A book year in review
News from Robin Kirk
Goodreads has a neat feature that allows users to review your year in books. Going through my page was an unexpected pleasure. Books create moods and are also mileposts. I list what I read for pleasure as well as some work-related choices. The feature showed me that the two things aren’t as far apart as I might have thought.
For instance, I’m preparing a new Spring 2020 class looking at the development of human rights through the lens of speculative fiction. The premise is simple. Fiction allows us to imagine different worlds and different systems of morals or ethics, opening up the possibility of applying these imaginary ideas to our own worlds.
One area is the rights of intelligent and evolving software. I decided to include in my syllabus Ted Chiang’s “The Lifecycle of Software Objects” in Exhalation: Stories. Once an entity has its own thoughts, desires, and life span, shouldn't it have rights? What does it mean to have a relationship with a piece of software programmed to establish a human connection, then to have the power of termination--life or death, in other words--over that software? At what point can a piece of engineering be said to have rights? What if humans themselves are increasingly "engineered" (a classic sci-fi theme).
There are plenty of echoes in this question in the history of human rights, including in the campaign against slavery (enslaved people were not considered human and the bearers or rights) and campaigns for the rights of women, the disabled, and LGBTQ people, among others. In important ways, the history of human rights is the history of hard-fought campaigns to be recognized as having inherent rights.
Entirely for fun, I read Sue Burke’s Semiosis, which takes us to a world where plants have a consciousness perhaps even more sophisticated than humans. Might plants also have rights? This is a question some in rights fields are contemplating. In my Goodreads review, I wrote:
I loved the concept of humans having to figure out how to live with a sentient ecology. The writing is spare, matter of fact. The development of this human colony feels very real, from their fatal mistakes to their evolution into a human-like sustainability. In some ways, the story is that of any colonist forced to survive in a radically different environment.
Then that brought me to another theme I glimpsed through my Goodreads summary. How do colonists engage with a new and hostile environment? I’m working on a novella loosely based on the story of Virginia Dare, the first English child born in a New World English possession. The colonists’ conditions that year, 1587, were catastrophic, forcing the colony’s leader (and Virginia's grandfather) to return to England for supplies. When he returned three years later, he found the dwellings collapsed and no trace of the 80 men, 17 women, and 11 children he’d left. The mystery of what happened to the "Lost Colony" remains to this day.
My novella-in-progress is the story of Maven, like Virginia the first-born in a new colony — on Mars. Maven yearns for Earth even as she knows the chances of her traveling there are slim given the cost of a ticket. Maven obsessively collects the tokens she needs to enter a contest for a free round-trip journey back to Earth. But her plans are complicated when she begins to understand that her birth has connected her to something mysterious under the planet’s crust… (more to come!)
The books helping me think out this story are collected under “The Expanse” series, by James S.A. Corey (actually a pen name for writers Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck). This popular series is now an Amazon Prime show that is quite wonderful (and very true to the excellent books). The books describe the challenges and dangers of haves and have-nots (the Belters) as humans colonize beyond Earth. The great trailer should be attached to the newsletter.
Spoiler alert: we bring our problems with us. And the act of colonizing — whether it’s in the New World or though The Ring — is usually fatal not only to colonists but to the existing populations on the worlds they encounter.
Lesson learned? Read widely and with an open mind. You never know how stories will feed you.
What I’m Writing
In November, I spent many, many, MANY hours revising The Bond’s sequel (thus no newsletter). Title TBA, but I’m hoping to be able to announce a release date, title, and cover soon!
Meanwhile, if you enjoyed The Bond, make sure to pass the word to others so they’ll be ready for Book II in 2020.
Social media
Twitter can be a brutal medium in many (most) ways, but I’ve been loving my interactions with other writers, especially when it comes to learning about new books. Writer Twitter (usually) is a place where people can rave about or dig into what they’ve been reading. One of my recent Twitters friends is Kira Jane Buxton. Her Hollow Kingdom was one of my best reads for 2019. If you are interested, check it out here.
Photo of the month
Scooty McScootface decked out for the season.
That’s it for December — and 2019. Thank you for reading and please don’t be strangers. Feel free to contact me through my website, Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
Wishing everyone a wonderful holiday break and the best for 2020.
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Merry reading!