Viewers Like You
by Christopher Brown
Late one Saturday night in early December as the bustle of the year wound down, I opened Volume One of my thrifted old Penguin copy of Robert Graves’ The Greek Myths to a random entry, kind of like the way the narrator of The Man in the High Castle throws the I Ching. The entry on page 188 opened as follows:
54. THE TELCHINES
The nine-headed, flipper-handed Telchines, Children of the Sea, originated in Rhodes, where they founded the cities of Cameirus, Ialysus, and Lindus; and migrating thence to Crete, became its first inhabitants. Rhea entrusted the infant Poseidon to their care, and they forged his trident but, long before this, had made for Cronus the toothed sickle with which he castrated his father Uranus; and were, moreover, the first to carve images of the gods.
b. Yet Zeus resolved to destroy them by a flood, because they had been interfering with the weather, raising magic mists and blighting crops by means of sulphur and Stygian water. Warned by Artemis, they all fled overseas: some to Boetia, where they built the temple of Athene at Teumessus; some to Sicyon, some to Lycia, others to Orchomenus, where they were the hands that tore Actaeon to pieces. But Zeus destroyed the Lycian ones, though they had tried to placate him with a new temple; and they are no longer to be found at Orchomenus. Rumour has it that some are still living in Sicyon.
That evening, after a busy day outdoors and at swimming lessons, we had let our 6-year-old daughter watch a couple of Lego experiment videos on YouTube while we tidied up and prepared dinner. We quickly realized, as my wife put it, that they (the platform operators) are “trying to colonize her brain” and persuaded the kid to play along as we switched to nature documentaries on the PBS streaming channel, thinking that could work as immediate deprogramming antidote.
We started with Nova, but it too proved to be infected with the virus of digital capital’s hunger for our attention, evident in the hyper-kinetic narrative and visual structure, channeling the ghosts of carnival barkers through the eyeball kick accelerator of advanced video graphics semiconductors. Then we tried Nature, which thankfully had the same old-school pacing I remembered from whenever I had last watched it, in the era when you watched whatever was on. The catch now in Season 44 is, they show you the lives of other species on a planet where we, like the Telchines, have been interfering with the weather (and every other aspect of the habitat).
Episode Four takes place on a beach in northwestern Costa Rica. It begins with a familiar parable, as the flipper-handed female sea turtles return after years roaming faraway oceans to lay their eggs in the sand on the same spot where they themselves were born. But then the story takes a grim and unexpected turn, as a jaguar lopes out from the treeline beyond the sand, takes one of the big mamas back into the jungle, and eats her on camera. Over the course of the ensuing 45 minutes, the documentarians lay out the wider backstory of a more interesting Anthropocene adaptation. How the coastal forest of the peninsula, razed for pasture as recently as the 1950s, has been allowed to rewild in the 21st century, providing an arboreal connection between the remnants of more mature jungle in the interior, where the decimated population of jaguar—the region’s apex predator—had been holding out. How the jaguar explored the new woods, found their way to the beach, and rebounded after discovering this bountiful new source of food. And counterintuitively, explain the ecologists monitoring the activity, the presence of the jaguars has stabilized the population of the sea turtles by deterring other terrestrial predators from coming anywhere near the beach, including when the adorable little hatchlings are scrambling for the water.
In Episode One of Season 44, we followed another fleet of seaborne mamas—the walrus of the Bering Sea, who travel north to the safety of the Arctic ice pack with their young pups while the males head for the beaches of Alaska. But the ice packs are melting, breaking up, and retreating farther north, and the narrator poses the question when it will become too far for them to travel, and what they will do then, these “saber-toothed seals.” This episode used digital technology in a valuable way, to visualize the migrations, each walrus a tiny yellow dot moving across a rapidly diminishing habitat, trying to make it across the open ocean to the retreating ice.
Through it all, you can’t help but notice the presence of the camera lens, of the human gaze, no matter how hard they try to hide it. Especially, as Agustina astutely and hilariously observed in slang improvised on the spot for her daughter to understand, when the camera noses its way into the shallow sand nests and looks up as the female sea turtles are dropping their eggs.
The best new science fiction story I read this year was not presented as such. It was the opening entry in the Spring 2025 issue of the Paris Review, which I picked up after an event at Austin’s First Light Books, curious to see what the literary cool kids are doing and surprised to find myself immediately transported by Amie Barrodale in “Crystal Palace” to a Strangelovian scene where the surviving Justices of the United States Supreme Court and the staffers stuck with caring for them as the world dies look for things to do in their apocalypse bunker, and turn to the most potent intoxicants they find:
The talk of trying them, of there being nothing else to do, of the possibility, however small, of finding a new kind of purpose—thinking outside the box—was mitigated by concern about epic bad trips or just plain death after what had happened to Amy, though that was more of a broken-leg issue. The AI medical wellness suite being not quite state-of-the-art, and there being the possibility that no one really wanted to explore of some kind of mismanagement of medication. Its being unclear, none of them having trained in medicine, what exactly it was that had caused Amy’s passing. John seemed to argue that death might not be so bad under the circumstances, though it was of course difficult to understand him, as he spoke through tears. Still. There was a certain, let’s say, carefulness around drugs among the remaining members of the judiciary and their support staff—Terry and Keith—who were great, of course.
They took it to a vote and agreed eight to two that anybody who wanted to was free to go ahead and “sample the wares.” Brett immediately raised a hand. Clarence looked around at the others, murmured that he was surprised, and extended a hand as well. And then, well, then that was it. The other justices sat there blinking until Sonia said, “Okay, what do we do now?” and Samuel said, “I guess they take the drugs. The acid or whatever.” And Clarence and Brett dropped, and then somebody suggested Bear Paw.
The worst new science fiction story I read this year was the widely-covered Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, a neoliberal manifesto of techno-progressive futurism outlining pathways to policies that could realize a utopian back half to the grim century currently unfolding. The vision telegraphed by the cover is one of habitat for all: gleaming cities powered by clean energy and magical technologies side by side with verdant green ecologies. A worthy goal, for certain, and the book is packed with useful ideas, but constrained by its intrinsic anthropocentrism, as evidenced by the fact that the word “nature” does not appear in the index. In the end, I found the index a more interesting text than the body of the book, like a naturally occurring variant of J. G. Ballard’s short story, “The Index” (an index to an imaginary autobiography that encodes a secret history of the 20th century).
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Curiously, the 1951 science fiction film The Day the Earth Stood Still does appear in the index to Abundance. Not, as you might expect, with a retelling of the powerful warning from more knowledgeable visitors about how dangerous a track we are on. Instead, when you flip to page 41 you find a discussion of how the alien Klaatu ends up staying in a rooming house in a nice neighborhood in D.C., and how misguided were the postwar zoning policies that made that kind of housing illegal.
The rekindled memory of that film, in such an unlikely context, reminded me how effective science fiction once was at doing the same thing as one finds embedded in The Greek Myths: using stories of what happens when we offend the gods and incur their vengeance as a way to regulate the human proclivity for abuse of nature’s bounty and gifts. Much used to be made by certain sorts of critics by the fact that Klaatu’s undercover alias was Carpenter, but the god or gods he echoed were older ones, the ones that embody the elemental forces of the Earth, rather than those that endeavor to maintain the eternity of patriarchal dominion.
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Some other recommendations of new work I got to read in 2025:
Helen of Nowhere by Makenna Goodman
Greyhound: A Memoir by Joanna Pocock
On the Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle
Capital’s Grave: Neofeudalism and the New Class Struggle by Jodi Dean
Crossings: How Road Ecology is Shaping the Future of the Planet by Ben Goldfarb
Bye Bye I Love You: The Story of our First and Last Words by Michael Erard
Capitalism: The Story Behind the Word by Michael Sonenscher
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Christopher Brown is the author of A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys and Other Wild Places, as well as the novels Tropic of Kansas, Rule of Capture and Failed State.
