Mythos for the Moment
In honor of the Memorial Day long weekend and the “beach read” days of summer that are upon us, this post is a little different.
In trying to name the current moment, somehow there are more takes than ever, but none of them do the trick. In terms of understanding our moment holistically, naming and framing and gaming out what’s happening, I’ve been unsatisfied.
I had a friend in grad school that was a Plato nut and he said Plato said there’s a relationship between logos (what’s true), mythos (stories/fiction) and ethos (what should be done). The mythos can get to ethos by playing with logos in a way nothing else can. I kind of like that theory, and as I’ve felt overwhelmed by the moment I started reading fiction explicitly oriented towards political change, upheaval, organizing, etc.
So this week I’m sending along some novels that have been particularly good and helpful. There’s nothing about school finance in particular, but I think that’s because there hasn’t been a good school finance novel written yet (something I kind of want to do).
After wanting desperately to be a literary fiction author for most of my young life (I had something of a good run in the 2010s), for the last fifteen years or so I’ve been a devoted genre fan: science fiction and fantasy. Starting a couple summers ago I dipped back into the literary sphere. So the list that follows is mixed. And it’s in no particular order, just more or less when I read them starting from the most recent. (And while you’re at it, a couple songs that I think get to the moment very well too: The Cool Greenhouse’s “Get Unjaded” and Jessica Mazin’s “The Simulation is Failing!”)
A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel
This book is a precise and sprawling romp through the French Revolution centered on three of its main leaders: Robespierre, Danton, and Desmoulins. I think it gives such a great sense of what it’s like to be in the middle of a revolutionary moment, both exciting and dangerous and transformational—the politics, personal relationships, and texture of everyday life—from late nights, debates, blood in the streets, meetings going on forever, etc. The writing is creative, crisp, and breathtaking.
The Deluge by Stephen Markeley
I couldn’t believe this novel as I was reading, in both a good way and a not so good way. Its strength is to show a dialectic of climate politics in the present, its fictional world grafted onto our world during and after the Biden administration. It was unnerving to read a world so close to ours but where Trump doesn’t win re-election, but in some ways it helped ground me by observing a possible world so close to this one. The book has a very strange post-woke politics, and likes to rely on the state of nature presumption about humans in crisis, but it’s an interesting way to work through so many of our ideologies and symptoms. While some of its characters are very poorly and grossly rendered (honestly, I almost put it down), it has the benefit of cutting across race, class, nationality, disability, regionality, religion, political tendency, activist strategy, climate impact, sexuality, gender, all while including detailed policy wonkiness on how to get rid of carbon emissions in the here and now.
A Country of Ghosts by Margaret Killjoy
A solid anarchist narrative in the tradition of The Dispossessed, but with a fantasy flare and spare sense of detail that gives a wonderful feeling of being part of a tense campaign between different political economies, specifically anarchists versus capitalists. It does a great job showing the fine-grained details of cultural difference between rigid individualism and horizontalist collectivism.
Creation Lake by Rachel Cushner
This book made a splash when it came out, and for good reason, it’s really interesting and strange and seems both right wing and left wing at the same time. Taking the perspective of a nihilistic narc-for-hire who has infiltrated a back-to-the-land environmentalist movement in rural France, Cushner does a counter-intuitive move by viewing far left prefigurative environmental movements from the outside, her flawed main character critiquing the movement, seeing its limitations and strengths, where it’s correct and lacking, etc. If anything, the book is a bit too cute by half, but it reads very well. It’s funny, incisive, and offers an intriguing concept through the environmental group’s favorite philosopher: maybe neanderthals were smarter and better than the homo sapiens that took over, and we can still access that aspect of ourselves.
The Bas-Lag Novels by China Mieville
I’d been meaning to read these books forever. Mieville’s work was a big gap in my reading, particularly given he’s one of the few leftist fantasy writers out there. These books are incredible. The steampunk wild world of New Crobuzon—its politics, history, populations, and dynamics—are spellbinding. Each book takes awhile to get started, but once they do, hang on. And all the books lead up to the third, The Iron Council, which is one of the best leftist fantasies I’ve ever read. It’s ending is fascinating, I’m still thinking about it. These books specifically helped me imagine what it’d be like to live in a city-state at war with its neighbors, like if New York City ever struck out on its own.
Savage Coast by Muriel Rukeyeser
Rukeyeser is a Jewish author known for plays and poetry, but this is one of her few novels, based on her own reporting and experiences during the Spanish Civil War. It’s autobiographical, detailed, and somewhat intimate/personal despite taking place in a fascist war zone, embedded with anarchist partisans as they fought against Franco. It’s an American’s take on this scene, and the perspective is helpful for what it’s like to be in America now: fascism, a familiar concept, is unfamiliar to many of us here actually living through it.
Far Away the Southern Sky by Joseph Andras
Wonderful meta-novella following Ho Chi Minh’s life as a young man in Paris. As much a reflection of internationalist, third world communist politics from the perspective of the global north/center as it is a portrait of a young leftist searching for answers, organizing, and in exile—waiting to return home for the revolution.
Great Expectations by Vinson Cunningham
A novel reflecting on the Obama years from a drama/theater critic. The memoiristic tone, scathing subtlety, and political history of Obama’s 2008 campaign from someone embedded in it—the text is both high brow and spicy, working through Blackness and identity politics at the turn of the millennium in American political life, and a surgical portrait of the multiracial, diverse liberal ruling class before the onset of what’s now clearly an American fascism.
The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson
We all know Robinson’s science fiction. He’s the leading leftist fiction writer in terms of imagining climate futures, and I was familiar with those books (the Mars trilogy, Ministry of the Future, 2140). But I heard about his historical fantasy, this book, and was blown away. It’s conceit is that European colonialism doesn’t really exist, or at least its world-historically bracketed, and the indigenous cultures of the Middle East, Far East, and North America encounter one another in and around the time of the Black Plague. Think that’s not complex enough? Add in Hindu-ish/Buddhist-ish cosmology of reincarnation, where the main characters live fraught lives throughout these cultures, die, then get reincarnated in different cultures, all the while trying to find one another to be able to overthrow the regime in charge of the metaphysical churn of birth and death. This book was so refreshingly extensive and helped me imagine the current moment on the scale of epochs and the carousel of time.
The Terraformers by Annalee Newitz
By far the best novel I read in 2024, this book imagines a distant future where interstellar real estate companies build whole planets, creating species appropriate for each stage of planetary development, all for the purpose of creating bespoke experiences for paying customers around the galaxy. We get to see one such species plan a revolution against the company. The first page features a talking moose that can fly and the thing launches from there, a liberatory dream across race, class, gender, sexuality, species, and technological boundaries. Come for the dramatic account of a transit system assessment across the planet, stay for the transit system that becomes conscious and forms its own culture. I was particularly taken with the mooses’ narrative, and the critique of the past by dogs.
Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson
Coming in at second for the best novel I read in 2024, this book is characteristic Stephenson: a crazy ride whose world, policies, and characters feel like they’ve been designed to advise tech moguls in our world. Stephenson’s politics are sort of neo-techno-authoritarian, but when he trains them on speculative climate fiction like this, with an acerbic and international awareness, we get a kind of troubling prophecy featuring geoengineering, a war between India, Pakistan, and China, and feral hogs. I don’t agree with the ideologemes in the book, but that’s almost besides the point, the story is infectious and one of the clearest visions of the future we seem to be headed for I’ve seen.
Reboot by Justin Taylor
Incisive hyper-realism for the climate era, Taylor’s reflection on contemporary culture is like an illustration of Anna Kornbluh’s immediacy in too-late capitalism. A portrait of the bankruptcy of nostalgia in a moment when it’s the only kind of text available to distract us from climate catastrophe, the rebooting of everything without the ability to really go back in time, the novel depicts the powerful nexus of social media, video games, television, film, entertainment, and capitalism with a sad and sardonic detail. (I don’t think it stuck the ending though.)
Everything for Everyone by M. O’Brien & Eman Abdelhadi
The best book I read in 2023, you simply have to read it to believe it: a speculative sociological oral history of a global communist revolution in the 2040s, the authors interviewing fictional characters telling their stories of living through that revolution and how they helped set up the communization of everything. It’s a thorough, rigorous imagining of what anarcho-communists think could happen and how it should end up across racial, sexual, familial, class, national, ethnic, urban, rural, and internationalist vectors. The chapter on the Levant sort of predicts what happened on October 7th and the aftermath, which is haunting.
The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen
This novel, which won the Pulitzer in 2022, is one of the few that names something precise and helpful about the ‘conflict’ in Israel-Palestine from the American Jewish perspective that’s really structured my understanding of it. Maybe you have to be an American Jewish academic from New England who’s family is all from Brooklyn to really enjoy it, but the contrast between the main character and the Netanyahus, and the short epilogue, get to the heart of the issue like few pieces I’ve encountered. (Chase the book with Cohen’s recent New Yorker short story “My Camp,” which I also think captures something important.)
Do you have any book recommendations for me? Send them along!