In my family growing up, my parents would take each child on their first out of the country trip when they were a teenager. I want to continue that tradition in my family, so July started with a trip to Japan with our 16 year old. He helped pick the destination and some of the activities. Our biggest hits were the Nintendo Museum, playing in an arcade in Ahkihabara, Teamlabs Borderless interactive art museum, our amazing AirBnB in Kyoto, and all the tasty treats from the conbinis and vending machines. The biggest flops were the once-in-a-decade heat wave, the basically empty Japanese Sword Museum, and that time when we accidentally boarded a reservation-only train and got yelled at by the ticket collector. Also, parents take note: traveling with one teenager is such a major upgrade from traveling with four small kids. Highly recommended if you can swing it.
As for the rest of the month, I’ve been trying to get a bit of summer in my summer instead of just working all the time—hard when I have so many fun projects to work on! We’ve been taking advantage of very late church to go on long family hikes on Sundays. We’re going to try to do Mount Timpanogos in August! I also gave in to my college self and bought Civ VII. I haven’t put in too many hours yet, but as a more casual player, I’m really enjoying the changes that make the game less cumbersome and more fun
On the academic side of things, I had lined up a research position for fall, then lost it to the whims of HR rules that prevent hiring former students at less than full time. Luckily, I’ve been able to pull together a teaching position for fall that I’m really excited about (and it comes with library access): I’ll be back at BYU teaching persuasive writing!
I continue in my quest to revive my podcasting schedule as well. In case you’ve been hiding under a rock and missed the internet’s new favorite show, we’ve got a podcast about the religious aspects of KPop Demon Hunters over at Pop Culture on the Apricot Tree.
The biggest news of the month, of course, was officially launching Further Light: Science Fiction and Fantasy in the Latter-day Saint Tradition. This new little magazine already has more subscribers than this blog. I’m so happy that so many people have caught the vision of it. We’ve also received enough paid subscriptions to cover paying all of the authors for the first issue! Of course, there are still the printing costs that will be coming out of my own pocket, so if you’re able and inclined to support Latter-day Saint speculative fiction, please subscribe. I don’t plan to make any money out of this venture (a good bet since most magazines don’t), but I plan to use any profit to increase our pay rates for writers. I’ve also had several people reach out and volunteer to help us get off the ground—thank you for your generosity and keep it coming!
With all that happening, there are a few less book reviews than usual, but some real gems nonetheless.
Speculative Fiction
Isles of the Emberdark by Brandon Sanderson – After feeling “meh” about The Lost Metal and Wind & Truth, Brandon Sanderson is back to form in this new novel. I loved the short story “Sixth of the Dust,” on which the book is based and which is incorporated into the first section as flashbacks. The story has been slightly updated and modernized as it leads towards a full-length story. Dusk is easily my new favorite Cosmere character; his terseness could have gotten tedious, but the twists and turns of its evolution over the novel make it fun.
The second perspective of the novel, Starling, brings us the first major character who is a dragon in Sanderson’s universe. I was worried that the human-changeling dragons would take some of the awe out of the dragon, which is does (especially since the dragon character is largely prevented from being a dragon in this book). But it makes room for something else that Sanderson does really well: dragons are yet another type of Cosmere god, and we get to examine some of their motivations and natural impulses. Starling’s chapters are fun motley-space-crew adventures, but they don’t really become meaningful until Starling’s dragon nature becomes more relevant in the last third.
As for themes, the book is a strong exploration of the colonial mindset and how a colonized culture can try to fight back. I agree with other reviews that the weakest part of this discussion is the villain, who is a bit over-the-top in his willful bias towards inferior cultures. The better discussion is within Dusk’s head, trying to figure out how he can both protect his culture while also providing for progress forward into the modern era. The resolution really only works because of fantasy conceits, which makes it a bit more limited in applications to the wider discussion, but the observations along the way are still enjoyable.
For my thoughts about religion in Isles of the Emberdark, see this post from two weeks back.
The Fox Wife by Yangsze Choo – I’m divided about this book. On the one hand, I really enjoyed the expansion of the fox trickster mythology of China and Japan, though my knowledge of the folklore is superficial enough that I can’t tell exactly where things have been changed in interesting ways. On the other hand, I found the alternating perspectives difficult to keep straight. Part of this is in the subtle way the author indicates the overlap between the two perspectives. Little details show that both the fox wife and the detective are meeting the same people from different angles, but it’s so realistically done that instead of being an interesting puzzle coming together, I found myself confused about which perspective was which. Once I got that straightened out, I enjoyed the novel a lot more. I guess my overall conclusion is that if you enjoy Asian folklore and detective novels, you’ll enjoy this one.
Or What You Will by Jo Walton – Jo Walton does it again! This book is a very metafictional tale about a writer who is dying of cancer and the fictional character/muse living in her head who wants to save her by dragging her into a story world. In between this internal conversation, we get chapters from the author’s current project which involves a magical version of Renaissance Italy populated by characters from Shakespeare. It’s an ideal (to me) mashup of a Shakespeare extended universe and contemplations about the nature of creativity and storytelling. I wasn’t sure I’d like that half: I’m not the kind of writer whose characters come to life and take off in their own directions, but the conversation is so much wider than that. We even get some of Walton’s signature SF book reviews embedded in the story. If you enjoyed the film Stranger than Fiction but thought it could use a lot more magic and Shakespeare (and Canada), you’re in luck with this one.
At this point, I probably should just set myself a project to read all of Walton’s backlist this fall.
Nonfiction
The Small and the Mighty: Twelve Unsung Americans Who Changed the Course of History, from the Founding to the Civil Rights Movement by Sharon McMahon – I enjoyed some of the stories more than others. I guess I expected a bit more diversity in the stories’ subject matter. Most of the stories, especially towards the end of the book, are focused on the Civil Rights movement and women’s rights. To be clear, they are really great stories with important work done. It just betrays a certain perspective about what counts as “changing the course of history.” I guess I just thought that the book would have a wider scope, including things like the arts, environmentalism, religion, sports, community, science, and business. Nonetheless, the stories in the book are interesting and bring to light some less known characters in America. The thing I thought about over and over while reading was that history is really storytelling. A compelling historian essentially creates new history from old and unremembered documents. History doesn’t become history until it becomes a story, and that takes a skilled storyteller, which Sharon McMahon certainly is.
The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen – If you are a writer or notebook user, this one will likely be as magical for you as it was for me. Roland Allen starts with his own Moleskine obsession and ferrets out the whole tale of humans writing informally on paper. And the paper part is important, since it made notebooks within reach of the average person. Each chapter takes on a different notebook or type of notebook throughout world history. I knew about some of them before–bullet journals, commonplace books, Da Vinci’s notebooks–but others were completely new to me. Who knew that the relative cheapness of paper in 1500s Italy led to the invention of double-book accounting which led to the wealth that funded the Renaissance? And Dutch friendship books were the forerunners of the yearbook and even the social media “like.”
This book also reinforced something I have been thinking about for a while in light of the invention of AI “writing.” So many of these thinkers would not have come up with the innovations they did without confiding their thoughts informally to paper. Writing truly *is* thinking. So while I’m all in favor of using LLMs to fill mindless uses of text (like podcast summaries and cover letters), I think there will always be a place for learning to write. The value of writing is even more clearly in the process, not the product. The concluding chapter of the book brings in the ideas of British philosopher Andy Clark to justify this idea that physical objects like a notebook can function as part of the extended brain. His ideas seem more focused on memory outsourcing than actual thought processing, but I think I’ll follow up by reading one of his books to see how his ideas apply to composition studies.