Walking on the Moon

Walter Mosley always writes as Walter Mosley. I can imagine a reader picking up this book wondering how the mystery writer does in the SF world.  Such a reader will find that genre does not bound Mosley. His voice and expressive powers inhabit a speculative story as easily as contemporary fiction.

Structurally, Futureland is built of multiple short stories from different points of view.  Each lights up the world from a different point of view.  There’s an overarching plot and some interesting technical speculation, but Mosley’s always got society and race on his mind.  His SF world is tuned to amplify the ongoing economic exploitation in America without oversimplifying it.

But enough about the big picture.  The thing I love best about these stories is how each struts into the reader’s mind with direct and powerful writing.  Mosley’s always got the right word in the right place without ostentation or pretension.  Even when his characters are downtrodden, his prose swaggers.  The results feel muscular and powerful, even when they’re tender and wistful.

Strongly recommended.

Carlton Reid has done some impressive research into the relationship of bicycles and modern transport infrastructure.  It is a surprisingly rich relationship.  The first automobiles adopted the power chain and wheel technologies from bicycles (as did aircraft as well, of course).  Beyond that, bicycles were a driving force behind paving roads across the US and Europe.  Roads Were Not Built For Cars is Reid’s presentation of this.

He does an excellent job of research, but his presentation didn’t bring the situation to life for me.  It’s unfortunate, because the facts at issue interest me considerably.  Reid presents both facts and conjecture that are surprising – did Nazi Germany whitewash England’s cycling contributions to automotive technology for political reasons? – but if he shaped it all into a narrative, I didn’t make it there.  I didn’t finish the whole thing.

Even if I weren’t connected to it, I’d have to agree that Aliquippa, PA is a remarkable place.  It has placed a steady steam of players into the NFL, been the source of two landmark Supreme Court labor decisions, given us the Pink Panther theme music, formed Mike Ditka, and produced my parents and grandparents.  The demographics and population of the town has also reflected the rise and fall of large scale manufacturing in America.  S. L. Price beings the place to life in Playing Through The Whistle in a way that’s engaging and consistent with my limited experience with the town.

As a sportswriter, a look at the football history of Western Pennsylvania raises your eyebrows. Just listing the stars – Hall of Fame members – who grew up and learned to play within 50 miles of Pittsburgh is startling.  A deeper look reveals a steady stream of both successes at all levels and strong prospects that don’t pan out.  There are a lot of factors that can distort the reality and the perception of that record, but as a writer it’s a story that must make you drool.  Price clearly couldn’t resist, and captures that duality.

I’m glad he couldn’t.  He digs in to the stories of the residents, the stars, and the history of the place and presents it dynamically. My experience reading the story of the place – so far – is certainly colored by my tenuous connection. Seeing names in print that I would hear as a kid visiting the place made a lot of the narrative real to me.  Beyond the names, the rhythms and emphasis in the stories from residents sound like the stories I’ve heard.  It’s remarkable to hear the tenor of them change in the years after my parents left.  I remember hearing my grandparents decrying many of the events that Price describes.  It’s enlightening to hear the events from a reporter with only a professional attachment to the place and compare them with how decades-long residents talked about them.

Even without that sort of history, Price balances the backdrop of the region and the specifics of the town admirable.  His research – historical and interviews – are remarkable.  Beyond the facts, he brings the place and the story to life. Coming into the area through the remarkable sports successes makes the other historical discussions accessible to a readership that might not usually look at history.

Strongly recommended.

As a regular BoingBoing reader, I’ve heard a lot about Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother.  It’s a book targeted at young adults that is pro-technology and pro-activism, both of which are of interest these days.  I found it kind of a mixed bag.

The technical discussions are all refreshingly sound. Doctorow does a really nice job of boiling tech down into (what I imagine are) easily digestible bites.  He also is adept at pulling out the parts of the technology that are relevant to privacy and risk in our modern surveillance state.  He tells the reader what’s important in clear engaging prose.

From what I know about participating in protests and activism in general – which is mostly second-hand – he seems to do the same for protests and attracting unwanted attention as well.  The catalyst for Little Brother‘s plot is that a bunch of kids get swept up in a government sweep during a crisis, and he pulls no punches about what can happen.  His honesty on this front is one of the book’s real strengths.  Even though the events come to a conclusion, he’s clear that that is a messy conclusion.  Being a lightning rod for powerful forces – or being in the wrong place at the wrong time – can permanently change a person’s life.  Activism has stakes, and he never shies away from relating them.

Honestly the worst part of the story is the fiction.  His intention seems clear to me.  He’s using a (lightly) fictionalized account of a government response to a terror attack in San Francisco to take readers through his primers on activism, technology’s role in it, and great places to eat in the mission district.  It’s a fine structure to hang a book on, and I suspect he can cite relevant reports for the majority of the details and incidents.

For me, though, his characters never quite breathe enough. Their roles as symbols or framing devices always stick out just a bit awkwardly.  As I say, there’s much to like about the factual content, research, and explication here.  I never get lost in the story, though.

I’m still trying to get a handle on how this place I call my home came to be what it is.  That leads me to histories of the area, like William Deverell‘s Whitewashed Adobe.  As with Before LA, Deverell focuses on the change in demographics that occurred here after the Mexican War.  The steady dilution of Mexico’s influence on the area is surprising, but evidently difficult to characterize.

Deverell focuses on several key events and environments that give a flavor, but root causes remain slippery.  He describes the brickyards where Mexican-descended laborers literally built LA from Los Angeles.  That’s telling and powerful, but there’s no watershed here.  Brickwork slowly went away for everyone – especially in the face of earthquakes.  It’s easy to feel the workers being engulfed by the emerging American city they laid the bones for, even when both sides would claim not to have participated in the assimilation.

Other events and iconography are also well chosen, including the Fiesta de Los Angeles and the Mission Play.  Both are interesting mergings of the social and commercial that reflect the prevailing mindsets of the time.  Either could be and probably have been the basis for books of their own.

I did learn a lot from Whitewashed Adobe, but I can’t say that it was an irresistible page-turner.  The writing is clear and informative, but not inspiring.

Recommended.

One of the enduring joys of Jo Walton’s What Makes This Book So Great was that it introduced me to Samuel R. Delany. His Dhalgren is a science fiction novel like few I’ve read, and like few books I’ve read for that matter.

Genre SF often takes the current world and makes a few changes to explore our world. Dhalgren creates a world that seems to be deliberately and fantastically isolated from ours. Of course, that’s not completely true.  A better description is that it is a magnification and or impressionistic view of some part of our world.  One of the many mysteries of Dhalgren is what part of the world that is.  I’ve bounced around between a bunch of possibilities, including ghettos of the marginalized, insular parties, and mental illness.  I can make an argument for any of them, though none convince me.

Delany has constructed a powerful metaphor here, though it’s complex enough that I can’t describe it simply.  I feel like I’ve been to his fictional setting, but I can’t completely place it.

Into that world he throws a polysexual wandering poet who has lost his name and is becoming slowly (or quickly?) unstuck in time.  Rates are difficult to gauge when time is wonky.  By the time his POV character has become the leader of a street gang that hides their identities behind holographic projections of fantastic beasts, the reader is either completely invested or completely out of the book.  I was completely invested.

As if enough weren’t going on, the storytelling techniques vary as well.  At times characters seem to intentionally kick holes in the scenery and talk to the reader directly.  At others, everything seems completely conventional.  And other times, the storytelling becomes remarkably experimental.

I’ve deliberately made this sound chaotic, but there’s actually a discordant harmony to the whole thing.  It’s a meal with a lot to chew on, plated in unusual ways, but nourishing across many levels.  It’s a hard book to stop thinking about, but it does take time and effort to take in.

Strongly recommended.

Ingrid Burrington’s Networks of New York combines accessible technical descriptions, aggressive journalism, and a subversive bent into an atlas of New York City’s informational and surveillance nervous system. She starts from a simple enough sounding question – “What does the Internet look like?” – and takes off into a city-wide census of construction sites and corporate history.  It’s engaging and enlightening, even if you know what the Internet looks like.

She starts from the very basics, the wires and fibers that pump our informational lifeblood.  Her approach is instructional.  There’s no easily accessible public map – if there is such a map at all – so she shows us how to infer one.  Construction sites mark the routes of the conduits, and she provides a key to interpreting them that lets the interested track the content and affiliation of the pathways.  The primer to this telecom argot opens the door to exploration in ways that a map would not.

The whole book is that way.  It’s both an informative tour the infrastructure and a HOWTO for exploring it yourself.  Along the way she expands her mandate from mapping the informational tubes to a bestiary of the data collection systems connected to it, from license plate detecting cameras to intriguingly located intelligence offices.

Networks is both an exportation and an invitation to other people and cities to explore their versions.

A must.

François Chastanet has curated an vibrant set of images of a unique LA street expression.  As I bike around LA, I’m becoming more and more interested in the graffiti and street art of LA.  Some of it is clearly people shouting to the world, but some of it looks like coded messages.  I love argot and secret languages, so it’s fascinating to get a look under the covers.

Cholo Writing is primarily a collection of photos of latino territory markings.  The work includes two excellent essays on the content and significance of the markings.  The whole thing is engaging and interesting.

Ah, Chuck Klosterman, how I love your mind.  I love watching a deep and brilliant analyst apply his considerable intelligence and skill to nigh pointless issues in popular culture.  I spend way too much time doing this myself, and it’s delightful to bask in Klosterman’s pop culture nature walks.  Better than that, I generally get a new insight from it.

Klosterman’s organizing issue in But What If We’re Wrong is how much predicting the future successfully depends on absolutely invalidating a fundamental assumption or two.  Researchers and pundits try to do this all the time, of course, but what sets Klosterman apart is how both how powerfully he buys into the premise and how he applies it to pop culture. He aggressively looks for fundamental bases to negate rather than surface distinctions to poke at. Serious futurists should take note.  As should I.

Then he points that basic principled analysis at rock music, for example.

The result is good fun – for me and Klosterman, I suppose.  He writes brilliantly and insightfully but there’s no risk of AbyssGaze.

Strongly Recommended.

One of my passtimes these days is researching the local history of the SoCal area I’ve adopted as my home.  It’s pretty difficult to get a handle on in many ways.  I’ve never lived in a place that seems to live so much in the present as this one.  That may be due to my limitations in finding sources as well as not getting immersed in the stuff through elementary education.

David Samuel Torres-Rouff has fleshed out some more parts of the puzzle.  Before LA is a scholarly exploration of the history of settlement in the LA basin from the early Spanish land grants until the late 1800s.  Torres-Rouff is focused on the relationships between the ethnic and political groups that clashed and blended here.

I find that choice very enlightening.  Torres-Rouff tracks the give and take of (at least) the Spanish ranchers, Mexican workers, indigenous people, Chinese workers,  and American immigrants (black and white).  His focus is on the political machinations rather than the cultural blending, which defines significant eras pretty well.  Up until the American immigrants uneasily (and coercively) unify the various classes into a more monocultural city in the late 1800s, the various groups push and pull on one another.  The push and pull is a usually motivated by a new group appearing and exerting claims on the power structure of the area.  Sadly but tellingly, the unification of the existing groups is often punctuated by the lynching of a newcomer.

Before LA has a scholarly bent and is easy to follow, though somewhat dry in presentation.  The presentation does maintain a useful distance in assessing the facts.  A scholarly mien is an asset when tracking a history so punctuated with racial violence.

Recommened.