, maybe it will make other people who disliked this book feel less insane, maybe it will just be fun!

There will definitely be some spoilers, if you can spoil something that is already rotten.

Introduction

Parable of the Sower is narrated by Lauren Olamina, a young girl living in Orange County, in the year 2024. The United States is collapsing into poverty and lawlessness, and is backsliding into oligarchy, all apparently driven by global warming. Things start bad and get a lot worse. Strike that: things start bad for Lauren’s last-gasp-of-the-middle-class enclave, and get a lot worse. For the poor, the misery is pretty abject from the very beginning.

The book has two major parts, about equal in length. In the first half, when things are only bad, Lauren is preparing for the worst, and trying to get her community to do so as well. This preparation mainly entails making bug out bags and reading books about foraging, first aid, etc. Also she wants to start a religion, “Earthseed,” which recognizes change as the only God, and as a fundamental force which people must accept and work through. She develops this religion, writing its holy verses, in secret.

In the second half, her community has been obliterated, and she travels north with a few survivors, hoping to find somewhere they can resettle. They join a mass migration north, and occasionally add new members to their group. Lauren starts to share Earthseed with them. They are attacked multiple times.

Also Lauren has a psychosomatic hyper-empathy condition triggered by the apparent physical sensations of others. It’s not plot-relevant or theme-relevant, and it’s barely character development-relevant, so I will not mention it again.

That is the basic story-shape of the book. There is a sequel, I haven’t read it.

What’s really strange is that this book is not good any way you turn it. With books I dislike, I can usually see the element that people enjoy in them. I cannot see it here. It fails, or is at most subpar, on all counts.

Let’s start with the loftiest of traditions which this book attempts to engage, which is societal critique. This is generally how this book is framed when people describe or recommend it—a cautionary tale of where we’re heading, or (jerk off motion) a prescient vision of where we are!! Oooo!! Octavia Butler warned us!!! (jerk off motion)

Review: The Gold Coast by Kim Stanley Robinson

25 September 202027 September 2020 Francis Bass1 Comment

The Gold Coast is the second book in the Three Californias Triptych, written by Kim Stanley Robinson. The triptych portrays three visions of a future Orange County: the first, The Wild Shore, post-apocalyptic; the second, The Gold Coast, dystopian; and the third, Pacific Edge, utopian. I’m simplifying, but that’s the basic idea. For the most part, characters don’t carry over from one book to the next—you could pick this book up by itself no problem. I’ll talk more about the effect of reading it together with the others later, but suffice it to say it makes an excellent stand-alone novel.

The two major plotlines of the book follow Jim McPherson and his father Dennis McPherson. Dennis is an engineer working for Laguna Space Research, a defense contractor. It’s 2027 but the Cold War never ended. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has set their clock “one second to midnight man, set there for twenty years.” Jim is a part-time English teacher at a junior college, making ends meet by doing some clerical work at a real estate office too. He’s enchanted by the history of Orange County, the orange groves long ago torn out to make room for condos and freeways, which have so devoured the landscape recently that he and his friends refer to the county as “autopia,” and it’s residential areas as “condomundo.” He’s dissatisfied with the state of the world and the state of his own life, but doesn’t know what to do about either. So the two major plot-lines are 1. Dennis McPherson’s efforts to land a contract for a new missile defense system, and the hell of bureaucracy and inter-departmental rivalries which get in his way; and 2. Jim McPherson’s growing involvement in efforts to sabotage defense contractors in Orange County. These two plotlines will of course have to converge at some point.

That said, this isn’t a book driven by plotlines, and the two I just described aren’t exactly the focus. Where other novels direct their energy forward in chains of causal events, Gold Coast directs its energy outwards. More than anything characters drive the novel, representing a broad section of the young people of Orange County. Steadily, steadily, the world reveals itself through their different viewpoints, through the maneuvers of their daily lives. Jim is a prototypical lost young man, but the pitfalls of this trope (e.g. telling a story ostensibly about social issues by centering a middle class straight cis white man, most protected from the consequences of those issues) are avoided by the fact that the book takes on so many different viewpoints. Each chapter follows a specific character, and Jim’s chapters are just one tributary of the novel’s expansive river basin. The book almost feels like a sitcom at times, especially since so many of the viewpoint characters are part of the same friend group. So Jim’s aimlessness isn’t valorized or held up as some universal experience, it’s just one life cast among the lives of drug dealers, ambulance drivers, surfers, revolutionaries, art teachers. The one glaring failure is the lack of women. Sure, they’re around, but only one of them is given her own chapters. Oddly enough, it’s Jim’s mother. So while Robinson is admirable for including chapters following her life, which is indeed an expansive and realized life entirely separate from her son or her husband, he’s worth criticizing for otherwise showing Orange County entirely through male inhabitants.