The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2023, pt. 31: Nancy Jane Moore

 

 

Always Reading in 2023

By Nancy Jane Moore

 

 

We are slowly being crowded out of our apartment by books. We buy them. We pick them up on the street and in little free libraries. We check them out of the public library. We keep trying to get rid of the ones we don’t want, but that requires us to both decide we don’t want something and then for one of us to actually take it out of the place.

Things would be worse if it wasn’t for ebooks. I’ve got three reading apps and two library apps for those. Plus magazines also take up space, especially New Scientist, which comes weekly. We keep trying to throw magazines out (or put them on the street for others), but it’s hard to be sure we’ve finished with them.

And of course, I read magazines and newspapers and newsletters online as well, not to mention various and sundry articles and blogs I stumble across. The truth is that my partner and I are always reading. It makes figuring out which books and other things to write about a challenge, because I can’t write about them all.

So instead of trying to include everything I read this year, I want to focus on two books that affected me profoundly and deeply. Two very different books.

 

The first is Menewood by Nicola Griffith. This is the sequel to Hild, which I also loved, but Menewood is so much more than a sequel. First of all, looking at it as a writer, it is simply a brilliant piece of written work. It’s 681 pages long (not counting notes and maps) and every page, every sentence, every word matters. I, who often skim through long and exciting books because I want to know what happens next, read every damn word. It took me five days and cost me sleep because I had some important things I also had to do. I could not put it down for long.

My passion for this book goes beyond the sheer beauty of the writing. While it shows Griffith’s depth of knowledge of the history of England in the seventh century (long before it was even one small country, much less an empire), it is much more than a good historical novel. Yes, of course, a lot of is made up, for so much of the history of that time is unknown. But Griffith has wedded her knowledge of the things that did happen with her speculative fiction writer’s ability to come up with what could have happened within the context of that reality. She made it up, but it fits.

And even more importantly to me, she has written a book about what true leaders do, and should do. The “kings” of English history in this time are warlords contending with each other for land and power and wealth. Each kingdom is tiny, by today’s standards, and each king has  ambition for more. But, like all too many leaders even of large countries, not to mention corporate barons of today, they want that power and wealth for its own sake, not for what they can do with it for their people.

 Hild is a woman with a lot of power, but she is different from those kings. Reading this book makes one see what a world could be like with true leadership.

This is a masterpiece of literature and Griffith’s best book yet. I have read all her novels and a good chunk of her short fiction and have been a fan of her work for a very long time, but this book crosses a threshold.

If you haven’t read Hild, read it first. Menewood transcends that very good book, but the underpinnings are important.

The second book is completely different: How Infrastructure Works, by engineering professor Deb Chachra. This deeply important book delves into the many systems that underlie our modern world – electricity, international shipping, roads, communications, plumbing – and makes it clear how essential they are.

Chachra makes several important points in this book. First of all, infrastructure systems are, by their very nature, collective. They are used by many people at once and work best when they are operated with that in mind.

Secondly, most crucial infrastructure is relatively new, having been developed within the last couple of hundred years. While roads have been around for millennia, the sheer number of highways that were built over the 20th century to accommodate the automobile boggles my mind when I think about it.

Third, infrastructure is what makes modern life modern. Without it, people must devote all their time to the basic tasks of life. If your home lacks running water, you must fetch it. If it lacks refrigeration, you can’t store food. Without a sewer system, you face challenges in dealing with human waste. Off the grid life may sound “free,” but modern systems are what gives us the time and space to do more with our lives than the basics.

Fourthly, and perhaps most importantly, infrastructure is something we humans invented. Unlike natural systems, it is not unchangeable. Not only that, but we can learn from our errors if we look at the system carefully. For example, people assumed that widening highways would solve traffic problems, but instead, that tends to increase traffic because more people use the road. And drainage systems that dump waste into rivers or even oceans have created new problems.

Much of our current infrastructure was created around fossil fuels, but here is the part of the book that gives me the most hope: Chachra says we can build a future that provides sufficient infrastructure to give all of us the systems we need to make life reasonable and comfortable from renewable energy sources. This will require redoing current infrastructure, which also will give us the opportunity to make different decisions about what we need. (Maybe we don’t need all those cars and roads.)

And once we do that, the energy to run our world will cost almost nothing, especially by comparison to fossil fuels. There are some technological challenges still, but the bigger ones are societal and political.

I’ve tried to summarize why I find this book so constructive, but I still feel like I’m not doing it justice. The writing is delightful, clear to a lay person like myself without being condescending. Chachra manages the trick of being honest about the challenges we face while still being optimistic about what we can do. The information is vital to everyone from the writer who wants to creature a non-dystopic future to the activist dealing with climate change to any person frustrated with badly run utilities and overcrowded highways.

I want everyone to read this book!

I’m so far behind on seeing movies that it’s almost silly for me to comment on them. But I do want to mention one movie that I think most people missed: the 2019 slasher film Black Christmas. (This is a remake of two earlier movies with the same name, so the date of release is important.)

 I actually saw this movie at the end of 2019, but I watched it again this year because I wanted to discuss it in an academic paper for WisCon. It’s one of the most feminist movies I’ve ever seen, which is not something you expect from a slasher film.

This particular movie roots the violence necessary to the genre in misogyny and most of the murder victims are women. In one healthy improvement to the genre, the camera does not dwell on dead female bodies.

But more than that, the women students fight back even though they are not superheroes or trained fighters, and they fight back collectively. This movie does not show women as powerless and it shows the importance of doing things together.

I found it much more inspiring than the various movies about women superheroes. Give me an ordinary hero any day.

I will confess that I found the movie a little harder to watch the second time because I knew that characters I was invested in were going to die. I don’t usually watch slasher movies or recommend them. But this one did inspire me and I’d like to see it get more of a following.

One other thing I did this year was become obsessed about so-called artificial intelligence as represented by the large language model (LLM) chatbots that were released into the wild with great hype and even greater flaws. There are many ways of looking at those programs; I know some writers very angry because their work was used in developing the LLMs and others who have lost the kind of steady freelance jobs that paid their bills because some fool thought they could be replaced with a program.

But while those things are a concern, I find them just one part of a much larger set of issues. Not, I hasten to add, the laughable idea that these LLMs will become true artificial general intelligence and either bring about some kind of salvation or destroy the word; contrary to the tech bro vision, neither the Terminator nor the Matrix movies are documentaries.

Unfortunately, much of the popular media coverage of these LLMs has been uncritical reports based on the hype laid out by Open AI and the other companies, leaving out the very real criticisms leveled by those who are generally called ethicists – people who understand what this tech is doing and who see a number of problems that aren’t even being considered, starting with the fact that most LLMs make some serious errors that can be dangerous if they are used for such things as facial recognition systems, just to pick one.

There is a lot of good material out there. I want to point to two good starting places for examining the deeper issues. One is the academic paper “On the Danger of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” by Emily Bender, Timnit Gebru, Margaret Mitchell, and Angelina McMillan-Major. It was this paper that got Gebru and Mitchell fired from Google.

 The other is an article by Ted Chiang in the New Yorker: “ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPG of the Web,” in which he describes the chatbots as “lossy text-compression algorithms.”

Both these pieces undercut the popular narrative and make clear that we’re a long way from real AI. They also make it clear that we need to stop falling for tech bro hype and start questioning and regulating the products that come out of that world. The copyright lawsuits currently pending may help, but the problems created by LLMs are much broader than the immediate issues of writers and publishers.

As I was about to send this piece off to Aqueduct, I read the latest newsletter from Dave Karpf, a professor who studies the internet and politics. He suggests two things that may happen with LLMs that will change the pop narrative and perhaps even open up the much more important ethical discussion.

One is that copyright law may be strong enough to override what they’re doing, similar to what happened with Napster some twenty years ago. But his second point, that we might figure out that these stronger LLMs are useful for a lot of things such tech has been used for in the past, rather than the next step to artificial general intelligence. That is, it’s not the birth of true AI, but simply a better computing tool for certain kinds of analytical and tech work.

That gave me something cheerful to think about as I approached the New Year.

 

Nancy Jane Moore is the author of the fantasy novel For the Good of the Realm, the science fiction novel The Weave, and the novella Changeling,  all from Aqueduct Press. Her short fiction has appeared in a number of anthologies and magazines and in a collection from PS Publishing. She holds a fourth degree black belt in Aikido. In other lifetimes she organized co-ops, practiced law, and worked as a legal editor. A native Anglo Texan, she lived in Washington, DC, for many years and now lives with her sweetheart in Oakland, California. Over the last few years, she has developed good relationships with her neighborhood crows. She is currently working on a sequel to For the Good of the Realm. Website (currently in progress): nancyjanemoore.com.