Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, April 2014

Attention conservation notice: I have no taste.

Chris Willrich, Scroll of Years

Mind candy fantasy. The blurbs are over the top, but it is fun and decidedly better-written than average. Mildly orientalist, though in a respectful mode.

Matthew Bogart, The Chairs' Hiatus

Kelly Sue DeConnick and Emma Rios, Pretty Deadly

Joe Harris, Great Pacific: 1, Trashed; 2, Nation Building

Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples, Saga, vols. 2 and 3

L. Frank Weber, Bikini Cowboy

Terry LaBan, Muktuk Wolfsbreath, Hard Boiled Shaman: The Spirit of Boo

Comic book mind candy. Muktuk Wolfsbreath is especially notable for ethnographic accuracy, Pretty Deadly for the gorgeous art and genuinely-mythic weirdness, and Saga for general awesomeness. (Previously for Saga.)

Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

Mind candy, but incredible mind candy. The basic story is a familiar one for SF: an expedition into an unknown and hostile environment quickly goes spectacularly awry, as the explorers don't appreciate just how strange that environment really is. But from there it builds to a gripping story that combines science fiction about bizarre biology with genuinely creepy horror. It's Lovecraftian in the best sense, not because it uses the props of Cthulhiana, but because it gives the feeling of having encountered something truly, frighteningly alien. (In contrast.)

There are two sequels coming out later this year; I've ordered both.

Adam Christopher, The Burning Dark

Mind candy: a haunted house story, with a space-opera setting. (Self-presentation.)

S. Frederick Starr, Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia's Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane

Starr has been a historian of Central Asia throughout his long professional career, and like many such, he feels that the region doesn't get enough respect in world history. This is very much an effort in rectifying that, along the way depicting medieval Central Asia as a center of the Hellenistic rationalism which he sees as being the seed of modern science and enlightenment. (It's pretty unashamedly whiggish history.)

Starr's Central Asia is urban and mercantile. It should be understood as the historic network of towns in, very roughly, the basins of the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers, or Transoxiana plus Khorasan and Khwarezm. Starr argues that this region formed a fairly coherent cultural area from a very early period, characterized by intensive irrigation, the cultural and political dominance of urban elites, the importance of long-distance over-land trade (famously but not exclusively, the Silk Road), and so cross-exposure to ideas and religions developed in the better-known civilizations of the Mediterranean, the Fertile Crescent, Iran, India and China. One consequence of this, he suggests, was an interest in systematizing these traditions, e.g., compiling versions of the Buddhist canon.

With the coming of Islam, which he depicts as a very drawn-out process, some of these same traditions led to directions like compiling hadith. Beyond this, the coming of Islam exposed local intellectuals both to Mulsim religious concepts, to the works of Greek science and philosophy, and to Indian mathematics and science. (He gives a lot more emphasis to the Arab and Greek contributions than the Indian.) In his telling, it was the tension between these which led to the great contributions of the great figures of medieval Islamic intellectual history. Starr is at pains to claim as many of these figures for Ce