The Roots of Dystopic Fiction - We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin

When reading Ursula Le Guin’s Words Are My Matter, I made a reading list from books she discussed or referenced.  That was years ago now, and I no longer remember exactly what Le Guin said about We that made me put it on my list, but I have no regrets about reading it!  I have no idea how I had never heard of this book as it appears to be the primary influence on Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World.  You can absolutely see the DNA of Zamyatin’s novel in those two dystopic works, from plot structures to characters and relationships.  Zamyatin provides us with the dystopian novel upon which a century of such works are built, and yet, I had never even heard of it, much less read it.

The book was written in 1920 and published first in 1925, not in Russia, Zamyatin’s home country, and not in Russian, the language he wrote it in, but in England and as an English translation, because the book could not get published in Soviet Russia.  I have the Penguin edition with a translation by Clarence Brown from 1993—and, man, do I love Brown’s translation.  I imagine the original writing in Russian must be just as beautiful and evocative, because this translation is scintillating. Here’s a sample of one of the many sentences that gave me pause: “Mortified, I handed him the paper. He read it, and I saw a smile slip out of his eyes, slide down his face, and, with a flick of its tail, take a seat on the right side of his mouth” (143). Right?!

The book takes the form of a collection of journal entries, originally designed to be one of the “treatises, epic poems, manifestoes, odes, or other compositions dealing with the beauty and grandeur of OneState” (1).  OneState is a dystopian city built of steel-like glass and surrounded by a glass wall that keeps the green wilds permanently separate from the city itself. There was a 200-year war between the city and the countryside, which the city won.  Everything within OneState operates on a strict schedule, with allotted hours to wake up, eat, exercise, work, have sex, and sleep, the whole population engaging in the exact same schedule.  There is not privacy, except when you are granted leave to lower your blinds during your permitted sex time.  Otherwise, the glass walls and furniture allow you to see all and be seen by all at any time.  All citizens have been assigned numbers instead of names, as individuality has been stamped out, each person being a mere organism of OneState, which is the true entity.  Our protagonist is D-503. D-503 is the head builder of the INTEGRAL, a glass spaceship that has been built to allow OneState to colonize space and spread its vision of orderly happiness. D-503 begins the novel as a true-believer in the glory and sophistication of OneState, and as you can already guess if you’ve engaged in any dystopic fiction, that will change over the course of the novel.

The first person perspective makes the novel surprisingly part of the epistolary tradition, as D-503 is always addressing an unknown reader, imagined to be on one of the as-yet-uncolonized planets, someone living in barbarity as D-503 understands it. It’s a great frame to allow the protagonist to explain culture and history to someone who knows nothing about it.  Zamyatin’s skill makes the character and the world come to life through this limited perspective, especially as D-503 goes through the changes caused by him becoming aware of his individuality, what he calls at one point, coming down with a “soul,” viewed as an illness.  As he writes, “So here I am, in step with everyone else, and yet separate from all of them. I’m still trembling all over from the recent excitement—like a bridge that one of the ancient iron trains has just rumbled over. I feel myself. But it’s only the eye with a lash in it, the swollen finger, the infected tooth that feels itself, is conscious of its own individual being. The healthy eye or finger or tooth doesn’t seem to exist. So it’s clear, isn’t it? Self-consciousness is just a disease” (110).  There are several passages that become downright confusing because it is unclear if our narrator is having a hallucination, unclear of how to find the words and mindset to describe what he is experiencing, or if it is exactly as he says.  Zamyatin does not shy away from that complication of the first-person narrative, but instead leans into it and allows it to be poetic and confusing, in hot contrast to the cool orderliness of D-503’s life at the beginning of the novel.

The book suffers only from the author’s racism and misogyny. While I was impressed that there were black characters at all in a novel started in 1917 Russia, let alone that one is the best fried of our protagonist, the portrayal is not one of love.  Similarly, D-503, and presumably Zamyatin himself, is fascinated with the roundness of women and their breasts, and while women presumably play an equal role in this society without individuality, there are few woman at all, and one of them is a soft, insipid, simpleton who marvels at the brilliance of her man.  All the women are love objects, important within the novel for their desire and desirability, or lack thereof.

On the back of my edition, Le Guin is quoted as calling this novel “the best single work of science fiction yet written.” I don’t agree with that, but it is certainly a fascinating one, and a beautifully written and thoughtful one.  It is well worth the reading.

Timothy Egan's A Fever in the Heartland

Timothy Egan’s A Fever in the Heartland was recommended to us at a luncheon, where we gathered to celebrate the wedding of some dear friends. It was the summer of 2024 and we had been studying American and European fascism and authoritarianism for several months. We were seated with like-minded people, and the topic naturally came up. I try to act on recommendations, and the premise of Egan’s historical recounting sounded perfectly in line with our studies. We are ourselves Hoosiers, so hearing about the Ku Klux Klan’s presence in Indiana in the 1920s was pertinent to every aspect. I was not prepared for how well-written, how gripping, or how traumatic the tale would be.

This is the story of how the Klan rose to power in America in the 1910s and 1920s on the back of anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, anti-black, white supremacist sentiment. By 1925, the Klan was everywhere and dominating state politics in many states, but especially in Indiana.  In fact, the man responsible to making the Klan’s presence in the North so extensive had become the most powerful man in Indiana and his eyes were set on the presidency of the whole nation.  It was not a pipe dream for him, either. With the Klan’s embedded power within Congress, this was a real possibility. That man was D.C. Stephenson, or at least that’s the name he adopted when he drifted into Indiana several years before.  Stephenson was vicious, crude, a bully, a racist, and a misogynist.  He had many times brutally abused women in his life, including his wives, but as the powerful often do, he escaped any kind of reckoning, keeping his victim’s silent through fear and power over the law enforcement. But when he brutalized one young woman in 1925, she and her family, along with an unbought prosecutor, took the remarkable steps to demand justice.  The trial changed the entire course of the Klan’s influence.  That’s the story that Egan artfully unfolds. 

As a book of history, A Fever in the Heartland is first rate.  It’s an easy read that is full of surprises (for me) and direct, powerful, recounting of the state of America.  Egan covers the history of the clan in deft strokes, doing an amazing job of bringing the times to life with sensitivity but without euphemisms.  Even as we spend time in the lives of Klan members, Egan always has the moral clarity to call their actions what they are—hateful, anti-democratic, self-interested, and repugnant.  I appreciated his balancing of an unimpassioned presentation of the facts as he knew them with the equally unimpassioned moral position of the horrors spurring the organization.  I walked away from the book with what felt like a full understanding of the times.  It is the kind of book that pulls you through even as you want to stop to ingest all the details so that you can recall them later.

If you listened to Rachel Maddow’s two seasons of Ultra, this book will be of especial interest to you.  The two narratives (along with others available to us in this age of podcasts and peoples’ histories) work together to build an understanding for how much of the 20^th century has been a struggle between the forces of authoritarian white supremacy and the those fighting for genuine democracy and equality.  This is the history I was never taught, as the American education system is too interested in the tale of American exceptionalism. The rotten fruits of the Trump administration were planted centuries ago, and the land has been tilled with fervor for more than 100 years.  This is a book that every Hoosier should read to understand the present moment, even though the events took place almost 100 years ago to the day.

The only thing I found dissatisfying about the book was the brief coverage of the Klan’s undoing that followed the trial that let to D.C. Stephenson’s incarceration and fall from power.  I realize that there are a lot of factors that play into something like a nationwide organizations crumbling, but I wanted more than the relief of knowing that the group was diminished.  It crumbles so quickly in the retelling that there is little to take away from it.  I would gladly read another 200 pages about all the bits and pieces that went into the Klan’s members shedding their robes and wearing their racism in other ways.  That was not the scope of this book, and I can’t blame Egan for not writing those additional 200 pages, but still I found myself disappointed in the denouement.

The book will be staying on my shelf because I will want to have this bit of history available to me to read again and from which to gather still more wisdom.

Sara Levine's Treasure Island!!!

 After reading Michael Poore’s Reincarnation Blues, I went looking for more comic novels, but I specifically wanted something written by a woman.  An internet search led me to Sara Levine’s 2012 novel, Treasure Island!!!.  The pitch of a modern young woman, so taken by the adventurousness of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic novel, that she decides to model her life after it, sounded fantastic to me.  The library had it in stock, and here I am!

It’s a captivating book, and wonderfully written.  I found myself put off by the main character almost immediately, and I found the premise positively ludicrous in practice.  But in spite of all that, I didn’t want to stop reading.  Partly, I was compelled by a desire to see where the novel went so that I could make sense of it, so that I could see what the author was trying to say.  Partly, I was compelled to see where the story would go—would it just escalate into insanity or would it try to create a moral from the narrator’s tale? The fact is that I read the book in a single weekend, which is not something I typically do.  The book moves quickly, but I truly had a hard time looking away.  I can’t think of a higher compliment to the writing and plotting of the tale.

As I have said in various other review/posts, I’m a sucker for a well-written first-person narrative.  Give me a fun and interesting unreliable narrator and I am all in.  The narrator here (and I can’t give you a name because she doesn’t have one) is a woman of 25 with no career ambitions, no relationship ambitions, no real need for money since her parents and friends allow her to live off them with very little complaining, and no direction in life.  After reading Treasure Island, she decides that the reason her life is so unsatisfying is that she has been leading a dull life as a dull person.  She goes, I can only infer, from a timid self-involved person to a bold self-involved person.  She leaves her job, but not because she has the character to quit and find a better job, but because she makes horrible choices and gets fired.  In fact, she’s ready to take the job back as long as she doesn’t have to apologize.  She leaves her relationship, but not because she has discovered she needs something better and more fulfilling, but because she makes unilateral decisions for her boyfriend who then dumps her and kicks her out of his apartment.

And the narrator truly is an awful person.  She’s unfeeling, uncaring and uninterested in others.  As she observes, courtesy is not a Core Value for her (118) and when her mom, after being direct with her, says, “I thought you liked candor,” the narrator replies, “I like my candor. There’s a big fat difference” (130). She is cruel toward her sister at every turn, because of her weight, her appearances, her job.  Everyone is valued by her insofar as they can do something for her.  She’s pretty much a catalogue of every undesirable trait you would want in a person in your life.

And yet, there is something about her that keeps her from being someone you hate.  I say that even though I’m aware that there are many readers who have hated her.  So perhaps I should say there is something about her that keeps me and many other from hating her.  First, there are the glimpses beneath the surface that show us her sorrow and pain, what she refuses to tell us directly in the self-conscious presentation of her writing, such as when Little Richard, her parrot, imitates our narrator unexpectedly: 

At first it seemed like a laugh. Then the laugh sort of fell down the stairs and became a wail. That intractable bird, that bird in whom I could barely wedge a useful phrase, had been studying my misery when I’d thought he was asleep. I threw the cloth over his cage and my hands began to tremble. The sound was terrible: defeated, despairing, almost crazy. Shut up, shut up, but he carried on sobbing, relentless as a wave (116).  

And even more importantly, there is a little bit of the narrator in all of us, a piece that we are both ashamed of and feel a little proud of.  It’s a stubborn and ugly part, but sometimes it’s the part that saves us.  It’s the part that makes everything about us, even when we don’t want it to. It’s the part that cuts our sympathies short to focus on some personal tragedy, lacking in comparison. It’s an embarrassing part, but it’s there. As a man, I have a difficult relationship with that part of me, but I imagine that relationship can be even more fraught for a young woman. The book leans into that complication to find the humor and sympathy and horror of its subject.

I can’t say I know what the book is doing, as much as I like being able to say that I know what books are doing.  At first, I thought it was a kind of clever spin on Fight Club, the useless empty feeling that consumerism and life in the suburbs makes us feel, but from the perspective of a young woman.  But that is unsatisfying and incomplete.  I think this book, in spite of its seemingly small world and limited scope, is grasping at some very large things and trying to present them all concurrently, even through the cacophonous voice of our narrator.  Adriane, Lars, Rena, Nancy, the narrator’s mother—they all have lives that Levine successfully gets us to feel are much larger than the narrator’s reduction of them all.  That’s no mean feat given the novel’s form.  Levine points to all these other narratives existing and drowned out by the narrator, and allows their unspoken narratives to be in dialogue with the only voice we are given.  What it all adds up to, however, I don’t know.  And I don’t know if Levine knows either, or if she is feeling her way toward truths, letting her sense of aesthetics and character guide her toward what it real.  That’s admirable.  And she is talented enough to accomplish all that in this short, quick-moving, humorous novel.

Michael Poore's Reincarnation Blues

 My son, on the strength of the first couple of paragraphs, picked up this book after a trip to the bookstore with friends a few years ago. I had been reading haltingly this year and thought something comedic might do me some good.  I haven’t read any of Michael Poore’s other books, and I was completely unfamiliar with him or his work before reading Reincarnation Blues.

 Poore is an excellent writer, with a knack for poetic language that makes his prose sparkle.  Here’s a brief example, in which he describes a roulette wheel: “A ball pops around like an electrocuted cat and eventually comes to rest somewhere” (108).  The electrocuted cat is surprising and funny and evocative.  A good deal of the humor of the book comes from Poore’s clever and insightful wielding of language, and it is truly a joy and a pleasure to read.

 

In the world of the narrative, we all live life after life, learning as we go, hopefully, until we achieve a moment of perfection that allows us to transcend into the oversoul and become one with the universe.  In between each life lived, there is a kind of staging world, in which you can collect yourself, reflect upon things, get coaching from two beings who are neither gods nor mortals, but agents of the universe.  Our protagonist is a man named Milo.  He’s not always a man, and he’s not always named Milo, but for the bulk of the narrative, he’s a man named Milo.  His two universal guides appear to him as older women named Mama and Nan.  In that in-between world with Mama and Nan, Milo has a friend and lover names Suzie, who is Death.  Her name as given by the universe is not Suzie, but that’s the name she gave herself to be pronounceable by Milo.  And she is not THE Death but merely one of many Deaths who help people transition from their living life to the in-between world.  Suzie, like Mama and Nan, is neither god nor mortal, another agent of the universe.  The crux of our story is this: Milo has lived 9,990-some lives when he learns that you only get 10,000 lives to achieve perfection and join the universal oversoul.  If you fail within that time period, you instead get option B, which is to become nothingness, to cease to be entirely.  Can he do it? Should he do it? What does perfection look like? Does he lose Suzie if he joins the oversoul?  Is the nothingness forever?  Read the book to find out.

 

It's an enjoyable read, even beyond Poore’s talented use of words and phrases. It’s fun to skip through whole arcs of lives.  Poore does something very neat with this world he created. Lives are of course not lived chronologically through the earth’s timeline as well know it.  You can live in 2,000 BC or 3,400 AD or 1848 or 1972 as you wish.  By shooting us into the future, Poore brings science fiction into a book that does not appear at first glance to be science fiction. And while the world of the past closely mirrors the real world as we readers will know it, the future takes some bold leaps that are funny and poignant. Best of all, there is a weaving between the lives in the futures that creates a stable timeline, a single invented world.  The lives lived are not part of alternate worlds of possibility, but one single timeline.  In doing so, Poore creates a genuinely new and unique world that’s fun to follow and play in. It’s a clever trick, expertly done.

 

Generally, I found the book to be a quick read, but there were parts that were very difficult to wade though. Poore does not shy away from the ugly parts of human nature and human history, and for that I applaud him. For the most part, the more sci-fi-y parts of the novel still feel grounded in a real understanding of humans and relationships. For me, however, the chapter set in a prison ship adrift in space was not just ugly, but unbelievable. There was no human compassion or sense of community among people outcast by society and left to die. I realize that he did this for a number of reasons, but none of those reasons make up for how unbelievable it is.  Part of his reason is that these are murderers and irredeemable people jettisoned from society.  Part of his reason is that Milo’s arc in that part of the story needs to raise him from the lowest of the low to what might be the highest of the highs. Part of his reason is that we are going to see another outcast society on the planet of Jupiter later in the novel, and you don’t want for them to be too similar; there needs to be considerable contrast between the two. In the end, though, I think it plays into the idea that people in prison are mean, horrible people, murderers and rapists and the worst of all of us. We of course know that societies formed within prisons, while there may be gangs and plays for power as there are anywhere else in society, are mutually supportive, containing all the positive aspects of society that we see anywhere else.  When Milo walks naked and battered into a room of people hanging out, playing a card game, every single person in the room has the first impulse to rape the 16-year-old boy and gleefully acts upon that impulse, en masse.  It’s not just upsetting, but ridiculous, and not in an amusing way.

 

There are other minor decisions that didn’t sit well with me, but nothing that ruined the book or the reading experience.  A story is the teller’s statement about the world and humanity and life, and I’m not surprised that Poore and I have different visions. None of those differences between us, in short, is the fault of the writer.

 

It’s a solid book, focused and funny, well-constructed and clever. If it sounds at all like your jam, I highly recommend it.

The Ups and Downs of Bram Stoker's Dracula

 

I read this novel for the first time in 1992 or 1993, for a literature class my junior year of college on horror stories and their cinematic adaptations.  I don’t know what about the topic gripped my imagination because I was not a fan of horror films at the time, nor was I a fan of horror literature.  Something about reading classic horror novels like Dracula, Frankenstein, The Island of Dr. Moreau, and Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde hit me in the exact right spot, and while all my essays written for that class were poorly done, the class itself had a huge impact on me.  I’ve watched horror films ever since, and I’ve had a particular interest in the different languages and requirements of cinema and novels.

 

My wife had never read Dracula, and after seeing The Last Voyage of the Demeter (a film that disappointed both of us) she found herself wanting to.  So we took to reading a couple of chapters before bed each night.

 

I found a lot to admire in the book and a few things that sent my eyes rolling.  Let’s start with the ugly stuff.  The politics in this book are deeply conservative and regressive. Bram Stoker is deeply invested in gender and sexual norms.  Women are the seat of all that is good and pure, and the need to save that goodness and purity is the driving force of the male protagonists.  When women become corrupted, they are repeatedly described as “voluptuous.”  They are wanton, sexually aggressive, full of hunger and desire.  Meanwhile the men cannot stop falling in love with each other’s manly virtues.  Vampirism is explicitly heterosexual in the novel.  Dracula only feeds on women, and the women only try to bite men.  That last part is not true—Lucy ends up feeding on children, even though her vampirism presumably gives her the strength to overpower men.  Nevertheless, she only uses her feminine wiles to get her way, entrancing men with her sexuality and children with promises of candy and sweets.  Even the domain of evil respects the hierarchy of men above women, and women above children, feeding down the line of power.

 

At the heart of the narrative, of course, is a foreign man coming to English soil to corrupt their women and undermine the noble society of this white world (there are as far as I could tell, no one in the novel who isn’t white).  The good English men (and one doctor from the Netherlands) have to drive this foreign invader from English soil to save their women and children, chasing him as far as it takes so that he cannot return to topple English greatness another time.  There are additionally references to physiognomy and the natural greatness of the white man’s brain.  Yuck.

 

There is plenty there to scoff at while reading the novel, but I did not find that that hopelessly sunk the reading experience.  Dracula is a wonderful character.  He is cruel and controlling, abusive and self-centered, powerful and intelligent.  He indeed has incredible strength and can scale walls like a fly; he possesses the ability to control the weather, wolves, and bats; and he wields the power to turn into mist itself.  But for all these supernatural powers, he is painfully human in his awfulness.  He may as well be Jack the Ripper or any Victorian serial killer.  When he tells Jonathan Harker to write three letters dated weeks apart to send to England, Harker sees no way out of doing so, and remarks that he now knows the day on which he will die.  And when Jonathan asks to leave, Dracula acts hurt and says that he would never keep him against his will, only to lead him to the front door behind which innumerable baying wolves howl, forcing Harker to “choose” to remain.  The cruelty is ugly and thrilling.  That same cruelty seems to trigger his interest in converting Mina.  While the men wreak havoc in the Carfax Estate, Dracula hits them where they care most, striking out at the one they want to protect.  Dracula’s draw, for me, had nothing to do with his supernatural trappings, and everything to do with how very human he was.

 

Another cool thing about the novel is that Stoker’s decision to use letters and diaries to tell the tale meant that he was forced to show Dracula’s presence mostly by the effects he created, like watching the footprints in the sand made by the invisible man.  Yes, the convention forced him to create silly reasons for different people to write about their experiences (and in ridiculous detail), but the rewards of the form were well worth it.  Dracula of course keeps no diary, so he only makes a few direct appearances.  And because of that, he is incapable of belaboring many connections and activities—he’s forced to trust the reader to make all the necessary connections.  Those connections are not hard to make, but it’s still nice to have them observed and then moved on from.

 

As an aside, it’s fun to think that “found footage” films, like The Blair Witch Project had a progenitor a hundred years earlier.  And just as films inspired by Blair Witch needed to keep coming up with reasons and ways to have a camera recording at those moments, Stoker had to come up with reasons to have his characters keeping detailed recountings of their experiences.

 

Something that met at the midway point between eyerolls and admiration, for me, was the relationship between the characters.  This is not a story about interpersonal drama.  In fact, since the characters have to be able to read each other’s diaries, they can’t really talk smack about each other and expect to trust each other and work together.  So Stoker’s format forces him to have all the character admire the holy hell out of each other.  It feels like the characters are constantly being blown away by how wonderful their companions are and continuously promising to be best friends until their dying days. It’s hokey.  But under that hokeyness is something genuinely attractive.  This isn’t the story of a single hero against a single villain, but of a community of people and a Great Evil.  There’s something beautiful in that.  That beauty is sadly undercut by their being a community of white hetero dudes from a colonizing empire—so yeah, it’s a real mixed bag.

 

As for the writing itself, the book has moments that ready smoothly and beautifully, and other moments that can be relatively rough to get through.  Overall, I was impressed and found reading it aloud very enjoyable.

Making Sense of Far-Right Religious Extremism in When the Moon Turns to Blood

 I listened to the first and second season of Leah Sotille’s Bundyville podcast in 2019 and was impressed by her talent for presenting a complicated and upsetting situation in a clear, interesting, and compelling way.  Moreover, she made what seemed to me an impenetrably different way of thinking about the world understandable.  So when I saw that she had a book out, I knew she would bring those same journalistic and personal skills to bear on her new subject.  It didn’t matter to me what the subject was—I had never heard of either Vallow or Daybell before—I just knew it would be worth reading. And I was right.

My wife often listens to true crime podcasts while trying to beat insomnia and slide into sleep, so I offered to read the book to her each night, a practice we have always enjoyed with a well-written book.  Sotille not only has the ability to turn a poetic phrase even when discussing the most awful aspects of human nature and activity, but she writes for the human ear, with flowing, rhythmic sentences.  Given that she is experienced in writing for her podcast, I am not surprised, but I was still pleased with the strength of her prose and structuring.

The book was published on the verge of Lori Vallow’s trial and well before Chad Daybell’s, so none of the book focuses on the trials. Instead, Sotille is interested in the How of the story—how did these two people get to a place where they could kill two children (not to mention one of their spouses and potentially both of them).  She looks at the environment of their upbringing and their social maturation, and the importance of the fringe cultures forming around the Mormon church.  She takes her time to explain the tenets of the church and the difficult tightrope the church walks with some of its most troublesome beliefs.  For example, the faith has at its very foundation a belief that God can give revelations to any member of the church.  So how then does the church help determine what revelations are from God, which are meaningful, and which should be given weight.  The official solution is that your personal revelations should be kept to yourself, that they are indeed revelations but that they are personal and apply to you only.  Sharing them could cause trouble, so don’t do that.  You can see how that has the ability to contain things like a sieve can hold water.  In addition to these personal revelations, the church, coming from a past of being attacked ideologically and physically by others, stresses being prepared for catastrophe, which leaves fertile ground for preppers and doomsdayers to grow within the church.  Add to these beliefs (and many more) the modern technology of online forums and the growing anti-government beliefs of right-wing religious groups and you have explosive ingredients intermixing near roaring flames.

There’s a wild shift in the book that occurs heading into Part Four.  Up to this point, Sotille has been explaining the landscape and history of the tragedy.  Heading into Part Four we understand that Vallow and Daybell have weird and dangerous beliefs.  But nothing that comes before prepared me for the wildness of their beliefs or for the influence those beliefs have over others.  It is a mad tumble down the rabbit hole, a murderous Wonderland where things are topsy turvy and subject only to their own twisted logic.  It was hard for me to tie these two parts together, because the conditions described in the first half get overwhelmed by the particular insanities of the second half.  It’s like getting an overview of the forest and then being suddenly thrown into the trees head first. It was difficult to keep the forest in mind while you are trying to dodge tree trunks.

There are so many moments in this book that blew my mind, looking into the lives and thoughts of a world well outside my own.  Sotille provides a glimpse at a whole slice of American life that is otherwise inaccessible to those of us outside of it.  This books may be about a specific set of crimes and the world that birthed them, but it is also about what is happening among the far-right religious groups, what is motivating them, what they take to be facts, and what they understand to be happening around them.  It is terrifying, but it is important to know.

Sotille never offers a solution to what’s happening. But there is, I think, a suggestion that the churches and organizations that house these rapidly radicalizing groups of people need to face the constituents and members directly.  They need to nip the paranoia and fear where it breeds, rather than watering it, or even ignoring it.  People outside these groups cannot convince them that their thinking is dangerous and harmful.  Only the authorities they trust and guide them out of the dark places they have been inhabiting.  I suspect that the Church of Latter Day Saints will react negatively to the look this book takes at them. I can only hope that instead of being angry at their portrayal, that they look inward and ask themselves what they can do to prevent the fanning of paranoia’s and fear’s flames.

H.G. Wells's The First Men in the Moon

I am not proud of the way that I came at this novel.  I wasn’t exactly reading to find faults, but I apparently wasn’t feeling especially generous either.  I was interested to see Wells do his magic, but several stories in the past had made me wary of a couple of unpleasant political leanings I had caught glimpses of.  “The Land of the Blind” particularly stuck with me like a splinter of wood beneath my fingernail.  The narrator of The Time Machine also sat uneasily with me.  So when The First Men in the Moon opened with a narrator running from his creditors, writing a play to make a quick buck, I was unenthused.  I read the majority of the novel with my shield in one hand and my sword in the other, as it were.

My edition, the Penguin Classics edition, first published in 2005, has an introduction by China Mieville.  I saved the introduction until after I had finished the book, to avoid potential spoilers.  On the one hand, this was a good move, because it was indeed full of spoilers.  On the other hand, I could have used Mieville’s insight and good sense while reading the novel!

Mieville’s introduction is thoughtful, well-researched, and invigorating.  If I were writing one of my usual analytical reviews, I would just want to quote everything Mieville says, because they are the things that I wish I had been thinking and seeing while I was reading.  Instead, I got a burst of information and analysis that cast the book in a new light, that let me look over the path I had followed and reinterpret it, more wisely now.

While reading, I kept looking to make sense of Bedford and Cavor as moral characters.  I don’t know why I did this—probably to get a glimpse behind the mask of who H.G. Wells was at this time in his life.  It is uncommon for a writer to make their main character a complete ass (uncommon but certainly not unheard of), and while the Wells novels and stories I have read certainly have flawed, limited, and human narrators, it did not occur to me that Bedford might be someone Wells disagreed with completely, someone he was mocking and expecting us to be in on the joke. I was appalled by much of his character, but I assumed that Wells was not, and that’s what I mean by reading with my sword and shield in hand.  I couldn’t interpret openly and honestly, enjoying what was there before me.  I was dancing around it as though in a duel.  It compromised both my enjoyment and my understanding.

Before reading the introduction, I would have told you the book, politically and philosophically, was a muddle and a mess.  But the more generous reading of that is to observe the beliefs that are in tension within the novel, to see what is at war in the very soul and imagination of the author.  What is rotten at the core of the Imperial and Industrial world of Britain, and how do you save it?  What does that look like?  How do we have the progress and quality of life experienced by some without the cost that such a life inflicts on many?  Wells is trying to work that all out while creating honest and living fiction.  In Mieville’s eyes, I see the book as something much more beautiful and searching than what I saw before.  And I am thankful for his guidance.