Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, May 2022

Attention conservation notice: I have no taste, and no qualifications to opine on the archaeology of the Southwest, the pre-history of diversity training, or trends in American economic inequality.

Walter Jon Williams, Metropolitan and City on Fire

These are two novels Williams wrote in the '90s about intrigue and machinations in a world-spanning city, where the geomantic forces generated by covering the planet in concrete, metal and plastic are carefully harvested and metered, and our heroine longs to smash it all. They're some of the best stuff Williams has ever done, which is saying a lot. Strictly speaking, they are fantasy, even "urban fantasy", but very much in the manner of well-thought-through science fiction.

As a character, Aiah has something in common with Williams's Caroline Sula and even (when it comes to learning to lie and manipulate) Dagmar Shaw, but she is her own, vivid and plausible, person.

I last read these in 1999; I re-read them because Williams recently said that the long, long delayed third volume will finally happen. I am very eager. §

John Kantner, Ancient Puebloan Southwest

This is a well-written, semi-popular account of the archaeology of the American Southwest, focusing on the period from the rise of Chaco Canyon to the early years of Spanish rule. The writing is mostly smooth and expository (*), and I learned a lot of fascinating-to-me details from it. Kantner does do the usual archaeologist thing of making very confident-sounding assertions about social organization which he must know are far more conjectural than he makes them sound. (**) But this is par for the archaeological course. If you have a non-expert interest in the subject, and can handle the lack of a definite article in the title, this is a worthwhile book. I would read a second edition. §

*: Though inconsistently so; he explains "inference", but not "dendrochronology" or "palynological". --- On a different plane, Kantner persistently writes "inequity" (an evaluative, qualitative judgment) when he should write "inequality" (a descriptive and quantitative comparison). Unless, that is, he regards every inequality as inequitable, which is his right but not something to be just assumed... ^

**: To paraphrase, he does things like assert that a division of such-and-such a community into "moieties" can be inferred from the construction of a wall dividing a building in two. Or, again, there are assertions that a one community couldn't have politically dominated another because the latter kept making pots in its old way. This sort of thing just shows a failure of imagination. (I used to part-own a house that had been built for one large family around 1900, and later split with a wall down the middle. While Pittsburgh has some peculiarities it does not divide duplex residents into two endogamous groups, so that I am expected to regard all North-Halfers as some kind of kin.) It also, I think, betrays a failure to check this sort of inference against cases where much more is known about society and politics from written records. ^

Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Race Experts: How Racial Etiquette, Sensitivity Training, and New Age Therapy Hijacked the Civil Rights Revolution (2001)

This is, obviously (?), a work of cultural criticism, but it's done with the tools of a serious historian who is trying to excavate where things like diversity training came from, and why they both emerged when and where they did, and how they survived that initial context. To oversimplify and exaggerate: the late 1960s/early 1970s were a weird time, when plenty of people on the fringes of psychology felt entitled to make stuff up because it sounded good and vibed with their politics, with very little reality-testing. Add the "triumph of the therapeutic" and of self-esteem, plus corporate concerns to ward off liability by claiming to do something (however ineffective), plus the continuing attraction of racialist thinking under another guise (*), and we get a mess.

There are, equally obviously, some political and ethical commitments animating this book, but they are transparent, and honestly ones I have