Books Read and Not

Heidi Kasa’s The Beginners is a collection of prose poems. The first, “A Grief That Shatters Oceans,” tells about the eponymous Beginners. “One day, without warning, we all woke up in black robes.” The Enders refuse to accept that this is a good thing though the Beginners embrace their new condition as their nature, eventually and literally true. 

I like Heidi Kasa’s style, her choice of words and their positionings. She reminds me of reading Toni Morrison and F. Scott Fitzgerald. She did not invent that kind of writing but she learned from it. She writes what she knows and she knows herself from the inside. She chose a medium that lets her paint with bold economical words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs that deliver a gallery of introspections. 

From "Ghosts are Hungry" in The Beginners by Heidi Kasa
https://digging-press.myshopify.com/collections/chapbooks

I read about twenty pages of The Murderbot Diaries Volume 1: All Systems Red. Even though I checked out Volumes 2 and 3, I did not open them. Martha Wells has won Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards among many others. (See Wikipedia here.)

Lots of people like her work and find it masterful. I did not. 

Wells attended Texas A & M University and lives in College Station. TAMU is the home of the Texas Cadets, an ROTC corps that is historically recognized. Their former commander, Col. Jake Betty, was later my commanding general in the Texas State Guard. I mention that because Murderbot reflected no special understanding of the warrior guardian ethos of the military and the police.

And Murderbot's getting wounded did not resonate with me: I did not feel it, even though I have been burned and punctured mostly from being a boy and not from being a soldier or a security guard. Wells did not write the words that I needed to read. 

Murderbot does not murder anyone, gratefully; he gets murdered time and again. 

Murderbot hacked his own software to give himself free will. Leaving aside that chicken-and-egg problem, not explaining how to hack an operating system is like not knowing how to hotwire a car. “I didn’t have the keys but I got the car started and drove off.” A robot who hacks his operating system is a story with ponderous consequences. Maybe Martha Wells got around to that later.

I did not get too far into Mickey 7 by Edward Ashton. Mickey is a protective services android or cyborg and before he gets killed in action, he is supposed to upload his most recent experiences in order allow a seamless download to the next Mickey. In our story, Mickey-7 does not get killed in the last split second and he returns to his station to find Mickey-8 waiting there. This is against the law and can get them both killed. One of them must go. 

They know that they must never be seen together or even allow happenstance encounters that challenge their rival and exclusive natures: they cannot be seen in two places at once. 

Then they meet at the garbage dump. This is an entropy pit into which refuse is thrown for the matter-t0-energy conversion that runs the ship. Jumping in or being thrown in would be fatal and Mickey-8 does not mind that Mickey-7 has considered this. The oubliette is easy to access, lacking any special barrier, to say nothing of an interlock or someone posted there. So, I just stopped reading. And I had at least one reason to continue, even though there are now only two people alive who still call me Mick: my brother and my ex. 

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ArmadilloCon 40: Part 2 

Do You Know Your Military 

Why I Served 

Shifting the Paradigm of Private Security 

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