Messy, mildly impressive. She switches between half a dozen styles (crayon, smudged charcoal, heavy pencil, what looks like felt tip with most of the Messy, mildly impressive. She switches between half a dozen styles (crayon, smudged charcoal, heavy pencil, what looks like felt tip with most of the panel untouched, simulating intense white light, scraped acrylic abstract landscapes) with no clear meaning. There are ghosts everywhere (the people you remember, the ones you wish were here). Everyone is bitter, dishonest, haranguing except the wee girl. Also melodrama, but bad luck in love does that to people. Niki’s tiny beaming gestures are the best bit. The weird shuffling makes it seem like a diary - you don’t need to introduce anyone in your diary or mention them more than once or for more than 3 panels. But then it’s a memoir where you also show your cheating lover with his ex while you’re still back at home, and don’t make much effort to sketch his inner life and show him telling you lies you can’t disprove…
(The lover is thanked in the Acknowledgments, so maybe they’re just radically open about their vices with each other, and explain their deceptions. This would be an odd pairing of vice and virtue: vicious enough to cheat and manipulate and lie, secure and honourable enough to admit it and accept your own shit)
She doesn’t spare herself much - shown lovelorn and ineffectual, a dupe who finishes the book falling for more of GM’s lies.
Overall it leaves a mucky feeling, and besides the style switching there’s not much to set it above your average experimental indie bit....more
A Toy version of the scientific method, with Senku just intuiting things and progressing ridiculously quickly. But having even a toy version of sciencA Toy version of the scientific method, with Senku just intuiting things and progressing ridiculously quickly. But having even a toy version of science is more sophisticated than most fiction....more
Simple, loveable SF. McHugh does not truck much with symbols: she just executes one theme and a bucket of naturalistic detail really well. Mostly a seSimple, loveable SF. McHugh does not truck much with symbols: she just executes one theme and a bucket of naturalistic detail really well. Mostly a serviceable replacement. The scifi is extremely unobtrusive. It's also a friendly primer on Chinese culture; she even teaches you some starchy Mandarin.
Her theme: invert the current positions of China and America; culturally, economically. Following economic collapse and a popular uprising, America gets colonised by China.
“I went to the Brooklyn Middle School of Theory and History and all of our classes were in Mandarin”
The effect is to make the western reader feel the Chinese condition. Politically Freaky Friday. Kitchen Sink Red Dawn.
The Soviet Union also went into bankruptcy because it was deeply invested in the U.S. bond market, whatever that was," they all laugh, we've all been taught that the U.S.S.R. was deeply hurt in the economic collapse because of their involvement in the U.S. bond market, but I'll be damned if I ever met anyone who really knew what that meant.
McHugh is neither alarmist nor tankie about this. Her socialist system is does some things right - but contrary to the undying dream of teen radicals, it's also way more racist and homophobic than the current system. Modern racism, too (i.e. unspoken).
As one goes further up in any hierarchy, one meets more and more ethnically Chinese people.
The main drama all comes from Zhang just trying to be gay in New York. (“They'll send him to Xinjiang Province, to Reform Through Labor”.) That and poverty. (The welfare system is depicted as realistically shitty, conditional, degraded, insufficient.)
There's some mind control stuff going on, but oddly restrained:
“There is a fine line, she explains, between too much activity which would overwhelm my system and too little which would mean that the new kidneys would not grow. I take all of this placidly. "Dr. Cui," I say, "you are controlling my moods, aren't you." She pats my hand, the first time she has touched me that I remember. "Of course, you are new here, alone, ill. If we didn't you would be frightened and depressed”
This and the wirehead gambling den makes this book the most subtle cyberpunk novel ever.
“your life says something about your politics whether you think about them or not. You can either just let that happen or you can think about the kind of choices you want to make." "I'd like to continue to make my choices because they fit my life rather than out of some sense of ideology”
“I am exhausted and angry and full of a hard, terrible joy. We have survived. Yes, it was luck as much as anything else, but we made our own luck. The chain and tackle system dangles in lines and shadows all around us, the light slowly brightens above us. There is a purity of form and line; reality, hard lean reality is very beautiful.”
“Students in a university live transient and comparatively marginal existences. That is true the world over. A university is concerned with preparation for the future and there is an underlying philosophy that overcrowded living conditions and a lack of the comforts of the middle class is not only excused but somehow educational. In Brooklyn, students who lived at school”
McHugh lived in China and keenly observed some things, like how deep-seated it is to be apolitical:
“Take for example the diagram behind me on the board. Does anyone recognize it?" They all look at me, blank. Of course they all recognize it. But it's politics. Nobody in their right mind is going to volunteer anything about politics. Keep your head down, don't get into trouble. Nervousness makes me a tyrant, I point at one young woman. "Tell me what it means." She looks around, hoping for escape. Normally I'd feel sympathy for her but now I am only concerned with how to fill another fifteen minutes. "Ah, it's Marx's analysis”
It actually gets a bit much, she explains things that could have been indicated:
China is obsessed with walls. The university is walled, every factory, every school, every office complex or hotel is surrounded by a wall.
“I don't believe in socialism but I don't believe in capitalism either. We are small, governments are large, we survive in the cracks. Cold comfort.”
Its depictions of the feeling of entrepreneurship and the huge difference in dignity that having in-demand skills gives you are great: these feelings are rare in art. (view spoiler)[Ends on a beautiful portrait of the joy of working for yourself, of realising you can start something, that you have served your time in organisations:
I feel curiously light... If this project sells, the fee will allow us to put a down payment on a system. A small system, but that will be better than going to the library. And I can talk to someone at Brooklyn College, maybe my ABC or my girl from Brooklyn could get credit as a student intern and I'll have someone to do some of the donkey work; the checking up on materials and all that. Eventually we're going to need a clerk. And Cinnabar said we'll have to file papers and get permits for the new company. We're going to call it Daoist Engineering...
“Una luz brillara en tu camina. Descubre lo que te has perdido." A brilliant light in your path. Discover what you have lost.
The light angles across Brooklyn, red now. It comes through the train windows. Sunset used to depress me. But I learned in Baffin Island, you've just got to remember the light, keep it inside you, and wait. The sun comes back every morning.
The sky doesn't fall: the mildly shitty, mildly oppressive machine remains unchanged at the end. Zhang becomes a confident artist and intellectual. There's yer lot.
(Might be the simplest book I have ever given 4 stars.)...more
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