Premature Antifascism Redux

The DTRPG thing that happened a few weeks ago has since sunk beneath newer waves of controversy and internet turmoil and far-right activist chicanery, but I keep thinking about it. It touched a nerve with me, obviously, provoking me to bleat (or skeet, if you insist, you degenerates) more in one thread than I think I'd done in all my prior days on Bluesky. I've since lapsed back into relative social-media quietude, but I keep thinking about punching Nazis (and being told not to).

As I said then, I don't think it's crazy for small businesses to err on the side of caution in cases like this (I'm also sympathetic to itch.io in their recent mess; of course they could have communicated better and more promptly, but when somebody threatens essentially to cut off your revenue entirely, what can you do?). It is plausible, in these benighted times, that you might be brought up on terrorism charges, or God knows what else, for having committed (or abetted, or financially benefited from) “hate crimes against Republicans,” never mind that they aren't in any sense a protected class. Hate crimes against Christians, maybe. Against white people. Who knows!

At any rate, I stand by the rest of what I said too. DTRPG's defense of their actions was weaselly and dishonest, pretending that the preface to Rebel Scum was far more violent and inflammatory than it actually was. “We didn't want to get sued or prosecuted for hate crimes,” unfortunately, would be a valid position; these are bad times. But pretending that the whole thing was obviously dangerous and unhinged and beyond the pale sidestepped the real question. Another comprehensible response might be “We personally thought that the level of vitriol in this material was more than we were comfortable with.” Hard to argue with a personal opinion, right? And I'd rather have seen that answer than a dishonest one. I still wouldn't have liked it, though.

The crux of the issue, and the question they dodged: Is it time to take a stand against fascism, and if so, what does that look like? If not, when is the right time? Does it ever come? (The corollary, of course: Can you talk about it on the internet? Hopefully, yes, as long as you keep everything vague and hypothetical.)

* * *

It's easy for me, a semi-anonymous schmuck with a blog that 40 people read, to call for people to be ready to man the barricades. People whose livelihoods depend on selling stuff from their small-business storefront? I understand why they'd prefer to keep a lower profile. But I think there's a broader cultural phenomenon at play here, something that's not easy to grapple with.

If you’re anything like me (i.e., the kind of nerd who’s been fascinated by the Spanish Civil War since he was a child), you are surely familiar with the concept of “premature antifascism.” In case you're not, though: American leftists who had gone to Spain to fight for the democratically elected government between 1936 and 1939 got tagged with this label even as, during the Second World War, leftism and antifascism were partially rehabilitated. The Soviet Union was an American ally and we briefly thought—or asserted to the public, at any rate—that communism was A-OK after all. But we still didn't trust people who'd been sympathetic to communism even back when the mainstream of American opinion leaned more toward sympathy with fascism and Nazism.

Somebody whose principles or internationalist political allegiances are stronger than his conformism and willingness to just do whatever his government tells him, right or wrong, is a problem. Somebody willing to break the law, whether for the purposes of revolutionary terrorism or good old American nonviolent civil disobedience, is a problem.

To wit: If you could go back in time and kill Hitler, when would be appropriate? We have the old “would you kill baby Hitler?” conundrum, of course. Nobody could believe how dangerous this baby would become; you'd be seen as a monster. But forget baby Hitler. What's the youngest adult Hitler you could step out of a time machine to bump off and not be tarred as a cold-blooded killer and commie terrorist? In 1940, sure, you'd be a hero—if you could get away alive. Even just two years earlier, though, in 1938, you'd be a much more ambivalent figure. Maybe it was for the best, people would say, but assassination? How uncivilized. What about 1933? What about 1928? You'd hang, of course.

We can't really talk about political violence, of course. I'm not going to propose that anybody break the law, and I'm certainly not going to propose that anybody do harm to anybody else. But we can at least talk about how we find ourselves in a cultural moment that demands ideological purity in art, but excuses the gravest moral cowardice in our real-world politics. And I don't mean the way we self-interestedly tiptoe around these real-world questions (and delist shit we might get sued or deplatformed over). I mean the way our ostensible opposition party dismisses everything the government does as a “distraction” while taking no action, the way our supposedly liberal media flatter our would-be dictator and downplay the enormity of his actions.

Meanwhile, art that asks people to sympathize with or identify with people who are morally compromised or who have done, or are planning to do, terrible things has never been met with more discomfort, even outright hostility. Each of us wants to believe that we're pure and good and uncompromised and would never countenance doing awful things nor admit any kind of ambivalence about the cause of righteousness. And yet here we are, watching the country sink into Nazism, and our resistance is haphazard, bewildered, ambivalent. Many people—many of the same people who want our movies, our games, our literature to outline a black and white morality, to present only flawless, pure-of-heart protagonists, are also dismayed that fascist politicians should be harassed in public or that awards shows taking blood money from war criminals should meet mild, measured censure.

“Games about punching Nazis are good, but when you start to talk about punching Nazis in real life, you've crossed a line” is a morally deranged position. In make believe, we should be comfortable trying on all sorts of positions (we murder and steal on the regular, in TTRPGs). It's in real life that we need to draw a line.

Hell Is Other People's Misconceptions

New Delhi from space, photographed by the ESA's Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellites

Spend enough time on Reddit, and you inevitably learn odd things about other people. I've learned, for example, that if you put an unlabeled map of a fictional world (or even the real one) in front of a bunch of nerds and ask them where civilizations should develop and where large cities should appear, the vast majority of them will point to the mouths or deltas of that map's largest rivers. Which is wrong! And who can stand to see other people be wrong on the internet? Not I.

* * * 

You can get pretty far into the weeds trying to define “civilization” and pinpoint the places where it independently arose, but it's not much of an oversimplification to say that it happened, at least on our planet, in river valleys. In valleys along the Mexican Gulf Coast, the Olmec civilization emerged; in valleys along the Peruvian Pacific Coast, the Caral–Supe civilization. (These were actually pretty close to the sea, with cities like La Venta and Caral being within a day's walking distance of the shore, but still: river valleys.) The Egyptian civilization, famously, emerged in the Nile valley, far upstream of the river's enormous delta. Where exactly civilization first appeared in the Fertile Crescent is kind of an open question, but all of the likely sites are, you guessed it, river valleys, and of course the famous city-states that went on to invent writing, math, the wheel, and boots appeared along the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates. Likewise, the exact spot where civilization first appeared in China, insofar as you can identity such a thing exactly (you can't), is disputed, but basically: the Yellow, Yangtze, and Liao valleys. And the Indus Valley Civilization? It's right there in the name.

So, okay, they form upstream, but then they move down to the shore, right? Well, yes and no. Mostly no, at least until modern times. River mouths were generally unsuitable for ancient cities both because of a lack of fresh water (estuarine water is brackish) and because river sedimentation caused floods and led the watercourse to shift regularly, which could drown a settlement or leave it stranded inland. Dredging, canal-building, and aqueducts (among other technologies) made it feasible to put large cities near river mouths, but even then, a city like Alexandria is actually well to the west of the river. (And of course Alexandria was a classical-era Greek city, not an ancient Egyptian one; every major ancient Egyptian city was built above the Nile delta, and even Canopus and Heracleion, the much smaller predecessors of Alexandria, were just west of the delta.)

Many major ancient port cities, like Carthage and Constantinople, weren't built anywhere near major rivers, but rather on peninsulas that controlled sea lanes; they depended on huge rainwater cisterns and aqueducts to sustain them. Few major Mesoamerican cities were built on the coast, and fewer still along large rivers. The one urban civilization in North America that built along a major river, the Mississippians, did so 1,000 kilometers from the ocean.

Even today, most of the world's largest cities are not coastal. Delhi, São Paulo, Mexico City, Chengdu, Cairo, Beijing, Dhaka, Tehran, Kolkata, Guangzhou, Moscow, Paris, Seoul, London, Kuala Lumpur, Johannesburg, Kinshasa, Wuhan, Riyadh: all inland. Most of the major coastal cities today have colonial-era foundations (Karachi, New York, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Chennai, Mumbai, Lagos, Manila, etc.) or are otherwise recent developments (Tianjin, Shenzhen, Saint Petersburg, Dubai, etc.).

There are some interesting exceptions (most big Japanese cities, and particularly Osaka, which has been a major port for almost 2,000 years; Jakarta; Shanghai and Hangzhou; and of course Istanbul), but they are unusual. Even with centuries of colonialism and globalized trade having driven the development of huge ports on every populated seaboard, and in spite of a colossal population boom in the last hundred years, the vast majority of the world's population still lives inland; fewer than 30% of us live within 50 kilometers of the coast.

What Are the Odds?

It's hard to see the world through the eyes of somebody who doesn't know what you know, especially when it comes to really fundamental knowledge about the way the world works. I managed to make it 30-something years into life without taking a chemistry class. When I finally did, as part of a quixotic premedical postbaccalaureate zig on the long and winding road of my life, take a bunch of chemistry classes, the new knowledge irreversibly changed the world for me. I see the chemistry of things everywhere now, all the time: the reactions in soft drinks, the ideal gas law at work, the molecular structures of things like caffeine and perfluorooctanoic acid. Having gone decades without this understanding, though, I can sometimes, with a little effort, turn my knowledge off and get access to a mindset that sees more inscrutable mystery in the makeup of things.

I cannot do that with probability. Is it the fact that I took AP Statistics at the formative age of 16? Or just a lifetime of playing with dice?

* * *

Anybody who's spent 15 minutes talking history with me (or letting me talk history at them) has probably heard me gripe about what a hard time people have seeing the past as having been anything other than inevitable. Some people do believe this literally, of course—that everything was foreordained by God—but many others start with at least a fuzzy understanding of contingency. You look at the present moment, you see the possibilities arrayed before us, and you understand that people living in the past also faced uncertainty and choices that had to be made with incomplete information. Oddly, though, many people then begin constructing an edifice of historical argument that denies or downplays that quality of contingency. Whatever did happen, even if it wasn't preordained and literally inevitable, must have been likely to happen, right? Very likely, in fact, given that it happened and the alternatives didn't. People look for factors that explain why what did happen was likely; they do not look for factors that support a contrary argument—that something that didn't happen actually was likely, or that what did happen was, before its realization, improbable.

We get a lot of post facto justifications for things that were extremely improbable. Ask the average reasonably well educated person why the German invasions of Poland and France were so successful, and you'll probably get some species of Nazi mythmaking. It was the genius of the German Blitzkrieg strategy. It was their highly advanced weapons. (Or, in a specious latter-day variant, it was that they were all hopped up on meth.) It was their iron will to power, whereas the Poles and French were unmotivated and demoralized. 

These things aren't all false—German doctrine was better suited to modern combined-arms warfare than Franco-Polish doctrine was, and that made a big difference—but several of them aren't as true, or as significant, as people assume. German armor was inferior to the best French and Polish designs. Many of their aircraft were obsolete. They had few halftracks and trucks; the vast majority of the Wehrmacht infantry and artillery moved on foot or was dragged by pack animals (this remained the case throughout the war). They had neither a major technological advantage nor an overwhelming numerical advantage over Poland, to say nothing of France; the decisive factors in the invasion of Poland were the fact that the French did not attack the weakly defended German west and that the Soviet Union did, after some delay (waiting to see what France would do), invade Poland from the east. The decisive factor in the subsequent invasion of France was either German boldness or luck, depending on how you want to look at it—they gambled on a high-risk, high-reward strategy and happened to line it up very well with Allied weakness.

The German planners, in 1939, were pessimistic. (Consider the series of false-flag attacks that German agents and German soldiers in Polish uniform carried out in the run-up to the invasion of Poland. People today often sneer at these efforts—who in the international community was going to be convinced by these brazen fabrications? But the audience wasn't France or Britain or the Soviet Union. It was the German public, who were extremely unenthusiastic about the prospect of war.) The world, in 1940, was astounded that France fell so quickly. Today, everybody just assumes it was inevitable. Nazi super science and übermenschlich tenacity carried the day!

* * *

I've realized lately that this blindness to the possibility that low-probability events can (and, in the big scheme of things, often do) defy the odds runs forward as well as backward. People don't just look at the past and assume that whatever did happen must have been most likely; they look at the future and assume that whatever they're told is the most likely outcome will happen. Models that said that Hillary Clinton had a 90% chance to win the 2016 election must have been wrong, because if she had actually had a 90% chance, she would have won: 90% is a very large percentage.

And it doesn't just have to be that large; 70% seems to be enough now to make people think something is essentially inevitable in political polling. Watching people respond to shifting recession forecasts in recent months has been bewildering; people (media outlets, even) keep reading a move from “45% chance of recession” to “55% chance of recession” as “recession now likely," as though 50% is some magical threshold. It's like a weird mutation of the old joke that everything has 50/50 odds—either it happens or it doesn't. Now everything is either certain to happen or certain not to.

My girlfriend works in public health, and was involved not long ago in a conversation about risk that baffled her. The doctors and public health experts in the room were arguing that a 0.1% chance of infecting each patient with a potentially deadly disease was unacceptable. Given a few years, this team will see hundreds, maybe more than a thousand patients, and one or two of those people will probably contract this infection, something they can't have on their conscience. But to others in the room, this seemed absurdly overcautious. A 99.9% chance of being safe? That's basically a guarantee. And if each individual patient is perfectly safe, what could possibly go wrong even in a large population, across a long stretch of time?

* * *

All of which is to say…I don't know, that maybe people ought to play with dice more? There's something about the physicality of them (even digital simulacra of them) that breathes life and menace (or hope) into low-probability outcomes. When percentages show up in videogames, they always seem to lead to frustration. I had a 95% chance of making that shot in XCOM—how could my dude have missed? It was supposed to be a guaranteed hit! But nobody rolling an actual d20 is ever blindsided when a natural 1 turns up. You're always holding your breath, watching it skitter across the tabletop, bracing for the worst or hoping for the best. Nothing is inevitable.

The Ends of the World

We're all freaking out, right? We're all coping in different ways. One of my least productive, most unhealthy ways of coping has been to trawl through some of the darker corners of Reddit not actually looking for concrete advice about how to arm myself or how to prepare myself for disaster but just sort of…window shopping for unhinged behavior. Determining that if I did belatedly decide to become a gun guy, I would get a Mini-14. That if I did decide to gird my proverbial loins for the crumbling of American society, I should have two months' worth of rice, beans, and water down in the basement.

That's right: I've been on r/preppers. And you know what? They have lots of good advice! Good advice about first aid training and water purification techniques and home gardening and lots of other stuff I intend to learn about. But you know what else they have? Well, yes, guns. Way too many guns. But also jargon! Jargon for days. More initialisms than the DoD. And there are several initialisms they particularly love that communicate something dark about the prepper mindset (and maybe about the American mindset in general): SHTF, WROL, TEOTWAWKI. These are when the Shit Hits The Fan, when we are living Without Rule Of Law, and The End Of The World As We Know It.

SHTF is a bit vague, kind of an all-purpose label for “things get bad enough that I actually get to put my preps into action.” Not so sinister on its own, but in light of what it turns out many preppers' strongest fixations are, the yearning for that moment starts to feel ugly. WROL is probably the most telling one, because “rule of law” actually means something, and it's not this—a society without rule of law is something we've struggled with, to a greater or lesser degree, for pretty much the entirety of civilization, or at least the part of civilizational history that actually aspired to establishing rule of law. We're definitely living without rule of law in the United States right now, in a particularly significant and dangerous way. But to the gun fetishists, the survivalists, the far-right fantasists, a state “without rule of law” is, in short, one where they get to shoot Black people without consequences. Or, excuse me, rioters and looters. Bandits. Criminals breaking into their houses.

It's an imagined emergency scenario that blends the fictions of postapocalyptic games and zombie shows with the quasi-history of the American frontier and decades of deranged right-wing news coverage. It's not something that has ever really happened in human history; periods of true anarchy tend to be extraordinarily short, because there's always some wannabe government (a barbarian tribe, a rebel general, a gang, a guerilla army, a crime syndicate, a militia) ready and willing to step in, for better or (usually) worse, when the preceding government recedes or collapses. Looting is something soldiers do in wartime; it's not something neighbors do to each other in emergencies, even prolonged ones. The preoccupation with “looters” and “scavengers” is closely tied to news coverage of American riots and natural disasters (as well as films, shows, and games that have reproduced the concept, often in even more lurid form), and that news coverage is propaganda. People steal the occasional TV, sure, but they mostly take essentials—food, sanitary products—that they have no other access to. And they take them from abandoned stores, not from each other, not from family homes.

But we have a lot of people yearning for this fantasy scenario, itching for a lawless state in which they can become the law (and gun down dangerous dark-skinned criminals). They keep dreaming even as actual rule of law dissolves and the Republic with it.

It's TEOTWAWKI that really gets me. Child of the 90s that I am, the phrase never fails to conjure up for me the REM classic “It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine),” and specifically the Roland Emmerich classic Independence Day. Alien invasion! The White House blowing up! Mass destruction across the world, governments decapitated, military forces obliterated. This is essentially what a lot of preppers seem to have in mind as TEOTWAWKI—maybe not the literal aliens, but some cataclysm that obliterates all governments and most of the world's population. Global nuclear war, or in recent years an impossibly virulent and deadly pandemic. A vanishingly improbable event that, if it does come, they will almost certainly not survive.

Meanwhile, the world is ending every day, in ways large and small. The change is usually gradual enough not to feel jarring, but the world never stops turning. Think back to just 10 years ago. How inconceivable did a Donald Trump regime and all its attendant absurdities and humiliations seem? Think back 25 years. Could anybody imagine the erosion of American hegemony, the failure of the new international order, imperialist or revanchist states invading each other across the globe in naked attempts to impose puppet regimes or seize territory? Go back 40 years. Forget the fall of the Soviet Union; who could have imagined the internet? Smartphones? Machine translation?

There's some worldbuilding advice here, something to keep in mind when putting a TTRPG campaign setting together: There is no such thing as global collapse. The Black Death didn't do it; nothing short of complete annihilation will. We will not reexperience the Dark Ages and see worldwide technological regression. (The supposed Dark Ages weren't really all that dark, anyway, even in Europe.) There's arguably not even such a thing as regional or civilizational collapse. The histories we have of collapse, of decline and fall, of civilizational ruin, are nearly all elite narratives. If you were a Roman patrician in 476 CE, the Ostrogothic conquest of the city surely felt like the end of the world. If you were a plebe, or a slave, you could have been forgiven for hardly having noticed. Local government didn't change. The Senate didn't go away. Everybody still spoke Latin. No perceptible catastrophe occurred. The world kept turning. It always does. Things change, and often for the worse, but often in dreary, grinding, unspectacular ways.

There are lulls in history, too, of course, but they're shorter and more contingent and more localized than you might think. The European Middle Ages, particularly in Western Europe—the basis for the traditional fantasy settings that underpin so much of the TTRPG world—seem fairly socially and technologically static to many contemporary observers, but at the same time than England and France were slogging through their Hundred Years' War and building the zillion frontier castles that dot our imagined fantasy landscapes, enormous changes were taking place as nearby as Iberia, and of course French and English people were sailing off to the Crusades (and extraordinary things were happening in the Americas, and in Africa, and in Asia).

And there are counterparts to even the relative lulls. “There are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen,” as Lenin actually probably never did say. The shit is mostly definitely hitting the fan now. None of us were prepared.

States of Exception

Detail of Frontal Self-Portrait by Käthe Kollwitz

I was an odd little kid, obsessed with the Second World War, and I grew up into a college student still preoccupied with it, with the ideologies that animated it, with its attendant disasters and atrocities, and with the era in general. I wrote an undergraduate thesis about Zionism and Black nationalism. I read and thought a lot about the Holocaust.

Consequently, I learned, from a too-early age, that Americans do not want to think deeply, or much at all, about how and why these things, particularly the Holocaust, happened. The narrative I encountered, over and over, was that Hitler was a singularly bad man and the Germans a singularly, peculiarly obedient people (this was a great vein of humor for Boomers to mine in the 80s and 90s). It could probably only happen there, and with him at the helm. And it definitely could not happen here, because we Americans love liberty too much. We’re too independent minded, too skeptical of authority, too rebellious, too big-hearted.

This thinking persists today, decades later. American exceptionalism has become (if it was ever otherwise) tautological. We can’t be authoritarian, because we’re free. We can’t be undemocratic—we invented democracy! Freedom and democracy inhere in our land, in us, in our sacred laws. The first thing Hitler did, American conservatives darkly intimate, was take away German citizens’ guns. And they, the obedient sheep, let it happen! Not me, they say. No Gestapo man would come and take my guns away. They wouldn’t take my neighbors—I wouldn’t let them. They’d never take over in the first place. I wouldn’t allow it. We wouldn’t. At the first whiff of totalitarianism, we’d buck them.

In point of fact, of course, all of this is untrue, starting with the “Hitler took away their guns” thing. Weimar Germany had very strict firearms regulations; when the Nazis took power, they did tighten these restrictions even further for Jewish citizens and other enemies, but they loosened them for Party members. As the man said, “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”

It should go without saying, but it doesn’t: The vast majority of Germans did not experience the Nazi regime as whatever you think of when you hear the word “totalitarian.” The boot did not stamp on all faces equally—it stamped on very few at all, in the big scheme of things, at least until the war started. 1930s Germany wasn’t 1984; it wasn’t even the postwar German Democratic Republic (i.e., East Germany).

Unlike the Stasi, the Gestapo did not have the manpower, the resources, or the inclination to establish a surveillance state. They did not spy on “regular people” (i.e., apolitical or pro-Nazi ethnic Germans). If you belonged to the compliant majority, they did not take your guns, or read your mail, or pay any attention to you at all (unless perhaps you were denounced by a neighbor or a jealous spouse, and even then they paid a lazy, indifferent kind of attention).

Even if you weren’t particularly compliant, they left you alone as long as you kept your dissent to yourself. The state was willing to accommodate anybody who didn’t belong to one of the minorities it sought to destroy and who did not actively obstruct its efforts. Many people—many good people, including many beloved artists and writers (like Käthe Kollwitz above)—went into “internal exile.” They retreated to the countryside or walled themselves up in their apartments and disengaged from Nazi society. Nazi society condemned them and denigrated them but left them alone, by and large.

For the vast majority of Germans, even most of those passive dissidents in internal exile, there was no reign of terror (not until the bombs starting falling, anyway). The Gestapo weren’t a sinister death squad—they were just federal police. Raids happened, people were snatched from the streets or shot in their homes, but so what? That’s what happens to criminals, terrorists, vagrants, illegal immigrants, and other unreliable elements. Whether you approve or not, it’s happening somewhere else, to someone else, and it doesn’t seem exceptional or extraordinary. You might not agree with all the new laws, but they are the laws now, and this is just law enforcement at work.

All of which is to say: Not only could it happen here, it already has. Totalitarianism isn’t equally perceptible to all. The Jim Crow South was totalitarian for Black people; for many white people, it was idyllic, practically utopian. Contemporary American life—even our present idyll under Biden, before the storm—is authoritarian in the extreme for undocumented immigrants, people subject to carceral control, the very poor, and many others. And it will get much worse, long before there are soldiers on your street or bombs falling on your roof.

Bookpost #2

Something else I’m way behind on: cataloging and reviewing my reading this year. Here’s a partial account.

Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire (Jonathan Katz)

I knew some parts of Smedley Butler’s biography (like the Business Plot, of course), and I knew of the U.S. role in the establishment of banana republics favorable to business all over Latin America (thanks in no small part to Stephen Kinzer’s excellent The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of the American Empire), but I never knew the extent to which Butler was the Forrest Gump of imperial warmongering. Some of these episodes—the Marines holding the Haitian legislature at gunpoint and forcing them to essentially sign away their sovereignty; Congress engineering Panama’s secession from Colombia at the behest of American banks—are so sordid and cartoonishly evil you’d scarcely believe them in fiction.

The Other Wind (Ursula Le Guin)

Like some of the short stories, I’d never read this one before. I think I was at just the wrong age for it when it was published—too old for kids’ fantasy books, in my teenage mind—and then I simply didn’t pick it up as an adult, for whatever reason. I wonder what I would have made it at age 17 or 25; now, on the heels of rereading The Farthest Shore and Tehanu, I found it surprisingly hopeful and youthful in spirit. A beautiful conclusion to the Earthsea saga.

Pattern Recognition (William Gibson)

For a guy who loves Neuromancer as much as I do, I really haven’t read enough of Gibson’s later work. Or maybe I have, because I didn’t love this. Aseptic and lifeless, clever but purposeless. Not nearly as prescient as it was, I gather, hailed for being at the time.

They Will Dream in the Garden (Gabriela Damien Miravete)

I asked a friend for some obscure SFF in translation for a book swap, and she delivered. Short stories, some science fiction, some fantasy, some horror, some hybrids, almost all excellent. “The Synchrony of Touch” and “The End of the Party” were my particular favorites, the former for its elegiac strangeness, the latter for making a hoary old theme fresh and new.

Bliss Montage (Ling Ma)

Another gift from a friend, more genre-bending short stories, another big hit. Here, the hilarious and the surreal keep melting, or crashing, into the deadly serious and the all too real. Lots of troubled, or troubling, relationships; domestic violence features in several stories (including the excellent, and very funny, “Los Angeles”) and haunts others. “Office Hours” is particularly good, a challenging, uneasy, fascinating blend of the cozy and the sinister.

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023 (eds. R.F. Kuang and John Joseph Adams)

Having read and enjoyed a bunch of short genre fiction, I thought back on my childhood love and diligent collecting of Gardner Dozois’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction anthologies. I knew Dozois had passed away and the series had ended with him, but had anybody picked up the baton and started something similar? Hey, somebody had, and R.F. Kuang had guest-edited the most recent edition!

It was a bit of a disappointment. Lots of amateurish work, lots of pieces that strain the definition of “short fiction” (and mostly not in fun, experimental ways), lots of shallow treatment of hot-button topics. There are some winners, though; Isabel Kim’s “Termination Stories for the Cyberpunk Dystopia Protagonist” is the absolute hands-down standout. Alix Harrow’s formally (if not thematically) inventive “The Six Deaths of the Saint,” Chris Willrich’s cute Star Trek satire “The Odyssey Problem,” and Maria Dong’s strange, unsettling “In the Beginning of Me, I Was a Bird” are also good.

Zhou Enlai: The Last Perfect Revolutionary (Gao Wenqian)

Imagine how nonplussed everybody in my life was when I spent a couple weeks after finishing this being like, “Okay, I know you already think Mao was bad, but what if I told you he was even worse?!” Zhou’s biographer intended this as a corrective to decades of official hagiography, showing us that the man was, after all, only human, and flawed like all of us. He was human, of course, and he was flawed, but I’m now convinced he was one of the most extraordinary human beings of his time, and very much worthy of praise (if not sainthood).

The Viking Heart: How Scandinavians Conquered the World (Arthur Herman)

You ever read something that covers a bunch of subject matter you don’t know very well, and then gets to a subject you do know quite well, hundreds of pages in, and you realize, wow, this author knows less about this stuff than I do, and he’s made a bunch of elementary mistakes, and what if the whole book has been like this and I just didn’t know? Yeah. Also, the titular thesis is a bit fashy (in spite of Herman’s protests-too-much efforts to distance himself from the far right) and the title itself gets laboriously worked into the text about nine hundred times, which is just annoying.

System Collapse (Martha Wells)

All the Murderbot books are starting to blur together in my memory a bit, which I think is 50% the extremely generic titles and 50% that, well, there’s a bit of a formula at work here. Still enjoyable!

Prophet Song (Paul Lynch)

Gorgeous, harrowing, haunting. Exemplary evidence for the argument that the novel is a powerful, perhaps unique medium for generating true empathy, for conjuring up other lives, other people, letting you walk in their shoes, experience their fears and sorrows, and bring something of them back to your own life—a memory, a feeling, some moral clarity and guidance, a light in the dark. Right up there with Kairos. The best books I’ve read all year.

Station Eleven (Emily St. John Mandel

I read this immediately after Prophet Song, which was a tough act to follow. Had I jumped into it after, say, Murderbot, would the prose have seemed so pedestrian, the characters so thinly developed and undifferentiated, the setting such a lazy pastiche of scenes from filmic zombie apocalypses? Maybe, maybe not. But I still don’t think I’d have loved it. This is very much a conservative, even reactionary, perspective on civilization and crisis—makes the case that some fragile membrane (a thin blue line, one might say) is all that protects us from savage violence, from people turning feral, from the whole human species unlearning centuries of science and engineering. Wrong! All wrong! People aren't feral monsters in waiting. Pandemics don’t work this way (as we all know now thanks to COVID). And you can make penicillin in your kitchen!

Bookpost #1

Charles Vess's cover art for the Earthsea omnibus

 

Here's what I've read so far in 2024:

Beyond the Wall: A History of East Germany (Katja Hoyer)

Incomplete but fascinating and much-needed. It has caused controversy in Germany because Germany remains deeply in the thrall of the far right and is forever trying to draw a false equivalence between the Nazi era and the communist era; many Germans believe that the one was no worse than the other, and thus that even faint and qualified praise of the German Democratic Republic is tantamount to Holocaust denial. (Never mind that the German right's tireless effort to memorialize “the forgotten victims of Soviet tyranny” and their whining whenever the Holocaust and the other crimes of the Nazi era are discussed without the crimes of the GDR placed alongside them represent a soft form of Holocaust denial. Even the most exaggerated, partisan estimates of the GDR's death toll put it at a few thousand, while neutral estimates are in the high hundreds. The Nazis killed twelve million or more.) Was the GDR perfect, or even good? No. It was truly undemocratic, and the Stasi were a decades-long waking nightmare. But it's incredibly depressing to see what the state accomplished in terms of women's rights in particular and how far even the most progressive corners of the developed world are from achieving the same, more than 40 years on. Hard to even see it as a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater—more like drowning the baby in the tub.

Same Bed Different Dreams (Ed Park)

Enthralling. The sort of book that fills me with envy and admiration: How did you make something this big, this ambitious, and this complex work this well?

Shark Heart (Emily Habeck)

In this novel, people sometimes turn into animals. This seems to be a metaphor for mental illness, degenerative illness, cancer, or some combination of those things; it's not very consistent. The characters treat the transformations not as metaphor but as long-established scientific fact, and yet the world they live in is just our world, with no accommodations for the transformed or any decent idea of what to do with them. If I were mean-spirited, I'd make a big fuss online about how this book's message is essentially “Disabled people should be cast into the wilderness to die or make their own society.” I'm not, and I don't think the author intended that kind of harm, but it's hard to read it any other way. Even apart from the simultaneous ugliness and unseriousness of the central conceit, there's not much to like here: one-dimensional characters, a raft of annoying stylistic gimmicks, Rupi Kaur platitudes.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog (Muriel Barbery)

Charming, delightfully French, uncomfortably misanthropic, politically dodgy, ultimately let down by a hackneyed ending.

The Scythian Empire: Central Eurasia and the Birth of the Classical Age from Persia to China (Christopher Beckwith)

Spends too much time and energy on its weakest evidence (make-believe linguistics) and most far-fetched claims (including the titular one, that there was a unified Scythian Empire stretching from Eastern Europe to Northern China). Some pretty cool and entirely plausible ideas about early Iranian history, though. Fun fodder for fantasy and alternate-history worldbuilding.

Persuasion (Jane Austen)

Every few years, I reread something by Austen and am shocked all over again at what a catty bitch she was. This one lays on the classism and fatphobia pretty thick and is also halfway to being a Royal Navy recruitment pamphlet. Still hilarious and 100% charming, of course.

Counterweight (Djuna)

Great big heaps of dry exposition interspersed with frenetic, sometimes disjointed action, and yet pretty enjoyable. Characters don't get a lot of room to breathe and grow but are nevertheless well drawn and distinct. Packed with cool cyberpunk ideas and images. Better than the sum of its parts.

Kairos (Jenny Erpenbeck)

If this doesn't end up being the best book I read in 2024, I will eat my hat (and praise the heavens for a year of superlative reading). Astounding. Heartbreaking. Puts everything else I've read in recent months in its shadow. It's rare to read a personal, probably autobiographical narrative this moving, and it's rare to read political allegory this compelling, but to unite the two so seamlessly, so that each operates perfectly without in any way interfering with or diminishing the other, is incredible. I read it in English translation and am looking forward to muddling my way through it again in German.

Berlin (Bea Setton)

One of those books that you think you're not really enjoying until you finish it, at which point you find that it sticks with you and that, well, yeah, you didn't enjoy it, but the ways in which it made you uncomfortable or exasperated or angry were strengths, not weaknesses.

The Siege of Krishnapur (J.G. Farrell)

A novel about a bunch of East India Company colonists starving, dying of cholera, and massacring nameless hundreds or thousands of Indians has no right to be this funny. Female characters are a bit thin, but some of the men are astonishingly fully realized. As profound and moving as it is hilarious.

The History of Love (Nicole Krauss)

Is it nakedly emotionally manipulative? Yes. Did I cry? Also yes.

Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine (Uché Blackstock)

I would have organized it differently, putting more of the hard facts of unequal treatment and outcomes for Black Americans front and center and then easing into the memoir elements…but I might not be the primary audience, working where I do and knowing what I do (although I am certainly part of the explicitly defined target audience, in more than one category). The facts remain harrowing, and although I knew a good deal about the subject already, I learned a good deal more.

The Laughter (Sonora Jha)

More than most books these days, it's clear that this one got literally no attention from any editor whatsoever. Unbearably sloppy, and I almost gave up in the first 20 or 30 pages. (And then again on page 74, where I encountered the single worst sentence I've read in print in years: “They have been to my home twice before in the past two days since the incident.”) By page 250, I was glad I hadn't—the narrator is a bit of a sock puppet, but some of the secondary characters are very well drawn and the themes are interesting—but by the end, I'd changed my mind again. The narrative's straining to remain believable and the narrator's straining to remain a coherent, plausible human being finally give out under the weight of some thuddingly didactic ripped-from-the-headlines twists. The author's ambition far exceeds her grasp here; I admire her chutzpah, but if you want to create a narrator in the mold of Humbert Humbert—and you make the comparison yourself, in the text!—your prose had better be flawless. I don't even like Nabokov (a self-obsessed, misanthropic, arch-misogynist reactionary who never had anything interesting to say), but credit where it's due: He was one of the greatest prose stylists we've ever had. Come for the king, better not miss, etc.

Tales from Earthsea (Ursula Le Guin)

Tales from the GOAT. Fantasy really doesn't get any better than this. “The Bones of the Earth” is particularly beautiful.

 

Till the Rusting of Guns

"Great blocks of manstone, built by people for people"

 

The Austrian Civil War ended 90 years ago today. I think really it was over in just a day or two; most of the fighting was in Vienna, where the Schutzbund (the leftist militia) held out for not much longer than 24 hours. Stephen Vincent Benét wrote an indelible poem about it, which I think about probably once a week most weeks, but more often in February.

"Red Vienna," the era of democratic socialist government which ended with the Civil War, was one of the great socialist success stories of the 20th century and left a mark on the city that even four years of fascist rule followed by seven years under the Nazis (and several under a rain of Allied bombs) couldn't erase, especially in the form of an astoundingly ambitious social-housing program. Today, Vienna is one of the most affordable, livable cities in the developed world in part thanks to that legacy: a majority of the population lives either in public housing in or government-subsidized cooperatives.

The Wild West Is Boring

As many folks have observed over the years (e.g., James Maliszewski back in 2008, Paul Hughes at greater length in 2016), Westerns were a huge influence on D&D (and Traveller), and you can see the imprint of the Western mythos on many subsequent TTRPGs. Game designers love their open ranges and noble savages, even in genres that wouldn't seem likely to accommodate them—think of Shadowrun's Great Ghost Dance and Cyberpunk's Nomads. Lots of non-Western RPG settings include quasi-Western gimmicks or locations (wandslingers in D&D's Eberron, the Savage Coast in…D&D's Mystara). There have been many attempts to create Western systems and settings over the years, too, some played straight, others with Lovecraftian or other horror and fantasy elements woven in.

Few of them really stuck, and none in a big way. Some of it's probably timing; the Western's star was on the wane all through the early decades of TTRPGs. Boot Hill, the direct follow-up to OD&D, came out in 1975, already past the peak of the Western zeitgeist (a lot of the long-running Western TV shows, like Gunsmoke and Bonanza, ended in the early and mid '70s; the spaghetti Western craze was still going, but was starting to peter out). Still, Boot Hill's heyday coincided with How the West Was Won; the '80s had the novels of Larry McMurtry and Cormac McCarthy; the '90s had a small Western film revival (and Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman); the 2000s had Deadwood; and the list goes on. The Western never went away. It just never caught on in RPGs.

Why not? You already know my thesis: The Wild West is boring (as an RPG setting).

* * *

When I say “the Wild West,” I mean the post facto American (but also German, Italian, Spanish…) vision of “the Old West,” the setting of nearly all of the movies, TV shows, comics, and books that Gygax and company grew up with, and the setting we all reflexively think of when we hear “Wild West.” Cowboys and Indians, sheriffs and outlaws, six-shooters, chaps, big rowel spurs, ten-gallon hats, saloons, cattle drives—and, narrowly, the time period from the end of the American Civil War to the end of the 19th century (or perhaps to the First World War, depending on whom you ask and where exactly you're talking about).

Why's it boring? Because total hegemony by the United States is a fait accompli. For everybody else, the wicked and the just alike, in every sense—historically, culturally, geopolitically—it's all over but the crying. The Confederacy is gone. The Mormon Rebellion is over. Mexico has been conquered. The border with Canada is settled. Russia is out of the picture. France is out of the picture. Native American resistance continues in fits and spurts, but it is doomed to fail; the war has been lost for decades, if not a century or longer. On an individual level, of course, there's plenty of potential for conflict and adventure (up to a point), but at a societal level, there is no real conflict and no potential for change. It's a lifeless world.

(As a side note, it's also not merely a racist fantasy, but an unsporting racist fantasy, one in which the colonizers can't possibly fail. Compare the also fantastically racist South Asian setting of Rupyard Kipling stories like “The Man Who Would Be King”: You've still got all sorts of fucked-up white supremacist assumptions baked in, but instead of the patronizingly mournful idea of the Vanishing Indian—history's sun setting on a picturesque but irrelevant race doomed to extinction—there's a sense of the indigenous people as an indivisible part of an inimical, unconquerable landscape. Better? No. More respectful? Kind of a win some, lose some situation. But a more gameable assumption about the setting! To Zedeck Siew's excellent Twitter observations about decolonizing D&D, handily collected here by W. F. Smith at Prismatic Wasteland, I add a corollary: We should not avert our eyes from D&D's colonialism, but, in the spirit of those colonizers par excellence and all-around degenerates the British upper class, we should, by Jove, be sportsmanlike about it. Or seem to be.)

The West is good at beginnings, offering all kinds of exciting reasons for characters to head for the frontier, many of which come with baked-in vendettas, rivalries, nemeses, and other animosities. The ex-slave trying to make the most of her hard-won freedom, looking over her shoulder for Confederate sympathizers. The Union veteran unable to readjust to civilian life, jumping at every sound and loathing Johnny Reb. The young woman fleeing an unhappy engagement, or an unhappy marriage, or a scandal of some kind. The disgraced physician (or lawyer, or journalist) who wants to start over with a blank slate. The dilettante son of a rich family, itching to escape the constraints of upper-class urban life.

But, especially in campaign play, especially if experience brings even a modest increase in power, especially with even a hint of domain or faction play, it all falls apart. You win a gunfight or two, you find some buried Spanish gold, you rout the Klan…now what? Conversely, you're an outlaw: You rob banks, hold up stagecoaches, derail a train. Your infamy grows. The Marshals come for you. Now where? There are no rival factions to play against each other, no rebel prince to pledge your loyalty to; there isn't even a frontier, really. There's just the inexorable grind of Manifest Destiny. It's manifested California and Oregon already, and Washington is just around the corner (if it hasn't happened yet). The “frontier” is a shrinking patch of wilderness, a shrinking population of hopeless people hemmed in and subject to the final spasms of a slow-motion genocide. It would be unappealing even if it weren't so sordid (and don't get me wrong; it's absolutely morally repugnant). There's no uncertainty. No possibility.

* * *

Above, I said that “few” Western settings and systems stuck. I see people praise Aces & Eights and Dogs in the Vineyard once in a while, but it seems to me that the big one, the closest to an enduring success, has been Deadlands (besides, it's the only one I've read; I ended up with a copy of Deadlands Reloaded thanks to some bygone PDF bundle). I don't like the setting, to be clear up front—neither before nor after the retcon of the Confederacy—but I do think it understands the assignment, as they say, and that understanding has been part of its success.

The decision to use a supernatural deus ex machina to shake up the American balance of power in the late 19th century probably wouldn't do it for me even if it weren't aided and abetted (even post-retcon) by Lost Cause propaganda. It's not just racist; it's goofy and, even with its “a wizard did it” handwaving, implausible. But putting independent Mormons, multiple Native American polities, Chinese pirate lords, a Haitian robber baron, and some kind of zombie California in there? That's the right idea, even if the setting can't make the weakness of the United States make sense and weighs everything down with a heavy and very Manifestly Destined metaplot.

"How would you do it, Michael?" I don't hear you ask. But obviously I've been thinking about it, so: Just stop clinging to the post–Civil War American West. Keep your duels at high noon, train robberies, bank heists, stagecoach chases, abandoned silver mines, and all that. Keep your saguaros and tumbleweeds, if you must. But whip up a good old secondary world for them. Mix and match different eras of North American colonial history, and stir in some South African history too.

Keep the basic premise: overland expansion by an Anglo-analogue empire. For the flavor, mash up the American revolution, the Confederacy, the Mormon Rebellion, and the Boer Wars (throw in the English Civil Wars and Europe's 1848 revolutions for good measure): A republican revolution “back home” failed, but it's had a partial success here in the colonies, with separatists establishing several fragile independent republics on the frontier. These new republics are egalitarian (for some people) lands of opportunity, with an economic dynamism and social mobility (for some people) that put “back home” to shame. They're also variously run by, or at least harbor, slavers, genocidaires, and intolerant religious zealots. Win some, lose some!

On the far side of the colonized continent, mash up Russia, France, and China: A culturally distinct great power from across the sea is sailing up and down the coast. They've established some port cities, but are less interested in large-scale settlement than they are in trade and resource extraction. Where the Anglo empire tends to rely on exclusion and ethnic cleansing, and the separatist republics on outright genocide, the Franco-Sino-Russians have developed a policy of nonaggression and cooperation with the indigenous people, organizing native auxiliaries to supplement their limited military presence and pouring advanced weapons into indigenous hands in exchange for furs, spices, jewels, or whatever it is the land is rich in.

Combine Mexico (reaching back to pre-Colombian cultures for inspiration) with the Zulus: A third power, erroneously conflated by the settlers with the indigenous people whom they in some superficial respects physically resemble, is making their own bid for regional hegemony, pressing in by land from another direction. Better organized and more technologically advanced than the other colonizers give them credit for, they are led by the greatest military genius of the era. The more battles they win, the more lurid racist propaganda the Anglo-types will hurl at them.

Voilà! An unstable balance of power, villains and antiheroes aplenty, and the wind of change blowing across the frontier—but with the future entirely uncertain. Sprinkle the ancient ruins of a lost empire around for some classic D&D or voguish science fantasy flavor. Delicious!