The author makes us look at the world and speculative creations in a new, defamiliarized way.
An eclectic collection about topics related to our current position in the Anthropocene.
In a wide-ranging series of essays, Wilk, author of the acclaimed novel Oval, examines a variety of genre-bending creative works. She derives her title from a Margaret Atwood story about how a missing girl in a liminal person-plant transition becomes part of the landscape. Wilk begins with “what it means to be a person in an age of drastic ecosystem decline—of planetary extinction.” A sense of urgency pervaded what she calls the early systems novels of DeLillo, Coover, Pynchon, and Gaddis, which manipulated or upended genre conventions. Drawing on works by H.P. Lovecraft and Richard Powers, among others, Wilk explores what constitutes weirdness, eeriness, and ecosystems in fiction. She seeks to understand death as a “kind of life through landscape,” including the effects of a toxic environment on people and art as employed in Jenny Hval’s novel Paradise Rot and Karen Russell’s short story “The Bad Graft,” which follows “an unwanted, unexpected, erotic interspecies incursion.” The “impossible terrain” of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, Wilk notes, is a good example of “narratives reflecting the transformations of the drastically changing planet.” Pandemic and apocalyptic stories “offer a lot for comprehending our current situation,” while dystopian landscapes “rendered in familiar fashions” can still be titillating or terrifying. Science fiction, Wilk contends, has found its own utopian landscapes in steampunk, solarpunk, cyberpunk, and films like Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium. In the latter part of the book, the author verges off into some robust issues about empathy and virtual reality as a “trauma machine” as well as her own intriguing participation in the improvisational theater of a vampire larp (live action role-playing). Wilk concludes with autobiographical reflections on Oval, a larp based on it, and her writing methods.
The author makes us look at the world and speculative creations in a new, defamiliarized way.Pub Date: July 19, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-59376-715-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: April 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
