Capitalism Undone . . . by Mutants

To kick off 2026, I finished yet another Clifford D. Simak classic sci-fi novel, Ring Around the Sun, and this one is full of big ideas: pristine parallel earths; mutant humans--who may or may not know they are mutants; telepathy with alien races; corporeal temporal stasis; consciousness transfers-- it's too much for one book (from 1952!) but it is mainly a story of scarcity and abundance and how to break our capitalist, materialist consumer society with "forever" products engineered by mutant humans and imported from various parallel earths, to break the supply-and-demand system and allow humans to progress to something transcendent-- but at what cost, at what cost?

2025 Book List

1) The Birdwatcher by William Shaw

2) Doomsday Book by Connie Willis

3) IQ by Joe Ide

4) Save Our Souls: The True Story of A Castaway Family, Treachery, and Murder by Matthew Pearl

5) The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl

6) Never Tell by Lisa Gardner

7) The Loom of Time: Between Anarchy and Empire, from the Mediterranean to China by Robert Kaplan

8) The Secret Hours by Mick Herron

9) The Man Who Fell to Earth by Walter Tevis

10) Dry Bones (Longmire #11) by Craig Johnson

11) The Getaway by Jim Thompson

12) Pop. 1280 by Jim Thompson

13) Witchcraft for Wayward Girls by Grady Hendrix

14) A Hell of a Woman by Jim Thompson

15) Mastodonia by Clifford D. Simak

16) Boy's Life by Robert R. McCammon

17) Lexicon by Max Barry

18) Pure Innocent Fun by Ira Madison III

19) Dance Hall of the Dead by Tony Hillerman

20) The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties by Paul Collier

21) Hang On, St. Christopher by Adrian McKinty

22) Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence by Bryan Burrough 

23) The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson

24) The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

25) Gringos by Charles Portis

26) Moonflower Murders by Anthony Horowitz

27) Red Chameleon by Stuart M. Kaminsky

28)  A Taste for Death by PD James

29)  The Trespasser by Tana French

30) Broken Harbor by Tana French

31) King of Ashes by S.A. Cosby

32) Marble Hall Murders by Anthony Horowitz

33) The Secret Place by Tana French

34) The Likeness by Tana French

35) Hot Money by Dick Francis

36) The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces by Seth Harp

37) A True History of the United States by Daniel A. Sjursen

38) Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era by James M. McPherson

39) Annie Bot by Sierra Greer

40) Harold by Stephen Wright

41) The Hunter by Tana French

42) Facing East From Indian Country

43) One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad

44) Time and Again by Clifford Simak

45) The Time Traders by Andre Norton

46) Starter Villain by John Scalzi

47) The Doorman by Chris Pavone

And a few mammoth non-fiction books that I've been reading all year on my Kindle, which I hope to finish in 2026. . .

Reaganland by Rick Perlstein

The Vertigo Years: Change and Culture in the West, 1900-1914 by Philip Blom

The Great Divide: Nature and Human Nature in the Old World and the New by Peter Watson

Forgotten Continent: A History of New Latin America by Michael Reid

Enough With the Time Wars . . .

I'm not sure how-- serendipity, I guess-- but I just finished another sci-fi book written in the 1950s that details a war being waged throughout time . . . this one, The Time Traders, by Andre Norton, is much faster-paced than Simak's Time and Again-- although it features an American rehabilitation prison/time traveller program, a hostile advanced alien race and the Russians, and everyone is at odds with one another, this is really more of a Bell Beaker-era (2000 B.C.) survival tale, with some interesting anthropological details (and a bunch of sci-fi action) and the usual cautionary lesson, that when you fuck with the past, things are going to get ugly-- but with the additional idea that there may have been great technological wonders in the past, whether alien-made or human-made, that were lost in the haze of the millenia-- modern humans have only been around for 300,000 years . . . in the millions and millions of years of life on earth, advanced technologies could have risen and decayed and left no trace (although this is highly unlikely-- they probably woudl have left some chemical fingerprint or isotopic anomaly).

Even With Some Help, I Don't Think Our Brains Will Ever Work This Well

Time and Again is more profound and serious than most of the Clifford Simak books I've read (Mastodonia, They Walked Like Men, The Goblin Reservation, City) and while the book has some fun sci-fi tropes-- a war throughout time, androids that can chemically reproduce vying for human rights-- it also has that 1950s transcendent evolutionary vibe that seems naive today . . . the idea that humans will eventually, possibly with the help of alien intelligence, become something mentally more, something psionic and telepathic and revolutionary . . . and maybe I'm being pessimistic and thispsychological transcendence is possible, but I'm more of the feeling that the huan race is going to be perpetually stupid until we exterminate ourselves.

This Novel Has Got It All!

If you're a sucker for dinosaurs and charismatic megafauna, and you are curious about the legal and political ramifications of time travel, then Clifford D. Simak's sci-fi novel Mastodonia is the book for you.

The Books Dave Read in 2024

1) The Dreaming Jewels by Theodore Sturgeon

2) More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon

3) They Walked Like Men by Clifford D. Simak

4) Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz

5) Welcome Home, Stranger by Kate Christensen

6) All Systems Red (The Murderbot Diaries #1) by Martha Wells

7) Artificial Condition (The Murderbot Diaries #2) by Martha Wells

8) Dark Rivers of the Heart by Dean Koontz

9) The Charm School by Nelson DeMille

10) Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis by Jonathan Blitzer

11) Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

12) The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham

13) Disillusioned: Five Families and the Unraveling of America's Suburbs by Benjamin Herold

14) The New Analog: Listening and Reconnecting in a Digital World by Damon Krukowski

15) Case Histories by Kate Atkinson

16) The Fifties by David Halberstam

17) Outside the Gates of Eden: The Dream of America from Hiroshima to Now by
Peter Bacon Hales

18) A Year in the Life of Shakespeare:1599 by James Shapiro

19) One Good Turn (Jackson Brodie 2) by Kate Atkinson

20) Sentient by Jeff Lemire and Gabriel Walta

21) Faithful Place by Tana French

22) Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present by Fareed Zakaria

23) The Detective Up Late by Adrian McKinty

24) When Where There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson

25) The Word is Murder by Anthony Horowitz

26) The Man in the Flannel Gray Suit by Sloan Wilson

27) A Line to Kill by Anthony Horowitz

28) Banal Nightmare by Halle Butler

29) The Sentence is Death by Anthony Horowitz

30) Perfect Little Children by Sophie Hannah

31) The New Me by Halle Butler

32) The Twist of a Knife by Anthony Horowitz

33) Close to Death by Anthony Horowitz

34) Horror Movie by Paul Tremblay

35) The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul Tremblay

36) A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay

37) Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman

38) Medieval Horizons: Why the Middle Ages Matter by Ian Mortimer

39) Fuzzy Dice by Paul Di Filippo

40) The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory by Andrew Bacevich

41) Supernova Era by Cixin Liu

42) Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

43) The Wych Elm by Tana French

44) Spin  by Robert Charles Wilson

Artificial Intelligence Invades High School English Class

 

In my new, very special episode of We Defy Augury . . . which is based on my experiences teaching high school English in the age of AI (with bonus thoughts-- loosely--based on three classic science-fiction novels: Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human and The Dreaming Jewels and They Walked Like Men by Clifford D. Simak) I attempt to answer this question: "Is AI Cheating Our Students Out of an Education?" and while I may not come to a definitive conclusion, somebody needs to address this issue . . . 

Special Guests include: Gary Gasparov, Jimmy Kimmel, The Beach Boys, Alan Turing, The Matrix, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, ChatGPT, Bard AI, and Mark "Imprint" Zuckerberg.

The Long Goodbye

I am cleaning out my side room so I can expand Greasetruck Studios, but getting rid of the piles and piles of books I've acquired over the years is extremely difficult . . . the books I've read and don't remember are easy to part with, and I'm keeping the best books by my favorite authors, but it's hard to get rid of all the trade paperbacks-- even though I know I'll never read them, the numerous Philip K. Dick and Elmore Leonard and Clifford Simak novels-- but the font is too small and pages are yellowed and my kids will never touch them and I've got a Kindle . . . and it's also hard to get rid of the books that I bought but never read, the testament to my literary failures, but I didn't pick up The History of the Vikings for the last ten years, and it's been sitting there in plain sight, so I don't think I'm ever going to read it (the same goes for Bleak House and Finnegan's Wake . . . but I've still got aspirations for Nostromo).