Or maybe it’s rime ice, I’m not sure.
Whichever it is, it’s pretty. If it’s got to be cold outside, it may as well look nice.
Frosty morning
Blog
Book review: Absolution
About 10 years ago I checked Jeff Vandermeer’s novel Annihilation out of my local library. It was a short, weird story about the twelfth[1]Well, depending how you count, as it turns out. expedition into a deeply weird place called Area X.
Area X is a section of Florida, the Forgotten Coast, where something has changed. Lifeforms are modified, sometimes merged, sometimes wholly remade; ghosts and doppelgängers appear, both in Area X and back in the normal world; time seems to move in different ways once you’ve crossed the border. There’s a tower that descends into the ground[2]Where lies the strangling fruit… and a lighthouse that I’m not sure anyone wants to go near. Annihilation was a dreamlike experience, with the caveat that nightmares are also dreams.
Having read the first book, I read the sequels too: Authority is the story of a man code-named Control, who is sent from Central to the Southern Reach—the shadowy government entity that supervises explorations of Area X—to try to get the place back under, well, control. It’s a spy thriller with a soupçon of body horror and weird, in its own way, as Annihilation. The third book, Acceptance, merges and extends the first two: Control is now inside Area X, with someone who might or might not be the biologist whose POV dominated Annihilation, while other chapters give us some insight into the formation of Area X.
Now, ten years later, Vandermeer has written a fourth novel in the series, a prequel and capstone: Absolution. And it’s good.
It’s essentially three novellas, interwoven together[3]Not unlike Gene Wolfe’s The Fifth Head of Cerberus.. The first one is an exploration of the Forgotten Coast, twenty years before Area X formed, filtered through a one-time Central operative named Old Jim as he reads decades-old reports. Part two, eighteen months before the border comes down, has Old Jim in the field, now with a young partner posing as his estranged daughter, working as a dive-bar manager and digging deeper into the interlocking weirdnesses happening on the Forgotten Coast. The third section is the story of the very first[4]Well, apart from the chicken. expedition to Area X, from the point of view of Lowry, who eventually becomes the director of the Southern Reach.
Absolution is a wild ride through a burgeoning apocalypse, and it carries the same sense of dread I got from the extant trilogy: This will not end well. There are numerous callbacks to the first three books, and while some mysteries might end up resolved, plenty more question are raised than are answered. A great many questions may well be unanswerable.
If you’re looking for everything to be neatly tied up at the end, this isn’t the book for you, isn’t the series for you. If you’re looking for a spy thriller, an existential threat to the human race, a bunch of body horror, and a stunning number of F‑bombs[5]There were more fucks in the table of contents than in some novels., you’ll probably enjoy this one. (You’ll probably want to read the first three books first, though.)
I look forward to re-reading the whole saga in a few years.
As if in a dream
I had a dream the other night that I was writing a story about a tower, a wooden tower like you find in national parks at scenic outlooks, but every step on it was a day. If you came down the stairs too quickly you’d find yourself back in time.
When I woke up I held onto it, tweaked it, made it more logical. I’ve started on a first draft, because a gift in a dream is still a gift.
The tower had three hundred and sixty-five steps, but one of them—it was never clear to me which one—was about 25% higher than the rest. My best friend Riley, who went missing for a week and a half in the summertime and then showed up claiming he’d tripped on the way back down from the top, told me over pie and black coffee in the Chicken Chef that I should always watch my step.
“On the tower,” I said, “or everywhere?”
“Everywhere, but especially on the tower.”
Souris Valley
My friend Kelly talked me into going for a bike ride in the Souris Valley today, in a wildlife management area. He wasn’t sure how many hills there were[1]There were lots. but he was pretty sure there’d be some great views[2]There were..
Continue reading “Souris Valley”Bare trees
…at golden hour.
Hollow Bean 2024: The Costumes
From 5:30pm to 8:30pm last night[1]Which was, we realized, the 25th anniversary of the day we moved into the house, we had 16 trick-or-treaters show up at our place.
- Harlequin with a little hat
- Pig (he wore a burlap overall and had quite the full-head mask going on)
- Pikachu (it was her first Hallowe’en; when her mom said “What do you say?” her first guess was “Candy please?”)
- A giant black dot
- The Phantom of the Opera
- Teen who likes candy ×2
- Skull-faced clown
- Zombie mobster
- Delivery drivers who brought us our torta ×2
- Stitch
- Deadpool
- Minions ×2
- Vampire
We turned off the light about 9:20pm, and we’ve got a bunch of candy left.
Footnotes
| ↑1 | Which was, we realized, the 25th anniversary of the day we moved into the house |
|---|
Hollow Bean 2024
“Explain,” said the interrogation machine. “Describe their culture.”
“They have an important celebration,” said E.T., “called Hollow Bean. Everyone carves faces in fruit squashes and dresses up in sheets.”
“Who holds this celebration?”
“The children, who actually rule the Blue Planet of Earth. They are more intelligent than the older people and outrun them on bicycles.”
The machine whirled around him again. “And what is the purpose of this celebration?”
“To collect the all-important food.”
“Which is?”
“Candy.”
—William Kotzwinkle, E.T. The Book of the Green Planet. 1985, Berkeley Books.
Happy Hollow Bean, everyone! And b. good.
Photo by Zdeněk Macháček on Unsplash.
Review: My Real Children
It’s 2015. Patricia Cowan is in a care home. The chart at the end of her bed reads “Confused today.” Sometimes it reads “Very confused.” She’s not entirely sure if the washroom is to the left or to the right.
She remembers two lives. In one she married a man, had four children and five miscarriages, and lived a life of quiet desperation. In the other she lived with a woman, with whom she shared three children children, and wrote travel guides to Florence and other Italian cities. There are cities on the moon, or maybe they’re just weapon platforms.
Which life was real? Where did they diverge?
Well, you’ll need to read Jo Walton’s novel My Real Children to know for sure. It’s a look at two lives, four generations, alternate geopolitics, the Renaissance, and all the lives we touch whether we mean to or not.
(I lied, a little, when I said it’s about two lives. Honestly, it’s about dozens and dozens of lives touched by Patricia, not just her two lives.)
You’ll find happiness and sorrow throughout, both at the personal scale and the grand. This is my second foray into the work of Jo Walton, after the Just City trilogy, and she does not flinch from showing you the tragedy of life. But she’ll show you the joy, too.
Oh, hello
There’s a comet in the western sky, visible not long after sunset, called C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan–ATLAS.
Aurora and clouds, Oct. 10–11, 2024
It was clear to the west, so I grabbed my camera and took a chance.
It was not clear to the north.
Once I got home, the sky to the east was clear. I set up a camera in our spare room, aimed due east, and let it click until the batteries died. Between 11:30pm and 2:30am it got these gems, plucked from almost 2000 frames.
These photos, I have to keep reminding myself, were taken inside the city. Normally I’m happy when I get light like this a few kilometres out of town, where it’s starting to get properly dark. These aurora were competing with streetlights, and winning.
Oh yeah, I also turned the 2000ish photos from the spare room into a timelapse.