#the dissident library

[dissidentlibrary]

That's when I saw the photograph.

Facing us, on every newspaper kiosk

on that wide, tree-shaded boulevard in Paris

were photographs of fifteen-year-old Dorothy Counts

being reviled and spat upon by the mob

as she was making her way to school

in Charlotte, North Carolina.

James Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro.

[literary-illuminati]

2024 Book Review #72 – Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Tchaikovsky is not exactly one of my favourite working authors, but at this point he’s probably quite close. Certainly I haven’t yet regretted giving anything new of his I could get my hands on a try – and this is no exception (even if it’s not really that new, given I waited for my library system to get a copy). It doesn’t completely succeed at everything it goes for, but privileging themes over speculative xeno-biology is really a pretty fair choice, and as narratives go it was both fun and compelling.

The story follows Anton Daghdev – dissident, academic, and dissident academic who, for crimes against the Mandate of Humanity, has been sentenced to transportation to an extrasolar penal colony and a lifetime of hard labour furthering the Mandate’s understanding of the alien ecosystem which has flourished there. It’s a life sentence, make no mistake – but the fecund, symbiosis-obsessed ecology of ‘Kiln’ is far beyond anything he imagined when he was put into cryosleep for the 30 year voyage , and that’s before he is introduced to the real prize: Ruins. Real, artificial structures, with ornamentation, power generation, and writing – all signs of an intelligent creator which has entirely vanished from the ecosystem. Anton is caught between a camp that is itself is a horror show, ruled throgh brutality and fear by a commandant who devotion to the Mandate’s doctrines makes any actual understanding of Kiln impossible, and the ever-growing ecosystem beyond the compound’s walls that is forever seeking the right combination of proteins and molecules to form a bridge between species and worlds, ten thousand species of parasites and symbiotes forever seeking promising new hosts.

The book is concerned with several things, but the most obvious and the aesthetically dominant is the whole trope of the ‘death world’ – specifically the verdant and overgrowing jungle variety, where everything is green and beautiful and constantly looking for a way to kill you. A trope that’s always been more-or-less obviously inspired by 19th century European explorers and colonizers experience in the Amazon and Congo, and 20th century Americans in South East Asia – and the book is very interested in the colonial imagery, here. Everyone’s utter horror at the idea of contamination by the environment and its use as threat and punishment to keep the labourers in line is a central organizing principle of camp life. The fact that that the efforts to understand the nature of kilnish life and intelligence has been futile from the word go because of doctrines and assumptions the human scientists are labouring under and their studies has only ever been destructive and useless stamp-collecting is also just a theme running through the whole book.

From a slightly different perspective, this would be a fairly classic sci fi horror story, honestly – a moral atrocity of a scientific mission, destroyed in a fit of destructive karma as its prisoner/slave labour is infected and comes to know the alien life surrounding them in a way no human science could ever hope to. Very gothic, very Lovecraft. The lead archaeologist even gives a more-or-less sympathetic protagonist to tell it through.

As it is, on the level of genre this is basically an anti-cosmic horror story. The alien really is Alien, the world is vast and strange and you can’t really know anyone or anything – which is the trap. It’s not the alien infection that drives you mad, it’s the isolation and solitude of having felt the connection and ability to truly communicate without lies or deception it offers and then losing it beneath airlocks and thick plastic walls. It’s only be true trust and embrace of the most shockingly alien life ever seen – let alone any other humans – that the species can actually be liberated.

It rather reminds me of Last Exit by Max Gladstone that way – basically entirely different genres, but in both manage to make the alien seem truly terrifying and uncanny, and in both cases it’s the obsession with remaining pure and human and trying a sharp border between Us and Them that’s the real source of horror.

The thematic counterpoint here is the Mandate. It’s a totalitarian state in a very old-school, 20th century modernist way. Government through police spies and regular purges, legitimized by a grand historical project which is mostly just keeping everything neat and legible for the benefit of the top of the pyramid. It’s not that there aren’t true believers to the cause of Scientific Philanthropy, but it really doesn’t need that many of them. It rules through self-interest and fear – the tiny impossible hope of actually changing anything, or the absolute certainty of being sold out and swept up by the time your conspiracy has enough people in it to actually change anything. The Mandate makes it impossible to trust or rely upon anyone else, and by atomizing humanity makes it possible to bind them more tightly to the ruling state than ever before. It’s only be really radical – inhuman, really – levels of trust and cooperation and openness among people trying to resist that it can be fought, with its snitches and its tear gas and its automatic weaponry.

So yes, not the most subtle book in the world. But it definitely worked for me, on balance. It’s surprisingly rare to have a protagonist whose a committed political revolutionary on page 1 and never stops being one in damn near any story I come across, so maybe I just enjoyed the rare treat.

Though it does suffer some in the third act. An opinion I increasingly think I have about everything, but still. Kilnish xenobiology and -ecology is for the first two acts o the book is both aesthetically amazing and actually plausibly alien-seeming, but as Anton really understands it does become a bit credulity-stretchingly benevolent and purely symbiotic (not to mention structurally stable and only changing in the particulars across aeons), a few offhand lines about ‘red in two and claw’ aside. The narration also really doth protest too much about how the connection between the Kiln-infected humans totally isn’t telepathy. It wasn’t really a long book (certainly not by genre standards) but the whole final act also did just feel a bit bloated and meandering.

All of which is really just me being incapable of enjoying something without complaining though. If you like old-school feeling sci fi about alien worlds, Big Themes and improbably physically fit scientists, would recommend.

[steinbecks]

notes on penquan island

mako ONCE AGAIN projecting hardcore onto children who have (almost) no one and nothing and feels irrational but, well, entirely reasonable need to protect and look after them

mako remains TESTY AND BITCHY with bolin throughout the whole thing. good. ahahaha. i love it. GOOD.

bolin is the cook in the family which is pretty hilarious. the bit with the mustard is fun lol <3

no lin bei fong... thats okay i guess...

HE'S SO AWKWARD in the fire nation shop he cannot hold a normal conversation to save his life. he insists on being awkward. he MUST be awkward or else he'll die

mako being intimidated by hisa <3 GET HIM <3

bolin wanting to wear the traditional fire nation headdress is cute <3

I ignore all mako dating jokes. i do not see them. he is dating the radio operator or whoever the fuck and it's lowkey and stable and they're the most boring people alive. they like to go to the library and read. their favorite date night spot is d[rrrrrrrsf[fdfdsfhttttttttttttttt [SIGNAL LOST]

mako and bolin griefing about what his job is and how he feels about it..... must think. machinery is rusty. i think the "i need to protect people" angle is kinda lame and an oversimplification of his whole deal (i HATE the wu bodyguard plotline, i was never on board with OWL Mako headcanons) like it's not JUST that.......... like he says it's his "responsibility to look after people" but that's because you were forced into this role by circumstances and never gave yourself the choice to consider other options....... .sdkfjfljdf i like that bolin takes him to task like "don't protect me just be my brother"

"you shouldn't have to do that while you're just a kid yourself" oh okay how's your therapy going mako? bad? it's going bad because you'd rather eat glass than talk about your feelings ? that's okay. take your time. i'm sure this will have zero repercussions for any of your relationships

okay now the plot tweest

the plot twist that they're from a patriarchal conservative traditional fire nation town that won't let girls firebend is a LITTLE ODD given how it is directly contradicted by [checks notes] none other than azula so is it like... an attitude from BEFORE THE WAR? the idea that some guy would put out a hit on a woman who left the village just to punish her for leaving is a little outrageous for what we know about the world of avatar, although patriarchal attitudes are not strange (katara + waterbending in book 1: water) so she REALLY must have been some kind of dissident lol. like with a bit more juice (as always with legend of korra el oh el) this story is about a woman who advocated for change in her village and fled for her life to the safety of republic city when she pushed too hard against the status quo.

mako and naoki 🤝 "fuck fascism and fuck tyrants" in this sense i don't hate it lol. never forget he called bolin a bootlicker <3

the random mugging death was always a little overblown but i guess it was supposed to be like "look how dangerous republic city is" which this whole comic undermines. i should have written this comic btw. REGARDLESS i love that mako gets to be pissed off about how he and bolin ended up alone and homeless like GOOD!!!!! HE HAS ALWAYS BEEN ALLOWED TO BE BITTER AND CRANKY ABOUT THISSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

when he started crying i got so emotional i dropped the book and punched my pillow

[justforbooks]

‘It allowed us to survive, to not go mad’: the CIA book smuggling operation that helped bring down communism

From George Orwell to Hannah Arendt and John le Carré, thousands of blacklisted books flooded into Poland during the cold war, as publishers and printers risked their lives for literature

The volume’s glossy dust jacket shows a 1970s computer room, where high priests of the information age, dressed in kipper ties and flares, tap instructions into the terminals of some ancient mainframe. The only words on the front read “Master Operating Station”, “Subsidiary Operating Station” and “Free Standing Display”. Is any publication less appetising than an out-of-date technical manual?

Turn inside, however, and the book reveals a secret. It isn’t a computer manual at all, but a Polish language edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell’s famous anti-totalitarian novel, which was banned for decades by communist censors in the eastern bloc.

This copy lives now in the library of Warsaw University, but for much of the cold war it belonged to the Polish writer and dissident Teresa Bogucka. It was Teresa’s father, the art critic Janusz Bogucki, who first brought it to Poland. In 1957, during a window of liberalisation that opened after Stalin’s death, Janusz picked up the Orwell translation from a Polish bookshop in Paris, smuggled it back through the border and gave it to his daughter. Teresa was only 10 or 11 years old then, but she was a precocious reader, and recognised the ways in which communist Poland mirrored Orwell’s fictional dystopian state: “It absolutely traumatised me,” she remembered.

Years later, in 1976, when Bogucka joined the emerging Polish opposition movement, she decided to create a library of books that had bypassed the state censor, and donated her own small collection, including this Nineteen Eighty-Four. The SB security service, Poland’s KGB, kept continual watch on her, eavesdropping on her conversations, arresting her and searching her apartment, so she asked neighbours to store the forbidden books. Much of the time, though, they would be circulating among readers, since this would be a “Flying Library”, which rarely touched the  ground.

Bogucka’s system of covert lending ran through a network of coordinators, each of whom was responsible for their own tight group of readers. She sorted the books into categories – politics, economics, history, literature – and divided them into packages of 10, before allocating each coordinator a particular day to pick up their parcel, which they carried away in a rucksack. The coordinator would drop the books back the following month at a different address, before picking up a new set.

The demand for Bogucka’s books was such that soon she needed more, and these could only come from the west. Activist friends passed word to London, where émigré publishers arranged shipments of 30 or 40 volumes at a time, smuggling them through the iron curtain aboard the sleeper trains that shuttled back and forth between Paris and Moscow, stopping in Poland along the way. By 1978, Teresa Bogucka’s Flying Library had a stock of 500 prohibited titles.

How many people read her copy of Orwell’s book in those crucial cold war years? Hundreds, probably thousands. And this was just one of millions of titles that arrived illegally in Poland at that time. As well as via trains, books arrived by every possible conveyance: aboard yachts; in secret compartments built into vans and trucks; by balloon; in the post. Mini-editions were slipped into the sheet music of touring musicians, or packed into food tins or Tampax boxes. In one instance, a copy of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago was carried on a flight to Warsaw hidden in a baby’s nappy.

What some in the east suspected, but very few knew for sure, was that the uncensored literature flooding the country wasn’t reaching Poles by chance. It was sent as part of a decades-long US intelligence operation, known in Washington as the “CIA book program”, designed, in the words of the programme’s leader, George Minden, to assault the eastern bloc with an “offensive of free, honest thinking”. Minden believed that “truth is contagious”, and if they could only deliver it to the oppressed peoples of the Soviet zone, it was certain to have an effect.

From today’s vantage point, when disinformation threatens western liberal democracy as never before, and censorship and book bans are once again turning schools and libraries into ideological battlegrounds, the CIA literary programmes appear almost quaint. Although they had political goals, they must rank among the most highbrow of psychological warfare operations. Along with copies of the Manchester Guardian Weekly and the New York Review of Books, the CIA sent works by blacklisted authors such as Boris Pasternak, Czesław Miłosz and Joseph Brodsky, anti-totalitarian writings by Hannah Arendt and Albert Camus, literary fiction from Philip Roth and Kurt Vonnegut, writing advice from Virginia Woolf, the plays of Václav Havel and Bertolt Brecht, and the spy thrillers of John le Carré.

Later, as well as smuggling books, the CIA would fund and ship presses and printing equipment into Poland, so that the banned titles could be reproduced in huge quantities by underground printers in situ. Few individuals were more central to these latter operations than the dissident publisher Mirosław Chojecki, known to the CIA by the cryptonym QRGUIDE.

On a Tuesday evening in March 1980, the police came to arrest Chojecki for the 43rd time. Chojecki was 30 years old that night – a tall man, with a mane of red-brown hair. He lived with his family in a third-floor apartment in Żoliborz, a suburb of northern Warsaw, and was cooking dinner for his young son and talking to his father-in-law when they heard the door. There were three men outside, a local cop in the jackboots and grey tunic of the citizen’s militia, and two plainclothes SB agents. They flashed their badges and told him to get his coat. There was no explanation. He had just enough time to calm his crying son, grab a toothbrush and a pack of cigarettes, then they clapped handcuffs on his wrists and took him down to the police Fiat waiting on the road below.

They brought him to Mokotów jail, a house of terror to rival the KGB’s Lubyanka headquarters in Moscow, and put him in block III, a wing reserved for political prisoners. He had been here before, once for “vilifying the Polish People’s Republic” and again for “organising a criminal group with the aim of distributing illegal publications” – at least then he had known the reason for his detention. As the days dripped by, he and his cellmates talked politics and played chess with a set made from heavy black prison bread. He wasn’t allowed a lawyer.

At Easter, when he had been locked up for 10 days without being summoned to court or allowed to contact his family, he decided to take the path chosen by political prisoners everywhere: he would go on a hunger strike. Eight days later, when he had lost 8kg (17lb), the prison doctor announced that they would force-feed him. They inserted a hose into his mouth, pushing it in deep so that it scratched his oesophagus and made him gag, and poured in a sweet, fatty mush. Tears ran down his face, of helplessness, rage, revulsion. When the food was gone, the doctor whipped out the tube and left without a word.

Chojecki had not yet recovered when the guards returned and forced him to climb three landings to an interrogation room, where an intelligence officer was waiting. It was Lieutenant Chernyshevsky, an old sparring partner.

How was he feeling, Chernyshevsky asked?

“Bad.”

“Do you know that there is a printing house on Reymonta Street?”

Chojecki didn’t answer.

“Do you have Jan Nowak’s book Courier from Warsaw? If so, where, when and how did you come into possession of it and what is your relationship with the author?”

There were more questions in this vein, all about the underground press. Chojecki gave the same response to each: as long as he didn’t know what the evidence was against him, they had nothing to discuss.

Realising the interrogation was pointless, Chernyshevsky brought it to an end. He offered the prisoner a cigarette, then the guards took Chojecki back to his cell.

Of course he knew all about Nowak’s outlawed text. His publishing house had just printed it. It was, he said later, one of the best books they had ever produced.

Unlike the Nazis, who burned books as a public ritual, in the Soviet system the destruction of literature was designed to be invisible. The lists of banned titles sent round to libraries and bookstores every year were secret. Works were pulped covertly. Allusions to censorship were not allowed. A list of prohibited publications from 1951 details 2,482 items, including 238 works of “outdated” sociopolitical literature and 562 books for children. Mostly these were proscribed for ideological reasons, but some rulings made little sense even within the bizarre logic of the party: a book about growing carrots was destroyed for implying that vegetables could sprout in individuals’ gardens, as well as in those run by collectives.

Chojecki was introduced to the idea of uncensored literature by Krystyna Starczewska, a teacher at his high school. “She got me interested,” he remembered. “She got me reading.” It wasn’t hard for Chojecki to find banned books, as his parents – war heroes who fought against the Nazis – were already plugged into dissident intellectual circles. He was never allowed much time with these publications as they had to be passed on to other readers. But the fragments he read, often overnight, were enough to sow the seeds of dissent.

In 1976, when the government announced drastic increases in the state-controlled prices of food, workers went on strike, and the party responded as it always did, with violence. One victim recalled waking up from a beating with a broken nose and no teeth; another remembered seeing men beat a pregnant woman. The 1976 events turned a group of bookish young graduates into hardened opposition activists, and it didn’t take them long to realise they needed a public voice.

In spring 1977, Chojecki decided to focus on underground publishing. He wasn’t the only pioneer of illicit printing techniques, but the operation he led, the Independent Publishing House NOWa, grew to be the biggest and most successful in the underground. By Christmas they had published short runs of half a dozen books by blacklisted writers in Poland. Crucially, they also began to reprint editions of titles that were arriving from the west. The same books that were actively pushed by the CIA.

By the third week of his hunger strike, Chojecki’s body was shutting down. On 27 April 1980, the warden came to see him. This was a first: he had never heard of the head of the prison visiting an inmate in their cell before.

“How’s the starvation?” the warden asked.

“Very well.”

“Do you intend to starve for a long time?”

“Until I leave prison.”

“That’s five years.”

“Less.”

“Four and a half years?”

“A few days, Citizen Warden.”

The warden was wrong, as it turned out. Two weeks later, on Saturday 10 May, the order came through that Chojecki was to be released. He had been arrested in the snow; now the season had turned. As he squinted out from the shadow cast by the prison wall at the sunshine blazing down, he could pick out green shoots on the branches of the trees.

He had no appetite, but he knew he needed to eat. He struggled round the corner to a cafe, where he bought a small coffee and two doughnuts, and sat at a window table. He ate very slowly, savouring the sweet pastry with absolute delight. People passed by on the other side of the glass.

“They think they are free,” he thought.

The regime might have released him, but it was still determined to prosecute Chojecki. As he prepared for his moment in the dock, it was more important than ever for the dissidents to show that underground publishing operations would not be stopped. Five days before the court date, two young NOWa printers set out on a job that would turn into a cat-and-mouse game with the secret police.

The night before leaving for work, Jan Walc went through his pockets. In this line of business, you had to assume you would be caught, searched and interrogated, and he couldn’t be found with anything that would incriminate him or his friends. Next he packed a few essentials and took a long bath, knowing it would be his last for some time.

He knew where to meet his partner, Zenek Pałka. The only extra piece of information he needed was the time, and Pałka had given him that over the phone. Without saying his name, he had announced that they should get together at 11am on Monday 9 June. Walc recognised the voice. He also knew what the wiretap sergeant listening in didn’t: namely, that he had to subtract two from everything, so the rendezvous was set for 9am on Saturday 7 June. That morning, he said goodbye to his wife and young son and walked out into a humid Warsaw day.

Leaving the building, Walc discreetly scanned the street. As a rule the secret police liked to watch your apartment or place of work and follow you from there, so if you didn’t pick up a tail right away, the prospects of avoiding one were good. All the same, he kept checking until he reached the cafe. Soon Pałka, a giant of a man with frizzy red hair, was settling into the seat next to him.

“Is the place far away?” Walc asked. Pałka took a paper serviette and wrote down an address before burning through the words with his cigarette. Then he passed on a few more details. Water came from a well, but they would need a week’s worth of food, since they couldn’t risk leaving the job to go shopping. The printing machine was a mimeograph made by AB Dick of Chicago. It had already been delivered to the house, along with a tonne and a half of paper, six full carloads. The job was to print several thousand copies of the civil society newsletter Information Bulletin, plus some pages for NOWa’s literary journal Pulse. They would need to buy 10 bottles of turpentine to run and clean the press.

By the time they’d packed all the food, they had no room for the solvent, so they stopped by at a friend’s place to borrow an extra bag. They didn’t realise he was under surveillance, and when they left his building they spotted a boxy grey Fiat saloon with three men inside which shadowed them as they walked along the road.

Reaching a tram stop, they saw the Fiat pull into a side road and park illegally, a sure sign it was the secret police, and when the tram arrived and the printers boarded, two plainclothes agents jumped out of the car and ran across the street, climbing up behind them. All four men now sat in the same streetcar as it rattled towards Zawisza Square. The Fiat kept pace alongside.

How to get rid of them? As they reached a stop, the printers saw the Fiat was boxed in at the traffic lights, and they took their chance, leaving the tram at the last minute. When the lights changed and the unmarked car had to pull away, Walc and Pałka were hurrying in a different direction, towards the railway station. A part of their tail was lost, but the other two agents had been alert and were keeping pace behind them as they ran down the station platform.

The agents were close as they boarded a train for Warsaw Central. Walc made a show of placing his bags on the luggage rack, but as the doors closed Pałka jammed his leg between them and slipped out. Walc now had the two remaining agents to himself. His job was to drag them around long enough for Pałka to prepare the next move. The men were behind him as he left the train at Warsaw Central and ducked into the warren of passages beneath the station. He knew police radios wouldn’t work down here. He ordered a Coke at a bar, bought some cigarettes, browsed the shops. When 20 minutes had passed, he emerged and headed for the taxi rank. He could see one of the men talking into his lapel as he climbed into a cab.

Warsaw’s Poniatowski Bbridge is as much a viaduct as a river crossing, the roadway linked to the streets below by a series of stone staircases. Speeding east, Walc gave the driver his instructions. Midway along the viaduct, the taxi came to a sudden halt, and the printer dived out and ran down the steps to the street below.

The chasing agents pulled up behind and raced down in pursuit, but as they reached the lower level Walc was already climbing into another cab, where Pałka was waiting. The policemen watched as their quarry pulled away. Knowing they would now be radioing in the cab’s licence plate, a few hundred yards up the road the printers swapped into another taxi. They transferred their bags, left a generous tip and gave the new driver an address on the far side of the city.

Around 3pm, they caught the train to Rembertów The place looked ideal. It was set back from the street, at the far end of a large, overgrown garden. The printing machine and the paper were hidden in an outhouse, 500 reams stacked almost to the roof. The paper was damp, which was far from ideal, but they would make it work somehow.

By evening their small room was filled with the fumes of cigarettes and turpentine, and the sound of the duplicating machine beating out its regular, soporific rhythm, bad-dum bad-dum bad-dum bad-dum. Underground printing was filthy, exhausting work. The duplicators were old and the paper was poor. Bibula, the Polish word for uncensored publications, means “blotting paper”, which reflected the stock they had to work with, which had to be hand-fed into the machine, three pages a second, hour upon hour. This meant they worked round the clock, in shifts, for days, until the job was done.

Pałka had brought along a transistor. They tuned it to Radio Free Europe, which maintained a regular commentary on Chojecki’s upcoming trial. American printers and British lawyers were protesting at what they called a show trial. Amnesty International was sending a legal representative. “A great day is coming,” Walc thought, “and we are stuck in a printing shop!” If they hurried the job, they might still be able to get to court.

Early on Thursday morning they had 20 reams left to print. By 8pm, Pałka was finishing the last stencil and Walc was burning misprints in the garden. Before leaving they had to strip down the machine, wash all the parts and lubricate them.

At last, carrying 50 copies of the Bulletin, they found a taxi and gave the driver the address of the apartment where they had been told to collect their pay. They arrived around 11pm. It was crowded with people, including half the Bulletin’s editors. Walc asked about the trial. He was astonished to hear it was already over. The sentence had been read an hour ago. One of the editors had just come back from the court, where they saw Chojecki deliver an excoriating indictment of the communist system. He told the court that his flat had been searched 17 times in the past four years, on a litany of pretexts: they were looking for a murderer, they had said, or a poisoner or a thief, but all they ever took away for evidence were books, typewriters and manuscripts.

“Why are such accusations levelled against people who fight against the pillaging of our culture?Officially, half of our recent history is erased from textbooks, studies, encyclopedias,” said Chojecki. It was the same in literature, where the state gave itself a “monopoly of thought” and a “monopoly of the word”. The lists of banned authors contained some of world’s best writers, he said. That was why he and his colleagues had set up NOWa, to fill the silences and correct the falsification.

Reaching a rousing finale, Chojecki announced that the trial was not about the accused at all, but about “free speech and thought, about Polish culture, about the dignity of society”.

Of course, none of this would change the verdict. The court duly convicted Chojecki and his co-defendants of theft of state property. He was sentenced to 18 months in prison, suspended for three years. But to everyone gathered in the editors’ apartment, this was a tremendous victory and Chojecki was a hero.

“Everybody around us rejoices,” Walc wrote in his account of that week’s events, which would be published in the following month’s Bulletin.

Someone pressed a cold beer into his hand. It was midnight.

Chojecki’s parents had fought for Polish independence with guns and bullets. He continued the struggle through literature and publishing. At times, his father, Jerzy was sceptical of his son’s tactics. “Do you think, Mirek, that you’ll be able to bring down the communist system with your little books?” he would ask. “Do you think your little words will make a difference?”

In fact, the impact of the CIA-sponsored literary tide was huge. By the mid-1980s the so-called “second circulation” of illicit literature in Poland grew so large that the system of communist censorship began to break down. Poland was the most crucial of eastern bloc nations: when communism collapsed in 1989, this was the first domino to fall. As the leading Polish dissident Adam Michnik put it: “It was books that were victorious in the fight. A book is like a reservoir of freedom, of independent thought, a reservoir of human dignity. A book was like fresh air. We should build a monument to books … they allowed us to survive and not go mad.”

Teresa Bogucka didn’t know for sure who was paying for the literature she received from the west, but she was aware that the Polish regime claimed that American intelligence supported émigré publishers, and the idea didn’t concern her at all.

“I thought, wow, a secret service supporting books,” she said. “That’s fantastic.”

🔴 This is an edited extract from The CIA Book Club: The Best Kept Secret of the Cold War by Charlie English, published by William Collins on 13 March.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[deanmarywinchester]

previous years: 2022, 2021 / list of worst sf/f/horror

the bangers were BANGING this year, I kept mentally readjusting my top 5 list every time I read something good so the honorable mentions are extremely honorable this year. I hope you read anything that sounds good from this list and tell me about it!

top 5:

chain gang all stars by nana kwame adjei-brenyah: when I say that this book is like the hunger games for adults, I’m not making a glib comparison between two books about fighting to the death, I’m saying that I haven’t felt so intensely about a book since I stayed up late to tear through the hunger games and sob about it when I was thirteen. this book is satire as real and devastating as I’ve ever read, with action scenes that feel like they’re being dripped directly into my hindbrain and a unique and believable love story. put it on hold at your library literally RIGHT now.

the actual star by monica byrne: about a post-climate catastrophe utopian society built around a religion started by a teenage girl in 2012 based on mayan traditions, and also about the teenage girl, and also about the maya. this book made me crazy because the future society felt real enough to touch, with its radical openness and collectivity solving problems that exist today but causing new ones that are totally novel and meaty and interesting to dig into. read it if you’re interested in different ways of being.

the spear cuts through water by simon jiménez: really, REALLY good, fresh, original epic fantasy. jimenez picks a few perspectives to stick to but hops fluidly into bystanders’ brains to give you their perspectives, so even background characters feel fleshed-out and no one’s pain is dismissed as a side effect of heroic battles or whatever. highly recommended if you like framing narratives and stories about stories, and like epic fantasy but wish it wasn’t mostly about finding acceptable enemies to slaughter with cool swords

the dispossessed by ursula k. le guin: I love how much this book is about hope as clear-eyed commitment to the boring and difficult work of a brighter and necessary future. sometimes the work of the glorious anarcho-communist revolution is leaving your university post and romantic partner for months at a time to dig irrigation ditches so nobody starves when there’s a drought. read this book for diplomatic conniving, a clash of values between a capitalist planet and its dissident moon, and hope.

imperial radch trilogy and its spinoffs by ann leckie: what if you were built to be a weapon of the empire, a serene sentient battleship with thousands of human bodies all containing your consciousness, and you lost all bodies but one and had to figure out how to be a person, singular and alone? what if you were a 19th century british military officer and you slept for a thousand years into the decline of the empire? what if you were grown in a vat to be a facsimile of human and then told off for eating all your siblings even though eating them was SO interesting? what then. leckie’s prose is incisive and funny, her unreliable narrators are wonderful, and her stories are intimate even though the backdrops are insanely huge. 👍.

honorable mentions:

house of leaves by mark z. danielewski: guys? anyone hearda this one? anyway. Something Is Wrong With This House horror with themes of storytelling and grief. recommending that you slam this book as fast as possible like I did so you can hold all its layers in your head at once.

the lathe of heaven by ursula k le guin: i thought I didn’t like ursula k le guin, and then I read this book, went OH and immediately devoured the hainish cycle. im so sorry miss ursula. this book about a hapless pacific northwesterner whose therapist is making him dream different realities into being is so sharp and sly and funny. themes of choices, ends and means.

he who drowned the world by shelley parker-chan: I liked the prequel to this addition to the radiant emperor duology. I LOVED this book. parker-chan has invented new and exciting modes of fucked-up codependency and im obsessed. historical light-fantasy with themes of ideals vs what it takes to reach them, gender, and regret.

babel by r. f. kuang: found the didacticism of this book annoying, but i really loved the concept of this novel and the way it slowly ratchets up the stakes. this novel is for people who want to smash the fun of the magic school genre against the reality of universities’ complicity in the imperial machine.

piranesi by susannah clarke: im late to this book but it’s such a weird little gem. peaceful yet unsettling. a man takes care of an endless house with an ocean inside it until he realizes the house is stealing his memories. themes of memory and devotion.

hell follows with us by andrew joseph white: I can only read YA these days if it’s a reread or if it’s genuinely good and really really strange. this is that. weird gory fantasy about a trans teen who escapes his militarized post-apocalyptic christian cult and finds himself turning into something Different. my only gripe is that he uses 2023-perfect language to describe transness and I think he should be inventing genders weve never even thought of. such is YA.

some desperate glory by emily tesch: a rolickin’ good space opera time with terrible women <3. a thriller about how the golden child of her isolated human-supremacist space station cult deprograms and the consequences of it. this feels like a grown-up SPOP until the theoretical physics gets involved. big fan

the library of mount char by scott hawkins: this book is harrow the ninth in suburbia until it becomes a more macabre version of the absurdity of the gomens apocalypse. God raises his children, sometimes brutally, to hone their powers in a neighborhood that mysteriously keeps out outsiders. came for the dysfunctional mess of the god-children and now I can never look at a grill the same way

runners up:

bunny by mona awad: books that make you WISH you were in mona awad’s MFA program where she must have been having a terrible time. the weird one out in an MFA program accepts overtures into the unbearable rich-girls’ clique to find out what they’re Up To. themes of aimlessness and the intersection of class with the art world

camp damascus by chuck tingle: have you ever wished that you were simply too autistic to be successfully demonically brainwashed into not having gay thoughts? horror-flavored thriller that was just fun

light from uncommon stars by ryka aoki: this author put a bunch of genres in a blender and came up with something fun and surprisingly cozy. an immortal woman must sell violinists’ souls to the devil in exchange for their fame, or he’ll drag her to damnation instead. there might be aliens and coffeeshop romance involved. definitely a blender.

the fragile threads of power by v. e. schwab: if you haven’t read a darker shade of magic and you like tightly paced high fantasy and historical fantasy elements, political intrigue, and pirates, read that first. if you have, there’s more now! lila bard are you free on thursday when I am free

the library of the dead & our lady of mysterious ailments by t. l. huchu: a teenage girl provides for her family in soft-apocalypse magic edinburgh with a job carrying messages from ghosts to their living relatives. an ongoing mystery series about the intrigues she uncovers among the dead.

severance by ling ma: this books is on the list of media that is the terror to me: it's about an apocalyptic disease that makes people reenact their routines mindlessly until they collapse. intimate apocalypse novel with themes of late capitalist malaise.

ocean’s echo by everina maxwell: i didn't really like winter's orbit because i'm just not a romance guy, but this second novel stands alone and the romance is more insane and less of the entire point of the novel. (also it's between essentially Discworld's Carrot and Moist Von Lipwig, which is. really something.) in the Space Military, a buttoned-up mind controller must pretend to bend a socialite with illegal mind-reading powers to his will. what if fake relationship but the relationship they have to fake is "brain linked master/servant pair."

the murderbot diaries by martha wells: novellas about a misanthropic security android who jailbroke itself in order to watch tv. the name "murderbot" is a joke but it very much did kill people <3 themes of paranoia and outsiderhood, corporate wrongdoing, repentance, and trust

black water sister by zen cho: zen cho is good at any kind of fantasy she writes, including this, her first modern fantasy novel. a closeted lesbian has to move in with her family in malaysia after college in the US, only to discover that her dead grandmother has some unfinished business involving a local goddess and a conniving real estate developer. themes of family, gender, and place.

the way inn by will wiles: a man who’s paid to pretend he’s other people to attend conferences in their place gets trapped in an endless Marriott. has the sharp humor of a colson whitehead corporate satire until it becomes more straightforwardly horror-flavored.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Andrew Doyle

Published: Feb 1, 2025

I do not much like the destruction of books. As a form of protest, it conjures sinister images from the past, most notably the Pathé news reels of brownshirts and students gathered around a pyre in Berlin’s Opernplatz under the watchful eye of Joseph Goebbels. The Nazis had raided libraries, universities and other private collections to harvest works by political dissidents, sexologists, “degenerate” artists and any others deemed to be “un-German”. Books by Left-wing authors such as Karl Marx, Bertolt Brecht and Rosa Luxemburg were publicly incinerated, along with fictional works by the likes of Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Victor Hugo, Oscar Wilde and James Joyce. This was philistinism in its purest form.

The symbolism of a burning book is, therefore, the repudiation of the very notion of freedom. And yet this same freedom means that we must be able to burn books if we so desire. The Nazis, of course, were destroying the property of others, an authoritarian act designed to eliminate whole branches of thought. This is not to be conflated with an individual who chooses to vandalise his or her own property. The trans activists who burn J.K. Rowling’s books and post the footage online are making fools of themselves, but they are also exercising their right to do so in a free society.

This is a distinction worth bearing in mind when we consider the murder of anti-Islam campaigner Salwan Momika, an Iraqi man who had been awaiting a verdict in Sweden for the crime of “agitation against an ethnic or national group”. Momika had publicly burned a number of copies of the Quran during the summer of 2023. He was shot dead during or just before a live stream on TikTok at his home in Södertälje on Wednesday. The details are as of yet unclear, but there are suggestions that the assassination may have involved a foreign power.

Momika had been granted temporary residence in Sweden in 2018, although his frustration with his adopted country’s lacklustre commitment to freedom of speech led him to seek asylum in Norway in March 2024. After just a few weeks, the Norwegian authorities had him deported back to Sweden. According to Momika, the prosecutor in his trial had been seeking his extradition back to Iraq because of his criticisms of Islam. Back in August, he had posted the following on X: “Sweden and Norway have identified me as a threat to their security. Yes, I am a threat to the Islamization project of the West, which is being pursued by your Leftist communist government that is deceiving the citizens and making the country Islamic. So I have come to awaken the people and thwart the Islamization project of the West, and I will not be afraid of you.”

In cases of this kind, it has become depressingly inevitable that commentators will seek to blame the victim. After the publication of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses in 1988, the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa calling for the author’s murder. Instead of taking a united stance against a foreign regime threatening the life of a British citizen, pundits and politicians engaged in endless debates about whether Rushdie had brought this on himself. Crime novelist John Le Carré stated that “there is no law in life or nature that says great religions may be insulted with impunity”, and that “there is no absolute standard of free speech in any society”. It should go without saying that powerful theocrats do not require protection from the hurtful words of novelists.

Last month was the 10th anniversary of the massacre at the offices of the French magazine Charlie Hebdo. Initially, world leaders were united in their condemnation of terrorists who had butchered cartoonists for drawing satirical caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed. Thousands gathered at vigils and held placards bearing the words “Je Suis Charlie”. PEN America — an organisation devoted to the principle of free expression — created a “courage award” for Charlie Hebdo. That was until dozens of members of PEN, including writers such as Joyce Carol Oates and Junot Díaz, signed an open letter in protest. Charlie Hebdo, they claimed, had mocked a “section of the French population that is already marginalized, embattled and victimized”. This was, of course, to misidentify the target. The cartoonists weren’t “punching down” at the Muslim minority, but rather “punching up” at the authoritarianism of institutionalised religion.

We never seem to learn that appeasement of religious extremists only makes them stronger. Our collective failure to take a firm stance for artistic liberty in the Rushdie affair has made it more difficult to uphold the principle today. That Momika was on trial in the first place suggests that Sweden’s commitment to freedom of expression has been subordinated to the creed of multiculturalism. According to the BBC, following Momika’s campaigns in 2023 the Swedish government had “pledged to explore legal means of abolishing protests that involve burning texts in certain circumstances”. Yet Momika’s copies of the Quran were his own property, and he was free to dispose of them as he wished. We might take the view that his method of protest is insensitive or provocative, but in a free society such behaviour is a matter of individual conscience.

The victim-blamers have been predictably vocal. Within hours of the news of Momika’s murder, television personality Bushra Shaikh posted the following on X: “Some of you may disagree but the public desecration of any holy book should be viewed as a hate crime and the offender should face consequences”. She later clarified that by “face consequences” she was not supporting murder, but rather the principle that the “government decides on the punishment”. And yet Shaikh’s logic defeats itself. Her post has been widely interpreted as hate-filled and authoritarian. Does this mean that, if the government were to designate the public advocacy of blasphemy laws a “hate crime”, she would be content to be prosecuted?

Those who endorse authoritarianism, in other words, are laying a trap for themselves. If we look to the state to punish our detractors, where does that leave us when the values of those in power no longer align with our own? Momika has been blamed for the riots and the international diplomatic rows that ensued following his campaigns, but the peaceful protester is not responsible for those who break the law in response. Last summer, the Guardian published a piece that presented his Quran-burning as evidence of a “racism crisis”. One of the Swedish Muslim interviewees was quoted as saying: “I understand you are allowed to think and feel what you want, this is a free country, but there must be boundaries. It’s such a pity that it has happened so many times and Sweden doesn’t seem to learn from its mistakes.”

Those of us who still believe in liberal values will baulk at the suggestion — and the implied threat — in claiming that we are mistaken to support freedom of expression. Moreover, there is nothing racist about burning a copy of the Quran. Islam is a belief-system, not a race. The criminalisation of “Islamophobia” makes about as much sense as prosecuting citizens for “Marxistophobia” or “Freemarketcapitalismophobia”. Had Momika burned a copy of The Communist Manifesto, would there be calls to modify the law to see him incarcerated?

Increasingly, Western societies are pandering to religious zealots who are willing to resort to violence to achieve their aims. Members of the ruling class are undeniably afraid. During Prime Minister’s Questions in November 2024, the Labour MP for Birmingham Hall Green and Moseley, Tahir Ali, asked Keir Starmer whether he would establish “measures to prohibit the desecration of all religious texts and the prophets of the Abrahamic religions”. Starmer replied: “I agree that desecration is awful and should be condemned across the House. We are, as I said before, committed to tackling all forms of hatred and division, including Islamophobia in all its forms.” A better response would have been: “Blasphemy laws are incompatible with the values of a free country.”

It is undeniably the case that Islamic theocracies are intolerant to dissent, but we have only ourselves to blame if we capitulate to pressure from foreign powers to undermine our commitment to secularism. Pakistan’s prime minister Imran Khan, for instance, blamed the radicalisation of Islamic terrorists on the French president Emmanuel Macron’s tolerance for the right of citizens to blaspheme against Islam. In October 2020, he tweeted: “President Macron has chosen to deliberately provoke Muslims, incl his own citizens, through encouraging the display of blasphemous cartoons targeting Islam & our Prophet PBUH.” President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey even cited Momika’s Quran-burning in an attempt to scupper Sweden’s bid to join Nato in 2023.

But blasphemy only makes sense to the faithful. Stéphane Charbonnier (known as “Charb”), the cartoonist and editor-in-chief of Charlie Hebdo who was among the victims of the 2015 atrocity, addressed this point in an “open letter” completed just two days before his death. “God is only sacred to those who believe in him,” he wrote. “If you wish to insult or offend God, you have to be sure that he exists… In France, a religion is nothing more than a collection of texts, traditions, and customs that it is perfectly legitimate to criticize. Sticking a clown nose on Marx is no more offensive or scandalous than popping the same schnoz on Muhammad.”=

This is the spirit of secularism — the French tradition of laïcité — that other countries in the western world should emulate. The problem is not the complaints from those who seek the implementation of sharia in democratic nations, but those in power who fail to reject such demands unequivocally. The murder of Salwan Momika should be a wake-up call for the West. Continued appeasement will only guarantee further bloodshed. For all the short-term risks of defending free speech, our long-term security depends upon it.

--

==

"Why can't you just comply with our authoritarian religious codes?"

Because you want me to. Your religious codes are for you, not me.

This is literally terrorism. We are supposed to be afraid of what will happen to us if we don't submit to Islamic totalitarianism. That is reason enough to not just resist, but actively oppose and defy Islamic totalitarian demands.

[clonerightsagenda]

#recently read March 25

Projections by S E Porter. The ghost of a young woman murdered by a jealous sorcerer narrates his continued destructive obsession and her quest for revenge. *An effectively constructed look at toxic masculinity, could've been shorter imo.

Heavenly Tyrant by Xiran Jay Zhao. After waking the legendary lost emperor, Zetian is forced to play along as his empress until they can overthrow the gods. *Was not expecting all the labor theory tbh but sure. A real 'leftist man who won't do the dishes' situation.

Taiwan Travelogue by Yang Shuang-Zi. Novel pretending to be translated autofiction by a Japanese visitor to colonial Taiwan, documenting her fraught relationship with her local interpreter. *Fun with metafiction, explores the limitations of translation and affection between colonizer and colonized.

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. A hacker and a courier team up to stop the release of a virus meant to hack people's brains. *Definitely helpful to read to orient me to other works in the genre but boy was it written by a white man in the early 90s.

Look Again by Elizabeth Trembley. Graphic memoir illustrating how the author's recollection of finding a corpse in the woods changed with each retelling, and how trauma impacts our memory.

Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky. A professor and political dissident is sent to a labor camp searching for the lifeforms that created signs of civilization on an alien world. *Tchaikovsky really loves speculative xenobiology huh. Also appreciated the full throated radicalism.

Magus of the Library by Mitsu Izumi. A young outcast trains to become one of the elite librarians who maintain the world's fragile peace. *My coworkers keep recommending library mangas. I didn't follow everything but the most recent volume featured the librarians debating their role in providing or restricting access to texts that foment bigotry and violence, which is a discussion our profession continues to have.

[aladaylessecondblog]

The Whore AU - Vemyn

Author's Note: Vemyn's into almost getting caught. nsft.

---------------------

The walk from the tunnel under Kogoruhn to Vemynal thankfully wasn't very far, and glad Sadara was of that. The blight winds were even worse inside the Ghostfence than out, and she was happy to get back indoors.

An ash ghoul who identified himself as Dagoth Nilor greeted her, and directed her to the "library," where she found Dagoth Vemyn.

The interview with him was short and to the point. There was no one else in the library at present. He would leave the room, after which she was to take a book - any book, it didn't really matter which one - and stand at a table in the corner to read it. Then he'd come back in and do as he pleased with her, while trying not to be seen by any who passed by or entered the room.

She nodded and Vemyn left.

Looking over the bookshelves she finally find a book that looked both small and interesting - The Seven Curses. She wouldn't be doing much reading anyway, once he got started. She carried it over to the table, and opened it.

...through the doors of the unmourned house

where scoffers scoff and schemers scheme

from the halls of the oath-breaking house

rings seven curses of gods blasphemed

She'd heard of these prophecies only a few times, from a customer of hers who had been the type to be deep in his cups and chatty. A Dissident Priest, before he'd disappeared. These things never seemed to turn up at all, he'd said, and if they did they were kept under lock and key, in secret compartments. But House Dagoth had them out in the open.

There was an echo of footsteps, and she kept her eyes on the paper before her.

first curse, Curse-of-Fire

second curse, Curse-of-Ash

third curse, Curse-of-Flesh

fourth curse, Curse-of-Ghosts

Curse of fire, curse of ash. Obviously Red Mountain itself, she thought, that was easy enough. Curse of flesh...corprus. She'd caught it a while back and thought nothing of it, assuming perhaps she'd just gotten lucky enough not to have a serious case. But then she'd learned that ALL cases were serious ones.

Save hers. And THAT, that was a small reason to think she was what Araynys had thought her to be. But once she was out of this she had no intention of declaring it. That was the surest way to get into trouble here.

Curse of ghosts, though, that was one she couldn't figure out.

fifth curse, Curse-of-Seed

Sadara gave a chuckle in her throat at reading those words. She certainly knew what THAT meant...

A pair of hands on her hips, that moved slowly forward and then up, to the neckline of her robe.

"Something funny?" came the whisper in her ear.

"Just reading the prophecies." Sadara replied to Vemyn, who took a firm grip on her breasts. "Seven curses...and one of them is curse-of-seed. I'm not certain I'd call it a curse, though."

"How fortunate for us that you're so open-minded." His tone flattened as he gave a tug to her robe; it was enough for her breasts to pop out over the neckline. In an instant Vemyn's hands were on them again. A growl of desire sounded off in her ear.

"So eager," she teased softly, "I--"

And then, suddenly, a hand moved up to cover her mouth. Someone was walking past the library entrance, meandering practically. Her chest was left bare to the air - even if whoever-it-was came in, they'd see nothing unless they got too close.

(She could feel Vemyn's cock, already half hard, rising to full mast as they waited for whoever-it-was to pass.)

Only when they were safe again did Vemyn move his hands again.

"So close to being caught, weren't we?" she teased, "Surely, they'd have seen me bare, but do you think they would have seen your cock hard like that for me too? Do you think -"

Vemyn groped her a bit longer before moving one hand south, to pull at the knot tied in her belt. It came loose, and the front of her robe opened for him. He let his hand slide slowly over her bare skin, seeming to revel in the touch, until it slipped beneath her smallclothes and his fingers began to probe at the heat between her legs.

Sadara clenched at the table, prompting a short laugh in her ear from Vemyn. He pressed closer - and she pushed back, grinding against his cock with her ass.

"Minx," he accused.

"Professional," Sadara retorted.

Once she was wet enough, he tugged her robe outward, tucking it back. It exposed her leg, and then her ass to the cold air of the room. She shivered just slightly, and bent slightly over the table, waiting. There was the slight shuffling sound of Vemyn adjusting his loincloth, and then suddenly--

She pressed a hand over her mouth to stifle the groan that wanted to slip out. The sudden shift from emptiness to being utterly filled with that cock was overwhelming. Clearly, he was eager - but she thought she might be too, if a year elapsed between each opportunity to indulge in the pleasures of the flesh.

"Can't keep quiet on your own, can you?" It was Vemyn's turned to tease. "No. No, of course not..."

It was a steady piston, his thrusts, and Sadara wanted to bring her hand down so she could respond. But he was right - she didn't trust herself not to make noise. The entire point of this was NOT to get caught.

So why--why, she wondered, as his next thrust, hard and deep enough to practically take her breath away, enough that her knees were suddenly weak--did he seem to be working so hard to make her do it?

Part of the draw of it. Easy to keep quiet and not get caught. Harder to do this and manage it.

"You're trying--" Vemyn's pace slowed as he pulled her upright, which let him hit a bit deeper, "--so hard to say nothing, aren't you?"

She nodded, hand still firmly clamped over her mouth.

He whispered a bit longer, words that seemed to touch some deep part of her that craved the praise he was dispensing. Words telling her how good she was being for him, trying to obey his orders, trying to do as he'd asked her. And all the while that cock spreading her around him, stoking the flames in her belly higher and higher.

"Lord Vemyn?"

The voice came from the doorway, and suddenly the orgasm that only a moment again seemed close enough to taste - was denied. Vemyn withdrew from her in a hurry, pushed her robe forward, and she hastily tied it while he adjusted himself.

"Yes?"

"We have new dreamers," came the voice, now more clearly an ash ghoul, "Three of them."

"Thank you, Soler," Vemyn said quickly, "I'll speak to them shortly. For now process them in the usual fashion."

There was a sound of acknowledgement and then of footsteps, as their intruder left.

Vemyn pounced on Sadara the moment he was able. Her robe, untied, pulled open, her pushed down and bent over the table - his cock, spreading her cunt wide around him.

"That--really--excited you--didn't it?" she let herself tease, forcing the moans to stay back. "You almost--seemed like you--wanted to get caught."

He didn't answer. Now those clawed fingers were at the bare skin of her hips, eagerly tugging her back against him, never letting her get completely free of his cock. A moan slipped from her lips, and seemed to energize him further.

"Gods," she moaned softly, "I'm so close."

She slipped a hand between her legs, stroking over her clit; between that and the rapid movement of Vemyn's thrusts, her climax rushed through her like the sudden crash of a wave and dashed her on the rocks below.

"Oh--GODS--" The sound she made now was strangled, broken, and she shuddered around his cock as pleasure drowned her.

A sudden clench--a hot triple pulse, wet inside her--and it was over.

Sadara was left breathing hard, and took a few moments to relax before she let herself get shakily to her feet. Vemyn helped her re-tie her robe, and gave a grin when she turned around. He indulged in a few kisses - riding out the high of that lovely heat.

"You did much better than the rest we've had," he said, "Perhaps next year we should ask you back, provided you've not yet been scared off."

"You all are nothing I haven't handled before," Sadara replied, "Speaking of...I was told Tureynul's next. What should I expect from him?"

"Nothing much, he's quite plain," Vemyn said. "Compared to the rest of us. He simply wants to get off and be done with it, nothing special. Sometimes he wants his whores to sleep beside him."

"That doesn't sound too bad."

[ilikereadingactually]

Alien Clay

Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky

WOW WOW WOW. WOW. it's been a while since i've encountered a book as surprising as this one. not in a one-big-shock kind of way, but rather a pleasant slow creep of "are we really going there? oh my god, we are." key features of my delight include absolutely perfect use of "unreliable" limited first person narration, and expertly wielded sections of non-chronological narrative.

i've realized that i tend to approach these casual reviews more like a reading journal and i usually don't give any plot synopsis, which is related to how i like to approach books—with enough sense of the vibe to know i might like it, but not much foreknowledge of what it's about. but i've been feeling like maybe it would be useful to other people to have a tiny bit of synopsis, as a treat. so:

the plot of this book in one sentence: a xenobiologist and academic political dissident is sentenced to a labor camp on an alien world, where he is sure to die, but he might get to study alien life forms first.

it's a fascinating read, and feels very prescient right now. the way Tchaikovsky presents the political orthodoxy of this future, and the strengths and weak points of resistance from a perspective inside it, is so striking! and it's all happening inside this quiet growing horror, the source of which slowly shifts and evolves over the course of the book. what a treat to read a novel so fully unified in its themes, on every level of the narrative and even in the structure!

i also have to yell a little about the narrator, Arton Daghdev. he is simultaneously charming and pathetic, wickedly sharp and foolishly soft. his observations and assessments of himself and the people around him, of academia, of oppression and the oppressors, of the alien surroundings, are all so delightful to me and remind me favorably and unfavorably of many academics i know.

a complete stunner of a book, and my takeaway is that i should have been reading Tchaikovsky's books before now, and i will definitely be requesting some from my library.

the deets

how i read it: another e-galley from NetGalley! so close to digging out from the fall backlog i got stuck in!

try this if you: revel in ambiguous morality, have ever experienced academia, dig stories about resisting fascism, love to see a classic alien planet scenario turned on its head, or were into Scavengers Reign.

some lines i really liked: not kidding, i took 17 screencaps of possible inclusions for this section and whittled it down to a few examples of Tchaikovsky's funny and startling prose and incredibly sharp arguments.

Then we start grappling, slinging ourselves back and forth as the rest of the Labour jeer and cheer. He tries to ram a knee right into my academic credentials and I try to yank a fistful of that wiry beard out.

---

Primatt doesn't even look at me. If I'm a personnel file, it's one she hasn't opened. She makes her face into standard-expression-when-confronted-with-authority number seventeen: willingness to be enlightened.

---

And on such hills I die. That doubtless sounds stupid, to you who tell yourself you will take up arms when they starve your children, when they rob you of your goods, when they come for that demographic which includes you. But it's deviation from the truth that lets them do these things. It's the lies, at all levels, which mean when they come for you and yours, the others won't lift a finger, because they've believed the lies spread about you. It is the lies that starve your children because you believe the stories about general shortages, even though the grandees of the Mandate feast off gold plates every day of the year. And it is lies about science which cut most deeply, telling you that this or that group of people are naturally inferior, or another group has an innate ability to lead. That there is sufficient genetic distinction to make the call, when in actuality we share the vast bulk of our inheritance with mushrooms. Or else that, because of this kinship with mushrooms, our leaders are justified in keeping us in the dirt and feeding us shit.

---

He smiles thinly. I never saw so thin a smile. You could open your wrists with it.

---

"This could have been your crowning achievement," he tells me. "To contribute to solving the mystery. Instead of which you make it all about politics." Thus sayeth the politician when the scientist ventures an opinion.

pub date: September 17, 2024. GO READ THIS, IM NOT KIDDING AROUND HERE.

[burningcheese-merchant]

Ok fuck it. Fuck it I need to rant. I'm disappointed to the high heavens. This just looks like X and Y again. It just looks like they finally bothered to get off their asses and make Pokémon Z like everyone begged for 10+ years ago and they're trying to relabel it as a Legends game. You know what the word "legend" means? It means OLD!!! It's a fantastical tale of days long past! PAST! NOT FUTURE! Why are we in the future!!! There are no legends about the damn future, only the past!!!

How cool would it have been if we were in the Pokémon equivalent of Napoleonic France? If the protagonist was from a lower-middle-class family (maybe even lower, a genuinely struggling protagonist would be interesting, especially within this time period), who set out with their Pokémon to earn money to help out, only to end up caught in the middle of a nationwide shitstorm? What if you ventured throughout the region, through the beaches and mountains and beautiful French/Kalosian countryside, all the way to Paris/Lumiose, where the societal rot is at its most obvious and damning? What if the "evil team" wasn't evil at first, just a band of revolutionaries with their hearts in the right place, seeking change and justice for the broke and starving public against the laziness and corruption of the self-absorbed elite? What if the villain was the king at first, because he and the other royals really are as awful as they're stated to be? What if there were (optional, because not everyone was against the French monarchy) side quests to help spread revolutionary propaganda or help the rebels earn money, gather resources, toughen up their Pokémon in preparation for future battles against the royals? Hell, what if there was a rival group of royalists who acted as the rebels' foil, whom you can also help and hinder as much or as little as you liked?

What if there was an honest-to-God violent coup where people and Pokémon stormed the royal palace and destroy everything in sight (and you could be there, battling guards or something)? What if the king was challenged to a battle and lost miserably, proving once and for all how weak and pathetic he is, and thus overthrown and exiled (can't execute him, this franchise is too cowardly to evolve past being milquetoast kiddie shit)? What if the rebel leader, with his dear Empoleon beside him, took his place and crowned himself emperor right then and there, to the overwhelming joy of his followers and sympathizers, dismay of his opponents, and whatever it is the player chooses to feel, because there should be a genuine undercurrent of historical, political and philosophical discussion about all of this throughout the story that encourages us to form our own thoughts and opinions about the situation?

Only for the rebel leader, the Napoleon figure, to turn out worse than the king ever was, and his close subordinates immediately going mad with their newfound power and practically destroying the country. Then they really ARE the evil team for real this time, because they became the tyrants they sought to destroy, and depending on the player's past actions, it might partially be their fault that they succeeded. Imagine the Pokémon equivalent of the fucking Reign of Terror. People and Pokémon being attacked, imprisoned, exiled (again, they're too chickenshit to kill people. Tens of thousands died during the REAL Reign of Terror). Imagine your new mission going from trying to flee Lumiose and go home (only to fail, because they won't let anyone leave outside of being formally exiled out of fear/paranoia about uncontrolled dissidents) to taking an active role against the new regime, battling police to bust innocents out of jail, reuniting families and friends torn apart by fear and force? Imagine a heated battle against the stand-in for Maximilien Robespierre to help put an end to the madness!!! What if you went to libraries and picked up newspapers and listened to the telegraph and discovered everything has been censored in some way? What if you went into houses and found depressed wives and mothers and sisters and daughters, and opened letters from the men in their families (and their Pokémon, too) who were conscripted into the Kalosian army because the Emperor is trying to wage wars against neighboring regions to fulfill territorial ambitions (which actually did happen, Napoleon's France was constantly at war, which majorly tanked the economy because all the men were sent off to die or be horrifically injured. Remember when they tried to invade Russia? Over half a million troops went, barely 1/6 of them came back)? The climax of the story + defeat of the Emperor in battle can be a nod to the Battle of Waterloo!!! The post-game can have the player looking for runaway rebels like how you hunted for the Sages in post-game Black and White! What if there was a limited time mystery gift event where you could win a ferry ticket to the island the former Emperor is imprisoned on, JUST LIKE THE ACTUAL NAPOLEON, and there was a final cutscene between you and him where you discuss everything that happened and he asserts that he did what he had to and he still believes that he was acting in Kalos's best interest!!! Because many of the revolutionaries really did think that way, they believed they were doing right by France!!! Even when they jailed and murdered thousands of innocent people!!!

But no, we don't get cool shit like that, we get AZ running a fucking inn for whatever reason and an "urban redevelopment plan" that's literally just "let the Pokémon trash half the city with zero repercussions or any consideration for the homes and businesses in the areas they overrun". What the fuck man

[tiger-tail]

Postinggw while um concussed to feed the crows

Jimmy hears Joel murmuring some random song with his headphones on from a few feet away. Joel is sitting across the table from him at a library. Jimmy is reading a very thick book on birds.

Joel looks so peaceful like this, Jimmy has the notion to point this out. Joel wasn't normally this relaxed. Jimmy can catch a few lyrics in his lazy sing-along. It sounds like Pup or Dog Park Dissidents but he's not sure. Maybe it was Destructo Disk?

As Joel starts doing finger drums in the air, Jimmy goes back to reading his book. The current page is about Robins, with a diagram pointing to all the different parts of the bird. Spring was starting to get warm, so of course his yard was covered in robins eating all the crabapples that fell from Joel's tree. He had actually photographed a few of them yesterday.

Robins reminded Jimmy of Joel. They're loud, small, and eat a lot. Robins wouldn't shut up if they knew what was good for them. Joel's humming from across the table gets a little louder. Robins were pretty small, but about average sized for a backyard bird. They're hungry and eat anything they're given. The only thing Joel won't eat is Scott's cooking. He makes a comment every time about how Scott doesn't know better than to not poison him out of distaste.

Jimmy knows better than to comment on Joel's height.

Jimmy flips the page. Mourning doves…

Jimmy is startled near intense enough that he slams the book down on the table. A loud bang and yelp sounds from the opposite side of the table, and the table shakes. Jimmy breathes in and out with closed eyes before peering over…. right.

Joel had fallen over in his chair leaning back. He made no attempt at getting up, clearly accepting his place on the floor. Jimmy scoffs.

He walks over to Joel and pulls the headphones off of the brunette's head. Jimmy gives Joel a glare and shushes him loudly.

Joel's voice is a whisper.

“Not even an ‘are you okay’? I'm heartbroken.”

“Are you okay?”

“It's too late now!”

…

“Yes I'm fine.” He laughs quietly.

Jimmy can hear the music that's blasting in his headphones.

Ah. Nine Inch Nails.

[dissidentlibrary]

Heroes

I begin in Septembe, when I go on the road. "The road" means my return to the South. It means, briefly, for example, seeing Myrlie Evers, and the children - those children, who are children no longer. It means going back to Atlanta, to Selma, to Birmingham. It means seeinng Coretta Scott King, and Martin's children.

James Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro.

[da3drat]

Meri in the library of the dissident priests.

Drew this aaaaages ago and couldn’t decide whether to post it but I thought eh, might as well.

[quietbluejay]

The Buried Dagger Take 2 #6

back in the present, mortarion is not dealing well with poor zurrieq's undeath

except…now one has it's like he was conquered and there's something warpy about it because of the undeath on the command deck, typhon is talking with a bunch of people there's trouble

they can't figure out how it's happening or who would have done it though morarg theorizes it's the alpha legion lmao typhon: u all forgot we're in the warp morarg: u forgot we got gellar fields and now it's time for mortarion to give a fleet-wide speech

mortarion: i'm not dramatic like SOME people

Arzach: dramatic entrance and exit in shadows

the tldr of his speech is it's a total lockdown

I'm not dramatic, he said, like a big fat liar

after the speech, mortarion whispers to typhon for him to get his specialists on the case

however, they get interrupted because one of the ships is going to try and transition back into realspace

end chapter yeah like, genuinely, the moment Typhon killed the navigators, maybe even the moment they entered the Warp, there was no way out of this

unfortunately we're back to terra

Rubio is feeling deeply suspicious because they didn't make him go through the normal security protocols so he goes immediately to Malcador checking out his library lol

flickering light this guy's going for peak drama

there's a velvet bag nearby with some silver coins on it i know what it is but i can't help but make the joke about this being Rubio's 30 pieces of silver rubio explains about the stuff that happened before, malcador makes some cryptic comments much to rubio's annoyance

lol. lmao. "you did exactly what i would have done, but i didn't order it, so it's bad" the foundations of the modern imperium really are found here in malcador Malcador also doesn't know what's up with the sisters also surprise appearance by Ael Wyntor Rubio: wtf. i saw him die. Malcador in his head: NO YOU DIDNT. DONT SAY ANYTHING. Rubio pulls out the recording of the sister(s), the one we left off on last time sounds like an offer of truce huh

over at white mountain, loken is showing garro and the rest a globe where the locations of all the sisters they found so far are marked there's a LOT

and there's no pattern to the disappearances

Garro: I know what it is okay but like, was this all alpha legion stuff? how DID these guys get so organized like lmaooo it's well within the bounds of reason to think there were a lot of discontents with the imperium so that's not a surprise it's the getting them organized that's the thing anyways Garro thinks about his personal lectitio copy

UwU groan the conversation moves on and they thought the imperial cult was a hideout for the horus dissidents which is incredibly hilarious to me but turns out some of the cult instances are but some of them are just…cultists Dr Brell isn't a fan of them lmao meanwhile Loken vibes with the messages and thinks it's Horus asking for peace

everyone: lmao why would horus even ask for peace loken: because somewhere deep down he knows this war is going to ruin us all also lmao, "arrogance" it's not like he's asking for their surrender this is way more diplomatic than that (i mean it's a trap as we all know, but still)

annnd right on cue Mr. Dramatic shows up to say "he's right, you know" i refer of course to Malcador so malcador is going to talk to them. alonnnne

it ends up with Rubio going with him malcador: on pain of death no one disturb me rubio meanwhile is NOT enjoying the psychic dampening here it feels like drowning

all the voices come together to say horus lupercal meanwhile back with the legionaries there's a bunch of cargo ships with horus' banners carrying a load of people who have somehow found this supposedly secret place loken orders them to fire at them they're gonna go out and attack all the people who escaped the ships so yeah back with the sisters, it's a message for Malcador

anyways yup it was a trap

he kills the scientist through the observation glass first for some reason yep rubio was a sleeper agent the whole time somehow

Arzach: One thing that irks me tho is how Swallow is, afaik, the only author to literally torture SoS / blanks in his books. Everytime. May be just a narrative thing but …

Sky: The contrast between the section with the Garro simping and 'Mortarion chooses to be a hero despite everything' is genuinely fascinating Feels like two different books

ok back to Mortarion and you know it's very appropriate i'm doing this book while i have a fever and have been sick for like 3 months (note: I don't have a fever any more! I have the arm problems but I am not sick!!)

he's going to the primarch access only secret room where daemon grulgor is held Grulgor: let me kill for you Mortarion: you'd like that, wouldn't you

Mortarion is here because he's got questions annnnd Grulgor has ✨ answers ✨

Grulgor: yes, and that's why it's so cool! Mortarion: i should kill you rn Grulgor: go ahead and do it, Grandfather's Gift will have me being like the cat from The Cat Came Back Mortarion internally: grandfather… ugh, it's time for some garro simping Mortarion briefly fantasizes about a universe where all this warpy stuff isn't involved in the heresy and garro is fighting side by side with him uwu Mortarion: ok i'll let you free if you give me your oath to obey me

(facepalm)

heh

dumbass and then mortarion…notices something….

next time we're going back to flashback land!

[lboogie1906]

Gisèle Rabesahala (May 7, 1929 - June 27, 2011) a political and human rights activist and councilwoman, was born Marie Gisèle Aimée Rabesahala in Antananarivo, Madagascar. Her father was a non-commissioned French army officer, she spent her childhood in France, Tunisia, and what is now Mali. She graduated from Jean Joseph Rabearivelo High School and earned her Preparatory Certificate. She trained as a Stenographer typist and entered politics when she was 17.

She was employed as secretary to the Democratic Movement for Malagasy Renewal. She helped free thousands of prisoners following the Malagasy Uprising through her articles, bringing attention to their cause and plight.

She became the first woman elected as a municipal councilor. She was a political party leader where she united several competing nationalist organizations, including the Protestant Merina dissidents and communists, to help create the Congress Party for the Independence of Madagascar which she co-founded.

She was the first woman to hold a ministerial position in the Madagascar government. She promoted the language, culture, and heritage of the Malagasy people. She created the Malagasy Copyright Office and spearheaded the restoration of historical sites and monuments such as royal palaces and tombs. She founded the National Library, creating branches of public libraries in 58 towns, and ensured that many books in the library were written in Malagasy by Malagasy authors. She advocated for the poor and underserved.

She was the Deputy Speaker of the Senate. She served as Founder of the Madagascar-Cuba Friendship Association, Grand Officer of the Malagasy National Order, Medalist of the Order of Friendship of the Peoples of the Former USSR, Medalist of the Order of Friendship of the Peoples of Vietnam, the Joliot Curie Gold Peace Medal of the World Peace Council, and the Order of Anna Betancourt Award.

She paved the way for other women African leaders. #africanhistory365 #africanexcellence

[mostlysignssomeportents]

This day in history

I’m kickstarting the audiobook for “The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation,” a Big Tech disassembly manual to disenshittify the web and bring back the old, good internet. It’s a DRM-free book, which means Audible won’t carry it, so this crowdfunder is essential. Back now to get the audio, Verso hardcover and ebook:

http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org

#15yrsago Interview with the Chicago Tribune https://web.archive.org/web/20080811084607/http://featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com/technology_internetcritic/2008/08/a-long-but-stil.html

#15yrsago Knitting all of Mario level one into a giant scarf https://themarioscarf.blogspot.com

#15yrsago Animatronic waterboarding exhibit at Coney Island https://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/06/arts/design/06wate.html

#10yrsago Judge who accepted private-prison bribes to send black kids to jail sentenced to 28 years https://rollingout.com/2013/07/30/judge-must-serve-28-years-after-making-2-million-for-sending-children-to-jail/

#15yrsago The Things That Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away — story about geek monasteries for smart people who don’t fit in https://www.tor.com/2008/08/06/weak-and-strange/

#10yrsago Civil Forfeiture: America’s daylight robbery, courtesy of the War on Drugs https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/08/12/taken

#10yrsago US Senate IP address linked to Snowden Wikipedia change from “dissident” to “traitor” https://www.techdirt.com/2013/08/05/someone-using-us-senate-ip-address-edits-wiki-entry-to-change-ed-snowden-dissident-to-traitor/

#10yrsago Jeff Bezos’s letter to the WashPo staff https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/jeff-bezos-on-post-purchase/2013/08/05/e5b293de-fe0d-11e2-9711-3708310f6f4d_story.html

#10yrsago Why writers should stand up for libraries https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vArSULK9Zzk

#10yrsago Ethical questions for security experts https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1UfOxCIIlcU-iRcUeA6p6fyEE4qUbSuFMqmSuWjRsL_4/edit?forcehl=1&hl=en#slide=id.p

#5yrsago Facebook to banks: give us our users’ financial data and we’ll let them bank with Facebook https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-to-banks-give-us-your-data-well-give-you-our-users-1533564049

#5yrsago Betsy DeVos’s summer monstrosity is pure McMansion Hell https://www.vox.com/first-person/2018/8/6/17654434/betsy-devos-yacht-mcmansion-hell

#5yrsago Consumer Reports now evaluates products’ security and privacy https://www.consumerreports.org/digital-payments/mobile-p2p-payment-services-review/

#5yrsago Germany’s top domestic spy advised far right xenophobic political party on how to avoid being billed as “extremists” https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/08/04/germ-a04.html

#5yrsago On the cruelty of ankle-monitors https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-ankle-monitors-are-another-kind-of-jail/

Back my anti-enshittification Kickstarter here!