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(em português, com links → sol2070.in/2024/02/livro-the-hidden-girl-ken-liu/ )

"The Hidden Girl" (2020) is a collection of short stories by award-winning speculative fiction author Ken Liu. Most of them are sci-fi, but there is also fantasy.

It's the book that includes the six stories on which the animated series "Pantheon" is based. I discovered Ken Liu because of this series. I read the book for the same reason and ended up finding several other memorable stories.

Some of them left me with the same impression as reading Ted Chiang, as they are stories that call for reflection, touchingo on deep themes. There are two or three dispensable stories out of a total of 19, which is an excellent average.

Apart from the "Pantheon" stories, the ones I liked the most were:

• "Reborn" - One of the best stories I've seen about coexistence with aliens.
• "Memories of My Mother" - A mother and daughter meet over an abnormal period of time.
• "Thoughts and Prayers" - About gun ownership and 4chan-style trolling. It could be an episode of Black Mirror.
• "The Message" - A xeno-archaeologist and his daughter try to decipher inscriptions on an abandoned planet.
• "Real Artists" - How far will the algorithmization of entertainment go?

I was only a little put off by some of the stories, which show Liu to be a techno-optimist. Considering the way technology has been captured by big techs, this position ends up being compromising. But you can overlook it, since much of science fiction is based on this enchantment.

I'm still reading the author's previous collection ("The Paper Menagerie"), which is said to be better than this one.

(em português → sol2070.in/2024/01/alan-watts-livro-the-book/ )

I've already mentioned "The Book - On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are" (1966) by Alan Watts a few times. I remembered it fondly from reading it about six years ago, and I've just completed one of my future re-readings. This time I made a point of buying a physical copy (at a second-hand bookshop) to browse through.

Watts had a degree in theology and even worked as a university chaplain, but he was basically self-taught. He was one of the forerunners of the psychedelic ebullience of the 1960s and is also often described as one of the greatest interpreters of Eastern philosophies for the West. But that's not what this book is about.

It condenses an idea that Watts never tired of conveying, in many different ways, about the true nature of our identity.

We generally consider ourselves to be the body, or some consciousness (or soul) that inhabits it. Although the book mentions Eastern religions (mainly the Hindu Vedanta), this question and its consequences are investigated without adopting spiritual beliefs.

There is no secret. Nowadays this is common sense in significant sections of philosophy and science. Our bodies are expressions of an ecosystem which, in turn, is an expression of the way reality is organized and manifested. The same could be said, in a sense, about our minds or even everything. Nothing exists in isolation and independently.

So far, no shocking revelation. But the consequence of this understanding and insight is that I'm actually not what I thought I was. This insight can gradually guide the way we perceive, think and act. Then everything changes radically, potentially towards something much more open and vast.

Another quality of the book is the engaging prose, which captures much of Watts' oral eloquence.

The essential message is not very different from what the philosopher Spinoza said in the 17th century. But Watts is much more persuasive, musical and psychedelic.

Considering the era, he could not fail to be an incorrigible nonconformist. His reflections often slip, in a way that seems involuntary, into deliciously corrosive socio-political tirades.

Although today he has been elevated almost to the status of a guru, Watts never presented himself as such. Nor was he any kind of role model, joining the predominant club of thinkers with fine words and somewhat despicable behavior. Not that he was an abusive charlatan, but people in his family didn't necessarily admire him.

However, I don't think he was a hypocrite and, besides, who am I to speculate on that...

(original em português com links → sol2070.in/2024/01/livro-after-world-apocalipse-IA-emerg%C3%AAncia-clim%C3%A1tica/ )

It's become commonplace to write here that a book is one of the best I've ever read. That's fine. That's exactly how I felt about "After World" (2023), by Debbie Urbanski, in the apocalyptic genre.

The story takes place more or less at the end of this century, after a gradual apocalypse has been programmed for humanity -- already in final deterioration due to environmental devastation -- so that the Earth's ecosystems don't also become extinct.

We follow an artificial intelligence responsible for documenting the life of the last person on the planet, Sen. This AI is the main narrator and ends up breaking the protocols after changes in her consciousness, due to what she learns and witnesses. She can't help falling in love with Sen.

Sen's job, in turn, was to witness and document the regeneration of the natural world, now without human destruction.

The book is different for several reasons. Starting with the format: there are transcriptions of notebooks, excerpts from works related to this "Great Transition", dialogues between AIs... There are even reproductions of a computer terminal listing files and commands (nerdy detail: it's Linux/Unix!).

The narrative also manages to convey the evolution of this AI towards a more human consciousness.

I finished the book in just a few days, even though it's a story without suspense or cliff hangers. Despite the extreme desolation, the story manages to capture and move just with the power of its narrative, characters and setting.

As Jorge Luis Borges said, some of the best stories are stories within stories. "After World" has many of them.

And it's also a meta-story, a story about the power of stories. To create the biography, the narrator draws on everything that has already been produced culturally, especially within the genre of apocalyptic fiction, and comments on her narrative choices. For example, undoing clichés or replicating them, when necessary.

She says things like: "When humans imagined their apocalypse, they created scenes like X and Y. But now that it's actually happened, we've seen that the truth is Z."

One detail that caught my eye was the repeated reference to the book "Station Eleven", which I love (the HBO series is also great). Debbie even mentioned in an interview that her work is a dialog-homage with this other book -- it also talks about the power of stories but, differently, portrays an optimistic apocalypse.

In "After World", the lives of all human beings are being documented and digitized for a project to archive and upload everything to the cloud. That's what the title refers to.

I was just a little puzzled by a paradox. After the event that defines the gradual extinction of humanity, the remaining humans are authoritatively indoctrinated to understand that nature is not at the service of people, that we are just one of its innumerable forms, with no hierarchy.

I found this paradoxical because the message is very true, but it is forced down the throats of unwittingly condemned people. So this ecological vision came across as something dogmatically radical, Taleban-style. It can make unsuspecting people who read the book dislike the idea that we are not the center of nature or the universe.

I even asked the author about this. Coincidentally, just as I finished the book and went to Reddit to find a discussion about the ending, I found an "Ask Me Anything" from her, started a few hours earlier. The dialog is in progress and I'll update later.

This is one of the gems of the few corners of the internet with more human motivations: being able to talk to the author of a beloved book after reading it!

(em português: sol2070.in/2024/01/the-lost-cause-cory-doctorow )

"The Lost Cause" (2023), by Cory Doctorow, is a climate fiction set 30 years in the future. It's not hard to see why it went straight to bestseller lists. The story basically extrapolates the current rift in the US between Trumpists and society to the imminence of something close to a civil war, with a focus on the climate emergency.

It could also be described as Green New Deal fiction, about the (non-fictional) proposal for a massive government investment that, while mitigating the catastrophic consequences of climate change and creating resilience, generates jobs and new technologies.

The setting is the city of Burbank (Los Angeles). Decades after the program began, society is still adapting to the ruined environment but, for the first time, there is hope for a real chance that civilization will recover.

Right-wing extremists have hardened, especially in the face of the waves of climate refugees, because they are losing influence. Firearms have already become illegal. So they stockpile rifles in basements in preparation for the last resort.

Crypto-bros and billionaires have taken refuge in fleets of yachts, so as not to be subject to the laws of any country. From there, they continue their lobbying to destabilize governments in favour of their corporations, in alliance with the extremists on land.

In addition to this intensely relevant scenario for the present, Cory once again shows his ability to narrate in a captivating way what would normally be dull. Many of the pages describe the reconstruction not only of society, but of houses and buildings, with technical details of the process!

Exemplary socio-political fiction.

(em português → sol2070.in/2023/12/livro-god-is-an-octopus/ )

"God Is An Octopus" (2023) is englishman Ben Goldsmith's autobiographical account of the loss of his 15-year-old daughter and how his involvement with reforestation initiatives saved him, as the subtitle describes: "Loss, love and a call to nature."

Because it's a true story, which easily arouses empathy, and quite significant in the face of the current ecological collapse, it's a book that conveys a rich life experience like few others. All the more so because the language is almost oral, so simple.

After his loss, Goldsmith begins a spiritual quest to try to find meaning and, in the end, he arrives where he has always been. Ever since he was a child, he treated the union and (the attempt at) harmony with nature as a kind of spirituality, although this dynamic was not 100% conscious.

The long process of mourning showed the author in practice how this larger context of life supports and restores. This is what the book's title refers to.

This figurative octopus also appears in a central insight during an ayahuasca immersion at the end, which is practically a model journey of how this psychedelic revives natural connections (it did for me too).

Although I was delighted with the extensive descriptions of ecosystems and processes of restoration and regeneration, I didn't enjoy them as much, since they are about european species that I don't even know the names of.

Another annoyance was my attitude, almost a prejudice. The author is a wealthy investor from England. The settings overflow with privileges that very few people can enjoy. No problem on the author's part; who says rich people can't write books? In his favor, he's not only a great supporter of environmental initiatives, but he also gets his hands dirty.

But I always had this nagging feeling: "Is he really as nice as he makes out in the book?" Perhaps I should rely more on the recommendation that led me to read the book, from George Monbiot, an author and environmental activist whom I follow and admire.