Books: April 2024
Ubik — Philip K. Dick
⭐⭐⭐ Ubik at first seems to be about a future where people with extrasensory powers battle on behalf of private corporations. But this is mostly a red herring. The story really turns on the fact that, in this future, people can keep their loved ones alive for exponentially long periods in a “half-life” state.
I generally don’t get much out of sci-fi world-building. “This isn’t a story about humans on Earth, it’s about Blingblongs from planet Worblorg – and they walk on the ceiling instead of the ground.” Who cares? It’s made up. Angler fish are crazy because they seem like aliens yet they are real.
Ubik is good because it mostly jettisons the sci-fi halfway through and turns into something closer to a horror novel. Joe Chip spends most of the latter half drifting through this dream/nightmare world, at the center of which is Ubik, a weird substance that can pierce through the haze.
Given Dick’s background with drugs, it’s hard not to read a drug allegory: the dreary dream-like world is reality and Ubik is the drug that cuts through. The other approach is to focus on the technology and how it mediates our interactions with the world, but that part seems less fleshed out.
The writing is impressive in parts and on the whole I liked this a lot.
The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century — Amia Srinivasan
⭐⭐ The Right to Sex is a series of essays on contemporary debates among feminists concerning consent, pornography, power, and the use of the state to redress injustice.
The standout essay is the titular “Right to Sex,” which sets up a spicy philosophical problem. When we think about complaints raised by incels and similar groups about being systematically excluded from sex, do we feel sympathy? Obviously no. But then: what about people who are disabled, trans, non-white, who also face exclusion and discrimination in their dating lives? Do we feel sympathy for them? Yes. But are they owed sex?
The author sets up the problem frankly: some people are undesired because of who they are. Some of this seems “neutral” (all people vary in attractiveness) and some seems “exclusionary” (rejection based on race, body type). But are the two really so different? And what can we do about it? Can people change what they desire? Or is desire pre-political, and therefore fine?
The author seems to land on “yes, we can change our desire.” But she also refuses to say this requires discipline. She asks: “Is there no difference between ‘telling people to change their desires’ and asking ourselves what we want, why we want it, and what it is we want to want?” To me, this feels like wanting to have your cake and eat it too. She could say: no, we can’t coerce desire, and whatever inequities emerge are morally neutral. Or: yes, we should change our desire even if it means disciplining the will.
This is a problem throughout the other essays, which are weaker. The first deals with the rights of the accused in sexual assault cases. She argues “believe women” is a corrective against a standard that protects abusers, but doesn’t adequately address that shifting the threshold of guilt changes the number of false positives. She does it again with pornography, where she rejects treating it as a question of free speech but doesn’t address how constraints on pornography would affect production that feminists might find acceptable. In each case, she refuses to accept that there are tradeoffs, which is disappointing for a philosopher.
The descriptions of feminist debates from the 1970s and 1980s around sex and pornography were interesting and new to me. And the deeper problem these debates surface – the absence of a common underlying principle for deciding which arguments are more persuasive – is genuinely fascinating.
The Complete Maus — Art Spiegelman
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ A masterpiece. The narrative is so rich, it’s hard to know where to begin. The book has this meta-fictional quality in that you follow the author as he writes Maus, which is about his parents’ experiences in Auschwitz. We see the author spend time with his father, their difficult relationship, and at points the father narrates his experiences in the Holocaust so his son can write his book.
A central theme is how the past haunts the present. We see father and son driving back from the grocery store, then transported to the camps as the father shares more memories. But it is also about how the horrors of the world are happening all the time, while we are driving to work, buying groceries. Maus squeezes it all together in these extremely dense pages.
The meta-narrative adds intensity. The son is frustrated by his father and frequently criticizes him, but as readers we know that many of the behaviors the son finds irritable can be linked to the camps – his intense frugality, resourcefulness, desire for predictability. And we know the son knows this too, which makes their relationship rich and painful. The guilt the author feels is palpable.
The father’s narrative is also laid out as memories, which are not fully reliable yet feel true regardless. The son at certain points questions the sequence. And the interpretation of the father’s “packrat” behaviors as legacy of the Holocaust, which seems so clear, is questioned by his second wife, who says something like, “I know other survivors, and they are not like this.”
I have consumed a lot of content about the Holocaust but none have made me feel the emotional dimension of the brutality like this book. The father’s losses are inconceivable. That they lost their first child to the camps is inconceivable. That his wife survived the camps to commit suicide decades later is inconceivable. The final page hits you like a ton of bricks.