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Catch-Up Book Post
Been a while since I bookblogged here, huh? This isn't EVERYTHING, but this post already took me fucking hours to type up, so, let's get into it—
Jhereg by Steven Brust
Mickey7 by Ashton Edward
Both of these books were romps, though the former is the more compelling overall package.
In Jhereg, our hero Vlad Taltos is a higher-up in House Jhereg—essentially a mob-like assassin-y guild—who's had some knocks in his life (being a physically short and also short-lived human in a society dominated by tall, long-lived Dragaerans; having had to fight pretty hard for his present position). A contract comes to him for the biggest hit job of his life, and...
...yep, the bones are about what you'd expect. Jhereg needs to kill a guy; there are Obstacles and Setbacks in his way; we watch our crafty clever hero finagle and maneuver and get almost-totally-fucked a few times before he comes out ahead. And it's all very well-done; you will enjoy it exactly as much as you expect to enjoy it based on hearing that premise.
BUT. What elevates it is how... weird? funky? clearly-just-the-result-of-the-author's-preoccupations-and-fascinations? all the worldbuilding is. So you'll have a big plot point in the middle that's like "actually genetics AND reincarnation are both real and well-understood in this universe and this has Implications For The Plot," and you're like "wait? genetics? I thought we were in a high fantasy setting?" and like you are KIND OF, but there've been enough sidelong references to Weird Science up to this point that you're like, huh this does fit in with what I know so far; damn I can't wait to learn more about this weirdness. And then there's references to the "cycle" of the Houses, and you're like oh okay maybe the houses correspond to months on the calendar or something, except it turns out these Houses are not just human constructs but clearly backed by some kind of... metaphysical... thing...? and for various lengthy spans of time, a particular House will be "ascendant" (something along those lines; I forget the exact word from the book), and thus have special powers that other Houses don't have, and that's another plot point because WELL if you're a very long-lived creature planning a heist maybe you need to bide your time until your House is back in power!!!
It's all so weird! And very fun.
The book has some Gender™ happening, but in the charming "there is literally no difference between men and women therefore there should be literally no difference between men and women" way. This means there's a lot of badass ladies with swords, which is neat. It also means e.g. Vlad's wife is also an assassin-stabby-knife-y person, and also their relationship feels weirdly sexless? but hey better than just going along with The Tedious Conventions Of The Time, I dig it.
There are... a lot of books in the Vlad Taltos series, and I'm reliably informed they're all pretty good and involve similar swashbuckly/assassin-y/noir-y antics. I like having a reliable novel series to read, because if I accidentally read a TERRIBLE book, I want to follow it up with a guaranteed-to-be-at-least-solid book as quickly as possible, lest I forget altogether that Reading Is Fun Actually. I think I'll be using Brust's oeuvre to a similar end, so, uh, look out for my Yendi review as soon as I read my next bad book :P
Anyway, Mickey7 compares pretty unfavorably against all that. The prose in Mickey7 discount Andy Weir, which, I don't mind per se—Weir makes me roll my eyes from time to time when his writing gives me 2010s Reddit vibes, but I cannot deny I absolutely devoured The Martian just as quickly and completely as the next shit-taste STEMlord. Like, there is something to be said for the punchy bro-y sardonic-teenaged-know-it-all style; it's generally pretty propulsive! (In particular, I was reading Mickey7 when I was extremely sick lying on the couch, so punchy bro-y sardonic-teenaged-know-it-all prose was probably all I was up for.)
But Weir knows how to make the plot underneath all that prose page-turner-y and compelling, whereas Edward... isn't quite as good on that front?
It starts off at a good pace, with a good premise. The schtick is, in the far far future where we've already colonized planets all across the universe, occasionally we send out a mission to colonize a new planet. But the process is really labor-intensive—flying there takes years; terraforming takes a lot of skilled labor; it's competitive to get a spot in one of those missions.
Mickey needs to get off his planet fast—he owes a lot of money to the wrong guy. However, Mickey has no particular skills, so he signs up to be an "expendable"—a guy they send in to do tasks that are somewhere between "dangerous" and "guaranteed lethal," which do in fact need SOME human to do them. In a way, this makes him immortal: human-duplication technology has advanced such that they can print out a new "you" within 20 hours, and they do a brain scan of you every week so they can redownload your consciousness and all that. In practice: I mean, how many people believe that that actually counts as the same "you," right. He's the only one who volunteers for the job, so he gets the job.
So far, so good. And when there's a fuckup and they accidentally print out a second Mickey while the first Mickey is still alive, that's where the tension starts—due to [boring backstory], it's Extremely Illegal and Extremely Taboo to have more than one of any duplicate-able person alive at any time, and the guy who runs the new space colony is an absolute hardass stickler for rules.
That's a lot of, uh, fridge logic introduced already (the rationale for why duplicates are so forbidden seems staggeringly weak; the space station's monitoring seems EXTREMELY COMPREHENSIVE when it's convenient for the plot and EXTREMELY LAX when it's convenient for the plot, in a way that lets the duplicates evade or draw scrutiny in ways that feel wholly arbitrary), but I'm willing to go along with a bit of fridge logic for the sake of a good time.
Mickey7 doesn't go quite as far or as goofy with the premise as you'd hope, though. Most the middle of the plot consists of the duplicates deciding a fair way to split their limited rations, avoiding being spotted together, and being hungry. Not the romp-iest stuff. There's hints at some interesting ideas—e.g. Mickey8 seems a bit different than Mickey7, huh, what's the deal there?—but the difference isn't that stark, and Mickey7 only ponders this for like, half a paragraph, so it feels like a dropped thread.
So yeah, it's beach-read-y but nothing special.
I happened to watch Bong Joon Ho's film adaptation, Mickey 17, with friends a bit after I'd read the novel. I don't think the movie was altogether successful, but it DOES venture to get weirder than the book does (the two Mickeys are VERY different and that leads to some real tension!), and thus I think is The Better Version Of The Thing.
(Also, amusing addendum: when my partner saw me reading this, he said, "Wait, I've heard of this book. Isn't this like the dude version of that one book you fucking hated?" I asked, "Which book that I fucking hated; there's a lot of them," and after some back and forth we determined that he was referencing The Echo Wife, and i'm like. okay. yeah. you know what. you got me. gagged rn.)
That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation by David Bentley Hart (DNF, 48%)
Honest to God by John A.T. Robinson (DNF, 54%)
Living Buddha, Living Christ by Thích Nhất Hạnh (DNF, 24%)
Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church by N.T. Wright
Look, to tip my hand, I'm in the (very!) early phase of writing a weird fantasy/historical/pastiche-y novel that dares to ask questions like "damn what was it like to be The Greatest Haterliest Poaster Of All Time" and also "what if Martin Luther was a chick" and "what if Martin Luther was two people instead of one" and "what if those peoplekissed failed to kiss" and "what if Martin Luther were a radical pacifist on top of all the other crazy shit he was doing" and "what if sacred music was actually efficacious and had geopolitical implications" and so on. I blame Lyndal Roper specifically for presenting a portrait of Martin Luther so vivid and intriguing that I could not help but go patently insane over him thereafter.
The logical next step for researching such a novel would be to read up on the theology and history of that period, because even if I'm VERY heavy on the pastiche aspects, it's nice to understand the historical context and some contemporaneous sources/writings for the period of history I'm interested in, if only for riffing purposes, yaknow.
Alas, however, I'm a magpie with no self-control, and thus easily beguiled by Every Other Book I Trip Over On The Way To The Stuff I Should Actually Be Reading, which is how I wound up with this grab-bag of rather more contemporary theology.
All of which I am entirely unqualified to properly evaluate, to be clear, as someone who's variously identified as "Southern Baptist," "Christian agnostic," "deist," "Quaker," "neopagan," "animist," and "some weird woo bullshit syncretic thing ig, sorry it's cringe I know" at various points in my life. But that sure won't stop me from prattling about 'em on my blog.
The first of these is David Bentley Hart's That All Shall Be Saved, which I first heard about ages ago on the Know Your Enemy podcast and intrigued me at the time, though it took me a hot minute to pick it up. The thesis is straightforward: because God is both absolutely good and all-powerful, then of course everyone will go to Heaven in the end. What kind of good God would let people suffer in hell forever, after all.
This is the sort of feel-good "let's just ignore the Bible and assume whatever Feels Right must be so" argumentation that I was trained to roll my eyes at back when I was a Southern Baptist kiddo, because, like, come on bro, the text clearly doesn't say that (even though, deep down, yeah, I was always like—that does seem pretty fucked!).
However! Hart is not a cafeteria Christian but apparently a big-deal and well-regarded relatively orthodox/conservative Eastern Orthodox theologian-y guy. "I did not know that was a Legal Christian Belief™," thought I, and took a peek.
Hart is an entertaining writer, and reminds me of Leslie Lamport in my own field, in that he's sharp, opinionated, blunt, and inclined to call everyone who disagrees with him a fucking moron. Okay, sorry, Hart will be a bit more artful about it than that:
In the half of the book that I read, Hart spends a while arguing that various "softer" theologies of hell are still fucked up; only universal liberation will do. For instance, he attacks the theory that "hell exists, but people can repent and leave it anytime they choose"—he gets into some theory-of-free-will stuff that'll be familiar to anyone who's spent too much time on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and argues that someone choosing hell would be an unfree action the same way a deluded man, dying of thirst, refusing to drink water, is not in any meaningful sense "free." Similarly, he bites back against "it's possible for everyone to be saved but not everyone will choose to do so," by pointing out that must mean either "that person, given a different set of circumstances/influences/etc, could have chosen to be saved, ergo they're essentially being punished due to their own bad (moral) luck (he doesn't cite Nagel, but I felt the vibe!), OR you're saying "yeah actually God just makes some people evil from the start :3," and Hart finds both these views intolerable. (He admits a sort of begrudging admiration for the hardcore Calvinist worldview at several points—he thinks they're wrong, but he does think they do fully bite the bullet with their beliefs, in a way that a lot of others don't.)
Hart does get into scripture, a little—exactly what Jesus means when he talks about "Gehenna" is a big point of debate, apparently—but most of his arguments felt more first-principle-y philosophy-class-y.
At least, in the part I read. Maybe he gets more into arguing about translations later, but I put the book down for a while, picked it up again, and realized that Hart's creative, verbose dunkings on "everyone who disagrees with me" was starting to feel more grating than entertaining (this Goodreads review of a different Hart book really... called out some familiar tendencies, lol), and figured I'd gotten the main idea. (And while I'm told universalism / universal reconciliation is a fringier Christian belief, it's apparently not outright heretical according to most orthodoxy, and apparently was reasonably common in the first 400 years of church history or so, so that was an interesting thing to learn.)
Certainly it's a book I wish I'd read back when I was a kid, though! Would've given me an intellectual scaffolding for Not Being Extremely Terrified Of Hell, at least, even if I imagine I would've left eventually regardless.
Anyway.
You know what's interesting? Episcopalians are interesting. I stumbled into learning about the denomination partially on the basis of "they were the churches flying huge pride flags in my city," another thing that I thought was Illegal For Christians™, and also ngl they had the prettiest building and the best pipe organ and all that.
One of the first things you learn about the Episcopalians, if you stick around long enough to start asking annoying questions, is that apparently their maxim is "via media", aka "the middle way," aka "did you know Episcopalians are part of the Anglican Communion, aka the Church of England, aka the church that got founded so Henry VIII could get a divorce, aka a church that has historically been VERY ANXIOUS about preventing schisms and thus has generally allowed a lot of variation in terms of specific theological beliefs for individuals or for various parishes.
In practice this seems to mean they produce a lot of goddamn apostates and heretics.
Which appeals to me, naturally. Like, hey, look at this wild guy who was apparently broskis with Philip K Dick? Or just lurk in the Episcopalian reddit, where every other week there's a lively bitchfest about why the denomination seems to produce so many people with loosey-goosey views of Christianity, and such individuals are named and shamed, and I'm like... what is going on here, tell me more, haha.
I picked up Robinson's Honest to God on that basis, but it was not nearly as heretical as I was expecting. (I think I might've gotten confused and I was supposed to pick up Spong instead? That guy definitely seems heretical.) Robinson's basic argument, in this book, is:
* The Bible, and accordingly most ministers, use a lot of metaphors when talking about or describing God-stuff. E.g. there's the image of God as a bearded guy in the sky, heaven as a place "above," and so on.
* All serious Biblical scholars have agreed since the start of Christianity that a lot of this language is metaphorical. God is not a bearded man because, among other things, God does not have a gender (a fact that was news to me; apparently that's the sort of thing even really conservative theologians agree about). Heaven is not "above"; "heaven" is a term that means a specific technical thing/state rather than a place floating above the clouds.
* Inasmuch as metaphorical language is helpful for people coming to understand God, it's good.
* However, in our modern scientific age, a lot of this metaphorical imagery feels silly and inhibits belief.
* Ergo we should use a new set of words/metaphors/etc instead.
He does make some statements that, in a vacuum, sound pretty provocative. He argues that "God" is better described as the "ground of all being," the source of all goodness in a way that lies parallel to / beneath / in concert with this world, in a way that sounded sort of pantheist-y/panpsychism-y to my ear. In this framing, Jesus is significant because he's wholly physical and wholly this "ground of all being," and thus the fullest manifestation of God in the world. (A representative passage, plucked at pseudo-random: "['In Christ Jesus'] is the life of 'the man for others', the love whereby we are brought completely into one with the Ground of our being, manifesting itself int he unreconciled relationships of our existence. It was manifested supremely on the Cross, but it is met whenever the Christ is shown forth and recognized in 'an entirely different mode of living-in-relationship from anything in the world'. For there, in however 'secular' a form, is the atonement and the resurrection. And the Christian community exists, not to promote a new religion, but simply to be the embodiment of this new being as love.") And he calls all this a "religionless Christianity."
This book was apparently a sensation when it was first published in 1963; the thing sold out its first printing almost immediately, had to go into multiple other quick printings, and apparently has sold over a million copies. (CS Lewis dunked on it.) All this for an angsty little theology tome. So clearly it struck some kind of chord at the time.
Reading it here in the year 2025, though, one's left slightly puzzled what all the fuss is about. Apparently, none of what Robinson's describing is particularly heretical, at least on its face. A cloudy heaven and a bearded old dude are just images for talking about God; there's nothing technically blasphemous in using other images if that serves the purpose better. These new metaphors certainly feel more resonant to me, in an instinctive way... but am I the target audience? I'm already kind of woo and thus open to this sort of thing; I don't think Robinson's new metaphor would particularly persuade the "intelligent/educated/modern man" who he seems to think he's targeting—the thing that's causing their unbelief isn't a rejection of the Sunday School picture of God; it goes deeper than that. (And I mean, even for myself—this book didn't leave me thinking "damn, Christianity's totally right," so much as "huh I guess Christians also have kind of woo ways of talking about spirituality, that's neat," which is probably not the goal!) So all this new-image-shaping just leaves a bit of a reshuffling-deck-chairs-on-the-Titanic feeling.
(Also: I felt like I had Gotten The Point a quarter of a way into it, so put it down halfway through. So repetitive.)
There's an old review of the book in Commonweal Magazine, written by someone far more qualified to comment on the contours of the debate than myself, and I found pretty interesting.
Anyway. After that, I picked up Living Buddha, Living Christ because I heard someone say that they found both Thích Nhất Hạnh and Thomas Merton foundational to their Catholic faith, and I looked at how many pages the median Merton book has and was like "uhhh, maybe I'll sample the other guy instead." I probably would've been better-served by the Merton, though.
Nhất Hạnh himself seems like a really fascinating figure. Apparently he was personal buddies with both Thomas Merton and Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK really got around; I feel like I'm constantly learning about random people he was involved haha), was pretty influential in persuading King to denounce the Vietnam War, and founded the largest Buddhist monastery in the West. A lot of the "mindfulness" stuff that's in the water supply probably comes from him.
The book itself, though... Nhất Hạnh's main insight is that the way Christians talk about the Holy Spirit feels very similar to the way Buddhists describe Buddhahood, an observation that's probably pretty familiar to your median Quaker, and he basically goes through doing 1:1 comparisons of the two faiths (e.g., Buddhism is practiced in community because, while it's possible to touch Buddhahood on one's own, it's easier with others, much like it's easier to access the Holy Spirit in a church; the encouragement to contemplate Christ as you consume Communion is similar to Buddhist practices of mindfulness around mealtimes, etc). Unfortunately, like most woo-mindful-y-Holy-Spirit-y-spiritual-y practices, this sort of thing is generally more interesting to experience than read about; the book started feeling kind of vapid and surface-level after a bit so I put it down.
(Though, fun fact, apparently the somewhat official line from the Catholic church on all this is "you can do meditation/mindfulness in the Christian faith, but you gotta be careful because the subtle differences between how Buddhists do it and we're supposed to do it are actually crucial?" A bit of a "contra Hạnh" take, if you will. Anyway yeah apparently all this woo meditation stuff got popular enough in the 1980s that Pope Benedict XVI, back when he was Cardinal Ratzinger, did a whole-ass writeup on the topic to set some people straight, apparently, heh.)
Anyway that finally brings us to Wright's Surprised By Hope. Wright's thesis is: a lot of (evangelical, conservative, Left Behind-brained) churches seem to think the point of the Christian message is (1) say a special prayer to make yourself "saved"; (2) condemn the wickedness of the world; (3) bide your time until you go to heaven. Notably, in this worldview, projects like "combating climate change" start to feel pretty pointless—this world is doomed anyway; why bother?
Wright's assertion is that those denominations have gotten everything wrong because their theological understanding is wrong. His assertion is that the resurrection of Jesus is a preview of what God eventually intends for everyone He saves—not whisking souls into heaven and leaving the earth behind, but instead remaking earth & its people into bodies that are physical and spiritual, just cleansed of sin and whatnot. So, what we do now matters because this is the body and earth we will have after the second coming—remade, yes, but very much the same thing—and therefore the stuff we do to bring the Kingdom of God about, whether that's making beautiful music or aiding the poor or whatnot, all will have consequence after that final day. (The metaphor he uses is an architect for a great cathedral, who assigns to his workers bits to build of the Overall Thing—they don't see the overall picture, and may not live to see it put together, but it does all matter in the end.)
This reframing does have some pleasing properties. I was reminded of the Oneida Community's belief that the second coming had already happened and therefore it's up to us to make heaven happen here, on earth, right now... and there's something envigorating in that! I get the appeal of "we can't expect God to do all the work" and all that.
But in other ways it does have a bit of that reshuffling-deck-chairs feeling that Robinson's book has. Like, okay, yeah, let's say what we do now contributes in some important way to this future world. But... it's also very clear in the Bible (and Wright does not dispute) that things will get worse before God finally comes to put everything right. And it's also clear that God is the only one who can put things right. Like, okay, our new bodies have some relation to our old bodies, but... they must be PRETTY DANG DIFFERENT if they're going to be immortal, so it's sort of hard to see the connection there? seems like you could easily still do the "shrug, better wait for the afterlife" stance? (Also: I find it a little hard to reconcile "death will be no more" with "but we'll still be physical in an important and real way." Death seems very intimately tied up with how the physical world is structured at pretty much every level? Wright even touches on this, briefly, when he argues that physical matter is not in itself evil: "[N]or . . . does evil consist in being transient, made to decay. There is nothing wrong with the tree dropping its leaves int he autumn. There is nothing wrong with the sunset fading away into darkness." But elsewhere death is described as the enemy, the thing that will be destroyed utterly, etc, so yeah I don't get it.)
There's also something kind of parochial/overly cute about the way Wright describes what Christian social justice looks like. His priorities don't 100% line up with 70's era liberalism, but... they line up an awful lot? Which has some stuff I approve of, naturally—it is nice to hear someone make a faith-based case for "maybe be a wise steward of the planet's resources"—but I feel like the legacy of localism-y stuff is pretty mixed overall—lots of denial of the fact that Buying All Your Food From A Cute Farmer Down The Road is fundamentally incompatible with the modern economy (which, for all its faults, is really good at producing surplus food, medicine, etc—you really don't want all that stuff replaced by A Cute Farmer Down The Road!), and also the fact that a lot of these localist-y laws/regulations/public hearings/etc are, in practice, used to entrench the power of People Who Happened To Be Able To Buy A House In 1978 over the wants or desires of Literally Anyone Who Came Along After That. Like, not to put too fine a point on it, but right now there's an awful lot of people making it impossible for anyone to move to my fucking coast because they do all kinds of wild shit to make building a house anywhere near them Illegal Forever. And then when housing prices predictably shoot up they sigh a lot about how our city just has "too many people" and they should just "go somewhere else" despite the fact that this is where the jobs are and what happened to being a "welcoming" community dare I ask. (Sorry. I'm. Twitchy. About this one.)
Also he's just kind of funny when he argues that the pope destroyed communism. What? Bro I think larger structural forces did that be so for real now.
BUT. It was an interesting read, and did feel like the most serious bit of scholarship among them—he spends a lot of time citing scripture and explaining various translation quibbles, in a way that I don't really have any grounds to properly evaluate (e.g. okay how much should we depend on "this passage is clearly an allusion to some thing from Isaiah" vs "you can just read the literal surface-level meaning, it's fine"), but I do poking my nose into the kinds of debates other nerds have in their own fields from time to time.
Aside: all of these books felt pretty repetitive. Something to do with the genre, I guess? No way to theology-y people to feel like they've gotten your point across without restating it three different ways? IDK.
ANYWAY. I should probably quit dicking around with these books for a bit, since, y'know, novel. I gotta read more Martin Luther himself and also probably some John Calvin. (Alas this means my copy of Kosuke Koyama's Five Mile an Hour God will likely remain mostly-unread on my shelf. Did I mention I'm a magpie. Books pile up in my home whenever I get on a weird pseudo-reasearch-y kick, and I am blessed with an indulgent partner who just keeps buying me more bookshelves instead of telling me to cut it the hell out, which is very sweet of him, but also I could really use someone to stop me before I commit more Irresponsible Spending Crimes... though I saw someone the other day comparing book-buying to wine-buying, e.g. hey it's valid and normal to let some of them age in the cellar & have more than you'll be able to drink; you want to have good wine when the time is right! and UNFORTUNATELY this is very effective for allowing me to continue in my profligate ways. RIP me.)
...okay yeah I couldn't find any way to fit Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik into all of this. Spinning Silver was very good, but I don't have much to say! The primary romance was a total nothingburger, but that's fine because mostly the book is about Miryem girlbossing her way through Rumpelstiltskin and that shit totally rules. I would like to read several more books about moneylenders Being Incredibly Good At Their Job. The book gets a bit bloated and flabbier as it goes along (though the parts with secondary-girlboss Irina and horrible little man Mirnatius can stay; those bits were great) but never enough to knock it down from the "very good" tier. Fairytale retellings aren't normally my thing but this one was solid.
Jhereg by Steven Brust
Mickey7 by Ashton Edward
Both of these books were romps, though the former is the more compelling overall package.
In Jhereg, our hero Vlad Taltos is a higher-up in House Jhereg—essentially a mob-like assassin-y guild—who's had some knocks in his life (being a physically short and also short-lived human in a society dominated by tall, long-lived Dragaerans; having had to fight pretty hard for his present position). A contract comes to him for the biggest hit job of his life, and...
...yep, the bones are about what you'd expect. Jhereg needs to kill a guy; there are Obstacles and Setbacks in his way; we watch our crafty clever hero finagle and maneuver and get almost-totally-fucked a few times before he comes out ahead. And it's all very well-done; you will enjoy it exactly as much as you expect to enjoy it based on hearing that premise.
BUT. What elevates it is how... weird? funky? clearly-just-the-result-of-the-author's-preoccupations-and-fascinations? all the worldbuilding is. So you'll have a big plot point in the middle that's like "actually genetics AND reincarnation are both real and well-understood in this universe and this has Implications For The Plot," and you're like "wait? genetics? I thought we were in a high fantasy setting?" and like you are KIND OF, but there've been enough sidelong references to Weird Science up to this point that you're like, huh this does fit in with what I know so far; damn I can't wait to learn more about this weirdness. And then there's references to the "cycle" of the Houses, and you're like oh okay maybe the houses correspond to months on the calendar or something, except it turns out these Houses are not just human constructs but clearly backed by some kind of... metaphysical... thing...? and for various lengthy spans of time, a particular House will be "ascendant" (something along those lines; I forget the exact word from the book), and thus have special powers that other Houses don't have, and that's another plot point because WELL if you're a very long-lived creature planning a heist maybe you need to bide your time until your House is back in power!!!
It's all so weird! And very fun.
The book has some Gender™ happening, but in the charming "there is literally no difference between men and women therefore there should be literally no difference between men and women" way. This means there's a lot of badass ladies with swords, which is neat. It also means e.g. Vlad's wife is also an assassin-stabby-knife-y person, and also their relationship feels weirdly sexless? but hey better than just going along with The Tedious Conventions Of The Time, I dig it.
There are... a lot of books in the Vlad Taltos series, and I'm reliably informed they're all pretty good and involve similar swashbuckly/assassin-y/noir-y antics. I like having a reliable novel series to read, because if I accidentally read a TERRIBLE book, I want to follow it up with a guaranteed-to-be-at-least-solid book as quickly as possible, lest I forget altogether that Reading Is Fun Actually. I think I'll be using Brust's oeuvre to a similar end, so, uh, look out for my Yendi review as soon as I read my next bad book :P
Anyway, Mickey7 compares pretty unfavorably against all that. The prose in Mickey7 discount Andy Weir, which, I don't mind per se—Weir makes me roll my eyes from time to time when his writing gives me 2010s Reddit vibes, but I cannot deny I absolutely devoured The Martian just as quickly and completely as the next shit-taste STEMlord. Like, there is something to be said for the punchy bro-y sardonic-teenaged-know-it-all style; it's generally pretty propulsive! (In particular, I was reading Mickey7 when I was extremely sick lying on the couch, so punchy bro-y sardonic-teenaged-know-it-all prose was probably all I was up for.)
But Weir knows how to make the plot underneath all that prose page-turner-y and compelling, whereas Edward... isn't quite as good on that front?
It starts off at a good pace, with a good premise. The schtick is, in the far far future where we've already colonized planets all across the universe, occasionally we send out a mission to colonize a new planet. But the process is really labor-intensive—flying there takes years; terraforming takes a lot of skilled labor; it's competitive to get a spot in one of those missions.
Mickey needs to get off his planet fast—he owes a lot of money to the wrong guy. However, Mickey has no particular skills, so he signs up to be an "expendable"—a guy they send in to do tasks that are somewhere between "dangerous" and "guaranteed lethal," which do in fact need SOME human to do them. In a way, this makes him immortal: human-duplication technology has advanced such that they can print out a new "you" within 20 hours, and they do a brain scan of you every week so they can redownload your consciousness and all that. In practice: I mean, how many people believe that that actually counts as the same "you," right. He's the only one who volunteers for the job, so he gets the job.
So far, so good. And when there's a fuckup and they accidentally print out a second Mickey while the first Mickey is still alive, that's where the tension starts—due to [boring backstory], it's Extremely Illegal and Extremely Taboo to have more than one of any duplicate-able person alive at any time, and the guy who runs the new space colony is an absolute hardass stickler for rules.
That's a lot of, uh, fridge logic introduced already (the rationale for why duplicates are so forbidden seems staggeringly weak; the space station's monitoring seems EXTREMELY COMPREHENSIVE when it's convenient for the plot and EXTREMELY LAX when it's convenient for the plot, in a way that lets the duplicates evade or draw scrutiny in ways that feel wholly arbitrary), but I'm willing to go along with a bit of fridge logic for the sake of a good time.
Mickey7 doesn't go quite as far or as goofy with the premise as you'd hope, though. Most the middle of the plot consists of the duplicates deciding a fair way to split their limited rations, avoiding being spotted together, and being hungry. Not the romp-iest stuff. There's hints at some interesting ideas—e.g. Mickey8 seems a bit different than Mickey7, huh, what's the deal there?—but the difference isn't that stark, and Mickey7 only ponders this for like, half a paragraph, so it feels like a dropped thread.
So yeah, it's beach-read-y but nothing special.
I happened to watch Bong Joon Ho's film adaptation, Mickey 17, with friends a bit after I'd read the novel. I don't think the movie was altogether successful, but it DOES venture to get weirder than the book does (the two Mickeys are VERY different and that leads to some real tension!), and thus I think is The Better Version Of The Thing.
(Also, amusing addendum: when my partner saw me reading this, he said, "Wait, I've heard of this book. Isn't this like the dude version of that one book you fucking hated?" I asked, "Which book that I fucking hated; there's a lot of them," and after some back and forth we determined that he was referencing The Echo Wife, and i'm like. okay. yeah. you know what. you got me. gagged rn.)
That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation by David Bentley Hart (DNF, 48%)
Honest to God by John A.T. Robinson (DNF, 54%)
Living Buddha, Living Christ by Thích Nhất Hạnh (DNF, 24%)
Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church by N.T. Wright
Look, to tip my hand, I'm in the (very!) early phase of writing a weird fantasy/historical/pastiche-y novel that dares to ask questions like "damn what was it like to be The Greatest Haterliest Poaster Of All Time" and also "what if Martin Luther was a chick" and "what if Martin Luther was two people instead of one" and "what if those people
The logical next step for researching such a novel would be to read up on the theology and history of that period, because even if I'm VERY heavy on the pastiche aspects, it's nice to understand the historical context and some contemporaneous sources/writings for the period of history I'm interested in, if only for riffing purposes, yaknow.
Alas, however, I'm a magpie with no self-control, and thus easily beguiled by Every Other Book I Trip Over On The Way To The Stuff I Should Actually Be Reading, which is how I wound up with this grab-bag of rather more contemporary theology.
All of which I am entirely unqualified to properly evaluate, to be clear, as someone who's variously identified as "Southern Baptist," "Christian agnostic," "deist," "Quaker," "neopagan," "animist," and "some weird woo bullshit syncretic thing ig, sorry it's cringe I know" at various points in my life. But that sure won't stop me from prattling about 'em on my blog.
The first of these is David Bentley Hart's That All Shall Be Saved, which I first heard about ages ago on the Know Your Enemy podcast and intrigued me at the time, though it took me a hot minute to pick it up. The thesis is straightforward: because God is both absolutely good and all-powerful, then of course everyone will go to Heaven in the end. What kind of good God would let people suffer in hell forever, after all.
This is the sort of feel-good "let's just ignore the Bible and assume whatever Feels Right must be so" argumentation that I was trained to roll my eyes at back when I was a Southern Baptist kiddo, because, like, come on bro, the text clearly doesn't say that (even though, deep down, yeah, I was always like—that does seem pretty fucked!).
However! Hart is not a cafeteria Christian but apparently a big-deal and well-regarded relatively orthodox/conservative Eastern Orthodox theologian-y guy. "I did not know that was a Legal Christian Belief™," thought I, and took a peek.
Hart is an entertaining writer, and reminds me of Leslie Lamport in my own field, in that he's sharp, opinionated, blunt, and inclined to call everyone who disagrees with him a fucking moron. Okay, sorry, Hart will be a bit more artful about it than that:
[S]ince this book first appeared—not quite a year ago, as I write—I have discovered dimensions of religious psychology of which I had formerly been blithely ignorant, or at most only obscurely conscious. [. . .] It has in some cases inspired polemic so shrill, intellectually diffuse, and rhetorically abandoned as to suggest unhealthy psychological sensitivities. As yet, though, it has elicited not a single cogent, interesting, or even vaguely accurate critique.(He's also, uh, kind of repetitive. Absolutely no shortage of haterade in this guy.)
In the half of the book that I read, Hart spends a while arguing that various "softer" theologies of hell are still fucked up; only universal liberation will do. For instance, he attacks the theory that "hell exists, but people can repent and leave it anytime they choose"—he gets into some theory-of-free-will stuff that'll be familiar to anyone who's spent too much time on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and argues that someone choosing hell would be an unfree action the same way a deluded man, dying of thirst, refusing to drink water, is not in any meaningful sense "free." Similarly, he bites back against "it's possible for everyone to be saved but not everyone will choose to do so," by pointing out that must mean either "that person, given a different set of circumstances/influences/etc, could have chosen to be saved, ergo they're essentially being punished due to their own bad (moral) luck (he doesn't cite Nagel, but I felt the vibe!), OR you're saying "yeah actually God just makes some people evil from the start :3," and Hart finds both these views intolerable. (He admits a sort of begrudging admiration for the hardcore Calvinist worldview at several points—he thinks they're wrong, but he does think they do fully bite the bullet with their beliefs, in a way that a lot of others don't.)
Hart does get into scripture, a little—exactly what Jesus means when he talks about "Gehenna" is a big point of debate, apparently—but most of his arguments felt more first-principle-y philosophy-class-y.
At least, in the part I read. Maybe he gets more into arguing about translations later, but I put the book down for a while, picked it up again, and realized that Hart's creative, verbose dunkings on "everyone who disagrees with me" was starting to feel more grating than entertaining (this Goodreads review of a different Hart book really... called out some familiar tendencies, lol), and figured I'd gotten the main idea. (And while I'm told universalism / universal reconciliation is a fringier Christian belief, it's apparently not outright heretical according to most orthodoxy, and apparently was reasonably common in the first 400 years of church history or so, so that was an interesting thing to learn.)
Certainly it's a book I wish I'd read back when I was a kid, though! Would've given me an intellectual scaffolding for Not Being Extremely Terrified Of Hell, at least, even if I imagine I would've left eventually regardless.
Anyway.
You know what's interesting? Episcopalians are interesting. I stumbled into learning about the denomination partially on the basis of "they were the churches flying huge pride flags in my city," another thing that I thought was Illegal For Christians™, and also ngl they had the prettiest building and the best pipe organ and all that.
One of the first things you learn about the Episcopalians, if you stick around long enough to start asking annoying questions, is that apparently their maxim is "via media", aka "the middle way," aka "did you know Episcopalians are part of the Anglican Communion, aka the Church of England, aka the church that got founded so Henry VIII could get a divorce, aka a church that has historically been VERY ANXIOUS about preventing schisms and thus has generally allowed a lot of variation in terms of specific theological beliefs for individuals or for various parishes.
In practice this seems to mean they produce a lot of goddamn apostates and heretics.
Which appeals to me, naturally. Like, hey, look at this wild guy who was apparently broskis with Philip K Dick? Or just lurk in the Episcopalian reddit, where every other week there's a lively bitchfest about why the denomination seems to produce so many people with loosey-goosey views of Christianity, and such individuals are named and shamed, and I'm like... what is going on here, tell me more, haha.
I picked up Robinson's Honest to God on that basis, but it was not nearly as heretical as I was expecting. (I think I might've gotten confused and I was supposed to pick up Spong instead? That guy definitely seems heretical.) Robinson's basic argument, in this book, is:
* The Bible, and accordingly most ministers, use a lot of metaphors when talking about or describing God-stuff. E.g. there's the image of God as a bearded guy in the sky, heaven as a place "above," and so on.
* All serious Biblical scholars have agreed since the start of Christianity that a lot of this language is metaphorical. God is not a bearded man because, among other things, God does not have a gender (a fact that was news to me; apparently that's the sort of thing even really conservative theologians agree about). Heaven is not "above"; "heaven" is a term that means a specific technical thing/state rather than a place floating above the clouds.
* Inasmuch as metaphorical language is helpful for people coming to understand God, it's good.
* However, in our modern scientific age, a lot of this metaphorical imagery feels silly and inhibits belief.
* Ergo we should use a new set of words/metaphors/etc instead.
He does make some statements that, in a vacuum, sound pretty provocative. He argues that "God" is better described as the "ground of all being," the source of all goodness in a way that lies parallel to / beneath / in concert with this world, in a way that sounded sort of pantheist-y/panpsychism-y to my ear. In this framing, Jesus is significant because he's wholly physical and wholly this "ground of all being," and thus the fullest manifestation of God in the world. (A representative passage, plucked at pseudo-random: "['In Christ Jesus'] is the life of 'the man for others', the love whereby we are brought completely into one with the Ground of our being, manifesting itself int he unreconciled relationships of our existence. It was manifested supremely on the Cross, but it is met whenever the Christ is shown forth and recognized in 'an entirely different mode of living-in-relationship from anything in the world'. For there, in however 'secular' a form, is the atonement and the resurrection. And the Christian community exists, not to promote a new religion, but simply to be the embodiment of this new being as love.") And he calls all this a "religionless Christianity."
This book was apparently a sensation when it was first published in 1963; the thing sold out its first printing almost immediately, had to go into multiple other quick printings, and apparently has sold over a million copies. (CS Lewis dunked on it.) All this for an angsty little theology tome. So clearly it struck some kind of chord at the time.
Reading it here in the year 2025, though, one's left slightly puzzled what all the fuss is about. Apparently, none of what Robinson's describing is particularly heretical, at least on its face. A cloudy heaven and a bearded old dude are just images for talking about God; there's nothing technically blasphemous in using other images if that serves the purpose better. These new metaphors certainly feel more resonant to me, in an instinctive way... but am I the target audience? I'm already kind of woo and thus open to this sort of thing; I don't think Robinson's new metaphor would particularly persuade the "intelligent/educated/modern man" who he seems to think he's targeting—the thing that's causing their unbelief isn't a rejection of the Sunday School picture of God; it goes deeper than that. (And I mean, even for myself—this book didn't leave me thinking "damn, Christianity's totally right," so much as "huh I guess Christians also have kind of woo ways of talking about spirituality, that's neat," which is probably not the goal!) So all this new-image-shaping just leaves a bit of a reshuffling-deck-chairs-on-the-Titanic feeling.
(Also: I felt like I had Gotten The Point a quarter of a way into it, so put it down halfway through. So repetitive.)
There's an old review of the book in Commonweal Magazine, written by someone far more qualified to comment on the contours of the debate than myself, and I found pretty interesting.
Anyway. After that, I picked up Living Buddha, Living Christ because I heard someone say that they found both Thích Nhất Hạnh and Thomas Merton foundational to their Catholic faith, and I looked at how many pages the median Merton book has and was like "uhhh, maybe I'll sample the other guy instead." I probably would've been better-served by the Merton, though.
Nhất Hạnh himself seems like a really fascinating figure. Apparently he was personal buddies with both Thomas Merton and Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK really got around; I feel like I'm constantly learning about random people he was involved haha), was pretty influential in persuading King to denounce the Vietnam War, and founded the largest Buddhist monastery in the West. A lot of the "mindfulness" stuff that's in the water supply probably comes from him.
The book itself, though... Nhất Hạnh's main insight is that the way Christians talk about the Holy Spirit feels very similar to the way Buddhists describe Buddhahood, an observation that's probably pretty familiar to your median Quaker, and he basically goes through doing 1:1 comparisons of the two faiths (e.g., Buddhism is practiced in community because, while it's possible to touch Buddhahood on one's own, it's easier with others, much like it's easier to access the Holy Spirit in a church; the encouragement to contemplate Christ as you consume Communion is similar to Buddhist practices of mindfulness around mealtimes, etc). Unfortunately, like most woo-mindful-y-Holy-Spirit-y-spiritual-y practices, this sort of thing is generally more interesting to experience than read about; the book started feeling kind of vapid and surface-level after a bit so I put it down.
(Though, fun fact, apparently the somewhat official line from the Catholic church on all this is "you can do meditation/mindfulness in the Christian faith, but you gotta be careful because the subtle differences between how Buddhists do it and we're supposed to do it are actually crucial?" A bit of a "contra Hạnh" take, if you will. Anyway yeah apparently all this woo meditation stuff got popular enough in the 1980s that Pope Benedict XVI, back when he was Cardinal Ratzinger, did a whole-ass writeup on the topic to set some people straight, apparently, heh.)
Anyway that finally brings us to Wright's Surprised By Hope. Wright's thesis is: a lot of (evangelical, conservative, Left Behind-brained) churches seem to think the point of the Christian message is (1) say a special prayer to make yourself "saved"; (2) condemn the wickedness of the world; (3) bide your time until you go to heaven. Notably, in this worldview, projects like "combating climate change" start to feel pretty pointless—this world is doomed anyway; why bother?
Wright's assertion is that those denominations have gotten everything wrong because their theological understanding is wrong. His assertion is that the resurrection of Jesus is a preview of what God eventually intends for everyone He saves—not whisking souls into heaven and leaving the earth behind, but instead remaking earth & its people into bodies that are physical and spiritual, just cleansed of sin and whatnot. So, what we do now matters because this is the body and earth we will have after the second coming—remade, yes, but very much the same thing—and therefore the stuff we do to bring the Kingdom of God about, whether that's making beautiful music or aiding the poor or whatnot, all will have consequence after that final day. (The metaphor he uses is an architect for a great cathedral, who assigns to his workers bits to build of the Overall Thing—they don't see the overall picture, and may not live to see it put together, but it does all matter in the end.)
This reframing does have some pleasing properties. I was reminded of the Oneida Community's belief that the second coming had already happened and therefore it's up to us to make heaven happen here, on earth, right now... and there's something envigorating in that! I get the appeal of "we can't expect God to do all the work" and all that.
But in other ways it does have a bit of that reshuffling-deck-chairs feeling that Robinson's book has. Like, okay, yeah, let's say what we do now contributes in some important way to this future world. But... it's also very clear in the Bible (and Wright does not dispute) that things will get worse before God finally comes to put everything right. And it's also clear that God is the only one who can put things right. Like, okay, our new bodies have some relation to our old bodies, but... they must be PRETTY DANG DIFFERENT if they're going to be immortal, so it's sort of hard to see the connection there? seems like you could easily still do the "shrug, better wait for the afterlife" stance? (Also: I find it a little hard to reconcile "death will be no more" with "but we'll still be physical in an important and real way." Death seems very intimately tied up with how the physical world is structured at pretty much every level? Wright even touches on this, briefly, when he argues that physical matter is not in itself evil: "[N]or . . . does evil consist in being transient, made to decay. There is nothing wrong with the tree dropping its leaves int he autumn. There is nothing wrong with the sunset fading away into darkness." But elsewhere death is described as the enemy, the thing that will be destroyed utterly, etc, so yeah I don't get it.)
There's also something kind of parochial/overly cute about the way Wright describes what Christian social justice looks like. His priorities don't 100% line up with 70's era liberalism, but... they line up an awful lot? Which has some stuff I approve of, naturally—it is nice to hear someone make a faith-based case for "maybe be a wise steward of the planet's resources"—but I feel like the legacy of localism-y stuff is pretty mixed overall—lots of denial of the fact that Buying All Your Food From A Cute Farmer Down The Road is fundamentally incompatible with the modern economy (which, for all its faults, is really good at producing surplus food, medicine, etc—you really don't want all that stuff replaced by A Cute Farmer Down The Road!), and also the fact that a lot of these localist-y laws/regulations/public hearings/etc are, in practice, used to entrench the power of People Who Happened To Be Able To Buy A House In 1978 over the wants or desires of Literally Anyone Who Came Along After That. Like, not to put too fine a point on it, but right now there's an awful lot of people making it impossible for anyone to move to my fucking coast because they do all kinds of wild shit to make building a house anywhere near them Illegal Forever. And then when housing prices predictably shoot up they sigh a lot about how our city just has "too many people" and they should just "go somewhere else" despite the fact that this is where the jobs are and what happened to being a "welcoming" community dare I ask. (Sorry. I'm. Twitchy. About this one.)
Also he's just kind of funny when he argues that the pope destroyed communism. What? Bro I think larger structural forces did that be so for real now.
BUT. It was an interesting read, and did feel like the most serious bit of scholarship among them—he spends a lot of time citing scripture and explaining various translation quibbles, in a way that I don't really have any grounds to properly evaluate (e.g. okay how much should we depend on "this passage is clearly an allusion to some thing from Isaiah" vs "you can just read the literal surface-level meaning, it's fine"), but I do poking my nose into the kinds of debates other nerds have in their own fields from time to time.
Aside: all of these books felt pretty repetitive. Something to do with the genre, I guess? No way to theology-y people to feel like they've gotten your point across without restating it three different ways? IDK.
ANYWAY. I should probably quit dicking around with these books for a bit, since, y'know, novel. I gotta read more Martin Luther himself and also probably some John Calvin. (Alas this means my copy of Kosuke Koyama's Five Mile an Hour God will likely remain mostly-unread on my shelf. Did I mention I'm a magpie. Books pile up in my home whenever I get on a weird pseudo-reasearch-y kick, and I am blessed with an indulgent partner who just keeps buying me more bookshelves instead of telling me to cut it the hell out, which is very sweet of him, but also I could really use someone to stop me before I commit more Irresponsible Spending Crimes... though I saw someone the other day comparing book-buying to wine-buying, e.g. hey it's valid and normal to let some of them age in the cellar & have more than you'll be able to drink; you want to have good wine when the time is right! and UNFORTUNATELY this is very effective for allowing me to continue in my profligate ways. RIP me.)
...okay yeah I couldn't find any way to fit Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik into all of this. Spinning Silver was very good, but I don't have much to say! The primary romance was a total nothingburger, but that's fine because mostly the book is about Miryem girlbossing her way through Rumpelstiltskin and that shit totally rules. I would like to read several more books about moneylenders Being Incredibly Good At Their Job. The book gets a bit bloated and flabbier as it goes along (though the parts with secondary-girlboss Irina and horrible little man Mirnatius can stay; those bits were great) but never enough to knock it down from the "very good" tier. Fairytale retellings aren't normally my thing but this one was solid.
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Yay Spinning Silver! You might find it fun to compare the original novella version of the story, which is a more streamlined version of the first part of the book (Miryem's POV only) but has a different ending and is not a romance. It was published in Novik's most recent story collection, Buried Deep. (I forget, have you read other Naomi Novik?)
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(That said, Yendi is one of the weakest in the series, so if you don't enjoy it as much as Jhereg, don't get discouraged -- there's better to come! It is still a romp, though, IMO.)
Also, yay for Spinning Silver! I found it really interesting to read first the novel and then the shorter thing it grew out of (novelette, maybe?), because it was neat to see what was kept and what was changed. Horrible little man Mirnatius and secondary girlboss are additions to the novel which I do think are absolutely justified, but there's some Miryem-centric stuff that I frankly liked better in the original :)
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and ooooh i do... want more Miryem stuff... between you &
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Brust is definitely trying to do a new thing in each book, sometimes in how the narrative is structured, sometimes sub-genre wise, often by what he brings into the epigraphs. Like, there's a heist book and a "war movie" book and a gothic and a ~courtroom drama and a musical pastiche. And while some experiments work better for me than others, I find the approach fascinating on the whole, you know?
between you & [personal profile] landofnowhere yeah i'll probably give the novelette a peek at some point ;)
Haha, it was only after I left my comment that I noticed
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I have the same problem(?) and my partner just says, very patiently: "yes, but the next bookshelves are going in your room, not the living room". :D And sometimes gets to obscure-ish research books long before me, which is always a little funny.
I enjoyed the write-ups of the theology books.
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lol... reminds me a bit of how, in the home where i grew up, sometimes someone in the house would get curious about whatever book my mom had just checked out from the library for book club, and then they'd read it before she had a chance to get to it, and then someone ELSE would pick it up after that, and then before long the entire family would've read it EXCEPT FOR MOM, who'd be like "look i don't want to discourage anyone reading, i'm glad everyone is inexplicably excited about this particular book, but can you all PLEASE finish up so i have a prayer of reading this myself before my actual book club meeting"... it always led to particularly lively dinner table discussions lol
(thank you; glad you liked the writeups!)
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