I’ve been a environmental activist since I was in my teens. I stood for the Green Party as a student, I was a direct action activist against road-building, illegal logging on Indigenous lands, and much more. I’ve never learned to drive a car, and that was entirely deliberate. We built a Passive House, and are aiming at a net-zero life (you can read more about that here).
But there is one aspect of my life as a working academic that is difficult to reconcile with this, and that is flying. Air travel is one of the worst sources of greenhouse gasses and it’s even worse because the emissions occur higher in the atmosphere. And yet, academics fly a lot. Partly this is about conferences – scholarly associations do love to have their events scattered all over the world – but partly it’s about research – we have to go to places to do observation, interviews etc. etc. – don’t we?
Well, perhaps not. Or perhaps we are not being imaginative enough. The pandemic has shown that many smaller seminars and workshops can happens perfectly well via the internet, and with VR, that’s only going to improve. I don’t think our Surveillance Studies Centre seminars, which have been entirely virtual this year, have been worse, indeed we’ve been able to invite people from further afield than we would normally do. I’d also argue that a lot of more distant research visits could be replaced by a combination of internet connection and on-the-ground work carried out via partnerships with local researchers.
I don’t think we can replace the magic of face-to-face interaction and chance meeting and discussion entirely. But we can minimise the environmental damage we do. A lot of this is strcutural and therefore it is a matter for funding agencies, scholarly associations and universities. We should be seeing research funding taking into account excessive travel proposals when evaluating grant applications etc.
But I think it is also necessary that we take personal action, especially those of us who in the most priviledged academic positions. My personal climate pledge is this: I will take no more than one long-haul return flight a year from now on –– forever. I’m not going to be doing lots of short-haul flights either –generally speaking, I will take none– but I do leave open the possibility that I would take one very occasionally.
This is ‘inconvenient’ but it just means I have to take decisions about what I do, when, and where I go. For example, I know the Surveillance & Society / Surveillance Studies Network Conference is every two years, in Europe. This means I can plan for a month-long conference / research and friends and family visit trip in 2022: I’ll be doing 4 conferences (ICA – Paris, SSN – Rotterdam, EuroS&P – Genoa, Beyond Smart Cities – Malmo), a mountain marathon in Leichenstein, and visiting family & friends in the UK, all by train (mainly night trains) and ferry. 2023 will have to be a family trip to Japan, but could also involve a significant research visit.
If I’m invited anywhere else overseas outside of this, I will either insist on virtual presentation or if that is not possible, I will just turn it down. I’ve been working out how to get to places I might need to go in Canada and the USA. It’s possible to get to most major cities by train. You just have to accept it’s going to to take longer, but since you can work on trains, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and the worst part of it is generally the Canadian elements: Canada desperately needs to invest in its railways and espcially in frequency and speed. It’s ridiculous that you can’t get to Montreal or Ottawa from Kingston much before midday. Anyway, we’ll find out how well this is going to work when I go to New York by train via Montreal, in April next year.
The 9th biennial Surveillance & Society conference of the Surveillance Studies Network, hosted by Erasmus University Rotterdam on June 1-3 2022 in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
TARGETS, TRACKS AND TRACES
Emerging blinking into the post-pandemic sunlight, the world’s longest-running surveillance studies conference is back, offering a famously welcoming, constructive atmosphere and three ways forward for thinking about surveillance:
1. TARGETS: Who is under surveillance? How are they affected, protected or harmed? Which individuals, communities or groups benefit and profit from surveillance, and which ones lose and are excluded?
2. TRACKS: How does surveillance happen – technologically, socially, politically, culturally etc.?And how is surveillance governed, controlled, regulated and prevented? What flows and what is blocked? What trajectories are emerging? What possibilities are there for critique, opposition, reform, resistance, struggle and destruction?
3. TRACES: What is left behind?How are trajectories and pathways (re)constructed across individual, collective and societal histories?
These themes will inspire a range of interventions across (sub-)disciplines and approaches. We invite scholars, artists, and practitioners from all backgrounds to engage critically with historical, current and emergent surveillance practices, performances, policies, patterns, plans and proposals, and the various dilemmas, opportunities and ambivalences these represent.
KEYNOTES
We are delighted to already confirm two superb keynote speakers:
Simone Browne, Associate Professor, in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies University of Texas (US)
Elizabeth Joh, Martin Luther King Professor of Law, UC Davis (US)
KEY TRACKS INCLUDE BUT ARE NOT LIMITED TO:
Organisational, industrial, and commercial visions
Surveillance and the workplace
Consumption and surveillance
Medical surveillance
Fraud detection and security
Education and monitoring
Viewing transitions
Migration and refugees
Borders and security
Social movements and protests for change
Electoral monitoring
Digitally mediated surveillance
Algorithms and focused monitoring
Drones and security devices
Social media platforms
Mobile devices, including wearables
Internet infrastructures
IoT devices
Big data analytics
Machine-learning
Sensing beyond seeing
Critiques of visual metaphors
Listening and other kinds of sensing
Bodies, biometrics & haptics
Affective surveillance
Law, Justice & Surveillance
Policing, intelligence and security
Surveillance in the courts
Surveillance and human rights
Privacy and Surveillance
Surveillance and Social Relations
Racialization
Gender and identity
Families and children
Households and neighbourhoods
Surveillance culture(s)
Surveillance art
Performing surveillance
Surveillance film and television
Writing surveillance
Science fiction and dystopian accounts
Politics and Philosophy of Surveillance
Surveillance politics
Surveillance and social justice
Philosophy of Surveillance
Ethics and Surveillance
Regulations, politics and governance of surveillance
There will also be two sponsored special sessions on the following themes:
Special Sessions: Surveillance and Smart Cities *
The smartification of cities has been the primary concern of many local municipalities. Collecting data from citizens’ movements within the city and interactions with city infrastructure has become increasingly important for municipal planning. Together with technological intermediaries, local governments have implemented a myriad of cameras, sensors, and other data collecting technologies in various urban spaces and contexts. Additionally, cities routinely ask citizens to voluntarily participate by urban smartification measures by donating their own personal data to city data repositories for ongoing analysis. Whether the city actively monitors its citizens or asks for their voluntary participation in urban initiatives, these approaches raise several surveillance and privacy concerns in the smart city. We invite papers that explore the diverse issues of surveillance in smart cities, ranging from its democratic foundations, citizen resistance and participation, post-covid smart city surveillance, stakeholder interests and platform influence, and other related topics.
Special Sessions: Social implications of AI supported surveillance #
As the adoption of machine-learning algorithms becomes widespread, the impacts of the broad set of technologies commonly labelled as Artificial Intelligence (AI) also pervade an increasing number of contexts, develop new facets, and shift everyday practices. We invite papers that explore the intersections of surveillance and AI, exploring this from a wide range of perspectives, including technical, legal, ethical, and economic considerations, among others, framed within the scope of social impacts. Papers that focus on core research areas of AI in arts and culture, communication and change, health care policy and management and work and labour are of particular interest. The definition of AI for this special session includes not only machine learning algorithms, but also perceptions and popular understandings of Artificial Intelligence and their perceived, potential and actual impacts.
Interested conference participants are invited to submit abstracts for this proposal. Due to the limited number of sessions, authors are limited to one first author submission for a paper and organisation of one proposed panel. Authors can be second author on other papers, but should not be the (primary) presenter.
Paper Proposals
Paper sessions will be composed by the Organising Committee based on the individual paper abstracts submitted. Abstracts should consist of:
Name(s) of Author(s)
Affiliation(s) of Author(s)
Proposed Title of Paper
An abstract of up to 200 words
For those who are unable to participate in person, selected panels will offer the possibility to present remotely. As there will be limited spaces, applicants will be asked to provide a motivation why they are unable to travel to Rotterdam.
Panel Proposals
Panels are sessions that bring together a group of presenters with contributions on a topic related to the conference themes. The session format should engage the panellists and audience in interactive discussions and preferably represent a diversity of views on the topic. Panels should be designed to fit in a 90-minute session, and feature a minimum of three and maximum of five presentations. Panel Proposals should consist of:
Name(s) and email address(es) of Organiser(s)
Affiliation(s) of Organiser(s)
Proposed Title of Panel including the indication [PANEL] in the title
An abstract of up to 350 words, including an explanation of why the panel is of interest to the conference, and the proposed format of the panel.
Name(s) and Affiliation(s) of all proposed panellists including a chair. NB: Organisers must secure the agreement of all proposed panellists before submitting the Panel Proposal.
If you have any additional questions, please contact us at: ssn2022@eshcc.eur.nl
Key dates:
December 15, 2021: Submission of individual paper abstracts and conference panels
February 15, 2022: Decisions regarding paper and panel proposal acceptance
March 15, 2022: Preliminary conference programme available
May 1, 2022: Submission of full papers and extended abstracts
June 1, 2022: Welcome and opening drinks
June 1-3, 2022: Conference is held in Rotterdam
Forthcoming request for artistic submissions
Within this conference, we wish to engage with artists working with various media to enhance our understandings and experiences of surveillance research and contexts. The conference organisers are working with local artists and the SSN Arts Prize Committee to ensure artistic inclusion at SSN 2022. In the coming months, more details about how to participate will be forthcoming.
Well, the big news is that 2021-22, will be my last year at Queen’s University. I’m grateful to all my colleagues and students here from 2009 onwards. But just as it was in 2009, it’s time to move on!
I’m going to be 50 years old next year and I still don’t feel that I have achieved what I want to achieve and having been away from Queen’s since mid-2019 because of sabbatical and then the pandemic, I had the space and time to think, and I realised that I needed a new challenge, a new incentive to force myself to do those things I really want to do. But I didn’t want to leave the island where we live, so my options were pretty limited. I was starting to think of leaving academic, cashing in everything I had and buying a local bookshop.
But then, during that time, I happened across a job that was being advertised at the University of Ottawa. It was in the Department of Criminology, which is not my discipline at all, but then neither was Sociology, or Architecture and Planning, or Rural Economics, or anywhere else I have ever been. What was important was the title, Critical Surveillance and Security Studies, and what they wanted, someone at my level who was ready to step up to full professor and could apply for a Tier 1 CRC. But I don’t have a lot of confidence in myself, so I called someone I knew in the department, one of my favourite people in the world, as it happens, and asked them if I had any chance of getting this job, and they literally screamed down the phone. So maybe I did have a chance! I applied.
Time went by.
Then I was asked to interview. The timing was perfect because I had just realised where my research was going in more concrete ways, and was able to put together a presentation that was really exciting (even to me!). And the interview went about as well as any interview could go.
More time went by. So much time that I had actually started to forget how the presentation and interview went and started to imagine that I had no chance, again.
And then, in the middle of the summer, I came back from a week entirely offline, a week of trail running and swimming up in Algonquin, to find that I had been offered the job.
We don’t need to talk about my negotiating skills, suffice it to say that when I suggested a salary figure they laughed at me and offered me substantially more. I’ll have a suite of offices (or a lab) and I’ll be able to assemble a team to work on the big projects I have in mind, and I’ll actually be able to offer them decent RA-ships, in other words all the things I was told I would be able to do when I got to Queen’s but it turned out that none of that was in writing. It’s in writing this time.
At my age, I don’t have any illusions. There is no academic paradise, especially not in this neoliberal age. But I am excited about the work I want to do again. There will be more about that in future. Hell, I may even start blogging again after a decade…
Maybe you can see my new office from here? The Social Sciences complex at UOttawa
Just a great example of how to write clearly and succinctly, while also challenging some deeply held theoretical assumptions, and drawing on an enormous amount of research and reading.
Continuing the project she began in General Intellects, Wark gives us insightful and always idiosyncratic summaries of key contemporary thinkers. You will have your own views on who is included and who is not. Deal with it.
This is a book I wish I had written. It’s a really sharp and wide-ranging critique of digital capitalism and the political economy of surveillance. It is also unusually well-written. Bastard.
Infrastructure seems to be the current thing, and for once, this is as it should be. Khalili’s book is a brilliant exploration of the whole world of capitalist logistics and infrastructure centred on the Arabian peninsula.
This book, which came out in 2019, but which I only finished this year, is about almost everything, via the collision of war and ecology. Books like this are here to help us prevent the end of the world.
An honorable mention goes to a book by an academic but which isn’t an academic book as such: Stardust to Stardustby the late sociologist, Erik Olin Wright, which is a collection of his posts written as he was diagnosed with, faught, and then died from, cancer.
I read a lot this year: over 100 novels and many novellas, in addition to my academic reading.
This was not a vintage year for science fiction. Of course I haven’t read everything, but it seemed to me that some great writers produced merely good books, some good writers released mediocre ones, and there were no startling new discoveries. I was given many recommendations and few of them turned out to be as strong as I had hoped. I did not seem to love the things that other SFF fans loved, and I loved a few things that most seemed to ignore or by writers they have forgotten. Most of what I liked best was on the fringes, what critics call ‘non-genre’ SFF – that is mainstream literary fiction with science fiction and or fantasy elements, and a lot of my favourite fiction wasn’t SFF at all.
So instead of my best SFF of the year here’s an (*edited to add a novel I inexplicably missed) top 15 of my favourite fiction of the year, with some thoughts on almost favourites, things I’m still reading, and one book I hated, just afterwards. I have brief notes about each here: full reviews you can find on StoryGraph, the growing independent alternative to the Amazon-owned Goodreads.
My number 1, was the long overdue return of the author of the enormous Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Susanna Clark, with a much slighter but every bit as compelling volume, Piranesi, a surrealist fantasy, set in an world composed of seemingly infinite palatial rooms filled lined with statues that contain worlds, oceans, clouds… but no people, other than the protaganist and ‘the other’, a researcher who seems to come from elsewhere. With its off-centre but very European magical anthropology, it has things in common with someone like Italo Calvino, or John Crowley’s Aegypt series or even M. John’s Harrison’s sensibility, but is also wonderfully fresh. Definitely one of the best things I’ve read in, as Piranesi might term it, “the year the plague came to the world.”
*War of the Maps – Paul J. McAuley. Still so underrated, perhaps Britain’s finest science fiction writer, Paul McAuley produced one of his most intriguing novels this year, and one which I somehow missed when I first drafted this list. It’s a combination of ‘lone gunslinger’ novel with a really weird ultra-far-future posthuman setting, set on a decaying civilization on a Dyson sphere around a star, a world where so much has been lost that history has become myth and technology has become magic. There are shades of Gene Wolfe and Jack Vance here but the themes and the writing are uniquely McAuley.
Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami, is an excellent two-part novel by this Japanese feminist writer, focusing initially on a trio of women: two sisters and the daughter of one of the pair. One sister is an ageing bar hostess and wants breast implants. The other wants a child but hates the idea of sex. In exploring their characters, relationships and dilemmas, the novel opens up multiple questions about what it means to be a woman in contemporary Japanese society. It’s probably the best recent novel I’ve read from Japan and the writing is very strong and individual, something that’s helped by a translation which stays away from the bland and tries to lighlight the regional dialect used by some of the characters – something you rarely see in translations from Japanese.
Creeping Jenny – Jeff Noon. 3rd in a sequence of weird detective novels, featuring John Nyquist, who stumbles around through metaphors and allusions not knowing what he is investigating or even who or where he is half the time. The first novel, A Man of Shadows, was set in a city made up of three areas: the artificially bright Dayzone, the dark Nightzone and the mysterious and dangerous, Dusk. The second, The Body Library, saw Nyquist living in Storyville, a city made up of words and letters and encountering horror within. The third, Creeping Jenny, is like something that mixes up Calvino, Burroughs and The Wicker Man. Nyquist has turned up in the mysterious English village of Hoxley, a place dominated by a never-ending parade of randomly selected local saints’ days, each of which imposes bizarre restrictions on the residents. Creepy, weird, disorienting, superbly written and a lot of fun all round.
The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again by M. John Harrison is one of the most beautifully written books I’ve read for a long time. There are sentences that make you stop in your tracks and read them again. At its heart it’s the story of two ageing British drifters, Shaw and Victoria, neither of whom really know what they are doing with their lives. They come together and they drift apart, with Victoria inheriting her late mother’s house in a small castle town in the Welsh borders. Water is everywhere. Shaw’s life is governed by the Thames, by canals, London ponds and his boss’s obsession with a conspiracy theory about the aquatic origins of humanity; Victoria’s by the River Seven which curves around her new home town, by saturated fields, by rain, endless rain and by visions of her new friends disappearing into strange lakes. Nothing much happens until near the end of the book and when you’ve finished, you won’t know exactly what you’ve just read or whether it was worth it, you will just feel damp and uneasy.
Hari Kunzru is one of my favourite contemporary writers and his last novel, White Tears, was the Get Out of literary fiction. Red Pill deals with similarly contemporary issues, but it’s set very specifically in 2016 in the run-up to the election of Donald Trump. The protagonist is an aimless British-Indian writer, Gary Bridgeman, who is offered a 3-month residency by an eccentric German oganisation, the Deuter Foundation, located in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee, just across the lake from the house where the Nazis developed the Final Solution. Gary reacts badly to the transparency doctrines of the foundation, and tries to escape. He encounters Syrian refugees and ex-Stasi informers, but most fatefully of all, Anton, a mephistophelean white supremacist who happens to write a TV show Gary is obsessed with, a truly horrific police drama called Blue Lives (and yes, you can’t help adding the ‘Matter’ at the end). From here things go very badly wrong. Red Pill is superbly written and genuinely disturbing but there is a lot going on and some of it feels a little forced.
I’ve enjoyed the other fictions I’ve read by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and, at least when I was younger, I was partial to a bit of gothic horror, so I was looking forward to Mexican Gothic. And it didn’t disappoint. If you want a tl;dr pitch, this is Rebecca meets Crimson Peaks in post-colonial Mexico. Noemí Taboada is a young, beautiful wealthy socialite in Mexico City in the 1950s who is sent by her father to inquire into the health and wellbeing of her slightly older cousin, Catalina, who got married very suddenly into an eccentric and racist English silver-mine owning family, the Doyles, who live in a remote mansion in the interior of the country near their abandoned mines, ruled over by the dying patriarch, Howard, a very old, tremendously creepy, loathsome, foul-smelling creature, who inabits the bedroom at the top of the house. Colonialism and race and their legacies in Mexico play a large part, which adds a seriousness to the usual gothic tropes, This is a really strong book with a sympathetic heroine and well-drawn characters.
Trouble is What I Do by Walter Mosley, is a reliably hardboiled crime story featuring his New York-based Black private eye, Leonid McGill. If you know what Mosley does, then you’ll love the latest in this sequence that started with The Long Fall, and which features a both a New York underworld and an overworld of the rich, with a protagonist who’s talents allow him to pass through both. Mosley is never going to better his Easy Rawlins novels, but these do their job well.
Network Effect is the first full length novel in Martha Wells’s extraordinarily popular and award-winning Murderbot Diaries sequence that started with the novella, All Systems Red, which feature the eopnymous lead character, “Murderbot,” the secret name that the protagonist calls itself. It’s known to others as “SecUnit”, a massively augmented, armed and very dangerous partially-human-looking cyborg or construct designed to provide security in a far-future dominated by corrupt, amoral, plundering corporations. Except that this SecUnit would rather be left alone to watch soap operas and make cynical and darkly amusing observations about the way the galaxy works. Network Effect also brings back another memorable nonhuman character from an earlier novella, the robot-pilot of the research ship, Perihelion, otherwise known (to Murderbot) as ART (for “Asshole Research Transport”). ART, for reasons that unfold during the novel, kidnaps Murderbot and his colleagues, and we off on a very bumpy ride. This book is a fine addition to the sequence which advances Murderbot as a character, while adding many potential further developments; it’s just not quite as sharp and impactful as the novellas.
N.K. Jemisin is probably the single most successful and talented fantasy writer out there at the moment, and The City We Became is the first in a new sequence, the Great Cities Trilogy. This is a love story to New York, every bit as devoted as the Beastie Boys’ ‘To The Five Boroughs’. This is its strength but also its weakness, if you’re not a New Yorker. What opens the book up, and promises more from future volumes is two things. The first is the premise which isthat at some point in their lifespan, cities are fully ‘born’ and generate an avatar that will speak for them to other cities, but also that this transformation, this birth, causes a rupture in the smoothness of the multiverse, a rupture that powerful, incomprehensible and seemingly malevolent Lovecraftian entities hate and want to close. The second is the characters: while her protagonists have to (by their nature) be avatars, personifications of place, they remain distinct individual people, all different components of the melting pot of New York immigration. There is a lot of potential here but this novel didn’t move me like her early works, or amaze me like her most recent multi-award wining Broken Earth trilogy.
Anne Charnock’s latest, Bridge 108, is set in the same climate breakdown-altered world as her earlier novel A Calculated Life. The story focuses mostly on Caleb, an immigrant from Spain (perhaps), who is trafficked to the vastly unequal future Britain and who we first meet working for a gang of recyclers in an enclave reserved for the unaugmented who constitute the lowest level of society. I don’t think this is as good as A Calculated Life; largely because of the lack of focus on Caleb’s point of view we never get to know him, feel with him, in the same way as the protagonist of that previous work. But it’s still worth reading for its portrayal of a very depressingly realistic near-future Britain.
Cars on Fire: Be warned, the thematically-linked stories in this fresh, experimental collection by this young Chilean author, Mónica Ramón Ríos, are frequently difficult. Sometimes what’s going on is completely unclear, sometimes the protagonist is vague and only half there, almost all the time, everrything is haunted by absent parents, unfulfilled desires, and the everpresence of systems of oppression and violence, whether it’s dictatorship or capitalism, universties or psychiatry. People are shiftless, bitter, stupid. They try to resist, or to turn the bad into something beautiful, but nothing happens, they don’t go anywhere, cars catch fire. Some people seem to hate this book. And sure, not all the stories work as well as the best ones like The Student and the eponymous Cars on Fire. But in this case, the polarized reactions only go to show Riós has done something right.
After only 3 novels, Charles Yu has already developed a certain style. His tales tend to be quite simple stories of love and family when all the frills are cut away, and set in very contained settings, pocket universes either literally or figuratively. In Interior Chinatown, he’s expanding on his personal personal very much to the political: this is a story about being Asian in America (any kind of Asian – doesn’t matter because they all look the same, right?). But rather like How To Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, the America in which the protagonist, Willis Wu lives is strangely small and circumsribed by almost game-like rules, here forced to play generic Asian background parts in a stereotyped police procedural, ‘Black and White’, the names reflecting not only those of the real stars, but also the identities which an Asian can never achieve. Interior Chinatown is very, very clever. It plays this all straight but mixes in chunks of real history arrive unepectedly, lifestories, and scripts in progress from Black and White. Erving Goffman’s famous research on the performance of everyday life is quoted. It has the same sort of weaknesses that How To Live Safely… had, which is that the emotionality can seem at once overdone and rather flat and facile. But this is still a throught-provoking, powerful, very sarcastic book.
A Song for the Dark Times by Ian Rankin. Even though Rankin’s irrascible, dogged detective is supposedly now several years into retirement, Rebus is called to help out his estranged daughter, Samantha, who lives on the bleak and windswept north coast of Scotland, to find Sam’s partner, Keith, who as gone missing. Meanwhile back in Edinburgh, a wealthy Saudi student, who mixed with the cream of Scottish society, has been found murdered in a decidedly unpreposessing carpark near a municipal golf course. Rebus’s former protégé, Siobhan Clarke, is on the case, helped none too willingly by another member of the old team, the ambitious Malcolm Fox, seconded by Headquarters to keep on the eye on the investigation because of the Saudi student’s important political connections. Surely these two cases can’t be linked? This is a very satisfying story, which gets the balance of criminal and domestic detail right, with enough red herrings and blind alleys to keep you guessing. And, in particular, while Rankin has always been a master at capturing Edinburgh high and low, the physical and social atmosphere of the remote villages along the North Sutherland coastline is portrayed perfectly here too.
The Arrestby Jonathan Lethem. In early 2019, my friend, Tim Maughan published his excellent novel of the end of the internet / technology, Infinite Detail. It got some attention, even appearing on a few book of the year shortlists. At the back end of 2020, almost 2 years on, we had two novels with a similar premise, one, The Silence, by increasingly pretentious twerp, Don DeLillo, and the other, The Arrrest, by the former bright young hope of American literature, Jonathan Lethem. Both were being praised as unprecedented and ‘original’. They clearly aren’t either – even Tim’s novel wasn’t that original in the sense that the end of technology dystopia goes back at least as far as E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops, published more than a century ago, in 1909. But are either any good? I didn’t even get as far as buying the DeLillo because on looking at it in the bookshop, I burst out laughing. The ‘novel’ looked suspiciously small and thin to begin with even in hardback, and on opening it, you can see that they’ve used a very spacious font in a massive point size and huge margins. In other words this may not even be a novella. DeLillo apparently couldn’t quite deliver on his promises, and I’m not paying novel price for an extended short story – I’ll get it out of the library or wait until it inevitably appeats for 0.99 on Kindle… The Arresttoo is a short novel, in bite-size chapters, some no more than a page. The protagonist, Sandy Duplessis AKA Journeyman, is a superannuated delivery boy in a post-technology society, which is maybe a reference to Fry from Futurama – it wouldn’t surprise me, because as with all Lethem novels, The Arrest is stacked with pop culture and sceince fiction references. But this isn’t hard science-fiction: the way in which the end of the internet and fossil fuels and everything has came about is vague and magical in a ‘just don’t ask’ sort of way. Instead the novel plays with being a meta-dystopia, which might or might not be the product of a film script that Journeyman had been writing off-and-on for years with his college buddy, later employer and highly irritating Hollywood somebody, Peter Todbaum, from an idea at least partly suggested by Journeyman’s sister, Maddy. Now after the Arrest, Maddy, and in his lesser, ineffectual way, Journeyman, are both part of self-sustaining organic cooperative township way up on the Maine coast, away from all the turmoil that is apparently going on elsewhere. And then suddenly Todbaum turns up… in a nuclear-powered chrome supercar-cum-tunnelling machine that looks like something straight out of a 1950s Popular Mechanics fever dream. And guess what? He’s still a major asshole. Is it any good? I don’t know. While if flirts with various SF tropes of alternate worlds and so on, it doens’t actually go there, and the story is actually quite linear and while somewhat unlikely in the specifics of its denouement, it won’t come as much of a surprise in any general sense. It’s okay.
I’m also only just starting Master of Poisons by Andrea Hairston, and it’s already clear that this African fantasy, or what Nnedi Okorafor would call ‘African Juju’ novel, is something special. It’s brilliant, inventive, written with verve and often very tricky to follow, and I am loving it. Quotients by Tracey O’Neill is another novel I haven’t finished yet, but I am still recommending because it may be the best big data surveillance novel I’ve ever read. In case you wondering whcih other big data surveillance novels there are, I also read the highly praised German satire, Qualityland this year, and quite frankly the farce in that comedy was a little too broad and unsubtle for my tastes.
If there is a ‘No!’, this year, it’s Earthlings by Sayaka Murata. I challenge anyone who has read this book not to come to the conclusion that it is an utterly repulsive novel, as disgusting as it’s possible to be by the end, and worse because whatever has come before you were still rooting for the protagonist, Natsuki, until the last chapter. After Convenience Store Woman, I had Murata pegged as a champion of neurodivergent feminism, and this books seems to be along the same lines until the protagonists, Natsuki and Tomoya and Yuu, decide to leave the world they call “the factory”, and make a genuine break from all social conventions and indeed from humanity itself, and from then things just get extreme. Really extreme. In fact so extreme, that it leads me to question my previous assessment of Murata’s politics and commitments.
ubisurv 