mutterwingwhirr

when the odds are always against you, you learn quickly what kind of adaptability it takes just to survive. what kind of compromises you were always going to be willing to make, and which ones you surprise yourself in taking, when it comes down to it. adaptability is life-- it is the stuff of it, it is the lifeblood of it. to live and to want to live are synecdoche to the myriad trials that one must navigate every waking moment and the desire to do so in order to guarantee the coming of tomorrow. perhaps, then, living can be considered a kind of ongoing negotiation-- one that outlines a vague image of the elusive "tomorrow" against the latest in a series of challenges, promising the former in exchange for the latter.

but what if the demands of tomorrow are too steep? what if, by some means, the prospect of termination becomes far less daunting than the challenges that tomorrow promises to bring? what then? time moves on, irrespective of your consent. tomorrow comes regardless. what would you do? how would you cope?

( spoilers within. )

i've sat on the end of this review for a long time. i've contemplated reading the end of this book again to see if there's a neat way to wrap up this analysis, to show some interesting throughline from the beginning of the novel to the end. but i lack the courage to read the end again. i'm uploading this review now, as it is, as i drafted it before i finished my reread, before i lost my courage. this book changed me, and hurt me, and made me cry. may it speak to you as profoundly as it spoke to me.

i've been sitting on this for far too long. and i know i won't cover everything this book made me feel, but. i need to try to get some thoughts down while it's still fresh.

babel is a story that doesn't pull punches. the machine of empire is, despite being speculative fiction interacting with the magic of silver, whole and complete. it's the stuff that all the textbooks leave out when we learn about the british empire in school. it's the emotion, it's the disgust, it's the hatred and violence and the desires to survive, to assimilate, to blend in. and love. it's so very full of the love of the illusion created by empire to justify its own perpetuity. how tantalizing it is to live on the outskirts of its promises. it doesn't pull punches. this book is not for the faint of heart. every heartbreak experienced in this book is escalated by a footnote that drives that hurt further, systematizes the mindset that makes these hurts possible.

where even do i begin?

i think i want to frame this book as a story about survival-- especially because of how it ends, but also because that thread exists. i've been rereading the book after finishing it and i'm surprised now at how many spaces have been left to talk about what survival inside the empire looks like. so let's talk about how the topic of survival in this book makes itself known.

( spoilers within. )

so much of this book hinges on robin's desire to survive by any means necessary. he loses his friends' respect for doing so, but he can't apologize for it. and... i don't know. i understand why he's so scared all the time. how can you function on your own if you're only ever scared of fucking up so bad you're sent off somewhere to wither and die? can you really ever act in violation of that instinct?

i tried to read piranesi by hand in the latter part of 2022, but it went poorly for me. i remember getting so bogged down, trying to keep track of the calendar system and just general navigation, that i lost my way in the story many times.

but i'm trying again, at camarata's behest (and audible account). one of my many points of appreciation of audiobook narrators: they know where the story is going, and what not to get caught up in.

i really love the way that piranesi makes sense of the world he's in. his vast appreciation for the world paints it as a beautiful, treacherous place to live, with much to do to keep on living within it, and with much to be grateful for. gratitude for suffering is functional to him just as much as gratitude for delights is functional. the horrors of survival and the transcendence of interpreting meaning from it is what powers the engine of his understanding. in the same way that minecraft has appeal, even though night always brings monsters, through all the little chores that let you make the world a little more your own, this world of halls/rooms in an endless house battered by the sea at regular intervals is... enticing. it encompasses the sublime, the horror so large and unfathomable that your view of the world, of life, is changed; it does so and simultaneously beckons you further in. :"will you not, for a little while, contemplate the statues you might see were you to walk down these many halls? with stone and seawater and rain, what would you be able to make and survive on? for how long?" what a fantastic way to build a deep sympathy and appreciation for the narrator and his understanding of the world.

and then there is the other part of this book. the one indicated by the epigraph at the beginning of the book. the one that tells us that this is a scientific investigation into amnesia. that this is being carried out by one so revolutionary a thinker as to make themself... a wizard? ( be wary traveler! herein be spoilers! )

i'm really excited to see how the story resolves. i'm scared to stop reading here, knowing how little is left in duration despite how many questions are yet unanswered. i can't imagine how this book will conclude at all, but i'm here for the ride.

for everything that's being established in this book, let's start the rating scale at an 8, for complexity and reader engagement tactics and just general story appeal. and let's tentatively rate it at 7/8 because i truly feel that at this point in the novel, more has been established or foreshadowed than it possibly feels can be adequately resolved.



also, ketterley is TOTALLY an ipad kid.

i know i already talked about this but. i feel like i didn't do it justice last time. i loved seeing how sissix let down her walls and became fully herself-- especially with rosemary acting as audience surrogate and just kind of enumerating the differences and appreciating them as fully alien. ive been thinking about this concept a lot where it's like... something something science fiction serves as a venue to highlight concepts already present in society and push them to an extreme so that they feel alien, so that they can be examined more closely and without "oh everyone does that" as a bias inhibiting real analysis. ive been thinking a lot about feather families, about aandrisk culture as a whole. the model of found family, of committing to offspring and raising them into curious people, of valuing people and their ideas moreso than valuing life given legs. of course, it's different when examining human children, because kids very much have ideas of their own and are people from the moment they start observing the world they're born into. but the rest of it? like. i dont feel like any of the rest of aandrisk culture contradicts a version of the human world that could exist. the idea that you're expected to leave your home (to go off to uni) and become your own person. the idea that you can choose the family you grow into (roommates) as you form your opinions based on lived experiences. with a little queer extrapolation, you get fluid polycules and cottagecore communes. those are spaces that already exist in the world and are dynamic and, from what i've seen, genuinely refreshing places to live, existing in defiance of an overarching system but also putting a lens of optimism, of living with the land, of choosing who you surround yourself with and how you apply your time, on top of such a stark act of rebellion. to have a life.

i mean, i was just thinking about how many internet spaces i've been part of, navigating long distance friend/relationships throughout the years, finding people who Got Me in a way my parents could not, and yeah, losing friends as our interests changed and diverged. getting ghosted when drama reared its ugly head. finding solace in friendships, new and rejuvenated, always always trying to bridge the gap between how i wanted to feel and how people around me made me feel. it may have been exclusively digital, but i could with certainty call those groups, and the journeying between them, as equivalent to feather families and their natural dissolution over time. i'm going to be thinking about this concept for a long, long time.

am i a little surprised about the events that followed between sissix and rosemary? yeah, although that's partially intentional due to the narration pov being sissix's and not rosemary's. we were supposed to discover it together. but i also just like... don't really recall that being part of rosemary's characterization? i never would have clocked that. i don't even know if i would clock it now, knowing what to look for. i wish there had been something to build up that anticipatory like.. crush? phase? more? but i guess that wasn't the focus of that little vignette. like i'm happy for them or whatever but it does really feel like two players at the table just kind of announced that this was happening at the top of the session and the gm was just like "alright, yeah okay sure. um. so. let's have that conversation. where does this discussion happen" and then that's kind of that.

and then there's the matter regarding ohan. i haven't gotten to the resolution of this yet, but i'm. processing how it would feel to be them. like. to have a little voice in my head that tells me i have to let it take over so that i can do cool math? and that payment for being able to see literally how space moves and the idk galatic forces that play into it is letting it slowly kill me? i can see why it's such a precious space for ohan to be in. the fear of committing to the death of the one for the salvation of the other when the two of you are so intertwined. and sissix's reaction to the whole thing really. kind of hammers home the other half of the equation. that it is those things but it is also very clearly a disease that is smothering out the life of its host. i'm not sure i agree with sissix, but i am glad she cared enough to try to get involved.

anyway. the rest is sort of hard to put on a timeline. like, i like this book a lot and i'm sure i'll revisit it many times over the years, but man does this book truly feel like a handful of vignettes without a real sense of time passing. it's just the moments that were noteworthy. i think that's why it feels so much like a summation of a ttrpg campaign. you know how sometimes you roleplay and it's just like, a means of getting to the next big thing? and then sometimes you roleplay and you're putting your whole entire pussy into acting out your character's impulses and reactions and letting the conversation swell and become this huge memorable thing that expresses not just your character's desires or the conflict of the moment, but some bigger question of what kind of world would have to exist to make this conflict come to a head and make you, of all people, have to weigh in on the decision at hand? yeah. this book feels like a collection of these latter moments. /pos

man. so i just finished the pirate/negotiation scene. and once again i'm just delighted (and a little flabbergasted) that so much of this book explores things that we explored while we were playing space legs.

curbing that thought for the moment, i do just want to say: it's so fucking delightful to hear that someone has proficiency in a language and then watch as the plot continually creates opportunities for us to see that yes, they are indeed proficient, and look at what they are able to create in spaces where the need arises. i don't think i could do that, really, since all my second languages are rusty and decaying. i've done it once, to sell hair extensions to a family that only spoke spanish. but not since, and not before. it wasn't something i really noted when i moved to arizona, but having moved back home, i realize how many spaces it's easy to see where spanish can bridge the gap more easily than english can. i guess there are a lot more spanish speakers in forward-facing roles here, where in arizona they were less so. or something.

but anyway. space legs. we had the opportunity to negotiate the same kind of "we're holding you at gunpoint because we need something from you" situation. and just like wow, what a game! i loved being in a space where we were allowed to just interact with different aliens where they were simply, like us, people with needs. being able to explore the spaces where our needs could be met by others, and how we could meet theirs... to me that stands out as the highlight of what that game/playtest campaign was for. sorry jack.

i'm really delighted by this book. i truly feel like this is a kind of science fiction that feels so... real? so genuine? in a way that other scifi media fail to grasp. it's not about how wide open space can be, or how exotic the distant horizons can turn out to be so much as it is about negotiating what the spaces around you, whether near or far from home, can look like. this could have easily been a story about armed robbery where all the robbers only spoke... idk greek or something. and then the translator, having studied russian to proficiency, was able to find common throughlines that allowed them to communicate effectively. (i'm not saying greek and russian come from a common ancestor language; this example is based of purely anecdotal data. i've heard of someone who went to greece and was able to scrape by with their russian. i love how languages interact.)

not much more to say here. i feel like one thing that's perhaps more lacking here than in other books is the clear division between events-- there's no downtime between events in a way that feels right for a chapter ending. things just melt together event after event after event. a delightful mix, but tricky to negotiate when you're waiting for the chapter break to like. go pee and grab a snack or whatever.

and, more than anything, i fucking love a story about a good interpreter.

alright. i finished the book late last night and... i'm not really certain how to format my thoughts. so much happens. the plot unfolds. of course there's a fucking sex dungeon. let's just go through what all happens and get to the review part of the review.

( SPOILERS INSIDE )

honestly, i'm not sure how i feel about this novel. i feel like it was written more for the sex and intrigue than it was written to be, like, a satisfying mystery novel. there are moments where the rigid adherence to first person narration does less for the tone and pacing than third person narration would accomplish. the secret, last-minute swap around makes it.... too clean, too trite of a resolution. suddenly the one who's dead this whole time was a man that no one could stand to be around anyway? then what was the point of making it seem like it was ben the whole time? ben, whom everyone looked at with rose-tinted lenses. half the time jacques isn't even MENTIONED, let alone admired. the snippets we do get of him are disjointed, ugly vignettes of what power and money do for a man who's determined to rule with an iron fist. there's no love lost on that man's death; there was no love gained on his integration in the story. were it not for how the story is written to incorporate him at the very end, it would make no difference if he were absent throughout. no, rather, he IS absent throughout and the characters make significant effort to assure the reader that yes, this is normal. jacques is frequently absent, and the loneliness the other characters feel when he is absent is part of their everyday lives. so now he's dead. so what?

i wish the story had been more contained inside the house. there were so many different reasons that each resident should wish for ben's demise that any number of them trying, in their turns, to destroy him would have made for a more compelling ending. i truly don't feel like ben and jess should have been rewarded for how invasively they entered this family's life and how disruptively they transgressed in those spaces. and i honestly would have been fine without the entire investigation into the club. like yeah, the club was a sinister, dire place and i guess it deserved to be shut down for what it was doing to the girls that worked there. but it was intended, positionally, to contribute to jacques' overall character. and he was simply so untouched by the narrative-- hell, the destruction of his club didn't even affect him because he was already dead!-- that he entered and exited without really leaving a mark.

i don't know. i wish the servants' staircase and the dumbwaiter had been more incorporated into the plot. i wish it had been some kind of complicated "it was mimi's weapon wielded in sophie's hand after nick riled antoine up so much antoine baited sophie into acting" trajectory, where everyone was as involved as there was love lost between them and ben. it would have been... neat. tidy. not whatever the hell the rest of this book was.

anyway. i think my rating of the book overall is a 5 out of 11 now. there are so many other things that could have happened with the plot devices that had been established. and what we got instead was a sex dungeon.