_Oil Beach_ by Christina Dunbar-Hester

 The very first thing in this book is a quote from Mike Davis' _City of Quartz_, and whatever interdisciplinary area of shelving that is in is where this should also be -- a book that looks at Los Angeles as both a particular place and as a way to see what is happening elsewhere.  It is probably more similar to Davis' _Ecology of Fear_ because it necessarily has a wider geographic scale than Los Angeles.  It examines a part of the county not advertised by the Hollywood sign -- L.A. as a center of trade, its existence as an oil field, its managed conflicts with wildlife, all with the city as a center of heavy industry and a military base looming in the background.  

 It is nearly evenly divided into chapters about commodities (oil, bananas) and wildlife (otters, whales) and thus avoids being one of the "history of a manufactured item" books that were once popular.  I think that it succeeds in being a useful look at infrastructure and ecological aspects of its politics through the lens of one of the largest ports in the US.

The above is as much of a book review as I usually write: the rest of this is going to be about some ideas that I examined through the book -- not an exhaustive look at what the book is about, but where it contributed to my particular interests in ecology and infrastructure.

The Infrastructure of Delay

The book contains a description of one of the archetypal industry/wildlife interactions in American media: seabirds covered in oil and cleaned by professionals or volunteers, with uncertain results.  Chapter I: "Precariously Perched in a Port", is largely about this interaction, with bird rescuers funded by Chevron or Proctor & Gamble, descriptions of "slow violence" done to the local ecology, declining populations of birds and action taken as reaction to incidents, and (throughout the book) the general idea that ecological protection exists only insofar as it will not impede trade or military use of the port.  What should people make of a building labelled the Los Angeles Oiled Bird Care and Education Center, designed to treat up to a thousand birds in a spill and run by a nonprofit with ties to both government and industry?

My first impulse would have been to describe all of this as a public relations exercise, but it is not quite that.  There is an actual building with actual full-time employees doing ongoing care of actual birds.  This building is part of the infrastructure of the port -- a kind of infrastructure that manages public permission for the activities of the port to go on as usual.  Thinking about this was probably the most useful part of the book for my particular concerns.

What does it actually do?  The answer isn't nothing, and the answer is also not "it protects birds".  Actually protecting them would require taking more expensive measures to reduce oil spills and other stressors before they happen.  I think that it's best thought of as an infrastructure of ecological delay.  The various interventions for birds, otters, and whales are not exactly adequate, but they do make it so that populations slowly are reduced rather than vanishing all at once.  It's possible that they even may work and have populations recover, which would be all to the good as far as the port is concerned -- as long as trade and industry are not interfered with.  This infrastructure of delay handles an important constraint on the port: charismatic megafauna and its accompanying public involvement in politics.

"Infrastructural Vitalism": Alive or Dead?

One of the concepts that the book coins as a phrase is "infrastructural vitalism": how managers treat ports, pipelines, and freeways as alive and as living systems that must be protected.  Illustrative phrases mentioned are like "the health of the nation depends on the flow of commercial goods" or "the freeway is the spine of the region."  It consists of:

"[...] heavily managed, industrial infrastructure which, I argue, is stuctured by industrial logics and possesses a 'life force' of its own.  I do not mean that this infrastructure literally is alive, but an animistic belief in infrastructure's life force motivates its creators and maintainers.  This belief does real work in the world -- and, ironically, is often deadly for biological life." [pg. 5]

Infrastructural vitalism is an interesting concept, but I do not agree with it as described.  Is it really a belief, or is it a metaphor (economic activity is full of metaphors), or an excuse?  How could we prove that creators and maintainers of core industrial capacity have an animistic belief, as opposed to someone figuring out that this is a good turn of phrase to put in a newspaper article?  How would the managers, if interviewed, even know whether this is an actual belief that they hold or a rationalization, not much thought about, that they heard once and adopted because they like to feel good about what they do when questioned?

But that is a negative objection and I will lay out an alternative positive model: that of a basic difference between what the public thinks of as the purpose of a profession and what that profession or role institutionally does.  The classic example is policing.  People think that police forces are there to catch criminals and protect the public, but in terms of both policy and actual behavior they are not: they are there to enforce public order (including "racial order")  and protect wealthy people's property.  Critically, you could not find this view of the police by interviewing cops, who would either actually believe in protecting the public / catching criminals or would at least say that they do.

In a similar way, the purpose of local politicians is to sell their area to capital.  People think that politicians do something else, but the important parts of cities like roads and sewers and electricity are run by technocratic managers: politicians and rare appointed high-level managers handle the interface between the area and business.  If selling the area to business is helped along by propounding infrastructural vitalism, that may be done, but if the public's favored metaphors change the justifications will also change, because the activity itself can not change.  The port presents itself as a part of America's bloodstream, the place where software design happens presents itself as a cyberpunk landscape ("Silicon Valley"), and the Southern states dependent on cheap labor reject metaphor altogether and put up signs on the roadways telling businesses that unions are discouraged in their state, but it is all to the same end.  Politicians may have to try to attract new business but an area with an already paid for infrastructural sunk cost offers a steadier line of work which generally is only given up due to some catastrophic market change.

A minor observation -- perhaps the book included this somewhere, I'm sorry if I'm only repeating it -- I think it's instructive that in this case the infrastructural vitalism is coming from the Port of Long Beach, which is administered by the City of Long Beach.  The nearby port of Los Angeles is larger, but the book does not focus on it because its records are not as easy to obtain.  So the Port of Long Beach is a centrally managed important piece of infrastructure which is not one of the grandfathered in Federal ones, but instead is run by a local public entity.  It is therefore in the strictest sense un-American.  They may have need of organic metaphors about how the place grew and demands life on its own in order to disguise this.

Infrastructuralism

The book raises the question of whether ports could become managed in a different way, under a different system, in order to actually protect ecosystems and as a kind of measurement and enforcement point for communal decisions about how we will treat products coming from elsewhere (how labor is treated where the products are from, for instance).  My political commitments don't lead me to examine this idea strongly as a possible element of our system, and if our system is ever replaced I have no idea what might happen.

Instead I'm going to write a bit about my own most successful idea about the constraints of infrastructure, the clumsily named Infrastructuralism, which claims that people use whatever infrastructure is available and that infrastructural use can only be changed only by actually building-and-debuilding.  This blog post predicted (at least to me) events such as the Yellow Vest protests taking down the French carbon tax, and the syndrome in the US where mothballed coal-burning power plants are bought and restarted by cryptocurrency miners.  How would it apply to a port?

In many ways it's a statement about how we handle sunk costs.  When an item of infrastructure is brought down by negative externalities, the business that ran it may go bankrupt, but the infrastructure often remains. Part of the system of capitalism is that these negative exernalities if they are taken into account at all are often applied to the business and are mysteriously set to zero again for a new purchaser.  In addition, infrastructure that is brought down by economic forces only awaits a market upturn or a new use (see e.g. the Jevons paradox) to be turned back on again.

In this sense the sunk cost of investments made into the infrastructure of the port ensure that the port is going to continue to be used somehow, for as long as economic activity continues to increase.  It will always be cheaper for someone doing some marginal use to turn things on again (the book, for example, explains how bananas were diverted back to less developed ports that had fewer investments in containerized cargo, because bananas don't use that and the less developed ports are cheaper / less crowded).  

In this sense the current metaphors for infrastructure are Lovecraftian -- for instance, market as shoggoth.  The port is not a living thing that must be cared for and that serves as a part of our communal body: it is the corpse-city of R'lyeh, and what has never lived can never truly die.

The Time of Monsters (part 3)

(second part of the series is here)

 

Synthesis

 So there are two implicit referential strands in Delicious in Dungeon: Lovecraft and Tolkien.  How are these brought together?

Before getting into this, one final side alley: to illuminate a better example of some popular genre, it's sometimes good to look at an absolutely bargain basement lowest common denominator one: I give you "The Strongest Tank’s Labyrinth Raids  -A Tank with a Rare 9999 Resistance Skill Got Kicked from the Hero’s Party", an isekai title which looks like it was put together by randomly selecting tropes that are currently popular.  The minor variation that minutely separates this from similar series is that the main character is a "tank" (as opposed to a healer, a tamer, a mage, a thief, or various forms of damage dealers all of which have had their own series) so it's the only one based around a big, burly, classically muscled guy, something which is not finally used to any really interesting purpose.  I bring it up because the protagonist becomes both the leader of the local adventurer's guild *and* the master of the local dungeon, who creates monsters (huge gorillas, dinosaurs) who are sentient enough to fight on the people's side when commanded to do and who the adventurers hunt for their hides and other parts.  So he is a kind of local magnate who runs an early-capitalism business: the adventurers sometimes get killed, the monsters are endlessly created and sacrificed, but presumably the little hell world of unending needless death and conflict is worth it for the economic benefits.

Since "The Strongest Tank" (etc) is a minor work this conflict is never resolved or even acknowledged.  How is Delicious in Dungeon addressing it?  After all, if Laios does become king it will involve control of the dungeon in some way: is he similarly going to have people hunting and dying in order to eat an endless stream of created sentient victims?

The first step in recognizing this as a conflict is by considering cooking itself.  Cooking is a creative act, and one that transforms Thanatos (killing all those monsters, risking death) into Eros (creating the source of life for oneself and others).  As I write about in Open Posts, Closed Works, Other Worlds , a characteristic part of the isekai genre, and one that often applies to generic fantasy anime, is that they serve as hopeful fantasies based around Eros rather than Thanatos -- fantasies in which people have the power to create a better world -- and this includes "humble" arts such as cooking.

So Delicious in Dungeon is overtly interested in ecology and is in some fundamental sense about our ecological crisis.  There is embedded in it a horror-world that we uneasily fear may be coming into being -- "Soylent Green is people!" and the whole mythos of things getting so bad that we are gradually acclimated into cannibalism.  ("Do you have any better ideas?" Laios asks when proposing that they eat his sister.)  There is also the hope of something else: the creation of a new ecology in which we all have enough to eat because we have changed what we eat.  Giving up meat for climate purposes?  Instead we can eat insects, protein grown from bacteria, or whatever and they are really delicious if prepared in the right way.  The second story starts from Tolkien and his "reject technology to preserve bucolic England", but it can not really end there because we have passed the point where preservation could work: we need a new system.

Laios is a monstrous figure because he stands at the juncture of these two stories.  No one can understand him or why he is so focused on eating monsters.  The new system has not yet come into being and might never do so: he might end as a monster, or he might prefigure the time when we have eaten our monsters and something that can sustain us into the future can arise.

(end of the series)

The Time of Monsters (part 2)

(first part is here)

 Can you eat Ents?

The reason why a Lovecraftian reading of Delicious in Dungeon is incomplete is because the series is also very interested in ecology, something that Lovecraft had no feeling for.  Before I can try to describe how these interact I have to go back to: where do these characters come from?  What more or less stock setting are they drawing on?

For a lot of this I'm going to be relying on analysis of the isekai subgenre that I wrote up as Open Posts, Closed Works, Other Worlds: if you like reading this you may want to read that at some point.  Delicious in Dungeon is not an isekai (none of the characters are from other worlds) but there are similarities between isekai and generic fantasy anime.  In particular, isekai are almost universally done as a type of fantasy world that uses conventions from after the transition from tabletop RPGs to computer game RPGs.

Delicious in Dungeon notably leaves out the computer game RPG conventions entirely.  There are no status windows through which characters can see their stats, no hyper-focus on numerical ratings and lists of skills.  In addition, although there clearly is some influence from tabletop RPGs (the concept of "dungeoning", "parties", some of the monsters) the characters are not really operating within a tabletop RPG system.  No one has a "level" as far as I can remember.  No one really has a "character class": Laios the fighter can be taught how to use basic magic if anyone bothers to teach him.  The combat system fundamentally does not use hit points: there is a scene where a burly fighter has a water spirit shoot a sort of spear of water through her skull and she is instantly dead in a way that no hit point based system would really allow.  The combat is generally brutal and people are killed when a vital spot is hit.

 What the characters do have is Tolkien-similar races, filtered through Tolkien's influence on the tabletop RPG Dungeons & Dragons.  Thus Chilchuck is a "half-foot" because Tolkein's hobbits were renamed to halflings in D&D because of copyright concerns.  In short, they are a party whose composition is somewhat like that of the Fellowship of the Ring: Laios the human future king is Aragorn, Chilchuck the trap expert (note: not a "thief") is a mixture of the various hobbits, Marcille the mage elf combines Legolas and Gandalf, and Senshi is Gimli.  The core party in Delicious in Dungeon has various members that were part of the group earlier or who joined later, and I could push the analogy further, but this is far enough for my purposes.

Are they really similar to these Tolkien models?  They are sort of reverse caricatures or jokes about them, distancing devices:

* Laios is one of the least classifiable characters in recent anime: anime has many doofus character stock types (the doofus who is OK because they are incredibly powerful, the one who makes bad decisions but always lucks out, the one driven by incredible horniness, the one who is just comic relief) and he isn't any of them.  He's socially awkward but not to the extent of being classifiable as having what people currently think of as a disability.  Mostly he is someone who just does not fit in: his backstory has him doing a number of combat-related jobs all of which he left without some precipitating crisis and without particularly learning anything from them.

* Marcille might be the closest to a Tolkien original type because Tolkien's elves notably sometimes had their magical creations go bad.  But she's a lesbian and Tolkien is probably the least lesbian fantasy writer imaginable.  She could conceivably be bi or pan or something -- it's not like we know her exact preference -- but the anime makes it as clear as it can without her saying "Hi, I'm a lesbian" that she's attracted to Falin (the scene where they rescue Falin and suddenly Marcille is all flirty and "sleep next to me") and probably in love with her (the scene where Marcille starts crying, thinking about a difficult part of Falin's life.)   By the way, what is it about anime fans even in the current day that made me encounter "Do Laios and Marcille end up getting married?" as a recurring question when looking up basic facts about the series?  Of course they don't.

* Chilchuck is almost a reverse hobbit: a good person on the inside to his friends, but close-mouthed, secretive (his long-term party doesn't even know he's married), cynical, not notably interested in food, an adult who has children.  Tolkien hobbits would have thought it was the greatest thing ever to eat all these tasty monsters.  There have been other Tolkien-derived halfling characters who were members of thieves guilds and the like -- Regis from the R.A. Salvatore Drizzt books, for instance -- but they tend to maintain outward good nature as a kind of racial trait.

* Senshi is a driven, complex personality without being in any way concerned with any of the things that Tolkien dwarves are concerned about.  He doesn't care about his clan.  He doesn't care about treasure: there's an amusing scene where they are cooking and eating bugs that look like coins and he throws some gold coins that were mixed with them away because gold is useless.  He doesn't care about his axe and his prized implements are his cooking tools.

So the series has made it very clear that although this may look like Tolkien it is not.  Why go this far for the look and then spend so much effort playing against type?  I suspect that it has something to do with the Ring (as in the the temptation to use power that works out badly), the Ents, and the Scouring of the Shire, these last not standing for a real ecological consciousness but at least a preservationist one.  The world of Delicious in Dungeon is one where the ancient elves and dwarves had rather modern technology, steampunk level if not contemporary, and gave it up.

Because there are many overt references to ecology in the series.  Marcille is interested in dungeons and how to create them because she is interested in magical self-sustaining systems.  Senshi purposefully does not destroy golems on a particular dungeon floor because to do so would throw off the dungeon's ecological balance, and he sees himself as a maintainer of that balance.  The dungeon is kept in repair not merely by "magic" but by actual creatures that mimic the walls when they are damaged and secrete new shells to replace them.  (Laios, of course, tries to eat these creatures because he must eat everything.)

To make a long story short, I think that the series is fundamentally about our contemporary ecological crises, and these have to take off from Tolkien in this context because that's the last branch of the series Tolkien -> tabletop RPG -> computer RPG where they really appear.  More about that in the next part.

(the second part is here )

The Time of Monsters (part 1)

 "The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters."

 

This is an extended critical piece about the amine Delicious in Dungeon, sometimes called Dungeon Meshi by people who want to call it by something that is like its Japanese name (transliterated as "Danjon Meshi") .  The direct translation would be "Dungeon Meal".    I've based it on the first 24 episodes and have lazily not looked up anything about the writer, the artist(s), or the (completed) manga that it's based on.  There will be spoilers for these episodes and this piece assumes familiarity with them.

How, exactly, is Laios monstrous?  I suggest that he is because, as in the Gramsci quote above, he stands in an old world while a new one is uncertainly coming into being around him.  This leads him to greater and greater acts of cannibalism, culminating in a plan to save his sister from being bodily merged with a dragon by killing her, cutting off her "dragon parts" (the anime shows an envisioned neat and bloodless sectioning, like parts of a cow separated in an illustration at a butcher's shop) and calling in everyone he knows for a great feast where they eat all of the parts of his sister that they want to dispose of before resurrecting her.  Laios is (clearly, in my opinion) slated to become king, and this is going to be a central story for his kingdom.

 What kind of story is this? At first it seems something like the stories from Joseph Campbell's book _Primitive Mythology_ about ceremonial kings who had the best of everything the community could provide and then were ritually sacrificed and eaten to ensure the turning of the seasons and continued fertility.   But Campbell is increasingly out of favor and this usage of "primitive" as a stage that humanity went through is no longer held.  More to the point, this is not a story about natural cycles, but about an incredible *un*naturalness.  Here is the voice over at the end of the 24th episode: "Dungeon food. To eat or be eaten.  There is no hierarchy here.  Only the simple concept that eating is a privilege of the living."  But the series has already made it clear that this dungeon has the unusual property that people killed here do not really die: their souls stay attached to their bodies and they may be brought back to life at any time if part of their body still exists.  For the monsters' part, they are created by magic.  So the dungeon is a hell world where creatures live to eat the dead, then die and are eaten, then are returned to life again to kill and eat.  Un-nature red in tooth and claw.

Descent to the Dungeons of Madness

 It is possible to interpret the series as an often sought after contemporary mashup, the cheery, cutesy Lovecraftian horror story.  It would go something like this.  A party is forced to descend into a dungeon without supplies in order to save and resurrect one of their party members who has been eaten by a dragon.  The party leader, Laios, has always been fascinated by the idea of eating monsters, and even has a sort of cookbook for doing so, but it seems like he's never really tried it.  Luckily they meet a dwarf, Senshi, who is an expert cook specializing in the use of monster parts.  They descend the dungeon and are forced to subsist on Senshi's cooking: some party members are repulsed by the idea of eating monsters but they all agree that the meals are delicious.

As they go on and the initial resistance of the party members to eating monsters fades, there is a new controversy: some of the monsters are partially humanoid and eating pieces of them is uncomfortably like eating human parts.  Some party members object: it is agreed that there will be some restrictions on this kind of food but this partial agreement is subverted, especially when food gets short.  They find and kill the dragon that ate their missing party member, Laios' sister Falin, and eat meat from the dragon even though it ate and mostly digested Falin.  Falin is resurrected and then lost when she is partially transformed into the dragon that ate her.

Then there is an absolutely critical bit of back story for this interpretation.  Senshi, as a young dwarf, was part of a dwarven expedition to this dungeon that went wrong, and he was the sole survivor.  To save his life, the leader of the expedition gave him a mysterious bowl of bad tasting meat, which Senshi devoured to avoid starvation.  Senshi has since then always suspected that he was cannibalistically fed the meat of another dwarf, and it is implied that a major reason why he took up cooking monsters was to taste them and find out whether it was a monster he ate or another person.  This lifelong trauma underlies the series.

Then, at episode 24, there is a suggestion of how the rest of the series will go: the dungeon, presided over by "the mad mage", has slowly changed the party into monsters, although they are physically no different from how they once were.  Laios enthusiastically proposes that they can separate their missing party member from the dragon she has been partly transformed into by calling in everyone they know to a great feast where they will all eat his sister Falin.  This will dispose of her "monstrous parts", but of course the monstrosity will have gone into the feasters as they insensibly enjoy themselves, their jaws dripping with dragon/human blood.

Lovecraft wrote more than one short story about cannibalism, I believe, and not cannibalism as a "primitive rite" -- there is at least one where a New England settler gains everlasting life for at long as he can kill and eat other people.   This reading is part of the series, but only a part.  This particular anime rehearses certain kinds on contemporary social tension, and the Lovecraftian reading functions as one of its component levels.  In future parts of this series I hope to look at how this horror is the base of a larger horror of our time and the hope of its eventual resolution.

Next part is here.

Naomi's Klein's _Doppelganger_

 This is a very good book about the politics of our contemporary moment, but I'm mostly going to write about where I disagree with it, since agreement amounts to a 200 character post on social media and it takes some element of disagreement to make a work worth writing about at length.  I'll generally assume that people reading this have read the book or are at least familiar with its premise: Naomi Klein writes about the ongoing popular confusion between her and Naomi Wolf as if Wolf is her doppelganger, using that as a springboard to write about the whole current right-wing movement and the way that it mirrors elements of leftism.

I.  Doppelgangers by Genre

Naomi Klein tries dutifully throughout the book to see the similarities between herself and Wolf in order to examine what lessons her shadow self or doppelganger might reveal.  She has to overcome her natural feelings of difference to do so -- Klein prides herself on careful analysis and fact checking, while Wolf is notoriously not careful and a fabulist -- but I don't think that she really seems able to do this well.

_Doppelganger_ is cultural criticism that makes extensive use of the most blighted staple of contemporary writing, the personal anecdote.  Reporters and writers never seem to grasp the difference between a scientist writing something as science and what they write, but this is a book that tries to give people a story through which they can think about current events, not some kind of social science description of them.  As a poet I appreciate the use of sense words to make anecdotes memorable: there is a scene in which someone gasps that they can smell the sandalwood after meeting a far-out person who one presumably expects to be a sort of hippie but who wants unfit people to die.  Is this person representative of a wider trend?  People who share vaguely left values certainly feel that this person is representative.  Due to the mirrored nature of our society, I could come up with a similar anecdote about how some member of any group wants all members of some other group to die.  (I think that this involves Freudian death drive and its rise in our society, but that is going far from the point.)

The point is that Wolf writes books that want to convince readers about societal narratives based on flimsy evidence: so does Klein.  It's possible to do this well or badly: Klein's description of why anti-vaxxing as a gateway to rightism became prevalent among "body people" (people who work on individual body improvement such as trainers, supplement providers etc.) is a brilliant set of observations that combine cultural and material analysis in a way that a pro forma "petit bourgeois are right wing" would not.  But doing it well is not in some ways a large difference from doing it badly.  

Am I mischaracterizing Klein's body of work?  I should mention that this is the only book of hers that I've read.  I heard about _No Logo_ a while after it was written and my response was an annoyed "read some Baudrillard or something, you can't escape branding by being conspicuously against branding" (something that Klein agrees with in _Doppelganger_) and when I heard about _This Changes Everything_ my response was that people who think that capitalism depends on a single commodity have had a bad run and that a green capitalism in which fossil fuels were eliminated and yet every renewable power plant and large battery array was mysteriously owned by investors so that energy was not free was perfectly possible.   But I haven't read these books and I may be doing her general work a disservice.

II. What is a Usable Past?

Now I come to the more serious critique of this work.  _Doppelganger_ references among much else a "usable past", an idea which I wish that leftism had never picked up on.  What makes a usable past?  Retelling past events in a different way to make a narrative that gives someone a foundational feeling that they can build on is something that can be done by any politics.  The current right-wing narrative is full of obvious scientific and historical falsehoods such as vaccines having extreme bad effects, Great Replacement theory, and so on.  Do these falsehoods make it not usable?  No.  A settler colonialist story has proven to be extremely usable throughout American history: people are not looking for scientific truth but instead something that justifies an elevated positional status in society. 

What is Naomi Klein's politics?  She doesn't forthrightly describe it at the beginning of the book, but it becomes clear that it's a fairly standard democratic socialism.  That is not a usable past.  Democratic socialism has died out everywhere: its advocates will of course say that it is far different from the authoritarian socialism of the USSR but others of course disagree.  The USSR took over about a third of the world and then died the most ignominious death possible: not through war or civil war or even really revolution but mostly through a tired sense that no one actually supported it.  State socialism survives as the authoritarian socialism of China (with its leader for life) and in various European social-democratic-influenced states whose policies are now neoliberal like any other Western state.

Klein references the core of why her politics is supposed to be preferable through the old "socialism of fools" idea.  Playing on the similarity of the words conspiracy and capitalism, she writes that teaching people about capitalism gives people a real sense of how the world works, and without that they make up conspiracy theories to explain what is happening to them.  I'm an anti-capitalist, so of course I'm inclined to agree, but really this doesn't reckon with the disaster that the left's attachment to Marxism and Marxist categories has been.  The story of how Marxist change is supposed to happen has proven to be just as fake as the right wing conspiracist one.

 Why is this?  Again, I have my own ideas: surplus value has been defined by Marxists in a tautological way but in a general sense I think it's apparent that surplus value is ecological, always was, and that proles have no world historical role as such, so the whole "scientific" basis of scientific socialism is flatly wrong.  Again, this is beside the point: the point is that people have been treating the "capitalism is a real, scientific description so our story is better" as an argument for leftism for a long time but the story has not worked.

III.  Do the particular beliefs of leftism matter?

A strength of the book is that Klein agrees that people, even petit b, suffer in our society and seek reasons that explain their suffering and give them a potential way out.  There was a very annoying recent moment on left social media where people would cite someone on the right saying or doing something racist and scornfully say that this disproved any suggestion that economic problems under liberalism led to fascism, which of course they do.  The problem is that she calls on science -- a science that left usable pasts do not notably participate in -- as the measure of what makes some stories good and some not.

As an anarchist, I think that our stories are better because of moral or ethical reasons and have to be forthrightly presented that way.  I see that some people find their deepest meaning in life, their greatest sense of joy and fulfillment, in being genocidaires.  You can't really say that this is bad because genocide involves false beliefs, because all of our pasts involve false beliefs: it has to be because genocide is wrong.

Anarchism opposes hierarchy and therefore is more than leftist anti-capitalism: it also includes opposition to all of the failures of state socialism.  In this opposition it includes racism, patriarchy, homophobia, and other forms that are only uneasily theorized as related to capitalism but that leftists reject in any case, as well as some things such as democratic elections of representatives or executives, which are used to justify capitalism in contemporary states but which leftists still generally like.  

Klein includes a generic appeal to the left not to be sectarian and not to tear each other down towards the end of her book.  All right.  But this doesn't mean that we should adopt a belief in scientism that has failed us for a century.  Moral consistency and clarity does not appeal to everyone but it is a better base for a path forwards than repeating the mistakes of the past.

My crank list of which novels should have won the Hugos

Why do the Hugos matter?  No one really knows.  Literary awards are usually judged by a group of experienced critics, academics, and/or writers who put some work into reading widely and trying to evaluate literary quality.  The Hugos are chosen by notably provincial SF fans who are typically from the US and who paid $50 for the privilege of voting.  Yet the Hugos are still referred to as science fiction's highest award and recommended to people as if they represent books that people may want to read.

My concern with the Hugos is as a list of recommendations for readers.  Every now and then someone decides that it would be interesting to read the major books in SF and they naturally think that maybe they should start with the Hugo list and read one from each year.  They shouldn't.  

I'm going to go through the list of Hugo novel winners and pick out which novel should have won in each year.  What makes me a good critic, or at least a better than the combined opinion of Hugo voters?  Not much, but frankly it does not take much.  I've read somewhat widely in SF and fantasy and I'm at least aware of what literary fiction is in a way that Hugo voters do not seem to be (I will get to the much discussed case of Gravity's Rainbow around 1973.)  There are going to be holes in my recommendations because I am still from the US and have not yet gotten around to reading Italo Calvino or the Strugatsky brothers.  For the purpose of this initial list I'm not even going to look at the winners of SF's juried awards and crib off of them: I may do that at some later time.

Since the Hugos are supposed to be about popularity, I'm going to consider popularity to at least some extent. As explained below, this is for the time being a list that only chooses winners for the 20th century.

Eligibility

I am going to consider which novel should have won, whether or not it was nominated for that year.  For the purpose of doing this, I had to figure out the Hugo award's eligibility rules.  To summarize:

* each Hugo award is for works first published in the year before that, sometimes for a longer period

* works published that are not in English are eligible in their first year of English translation

* serialized works can only win once, either for one element of the series or the whole series with its last installment

* one of the specific ways in which eligibility can be extended is that works are eligible up to their first year of US publication if they were first published outside the US. 

* there are rules that only science fiction cares about concerning the differences in length between novels, novellas, and novelettes that I may or may not follow.

 Lastly, there is one mind-boggling element listed in the Hugo award rules: the Hugo awards are apparently not for SF after all.  A breezy subheader called "Science Fiction? Fantasy? Horror?" says that works of fantasy or horror are also eligible.  I had originally looked at the list of Hugo winners and decided that they must have changed the rules to make fantasy eligible in 2000 (there are very few fantasy works nominated before this).  It seems clear to me, given that the change around 2000 was so notable, that the Hugos are awards for a marketing category -- in other words, the books placed in the science fiction section of a US bookstore that are now a mixture of SF and fantasy with fantasy predominating.  As such I'm going to choose which works should have won the Hugos as if fantasy was always eligible: horror gets a different couple of shelves in the bookstore so I will leave that out.

The 1950s 

Amusingly the Hugos started in the 1950s and therefore left out SF's "Golden Age" (1938-1946) entirely.  Don't worry, you are not really missing much.

1953: The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester , eligibility 1952-1953

my pick: same

 

After all I've written about the Hugos, they arguably got it right for the first ever one.  The Demolished Man is probably better than Bester's other major work and since it concerns a mentally ill oligarch who has to be taken down it is still relevant.  People will have heard of Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury a lot more but it is not actually a better work. 

1955: They'd Rather Be Right (aka The Forever Machine), Mark Clifton & Frank Riley, eligibility 1954-1955

my pick: The Lord of the Rings trilogy, J.R.R. Tolkien

The whole trilogy was first published 1954-1955.  Not many people may have heard of this obscure work, but it's better than whatever the Hugo process picked out.

1956: Double Star, Robert A. Heinlein, eligibility 1954-1956 but I will only consider 1956

my pick: Till We Have Faces, C.S. Lewis

 

Alternatively, The Last Battle by C.S. Lewis was published 1956 so I could have chosen the entire Narnia series but the work above is for adults and is better.

1958: The Big Time, Fritz Leiber, eligibility 1957-1958

my pick: The Languages of Pao, Jack Vance

I've read The Big Time and it is an absolutely horrible work that should be forgotten.  That is not to say that Fritz Leiber is a bad writer: he is going to be long remembered for the Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories but not for this.  The Hugos don't seem to have picked much Vance even when he wrote SF, inexplicably.

 

1959: A Case of Conscience, James Blish, eligibility 1958

 my pick: The Zimiamvian trilogy, E.R. Eddison

People may start complaining that my list is too fantasy dominated but what can I do -- The Mezentian Gate published in 1958 is the last element of the Zimiamvian trilogy, which is far better than anything Blish ever wrote.  That includes A Case of Conscience, which is incidentally one of the most morally and ethically objectionable genocide justifying books that SF has ever produced which is saying a lot.

 

This was the first Hugo with runner-up nominations.

 ,

1960: Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein , eligibility 1959

my pick: Titus Alone, Mervyn Peake or The Sirens of Titan, Kurt Vonnegut

Neither of these are fantasy works: Titus Alone has an actual surveillance drone in it and if Arthur C. Clarke invented satellites then Peake probably invented drones.  But of course the Gormenghast series, which Titus Alone is the last of, is better as writing than anything that Heinlein ever wrote.  The Sirens of Titan was nominated for a Hugo this year and I should acknowledge that this time they at least nominated something that plausibly should have won.

Hugo score for the 1950s: 1 out of 6

The 1960s 

The 1960s were the time of religious and ecological SF in the US, and were also when 3 of the best SF writers produced many of their major works -- Philip K. Dick. Ursula K. LeGuin, and Stanislaw Lem.  Going by the Hugo criterion of first publication in English, Lem's works do not show up in the 1960s although they should: I will try to drop them into later decades.  This decade's works were dominated by SF instead of fantasy as with the 1950s, and involved the first actually difficult decisions that I encountered.   All Hugos for this decade had the previous year as their eligibility period.

1961: A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr. 

my pick: Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys 

 

Rogue Moon was one of the nominees: it's not a great book but it's better than the Hugo winner.  I also considered A Fine and Private Place by Peter S. Beagle.

 

1962: Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein 

my pick: same

 

This was amazingly popular and gives a feel for the religious SF of the time: I think that it's amusing that it's likely to be the only Heinlein that makes my list because in terms of general writing quality it is not very good.

 

1963: The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick 

my pick: same

 

The Hugos are really going strong here: two in a row!

 

1964: Way Station, Clifford D. Simak

my pick: Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. 

 

Cat's Cradle was nominated, so the Hugos are still doing pretty well.

 

1965: The Wanderer, Fritz Leiber 

my pick: Martian Time-Slip, Philip K. Dick  

I don't know why people kept voting in minor works by Leiber.  Martian Time-Slip is a foundational work about the abandonment of people who are disabled, depressed, or old.

1966: tie between This Immortal, Roger Zelazny and Dune, Frank Herbert

my pick: Dune, Frank Herbert

 

The Hugos came so close but had to make this a tie.  This Immortal by Roger Zelazny is fine: I've read almost everything Zelazny has written and it's not his best but it's OK.  Dune was both popular and influential as one of the first major SF works to actually consider that alternate societies and ecosystems to "generic US or medieval Europe" might exist.  If there was going to be a tie, it should have been with The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by PKD.

1967: The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Robert A. Heinlein 

my pick: the totally incongruous combination of Giles Goat-Boy, John Barth, or The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov

 

The 1966 publication year was an extremely difficult one to choose from.  The Hugos nominated Babel-17 by Samuel Delany which was certainly in the running, but Giles Goat-Boy was one of the first popular metafictional / postmodern novels.  The Master and Margarita is in no real sense "a novel of the sixties" and was written between 1928-1940, but this was the year of its first English publication so in it goes.

1968: Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny

my pick: same

 

I might argue here but I wrote that I'd go along with the Hugos when they were close enough.

 

1969: Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner 

my pick: Camp Concentration by Thomas Disch or A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin

 

Brunner wrote some good books but this one should not have won for this year.   The year also had Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by PKD which also would have been better.

1970: The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin 

my pick: same

 

The year had PKD's Ubik, which usually would have won but not against this competition.

 

Hugo score for the 1960s: 4.5 out of 10.  I'm guessing this will be the best decade ever for the award. 

The 1970s

The 1970s were the decade in which people questioned the whole direction of SF as a genre, mostly particularly with a push to integrate SF into literary fiction.  The experimentalist fiction of the New Wave was the closest thing SF has had to an avant-garde.  People also started to point out how homophobic classical SF was and push a more feminist SF (one classic marker being The Female Man, Joanna Russ, 1975).  In general, this was a direction not followed in later decades, with the movie Star Wars (1977) signaling a change in SF from written to visual media and a corresponding reversion back to a more pulp style.

1971: Ringworld, Larry Niven 

my pick: Solaris, Stanislaw Lem (first English translation 1970)

The conparison between these two is particularly harsh because they are both supposedly hard SF writers.  It's just that one is "hard" by convention (how does the Ringworld material stand up under stress? Should the writer handwave something no don't bother, um, it's very hard) and one is the best hard SF writer ever, who wrote a whole oeuvre about the limits of science and how science actually works.

1972: To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip José Farmer 

my pick: The Lathe of Heaven, Ursula K. Le Guin 

This was at least nominated for a Hugo.

1973: The Gods Themselves, Isaac Asimov

my pick: The Iron Dream, Norman Spinrad 

Which should you choose, someone who you want to reward for work they did in the Golden Age, or someone who wrote a work that essentially destroys the Golden Age?  I'm not going to forget The Iron Dream and I can barely recall what differentiates The Gods Themselves from similar works.

 

1974: Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke 

my pick: Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon

 

Before I get to Gravity's Rainbow,  I'll mention that two Stanislaw Lem books, Memoirs Found in a Bathtub and The Invincible, were both first translated into English in 1973.  While Clarke was writing a classic Big Dumb Object book Lem was in print with SF's first use of nanomachines (in The Invincible).  Both Lem books were better than anything written within the genre that year.

 

But what about outside the genre?  There was a moment in 1973 when Gravity's Rainbow was nominated for a Nebula Award when it seemed like literary fiction and SF might be converging, in which SF would no longer be a ghettoized genre and be evaluated in literary terms.  That did not happen.  For a longer treatment of this theme, read Jonathan Lethem about it-- this is from a 1998 Village Voice article, but he's written the same in many other places.

In between Gravity's Rainbow and the end of the 20th century, each famous US literary author wrote approximately one SF novel.  In terms of technical writing skill, these were of course better than what SF writers could do: in terms of understanding SF ideas and the history of the genre, they were abysmal.  I'm going to ignore most of them.

 

1975: The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin 

my pick: same

 

As an anarchist I'm supposed to especially like this anarchist novel: I do not -- it is one of the most deprived and disappointing anarchies envisioned.  But it's a good book.  Quite possibly this should have been the year for Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino (first year of English translation) but I haven't read it.

1976: The Forever War, Joe Haldeman

 my pick: Dhalgren, Samuel Delany 

I really like The Forever War and I would like to just agree with this Hugo, but I can't.  Bonus pick: if you want something as end-of-the-Vietnam-War as The Forever War, but quite possibly a bit better, there is also The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson also published 1975.

 

1977: Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, Kate Wilhelm 

my pick: The Cornelius Quartet, Michael Moorcock 

I considered and rejected Ratner's Star by Dom DeLillo: the Cornelius quartet (the first four Jerry Cornelius novels, now generally bound into a single volume) are a pure distillation of what the English New Wave was.

1978: Gateway, Frederik Pohl

my pick: A Scanner Darkly, Philip K. Dick 

 

Gateway is a fairly good book, but A Scanner Darkly captured an era.

1979: Dreamsnake, Vonda N. McIntyre 

my pick: same

 

I thought of The Chain of Chance but this list is already overpopulated with time-shifted Lem books.  

1980: The Fountains of Paradise, Arthur C. Clarke

my pick: On Wings of Song, Thomas M. Disch

 

This was at least nominated for a Hugo.  Runner-up: Engine Summer by John Crowley.

 

 Hugo score for the 1970s: 2 out of 10. 

 

The 1980s 

The 1980s were a fragmented decade for SF -- they were certainly the decade of the emergence of cyberpunk, but the list of authors who have written cyberpunk that will last is a bit thin: it's William Gibson for a book that essentially created the subgenre for the public, and Bruce Sterling.   The end of the decade saw the first SF books by Iain M. Banks, part of what I consider to be a renaissance of politically left writing from UK authors.

 

1981: The Snow Queen, Joan D. Vinge 

my pick: Return From the Stara, Stanislaw Lem (first English translation) 

This should be the last time-shifted Lem book.

1982: Downbelow Station, C. J. Cherryh

my pick: Little, Big by John Crowley 

Little, Big was at least nominated for a Hugo.  In almost any other year, Lanark by Alasdair Gray would have been my pick.

 

1983: Foundation's Edge, Isaac Asimov

my pick: The Sword of the Lictor, Gene Wolfe (standing in some way for the entire Book of the New Sun)

 

The last Gene Wolfe book in the series was published in the next year, but this was the year in one of them was nominated for a Hugo so I will stick with this one.

 

1984: Startide Rising, David Brin 

my pick: the Dying Earth series, Jack Vance 

My pick would have been The Citadel of the Autarch by Gene Wolfe but it is not really a standalone book and the third book in the series was nominated for a Hugo in the last year.  Therefore I chose Cugel's Saga, published 1983, as the end (in terms of novels) of Jack Vance's Dying Earth series.

This year is as good as any to mark the start of a trend of popular fantasy series that are more of less open ended and that end when their writers can no longer write.  In particular, this year has the first Terry Pratchett Discworld book, The Colour of Magic, and the first Steven Brust Dragaeran book, Jherag.  I would expect these to win some kind of series award at some point, but not for any of the individual novels in the series.

1985: Neuromancer, William Gibson

my pick: same

 

1986: Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card 

my pick: Schismatrix, Bruce Sterling 

It's understandable that SF fans would like a book in which adults watch a child kick another child to death so that the child can be prepared to naturally accept genocide as a way to win, but Ender's Game is not actually a good book in any sense.  Schismatrix is better read as a later book, Schismatrix Plus which adds a number of short stories, but since this is a list of awards for novels I decided on the earlier version.

I would have liked to fit something by Brian Aldiss in here, such as Helliconia Winter standing for the whole Helliconia series or Hothouse in the previous year, but those are the tail end of the New Wave and this is the time of cyberpunk.

1987: Speaker for the Dead, Orson Scott Card

my pick: The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood 

Margaret Atwood notably does not consider her works to be SF, but in a category that spans SF and fantasy they should be in there somewhere.

1988: The Uplift War, David Brin

my pick: Consider Phlebas, Iain M.. Banks

 

The first of Iain Banks' Culture books.  Not his best, but better than anything else at the time.  This is usually classed as a space opera: I think it's better classified as a form of anarchist SF.

This year also has Soldiers of Paradise, the first book by Paul Park.  Some book by Paul Park should be on this list somewhere but popularity is part of even a fake Hugo list and I don't think that his books ever got the attention that they deserved.

1989: Cyteen, C. J. Cherryh

my pick: Islands in the Net, Bruce Sterling 

 

This was at least nominated for a Hugo.

 

1990: Hyperion, Dan Simmons 

my pick: The Player of Games, Iain M. Banks

 

Probably Banks' second best book.

 

Hugo score for the 1980s: 1 out of 10.  

The 1990s

 The 1990s were a decade of decline for written SF.  A larger and larger number of novels were published: fewer and fewer had any particular kind of literary quality.  For some previous decades it was a challenge to pick the best work in a year: for this one it's a challenge to pick anything.

Lois McMaster Bujold is a perennial favorite for this decade of Hugos.  I've read and enjoyed all of her books: as with any everlasting series, they don't seem individually better than the others or rising to the quality of something I could recommend as a single work. 

 

1991: The Vor Game, Lois McMaster Bujold 

my pick: Use of Weapons, Iain M. Banks

 

Probably Banks' best book and certainly should have won this year.

 

1992: Barrayar, Lois McMaster Bujold

my pick: The Difference Engine, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling 

 

The definitive steampunk - as - cyberpunk book.  

 

1993:  Doomsday Book, Connie Willis, and A Fire Upon the Deep, Vernor Vinge

my pick: same

 

I am not enthused by either of these but I can't find anything better.  I might have chosen Red Mars but another book in its series won the Hugo next year.   I really should have chosen The Course of the Heart by M. John Harrison but it wasn't published in the US until 2004 and for a US dominated award like the Hugos should probably win in a later year.

1994: Green Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson

my pick: same

 

Red Mars was a better book, but I will defer to the Hugos since it's close enough.

1995: Mirror Dance, Lois McMaster Bujold 

my pick: A History Maker, Alasdair Gray

 

This one would have been Four Ways to Forgiveness by Ursula K. Le Guin but it is classed as a collection of short stories.   There is a trend through the rest of this decade (and to some extent for the rest of SF's existence so far) of ignoring work from the UK because it is not as well known in the US or not even published in the US.

 

1996: The Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson 

my pick: Fairyland, Paul McAuley 

 

1997: Blue Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson 

my pick: Holy Fire, Bruce Sterling 

This was nominated for a Hugo and is one of Sterling's best books.

 

1998: Forever Peace, Joe Haldeman

my pick: nothing

 

I looked diligently over the list of books published in 1997 and couldn't find anything that seemed worth putting on this list.  I guess I'll count this as agreement with the Hugos but really this could have been a year for no award.

 

1999: To Say Nothing of the Dog, Connie Willis 

my pick: anything else

 

I will try not to write too much about the book that won, written as it was in a sentimental style that infiltrated the plot to the extent of characters saving a cat at the risk of destroying the historical timeline.  There are a good number of books better than this one published this year: they include A Parable of the Talents, Octavia Butler, The Book of Knights, Yves Mayanrd, and A Clash of Kings, George R.R. Martin.  I will count this as disagreement with the Hugos since it should have preferably gone to any of those.

2000: A Deepness in the Sky, Vernor Vinge

my pick: A Civil Campaign, Lois McMaster Bujold 

 

It seems like a joke that I would choose a book by Bujold after disagreeing with the Hugos so many times about them before, but there is a particular reason why this one should win: there is a trend in popular fantasy / SF that begins around this time in mashing up genres or reworking famous characters, and this book is a successful SF version of a Regency romance.

Hugo score for the 1990s: 3 out of 10.  

The 2000s Through Now

I don't think that I can trust my own judgement to make a list of winners from this point forward.  I was discouraged by the state of SF in the late 1990s and stopped reading as much of it.  There were certainly authors that I continued to read, and I could assign a number of years to China Mieville or Adam Roberts.  But I really haven't read enough of the field to be as confident of who should have won in each year.  For instance, I still haven't read any N.K. Jemison.  Here is a list of works that I think should have been at least nominated, by year of publication instead of eligibility year:

2001: Perdido Street Station, China Mieville

2002: Altered Carbon, Richard K. Morgan

2003: Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood

2004: Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Susanna Clarke and The Scar, China Mieville

2007: Land of the Headless, Adam Roberts

2009: Anathem, Neil Stephanson

2010: New Model Army, Adam Roberts, the city & the city, China Mieville

2011: By Light Alone, Adam Roberts, Kraken, China Mieville, The Half-Made World, Felix Gilman

2012: Embassytown, China Mieville

2013: The Hydrogen Sonata, Iain M. Banks

2014: The Islanders, Christopher Priest

2016: Europe in Winter, Dave Hutchinson 

2017: The Thing Itself, Adam Roberts

2018: Above the Snowline, Steph Swainston

2022: The This, Adam Roberts

I may add to this at some later time if I read more.

Total Score for the 20th Century Hugo novel awards

Rounding up, this gives the Hugos a total score of 12 good picks out of 46 awards, or 26%. If you had gone back to the Hugo list of novels that won in the 20th century, you would have had a 1/4 chance of getting the best one for each year.