A Newsletter At The End Of The World

bests, worsts, birds, books

HELLO and happy almost new year, my sweet and beautiful and exceptionally GIFTED CHILDREN. I mean readers!

For this last newsletter of the year, here’s an assortment of things I liked and disliked, which is mostly just my favorite genre fiction of the year, because I am a nerd (who fucks). Also included are other things I’ve written, which link to some of my favorite writing throughout the year, so be sure to check those out if you’re looking for more to read.

Anyways in my typical fashion this is disorganized and late, but I am nevertheless thankful and amazed, eternally, that anyone cares (let alone pays) for these musings.

Thank you for another year of reading, thank you for letting your email inboxes be a vessel for my brain (just try to unsubscribe! You’re trapped! Just kidding that’s illegal). Thank you for the emails about birds, books, how to get the anus of my dog more thoroughly cleaned. It has been maybe…two years or so since I was actively posting on the Internet at large, and that change has been both delicious and much needed and also, of course, quite odd, for my personal feelings and creative practice. That’s all to say, staying connected in this way is so, so meaningful (earnest ) and I look forward to further besmirching your inboxes next year!

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Most applicable cartoon of the year:

Best TV: Slow Horses. It’s great. Gary Oldman farting never gets old.

Best adaptation: Foundation. Apple TV is not PAYING ME to plug their shows. If you work there and want to pay me for doing this, my soul is yours. I will sell it gladly. I recently made my way through all of the Foundation books, and while I liked them, I thought the changes in the show were excellent, deepening the emotional lives of the characters, adding uhhhh some women, heightening the stakes.

BEST: WHEEL OF TIME. No more questions at this time.

Worst TV: Murder at the End Of the World (spoiler alert ahead if you want to watch this and have not).

I loved the first few episodes of this show and was extremely hopeful for the season. It has a stacked as hell cast full of hotties, and sets up what promises to be a fun exploration of an Elon Musk type tech billionaire and his coder wife, building a climate ark in the arctic, or something. They host a little Davos at the compound and then people start dying. It’s a great premise! It promised to be like The Glass Onion but good, because it had The Thing ambiance!

It promised a lot, but alas, didn’t deliver. It seems as though in trying to avoid getting “Lost,” Murder at the End of the World had many juicy potential outlets for mystery at the beginning, but narrowed them too thoroughly and concisely in the end that it became a farce. Absolute poo-poo. And a grievous misuse of Clive Owen.

TLDR it’s the AI that is doing the murders, and like, okay fine, we have many creepy forebears of sentient AI (Hal, obviously) which makes this reveal not only predictable but ultimately laughable. After the “adults go to camp” moment around a campfire and the discovery that the AI was doing the murders, the main characters have to smash and burn the server room as they contemplate “why they started coding.” Meanwhile the disembodied AI head is floating around like, noooo please, don’t do it. I’m serious this scene made me laugh out loud. God I wish I could insert a photo of the head (Ray) but I can’t take a screenshot. Clive Owen is like “ahhh we built protections around this!! how could this happen” and then the main character writes another book about it all but this time is happy at the reading. I’m still untangling how to process why the ending of this show irked me so much: I think I wanted it to be Hyperion somehow, or something spookier, but it’s just another tale about an abusive tech man and the rogue AI he makes? Hmm. Much to ponder. Clive…

Funniest music news:

Best things I’ve written this year you might have missed:

Best bird:

See also:

WORST BIRD: A.I. Came for Our Jobs, Our Art, and Our Souls. Now It’s Coming for Our Birds.

Best sci fi books of the year

as preamble and perhaps context, these are not books published this year, and thus as a list, it is not a ranking so much as a specific litany of what I, specifically, read and liked this year. Anyways:

Machines in the Head: Selected stories by Anna Kavan

I can’t remember if I’ve written about how much I love Anna Kavan’s novel Ice, I think I must’ve, I vaguely remember writing the phrase “slipstream fiction” and that is forever an apt way to describe her eerie, apocalyptic, mysterious and of course drug-addled writing.

Ice Trilogy by Vladimir Sorokin

Nothing to do with Anna Kavan’s Ice, though perhaps inspired by it. Fucking WILD book (an asteroid of ice has fallen to earth and by savagely hitting people in the chest with shards of this ice they awaken to their true purpose, to be rays of light, yup 700 pages of this) but also, so so beautifully written and compelling.

The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells. Still have two of these to go, but I love them. It’s about an extremely souped up, well, Murder Bot, who mostly wants to watch trashy TV instead of entangle themselves from the conspiracy of humans they’ve been snared in. Now this is the type of AI representation I want, mainly in that it doesn’t shy away from depicting the horrors of technology, but it also doesn’t blame that on the technology itself, and looks instead to continued corporate greed by humans as the problem.

Hard to be a God by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

I recommend anything and everything available in translation (or not if you can read Russian) by the Strugatsky Brothers. I love them! I’ve definitely talked about their most famous book Roadside Picnic—certainly worth reading (it was adapted into the Tarkovsky movie Stalker, Hard to be a God was also made into a film). I also recommend the book within a book and surprisingly timely Lame Fate (Ugly Swans)—probably the best expression of anxiety around machine interference in creative arts—and The Snail on the Slope.

The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada

I received this as a gift from the best people (hello) along with The Hole, which I realized I had read and then given to [redacted] 2.0, so it was a treat to be gifted again. I had never read The Factory, and though it’s not “explicitly” science fiction it is certainly weird as hell, in that beautiful way of being both contained and extremely strange.

The Employees, Olga Ravn

Another small but mighty, weird, workplace related science fiction/spooky book. I don’t want to say more! Read it!

Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delaney

This took me most of the year to get through. It is dense, intense, extremely horny, bizarre, profound. Incredible really.

A Deepness In The Sky, Vernor Vinge

This is a prequel of sorts to A Fire Upon The Deep, which I also recommend. I have yet to read the more recent installation. (Also this edition, shown above, places an extra “s” in ‘deepness’ on every single page on the inside, bewitching, deepnesss). Extremely weird and cool first contact books with highly intelligent and yet utterly different species.

We Who Are About To…by Joanna Russ

Intense, emotionally complex, thoughtful. A pioneer of her field!

Best book found on the street:

Tantric….constipation….dance? Tantric constipation dance.

And, a last Clem of the year:

Please notice how beautifully my beagle is graying…she’s so wise. She’s slightly bigger than a puzzle!!!!! Smaller than a plant…Some mysteries simply deepen every year.

Wishing you all happiness and love into the new year, xoxo
Shelby + Clem