Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, December 2019
Attention conservation notice: I have no taste, and no qualifications
to opine about histriography and/or evolutionary biology.
- Lee Goldberg, Lost Hills
- Mind-candy police procedural, in exurban Los Angeles.
- Edmund Russell, Evolutionary History: Uniting History and Biology to Understand Life on Earth
- A plea to historians to recognize interactions between humans and other
organisms as an evolutionary force affecting both sides, and therefore
as a factor in human history. Russell starts off with easy cases --- the
development of antibiotic resistance in bacteria and pesticide resistance in
insects; industrial melanism in moths --- before going on to things like
lactose tolerance in humans, the role of specific kinds of cotton in
the Industrial Revolution and their development by "Amerindian" breeders, and
the like. As these examples make clear, he's not very interested in human
evolution in the sense
of origins, though of
course he acknowledges it happened. He's also not very interested in applying
evolutionary ideas to the development of culture and institutions. What he
does care about seems entirely sound to me, but I am not a historian and
couldn't say whether he's right that it has been comparatively neglected in
(e.g.) environmental history.
- Disclaimer: Russell recently became a professor at CMU, in the same
department where my wife teaches. If I thought his book was bad, it might be
politic of me to keep quiet about it, but I honestly can't imagine I have
anything to gain by writing a review like this.
- Lilith Saintcrow, The Hedgewitch Queen and The Bandit King
- Mind-candy fantasy, loosely based on the French monarchy immediately before
absolutism. (Query: what would a fantasy novel inspired by
by Lineages
of the Absolutist State look like?)
- Elliott Kay, Last Man Out
- Mind-candy science fiction, latest in the series beginning with
Poor Man's War. Probably enjoyable independently, but a bunch
of developments are more satisfying if you've read all the previous volumes.
- R. Jean Stevenson, Tisiphone's Quest
- Mind-candy science-fantasy. It's very much mind candy (Sinister Masons IN
SPAAACE!), but it's very fun, and I'd absolutely try anything else Stevenson
writes. (Picked up on Walter Jon Williams's recommendation.)
- Jack Vance, Planet of Adventure [= City of the Chasch (1968), Servants of the Wankh (1969), The Dirdir (1969), The Pnume (1970)]
- Mind-candy: Vance's is in good form here, deploying his signature mix of
adventure story, high-flown and ironical rhetoric, somewhat sardonic
anthropological detachment, and romantic personal assertion in the face of
indifferent cosmic vastness. (Dated gender roles are dated.)
Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur;
Scientifiction and Fantastica;
Pleasures of Detection, Portraits of Crime;
Biology;
Writing for Antiquity
Posted at December 31, 2019 23:59 | permanent link