I don’t read a lot of fantasy. Sure, I read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. That’s about 95% of it right there, the remainder being short stories or books I’m not recalling at the moment. I’ve seen more fantasy movies–they’re quicker to consume–but generally while I am aware of most of the cliches, stereotypes, tropes and such of fantasy, I am not well-read on the genre.
This is my way of saying my opinion of A Darker Shade of Magic may come across as naive, or uninformed or kind of dumb. Because when it comes to fantasy I am kind of dumb.
Still, I’ll start by saying my strongest criticism of the book was its occasional lapse into twee language, passages where the author’s voice intrudes by phrasing something in a way that draws attention to the narrator. This can work if the entire novel is presented as a story being told by an unseen narrator (Mr. Norell and Jonathan Strange comes to mind in this regard–and hey, that’s another fantasy novel I read) but here it pops up only a few times, so it draws unnecessary attention. This is a very minor criticism, though.
Another mild criticism is how it feels like some of the character development happens very slowly, perhaps because this is the first book of a series, so by the end of the book it only feels like some parts of the story are getting started. The character of Lila is the best example of this, a cutpurse with grand plans for adventure and little care for anyone else who only just starts to show a more human side by the end of the story.
The story itself presents a plot with far-reaching implications–the fates of three parallel versions of Victorian-era London are at stake–but feels intimate because it focuses on a small number of characters, primarily the two Antari (powerful wielders of magic), the good-but-somewhat-naughty Kell of Red London, and Holland, the bad and beholden servant to the throne of the amoral White London, along with the aforementioned Lila Bard and assorted kings, queens and a royal brother.
The world building is likely to draw in a lot of readers, as Schwab does a fine job of laying out the different versions of London and how they and the magic within each, operates. Into this comes Kell, whose habit of trading trinkets from the different Londons, using blood magic that allow him as an Antari, to slip between the worlds while few if any others can, ends up with him coming into possession of something Very Bad from Black London. Black London, as you might guess, is also Very Bad and is sealed off from the other Londons to prevent its corrupt magic from spreading and possibly destroying the other three versions of the city.
There is a lot of vicious magic, swinging of swords and the occasional report of gunfire at play as things speed toward an increasingly bloody conclusion. While the story does achieve a certain level of closure, it’s still obvious by the end that there is more to come.
Why do I keep swearing off series and then find myself reading them? I’m not yet sure if I will read the follow-up to A Darker Shade of Magic, but I’m reasonably certain that anyone not entirely tired of stories set in Victorian London will find the story here a brisk and entertaining read. While there are few surprises, there are many small pleasures to be had, whether it be the exchanges between characters who won’t dare admit they like each other, to the showy displays of mages fighting, using wits and, sometimes, anything they can get their hands on.
This is one of my “what the heck, it’s on sale” impulse purchases.
Shattered Glass could also go by the alternate title Biting Lips because the characters bite their lips enough for it to be an obsession (of the characters and/or author). The main character, 26 year old police detective Austin Glass, frequently points out these biting lips, particularly those of a 20 year old hustler, the red-headed Peter, a volatile young man who has a shady past, a shady present and perhaps a shady future (in the ground) if he’s not careful.
Part police procedural and part coming out story, Shattered Glass begins with the Glass, a rich trust fund baby, preparing for his upcoming wedding. The story is narrated by him and he quickly demonstrates then confirms and re-confirms that he is a cheating, self-serving, smart-mouthed jerk. He also has daddy issues. And mommy issues. And then gay issues as he thinks back to all the signs that he was repressing who he really was when growing up. The planned wedding goes up in smoke. He begins a vision quest. Well, he gets drunk.
It comes to a head (and lips start getting bitten) when he and his grizzled veteran partner (yes, who woulda thunk it?) investigate a scheme that leads to a murder, arson and other fun stiff, all centered around the inscrutable yet angry yet distant yet tender but always smouldering hot Peter. Within a week Glass has fallen hard for the guy, despite constantly referring to him–usually to his face–as a whore. That could be the other alternate title for the story: Whore. You see the word a lot. Maybe Whores Biting Lips would be the best alternate title, although it perhaps suggests a different type of story than police procedural.
The two constantly fight, occasionally fool around a bit (the sex scenes are brief and would probably get an R rating if translated to screen, depending on how creative the camera angles were) then go back to fighting as the investigation gets increasingly complicated and dangerous.
The character of Glass reels off a constant sarcastic patter and I loves me some sarcasm, but it does wear after awhile. The story as a whole feels padded out, too, and yet still comes up short on dealing with the various relationships as the police procedural and “figuring out the gay” constantly vie for attention. Strangely, even though Glass ultimately come to terms with being gay, he doesn’t seem to experience any real growth as a person. He starts out an argumentative jerk (you know, one of those people who has to say something smart, no matter how ill-advised) and basically ends the same way, except in an allegedly committed relationship. It left me feeling like there were parts missing from the story, despite the aforementioned length of the novel.
Overall, though, this is a decent effort and though it wobbles a bit when trying to juggle the competing plot lines, I remained invested enough to stay with it to the end.
I’ve just discovered this is the first book in a series of Glass novels, though lamentably, the author elected not to give subsequent books awful glass-based puns for titles. Perhaps Glass experiences more growth in these additional books. Given the abrasive nature of the character I’m not sure I’d want to find out. But…maybe.
The Chronoliths takes the same broad theme of Wilson’s later novel Spin (mysterious giant objects appear around the globe) and uses it to frame a bleak look at a near-future where environmental and economic collapse have left the world vulnerable to military conquest on a level not seen since World War II. The twist is that the conquest is set to happen twenty years in the future and is foretold by the arrival of chronoliths, giant towers of indestructible stone and ice that commemorate the victories of someone or something only identified as Kuin.
With chronoliths spreading from Asia to South America and beyond, and pro and anti-Kuin forces forming, the story follows software developer Scott Warden as he witnesses the arrival of the first chronolith in Thailand and then becomes entangled in what Warden’s former teacher and scientist Sue Chopra calls “tau turbulence” in the quest to stop both the chronoliths and Kuin.
Written in 2001 and predating the 9/11 attacks, The Chronoliths is informed by a present that didn’t anticipate the arrival of the smartphone (it predates the launch of the iPhone by six years) and as such, even though it depicts a mid-21st century where video phones and terminals are commonplace, it feels ever-so-slightly out of date. This is not a real criticism, just a reflection on the likelihood of science fiction that chronicles near-future events not quite hitting the mark. Predicting the future is tricky business, which is ironically (and as Chopra would point out, not coincidentally) what the story is about. Reading the novel when it was published in 2001, these incongruities are non-existent. In 2016 you just have to keep the story in context of when it was written.
That said, the story moves along briskly and Wilson quickly ensnares Morgan, his friends and family into the future of the chronoliths, making Morgan’s actions and decisions both momentous and personal. He may not necessarily want to save the world, taking a rather jaundiced view of it, but he does want to save the people he loves. As more chronoliths appear and Kuin’s victory seems more and more inevitable, the tone becomes increasingly one of despair and hopelessness. Told from the first person perspective, the character of Scott Morgan deliberately feeds into this, framing the tale as one in which many terrible things happen. And they do!
I won’t spoil the ending but Wilson does kind of pull a rabbit out of a hat and it works. As with most stories that have a time travel element it’s best if you don’t try to pull the logic apart. In the case of The Chronoliths, Wilson makes that easy with a style that effortlessly moves the plot along.
Crawford draws on theories and ideas from Kant to Freud to Nietzsche and more, both favorably and negatively, as he makes his case for how we in the western world are suffering from distractions both insidious and incidental, all of which collectively diminish what we can achieve by working to make us conform, to comply, to passively listen and not question. Crawford isn’t talking about the people walking down the sidewalk with their eyes glued to their smartphones–though he touches on such digital distractions–but rather bigger and more encompassing things that work to grab our attention, usually because some corporate or other vested interest has deemed our eyeballs and ears too valuable to leave alone. We are fed muzak in public spaces with no option to turn it off. A children’s TV show (Mickey Mouse Clubhouse) presents life as a no-risk endeavor where every potential hazard can be overcome with miraculous devices and conflict is smoothed over quickly, if it ever happens (he contrasts this with the earliest episodes of Sesame Street where characters regularly fight and yell at each other). Slot machines (machine gambling) are carefully engineered with newer technology to maximize their addictive quality, at the expense of those that fall victim to the addiction. We are pushed to know a little of everything and away from specialization.
He laments that classrooms are largely comprised of students sitting at desks passively listening to a teacher presenting information that may or may not be relevant to them, and counters with examples of people engaged in occupations that make use of skills that are learned from other craftspeople/masters as well as drawn from the lessons of those who came before them in the same field, putting together a picture of how we can become more individualistic not by rebelling or isolating ourselves from others, but instead acknowledging and working with the people around us and our society.
He turns to examples ranging from efficiently multi-tasking short order cooks and, in greater detail, an organ shop that restores and builds church organs, to illustrate how focused craft and skills can produce more productive and engaged citizens, while criticizing the trend toward general, non-specific (shallow) knowledge. The loving detail to these examples and his own affection for building and working with tools is alluring. You may not want to assemble a motorcycle or build a church organ when you’re done reading, but you’ll probably want to make something with your hands.
The writing itself may be challenging for some, falling (sometimes awkwardly) between casual and academic. The footnotes alone are more than 40 pages. This is not a self-help book or one with quick fixes or bullet point lists of easy solutions. Instead it is a meditative exercise on where we can (or should) go as a society and the dangers of continuing along our present course. There is a lot to chew on here and I suspect I will return to this book from time to time to re-read key passages, while carrying the central message that the individual, crafting and building, is a wonderful thing.
If you ever talk to someone who’s read The Lord of the Rings books, it’s inevitable that you get to that question: Did you read the songs?
For me the answer was not a straightforward “no” because I did read some of them, then I read fewer as I worked my way through the story, then I just plain stopped. But I still had a great time reading The Lord of the Rings.
The same can be said of Neil Gaiman’s latest collection, Trigger Warning, which intersperses a few poems–the equivalent to Tolkien’s songs–in among the short stories. In his second collection, Fragile Things, he describes the poems as “bonuses for the kind of people who do not need to worry about sneaky and occasional poems lurking inside their short-story collections.”
I read some of the poems, then read fewer of them, the just plain stopped. But I still had a great time reading Trigger Warning.
This is a hodgepodge of stories, covering everything from modern horror to high fantasy, all of it presented with Gaiman’s usual dry wit and depiction of the world as a place both dark and beautiful.
I enjoyed all of the stories but being who I am, the ones I enjoyed most were the Twilight Zone-esque “The Thing About Cassandra” in which imagined loves are perhaps not so imaginary, “Orange,” which uses a question and answer format to show the transformation of a young, tanning-obsessed woman into something rather more cosmic and “The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury,” which paints a chilling portrait of a man who forgets words, with more impact than one might expect. Stories based on Dr. Who and Sherlock Holmes are well-executed and the final and original piece, “Black Dog” features Shadow from American Gods, in a story about murder, ghosts and the power of the mind to both protect and destroy.
This is an easy recommendation for anyone who enjoys Gaiman’s writing, but I feel there is enough variety here to entice those unfamiliar with his work.
This is an incomplete ranking as it doesn’t include any of Joel’s live albums nor does it feature his first three releases, Cold Spring Harbor (1971), Piano Man (1973) and Streetlife Serenade (1974) or his classical album, Fantasies and Delusions (2001). That still leaves nine studio albums, spanning the years 1977-1993.
I discovered Joel when a lot of people did, when he hit it big with The Stranger in 1977. The first album of his I owned (back when vinyl wasn’t cool, it was just the format every record store sold) was 1978’s 52nd Street, which went on to win a Grammy for Album of the Year. I loved what I heard and bought every album after until he retired from recording new music in 1993.
Billy Joel knows melody. He knows hooks. He knows how to write super-slick pop songs that can transcend that slickness to become something more. He also indulges himself regularly, a veritable Renaissance Man on some albums, shifting from Broadway-style show tunes to smoky ballads to jazzy riffs and effervescent pop. Sometimes it feels like he’s gleefully showing off and it works. Sometimes, less so. Here’s how I rank those nine albums, from best to worst.
First, let me say this is trickier than it seems because while I definitely think there are weaker albums in this mix, the better ones are fairly consistent, meaning the top five are almost interchangeable (while being quite different from each other, a nice trick).
The Nylon Curtain (1982). After his divorce, Joel channels The Beatles and gets serious. He stretches out vocally and writes on weighty topics, covering the Vietnam war, the collapse of the industrial economy in the U.S. and more. It’s an album filled with anxiety and regret, of faint hopes and dashed dreams. It’s not exactly feel-good material. But at its best the music shimmers and soars and Joel moves from one style to another with purpose. The first half particularly stands out, with “Allentown”, “Pressure” and “Laura”–another one of Joel’s poison pen letters to a demanding, damaged and imaginary (I hope) lover.
Glass Houses (1980). This is almost the literal opposite to The Nylon Curtain, a big arena-friendly album in which Joel tries to rock out. I say try because this is still pop, but it’s meatier than usual. There’s usually a little filler on every Joel album, but Glass Houses is incredibly tight, its scant 35 minute run time moving quickly from one song to the next. There are a few ballads here and they are lovely, but the album is driven by propulsive songs like “All for Leyna” and “Sometimes a Fantasy.”
52nd Street (1978). The first half is particularly strong, starting with the in-your-face “Big Shot” and ending with the jazzy tones of “Zanzibar.” The second half features some fine music, too, but the epic “Until the Night” is undercut by Joel’s lyrical weaknesses. His musings on women feel dated or old-fashioned if you’re feeling charitable.
The Stranger (1977). In some ways this is a better album than 52nd Street but it’s hurt by having several weaker songs padding it out. Some might call it heresy but I have never liked the schmaltzy “Just the Way You Are” and the closer “Everybody Has a Dream” is probably the least memorable finale on Joel’s albums. On the plus side, the Broadway-style production of “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” is great fun and “The Stranger” is a perfect blend of music and lyric, right down to the creepy whistle that opens and closes the song.
An Innocent Man (1983). A love letter to his then girlfriend Christie Brinkley, this throwback to the sound of the late 50s and early 60s is Joel at his most joyful and relaxed. The songs are like a bowl of candy, sweet little confections, from the rousing “Uptown Girl” to the somewhat preachy yet undeniably catchy “Tell Her About It.” My favorite is probably the wistful title track.
Turnstiles (1976). There are a number of good songs on this album and I happen to find the cynical tone of “Angry Young Man” amusing specifically because of Joel’s delivery (which I think was deliberate) but a number of the tracks are also featured on the live “Songs in the Attic (1981) and they are more vital in their live versions, notably “Say Goodbye to Hollywood,” which benefits from the string section being excised and “Miami 2017” (whose doomsday vision of the future only has one year to become reality).
River of Dreams (1993). His last pop album of new material and coming 22 years after his first, River of Dreams finds Joel angry in “The Great Wall of China” and “No Man’s Land” then showing a tender side as father in “Lullabye.” There’s more filler than usual here but as a send-off, it’s not bad at all.
Stormfront (1989). I rank this lower than River of Dreams simply because more of the songs are less memorable and it’s rather dated now. “We Didn’t Start the Fire” is catchy but superficial and “When in Rome” is one of my favorite Joel songs to skip. For some reason it just grates.
The Bridge (1986). A number of songs here are quite catchy but the album is rife with affectations, mostly in Joel’s vocalizations. He performs a duet with Ray Charles and mimics Ray Charles. He adopts a falsetto in “Big Man on Mulberry Street” because he can and “Modern Woman” is a song I simply can’t stand. The whole album feels indulgent, further brought down by weaker tracks that surround the set pieces.
Brother Odd is #3 in the Odd Thomas series and finds the titular character hanging out at an abbey in the California Sierras. When a few bodachs appear (smoky entities that only Odd can see that are harbingers of death) Odd knows trouble is a-coming and he works to protect the mentally and physically handicapped children under the care of the abbey’s monks and nuns.
While Odd remains a wonderfully self-deprecating character that Koontz could probably write in his sleep, the story this time is more out there, dealing with the quest to scientifically prove the existence of God and what happens when you start messing around with life on a quantum level (bad things, as it turns out). This may sound a bit odd (ahem) given the setting of the book, but it’s explained early when one of the monks in residence is revealed to be a former physicist who has bequeathed a fortune to the abbey and secretly continued his work while praying and meditating with his fellow monks.
As the number of bodachs grows, a blizzard sweeps over the mountain, effectively trapping everyone as the potential hour of doom nears. While it serves to increase tension, I was left with a feeling that the story has holes in it you could probably drive a monk-filled SUV outfitted with a snowplow through. Ultimately this only minimally detracts as Brother Odd is, despite its subject matter, not the kind of story you will ponder deeply afterward. It’s an entertaining popcorn read, exactly as I expected.
Some spoilers ahead, in as much as you can spoil a novel published in 1974.
King’s first published novel is in a way the ultimate teenage tale of revenge. Dowdy, introverted Carrie White, a 16 year old girl raised by an extreme Christian fundamentalist mother, is taunted and bullied through high school and does her best to ignore it all while bearing the incessant, borderline insane ravings of her mother. Things seem to be turning around when good boy Tommy Ross invites her to the prom but if you’ve seen the movie, you know how that turns out.
Carrie uses her telekinetic powers to take revenge on those who have humiliated and teased her, eventually spreading her wrath to the entire small town of Chamberlain. Basically, everyone dies.
King writes the story as an epistolary, inserting interviews, book excerpts, commission reports and newspaper stories between the more conventional narrative scenes. Two things I found interesting were how King tips his hand early–less than halfway through you learn that a lot of people are going to die, often which specific people. The story, bracketed by the interviews and reports, becomes less about what will happen and more about what did happen. There is still a slow-burning dread that builds as prom night approaches, a kind of Doom That Came To Chamberlain, if you will.
King also approaches telekinesis as something worthy of scientific study, showing experts speculating on its likely genetic origin and whether more “taunt me and watch me destroy the world” Carries might be out there. Perhaps this was meant as a way of making Carrie seem more sympathetic, a victim of both a brutal upbringing, and a terrible, albeit, natural ability she could not control (or could control all too well, perhaps).
Unlike many of King’s later novels, Carrie is fairly brief and some of the characters feel a bit thinly drawn as a result. There’s just enough meat on the bones here but only just. One of King’s affectations is in full force, though. This is where he’ll break a paragraph abruptly
(and put something in parentheses to emphasize a specific mood or line of thought)
and then continue on with the narrative only to
(switch back to the parenthetical interjection, often making liberal use of exclamation points! italics and word repetition word repetition o the words o the interjections over and over)
While it can certainly emphasize a particular mood or thought pattern, it looks a bit hamfisted now.
Still, any fan of King’s work would be remiss to not read Carrie. King’s skills are still being refined here and not every character or turn feels true (Carrie’s mother especially seems way over the top, something Piper Laurie took to heart in the 1976 film adaptation), but even at this early stage he shows an effortless ability to get a narrative rolling and keep it moving.
A second volume in a themed horror collection might seem like a good candidate for more experimental work that may not be entirely successful and such is the case with Wastelands 2, although I enjoyed the majority of the stories.
Post-apocalypse tales are one of the enduring favorites in horror fiction. Some of the classic boogeymen like nuclear war have faded as threats to all humanity while others like global warming have risen–Wastelands 2 delivers on both of these, along with biological terrors, Lovecraftian beasts from the sea, really mean flowers and, of course, Kevin Costner. Sort of.
While the stories are bound by the theme of apocalypse, style and tone is all over the place. There is little in the way of humor (as one might expect), though Keffy R. M. Kehrli’s “Advertising at the End of the World” with its androids-as-literal-walking-advertisements still searching for buyers after a super-virus decimates humanity, is quietly absurd. Most are dark or darker and the majority betray little hope regarding humankind’s ability to come back from the brink of extinction. You’ll also put down the book thinking most people are jerks.
This is not exactly feel-good material is what I’m saying.
A few standouts for me include Jack McDevitt’s “Ellie,” which presents a nice twist on a story about caretakers keeping things running at a massive particle collider in the hope of staving off further disaster. The aforementioned “Advertising at the End of the World” is a relatively original take on post-apocalypse, with the sensible protagonist Marie trying to deal with an army of annoying androids as humanely as possible. George R. R. Martin’s hippie-fest “…For a Single Yesterday” reminded me a bit of the novel Station Eleven, with entertainers providing a focal point in surviving communities, with a bit of time-travelly drugs tossed in.
“Monstro” is a deliciously weird story about a virus inducing strange and dangerous groupthink among the infected quarantined in Haiti. Author Junot Díaz steeps the story in local culture while slowly unwinding an ever-widening apocalypse that may or may not be contained on the island state.
Jake Kerr’s “Biological Fragments of the Life of Julian Prince” is an epistemological accounting of how an author survives, writes about and in a way is consumed by a meteor impact that devastates North America in the first half of the 21st century. I feel this format–excerpts from Wikipedia, interviews, news reports and so on–is trickier to pull off than it looks but Kerr handles it expertly, lending an authentic feel to these glimpses of Prince’s life and the apocalyptic event that sits at its core.
On the negative side, I found David Brin’s “The Postman” (a novella version of the novel) was fine but oddly undercuts the whole enterprise on the very last page with the protagonist turning weirdly flippant and derisive. I have no idea if the book (or the Costner movie) are the same, but I found it jarring.
But while “The Postman” was still a pleasant enough read overall, I only managed a few pages of Maria Dahvana Headley’s “The Traditional.” The story features an unlikable and uninteresting protagonist and is written in the second person: “You’ve always been the kind of liar who leans back and lets boys fall into you while you see if you can make them fall all the way out the other side. You want them to feel like they’ve hit Narnia. You traffic in interdimensional fucking, during which they transcend space and time, and you go nowhere.” I’ve always been the kind of person who finds the second person point of view a very tough sell. I was not sold. I didn’t even rent.
There are more than enough stories in Wastelands 2, however, to recommend it to anyone looking for some post-apocalyptic fun.
This one is kind of bonkers if you think the world and the universe around it are pretty much known things. If you’re less certain (just what is dark matter, anyway, and why is there so much of it?) then the you may find the ideas presented to be intriguing, even as the authors make no absolute claims on any of the evidence they bring forward.
The premise of The Super Natural is that the various unknown phenomena reported around the world–everything from UFOs to alien abductions, apparitions, implants, strange lights and more–are real and explainable, and point to a larger reality that most people lack the perception and skill to interact with in a meaningful way, or even at all. Further, they suggest the possibility of parallel universes that may intersect with ours at times. On top of that, there’s a lot of theory on what happens after you die and whether or not the soul exists. Finally, there is a common belief between the authors that some kind of intelligent plasma energy may be behind most of this.
Pretty bonkers, right?
Whitley Strieber is well-known for his books about what he calls the visitors, starting with Communion. His experiences have been largely ignored by mainstream media or openly mocked (he expresses regret for coming up with the phrase “rectal probe”, two words that have launched a thousand jokes over the past thirty years). His chapters largely consist of him recalling and expanding on experiences he has previously described, as well as bringing in some new ones. He offers theories but is very careful to commit to none of them, keeping his mind open to other possibilities. He doesn’t think the visitors are aliens from another planet, a common misconception people have with his experiences.
Jeff Kripal is a historian of religions and his chapters focus more specifically on the theories behind what may be going on, with different techniques offered as part of a “toolbox” for examining and cataloguing the unknown.
In a few instances the authors disagree on specifics but overall they present a united front in believing the likeliest explanations of all this weird stuff lies in intelligent plasma energy that exists perhaps in a dimension outside of ours and may be trying to teach those who are receptive what lies beyond our physical form and physical dimension. There are suggestions that these other beings live outside of normal space and time and to them we seem pretty primitive with our living and dying and not being able to fly around as spooky balls of energy. But the good news is they consider us teachable.
There are no good explanations on why these more advanced forms of life want to teach us or why they are being relatively coy about it (I say relatively because there are thousands of UFO sightings, for example, and even well-documented cases rarely get reported by conventional media, so while these various phenomena may be unknown, they are not exactly rare). Perhaps we’re just really slow learners. Maybe our nukes scare them. They still kind of scare me.
Kripal in particular also goes into detail about what is real versus fictional or imagined and how we may essentially make our own reality. One example he recounts is about an academic colleague who was making blueberry muffins (mmm). He finished mixing the wet ingredients then rinsed out and set the empty honey jar on the sink counter to dry. He went to get a tin of flour off a shelf and, surprised by how unusually heavy it felt, dropped it on the floor. He sifted through the spilled flour and found the honey jar, caked in the flour. He looked at the counter. The jar was no longer there. It had moved on its own. Neat! And weird.
Kripal explains:
Apparently, that is what the human mind-brain does when it is participating in a dimension of reality that is quite beyond our primitive “mental” and “material” categories of thinking (and our primitive science, which assumes the same division to work at all). It tells itself a story that involves otherwise impossible things and then acts out that story with physical objects. If those objects are available in the immediate environment, it uses them as props, like Dan’s honey jar. If they are not, it creates them “out of nowhere.”
He goes on to say these odd events happen to “mess with us” (that is a direct quote), to shake up our view of the world as one in which the mental and physical are separate things. It’s all very trippy, like trying to count to infinity.
In the end a skeptic is unlikely to be convinced by the evidence presented by Strieber and Kripal, but their ideas are interesting and entertainingly presented. The way they both hold back from making absolute claims seems less a dodge and more a genuine admission that they–and us–really don’t know for sure what it happening out there. But something certainly seems to be.
Meanwhile, I can’t even get the TV remote to teleport into my hand. If the mental and physical are really one, I wouldn’t mind at least a few perks before evolving into a super-intelligent ball of light.
A few months ago I decided to get an Apple Watch. I’m not always an early adopter but my partner wanted one and so I jumped in, too.
In the time (ho ho) that I’ve used it, I’ve found it’s a convenience I appreciate but one that is also not necessary. I wouldn’t want to forget to wear it but there’s nothing it does that can’t be replicated by other devices and in some cases, these other devices can perform the same functions better, though not always at a lower cost.
And speaking of cost, Apple recently cut the price of the watch, an unusual move for a company that normally never reduces pricing on products until the next version comes out (rumor has it the second version of the Apple Watch will debut before the end of the year). This underscores how the entire smartwatch market is immature, as Apple is apparently trying to boost sales only a year after the watch debuted.
For reference, I have the space grey 38 mm model with the black sports band. This is about as subtle as the watch gets, looks-wise, and it fits decently on my skinny wrists in a way the 42 mm version wouldn’t. The band and watch are both comfortable to wear all day.
The problems with the watch range from minor to downright existential. Ultimately you ask yourself, what is it for? To tell time? A $10 watch can do that. To allow you to see notifications without pulling out your iPhone? That’s a nice feature but is it really worth hundreds of dollars? What else can it do?
If you are looking for a killer app on the watch, you won’t find it. I don’t have an issue with this–a smartwatch is by design made to do multiple things, so I don’t think it needs to have one must-have function. No one buys a smartphone just to take phone calls, after all–a $40 flip phone can do that (and in some cases can do it better). But if the watch can do a lot of things, can it do them well? How many are genuinely useful vs. gimmicky?
Here’s how I use the watch and how I rank the usefulness of each function:
Show the time. It is slightly less convenient that a regular watch for this, as you need to either tap the face or turn your wrist in order for the display to light up. This is to conserve battery life and I suspect it will be an issue for all smartwatches using OLED/LED/LCD displays for some time to come. Nonetheless, the time is always accurate and unlike a regular watch you can choose from a variety of faces. The one I use also shows temperature, calendar events, alarms, the date and my activity. Tapping any of these takes you to the respective app, saving additional steps in navigation. Showing time is obviously a critical function. Sometimes the wrist gesture doesn’t get detected, which is annoying, but I’m not too bothered by it.
Notifications. You can customize these to match your iPhone or set them differently. If you turn everything on you’ll probably have your watch tapping, ringing and dinging constantly for half the day, after which the battery will be dead. I have it set to allow select notifications, some accompanied by a sound or tap, others showing up with the little red dot that says “mysterious notification has arrived.” I quickly got used to notifications on the watch and it is genuinely nice to not have to dig out the phone to check them. This works especially well for less-important notifications because now I just glance at my wrist to see them. They seem less annoying this way.
Playing music. Navigating your iPhone music collection with the watch works about as well as you’d expect on such a small screen and lists scroll fast, making it more tolerable. The best way to place music is via Siri and generally this works well, allowing for a truly hands-free experience. Sometimes Siri misunderstands (it interpreted “Play the album ‘Pyramid'” as “Play the album ‘pure mind'”) and sometimes it just flakes out completely, like when I said, “Hey Siri, play the album ‘Time.'” This exact command has worked perfectly before but this one time (ahem) Siri dutifully showed what it had heard on the watch face (which was exactly what I had said) then proceeded to play “Girl U Want” from Devo’s Greatest Hits.
Tracking activity. The built-in activity app tracks calories, stand time and exercise, allowing you to customize each. Throughout the day it reminds you to stand or shows you how close you are to a goal–these things can also be customized–and awards achievements when you hit your goals. The app works well and you can check more detailed stats on the iPhone version of the app. I feel like there should be a web version, though, for times when you really want to dig in.
Fitness/exercise. I use the fitness app for outdoor walks and runs, both of which will use the built-in heart rate monitor and the phone’s GPS. The results are fairly accurate and as long as you are specific with your commands, launching activities via Siri works well (“Hey Siri, start an 8K outdoor run”). Running offers customization on what you see during the run and taps at set intervals. For me it taps every km and at the end, though I’ve only ever noticed the taps exactly once when on a run, it’s just too subtle to feel when you’re moving faster. After the run, you get a breakdown of time, distance, pace, average BPM, calories burned and splits. The data seems fairly accurate, certainly good enough for me, especially since it is consistent, but I miss having a map of the route. Since the app uses the GPS in the phone, I’m not sure why it doesn’t do this. Still, it’s so convenient to use that my TomTom Runner Cardio has sat neglected for months.
Heart rate monitor. I check this occasionally, more for novelty than anything. It’s an essential part of the fitness app, though.
Text messaging. This works reasonably well, letting you use canned responses, adding customized ones via the phone or using Siri to dictate text that can be sent as audio (which seems silly) or as text. Again, you can often skip pulling out the phone and there seems to be some intelligence driving the options that come up for replies, suggesting that the watch tries to learn what you respond with most often.
Phone. Yes, you too can be Dick Tracy. The phone function works but I only use it by accident. This is one case where you really are better off pulling out the actual phone.
Third party apps. I’ve tried a few like Weather Underground’s app, but they often take several seconds to start up. That doesn’t sound like much but on a smartwatch, where you typically interact with the display in very short bursts, a few seconds feels like a very long time. As a result I’ve mostly abandoned third party apps. If I’m representative of other watch users, it doesn’t bode well for the health of the watch’s app ecosystem.
All of the above, save for the last two, I find useful and would miss if they weren’t available. But none are essential. I can’t tell someone that any of these functions are worth a minimum of $400 Canadian.
But worse than that, the watch feels unfinished, less a 1.0 product and more a 0.5 one. Third party apps perform poorly. This just isn’t acceptable. Sometimes the watch will feel sluggish when running the built-in apps. There is a strong sense that it is under-powered.
There are a bunch of ways to interact withe the watch. You can swipe, you can tap, you can “long press” you can force touch (press hard), you can use the digital crown (in multiple ways, not just by rotating it), you can use the other side button. And where and when to use any of these is never particularly clear or intuitive. I like options but it feels like the UI is an unwieldy amalgamation of iPhone conventions fused with new, watch-specific ones. And despite all these ways of controlling what is happening, I think the watch could use another physical button or at least allow re-mapping of the side button (which is dedicated to contacts, except when Apple decries otherwise, like when you long press it to restart the watch). In all, the interface seems muddled.
It also seems fiddly. I have often tapped a button, seen the button highlight to acknowledge the tap, then do nothing. It almost seems like I need to aim my finger at a particular angle on the face to get the tap recognized. Perhaps this is an artifact of me being left-handed but having the watch on my left wrist and thus using my right hand. On the plus side I am in some tiny way probably becoming slightly more ambidextrous. I’ve already mentioned the wrist gesture to check the face occasionally fails to be recognized.
Battery life has been fine for me. It’s supposed to last a day and I can do all the usual stuff, plus track a 10K walk and another 8K of walks without the watch having to slip into power-save mode. It also charges relatively quickly. Still, I’d like to see a minimum goal of having the watch face be able to stay on all the time and still have the battery last a day. I wouldn’t wear the watch at night regardless, so I’m not bothered by not being able to use it as a sleep tracker, but battery life is really at the minimum of where it should be.
In the end the Apple Watch is nice but uncompelling. Despite limitations, it has effectively replaced my running watch (for now, at least) and has allowed me to keep the phone tucked away while still keeping track of things. In fact, the watch means I am much less likely to miss a notification or phone call. But this is very much an unfinished product in a still ill-defined category. I don’t think smartwatches will go away any more than regular watches will, but we are probably another revision or two from an Apple Watch that lives up to the full potential of the format. If you can afford one, especially at the new lower price, and know what you’re getting, I don’t think you’ll experience buyer’s remorse, but you’re not missing out on a brave new world by waiting a little longer, either.
Victor LaValle takes one of H.P. Lovecraft’s most clumsily racist stories, “The Horror at Red Hook” and expands it into a novella that both builds on the original while dealing head-on with Lovecraft’s ill-informed and offensive take on race. The author does this by dividing the story into two parts, one from the perspective of police detective Malone, as in the original, and the other from the viewpoint of the titular Black Tom, also known as Charles “Tommy” Tester, a 20 year old living with his father in Harlem of 1924.
Tommy is both hero and villain, an agent of despair and a victim of senseless violence and racism. He and Malone cross paths when both encounter the enigmatic Robert Suydam, a man trying to unleash Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones on the world so that the oppressors may be wiped away while the oppressed are justly rewarded for awakening these elder gods.
The world LaValle depicts is one of easy cruelty and racial division, where hope is tamped down and then crushed, and songs play not to soothe souls but to help speed them along to a certain hell. He does this while effortlessly weaving in Lovecraft’s original characters and story and it is there that The Ballad of Black Tom is perhaps at its weakest, as the original material was rather thin to begin with.
Still, LaValle elevates the original far beyond what Lovecraft had achieved, creating a tragic tale that trades melodrama for something more human, even as the world is threatened by cosmic horrors.
If you enjoy Lovecraft’s work you’ll almost certainly enjoy this. LaValle’s prose is concise, sometimes wry and always on point. His expansion of the original simply works in every way you would expect. If you enjoy Lovecraft but have always been troubled by the racism weaved throughout so many of his stories, The Ballad of Black Tom comes even more highly recommended. LaValle has managed the difficult trick of both paying respect to and being scornful of a very flawed author.
A Darker Shade of Magic by V.E. Schwab
