The Unsung Author

I wanted to take a moment to mention a writer I discovered this year. Though in the past two months he was beaten out for my pick of best book, he was a close second for both March and February.

Both of his novels, Spoonbenders and When We Were Real, show his talent at weaving gripping yet amiable fantasy/sci-fi novels. Spoonbenders reminded me of what I felt like to grow up in a big extended family, a house full of quirky relatives each with their own petty disputes, then adding on-top of all of this the family’s “psychic” history and the loving though departed grandmother, it was one of those few books that is gripping in suspense but at the same time warm and welcoming.

In When We Were Real, he crafted an even bolder world with higher-stakes suspense, but at the end of this complex web of plot and narrative, you feel a little warmer having come to know each character better. I think it is also worth noting that Daryl Gregory does a wonderful job of creating a diverse cast of characters from different ethnic, gender, and sexual orientation backgrounds, and he lets them ‘be’ in the plot just as they are. He is very skilled at not creating ‘Diverse-Characters‘, but creating ‘Diverse-Characters‘. It is a low bar, but one I feel like white people struggle to meet coming from any direction.

All of the above, and the true beauty of his books I think is a direct result of him being a masterful character creator. Like Becky Chambers, Daryl Gregory seems to have an intuitive understanding of human nature and uses this skill to craft elaborate plots with masterfully developed characters.

The Needed Read:

There is a lot happening in the world right now. Madness and Chaos seem to rule, the news often seems to run every day with the strategy of ‘If it bleeds, it leads.’ Most of us know that the maliciousness of the world is discussed far more often than its righteousness. But if I asked you, is the world safer now than it was in 1990? Would you say yes? What if I asked you if the world in 1970 was safer than the world in 1920? What if I asked you if the peak of violence in the 1940s, amidst the holocaust and atomic bombs, was safer than 1850, 1450, 400, 400 BC, 10,000 BC? Would you agree?

Steven Pinker’s magnum opus is a much-needed read in our time of societal and economic change. Though I do not necessarily trust all the viewpoints in his work here, the data on nomadic societies from 12,ooo + years ago is too scant for me to believe they were either more or less violent than us today, and modern-day hunter-gatherers do not make a valid analog for many reasons. Also, the datasets used are heavily Eurocentric, but I imagine this largely reflects the data Pinker and his colleagues had access to. Minor disagreements aside I think Stephen Pinker’s Better Angels of Our Nature is true at it’s essence and is a necessary read for every 21st century citizen who watches the news or consumes media. With the optimal goal of news media being engagement, stoking fear and outrage is part of the business model. Also the world is not free of violence at all, what is happening right now in Iran, Palestine, Lebanon, and South Sudan is unacceptable an atrocious by all measures.

And yet, most of us do not contemplate how far we have come on a daily basis. This book would be at the top of my list for antidotes to modern angst. We should look back, we should do the math, as Pinker does, and we should be proud of how far we have come and watchful that we don’t undo our progress via overreactions. There is so much to commend in this book, from the data, tables, and charts, enough to convince even the most skeptical reader. To the horrifying historical anecdotes and the attitude of watchful hope for the future. This book is a testament to Rational Optimism about the human race and an exploration of the idea that Moral Truths exist, as do scientific ones, and that as we progress from taming fire to exploring space, we are discovering not just the scientific laws of reality but the moral ones as well.