apperception

Just finished Obstetrix by Naomi Kritzer. This is pure nightmare fuel (complimentary) and captures the zeitgeist in a visceral way. There's no real daylight between the near-future dystopia that the book portrays, where doctors face the choice between their duty and their careers and where cults are given free reign over the lives and destinies of their members/victims. We're here. 

If there's a fantastical element to it, it's the 80s paperback fantasy that our heroine rereads and, in her captivity, escapes into. Which is absolutely something that I do so it was note-perfect and incredibly relatable. Without spoilering the end because I'd just encourage you all to read it, the payoff with it is a joy.

Space Invaders by Nona Fernández. Two of you recommended this last week, and I will be a third. It'll take you like 15 minutes to read, go do it. It's a dreamy, magic realist-inflected story set in the late days of Pinochet's regime, following a group of childhood friends who remember a classmate in often contradictory fragments. I feel like the punchline to the story is something that I remember reading in the news; I know that some of the journal entries in this were real, but I'm not sure if the story itself is. It's haunting and heartbreaking.

Currently reading: When We Were Real by Daryl Gregory. It took me awhile to warm up to this (the first chapter, which introduces a load of characters and doesn't give them any goddamn names, is off-putting in a 450-page novel) but the concept was too cool to resist and now I'm glad I stuck with it because I could not put this down and want to be reading it now.

This is a loose retelling of the Canterbury Tales. A bus carrying a load of tourists travels to various locations across the US, with the twist is that seven years ago, the entire human population was told that it was living in a simulation, and the stops are all places that prove it. All of the characters have fascinating reasons for being on the tour. This could have easily just been straight up sci-fi humour, but it leans into the premise and takes the suffering and existential crises of the characters with the full gravity that they deserve. There's also just impressive worldbuilding here—the Impossibles are all really cool and well constructed, and the various theories and copes that people develop over the seven years following the Announcement feel grounded and realistic.

Anyway hopefully this lands the ending because it's fantastic so far.

Just finished: Owning the Unknown: A Science Fiction Writer Explores Atheism, Agnosticism, and the Idea of God by Robert Charles Wilson. I think I would have liked more sci-fi in this book about sci-fi and religion (Christianity) and atheism, as evidenced by there being two short stories at the end that I enjoyed a great dea.

As an atheist, I found the arguments in this book convincing up to the point of being agnostic about a specifically Christian God, but didn't make the logical leap that the other did to atheism about all gods. Which doesn't mean it's not worth reading, but I wanted it to go farther and deeper than it did.

Encampment: Resistance, Grace, and an Unhoused Community by Maggie Helwig. Complete coincidence that I read these one after another by the way; Encampment was next up on my list anyway. But I do think they provide an interesting contrast and go a long way to explaining why I find Wilson's arguments less interesting.

Encampment isn't about religion per se, despite being written by a priest and taking place on the grounds of a church and including some sermons. It's about mutual aid and community and the cruelty of the state towards its nominal subjects.

I once really weirded out a friend of mine of the more stoner persuasion by saying that I was almost completely uninterested in questions of where the universe came from or how it was created or whether there's life after death—things that he apparently spent a long time pondering. What is much more interesting to me is how we ought to act now, in relationship to each other and the planet. What we owe to each other by virtue of our own shared beinghood.

Maggie will say that she did nothing special. She allowed a tent encampment on her church's property (well, the issue of whose property becomes a major question in the City's fight to dismantle the encampment, but I've been there and it's very obviously part of the church). Then she tried to take care of those people as best she could. Unfortunately in the world that we live in, this is in fact extremely special and extremely heroic. This is not an easy task; many of these people have untreated psychiatric disorders, many have addictions, and beyond that, the tangled bureaucracies that nominally exist to help them are fragile as cobwebs, underfunded, and under resourced. 

This book broke my heart. I of course know this story well. Everyone in Toronto does. I argue about encampments in Facebook groups on the regular. The upcoming municipal election may hinge on them. I'm old enough to remember that Star Trek DS9 episode where a tent city was an indication of how deeply into dystopia Earth had fallen; now they are common enough that most people just walk by them every day. Maggie tells the story of the individuals who found themselves in these tents and their fight for basic dignity along with survival. She makes the invisible visible (which, isn't that part of what both religion and literature do?).

It's the best thing I've read this year, and I might buy like a million copies to give to people, especially if it looks like might Bradford win—not that Chow is great, but Bradford would build death camps if he could. Anyway, read it. It'll take you like a night.

Currently reading: Obstetrix by Naomi Kritzer. I love everything Naomi writes though I went into this with a little trepidation as I have a phobia around pregnancy and birth. It's about an OB/GYN who finds herself unemployed after terminating a pregnancy in North Dakota to save a woman's life. She gets a weird call about an interview for a job with a group of midwifes, which turns out to be bait to kidnap her and bring her to a cult compound, where many of the women and girls are pregnant. Also, the last doctor they brought there was murdered by one of the cult members.

If I hadn't been so tired last night I'd have binged through this in one night—it's hella tense and unsettling and Dr. Liz's wry, grounded narration is a perfect contrast to how disturbing the cultists are (fundie baby voice is a real thing and  y i k e s  on bikes).