Absolution
In the years since I finished reading Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, I’ve never stopped thinking about this world.
VanderMeer unites biophilic cosmic horror like HP Lovecraft; furnishes passionate descriptions of the majesty of nature like Jane Goodall or Sir Richard Attenborough; unmoors the reader with paranoia and conspiracy like Philip K. Dick; and stuns with affect-blunted narrators like Camus.
Fans had assumed that VanderMeer was done with the series after the third book in the trilogy. But I was surprised and intrigued that a fourth book was coming, some six years after the last volume appeared: Absolution.
Having listened to the audiobook narrated by Bronson Pinchot (yes, him!), I can say that Absolution was a worthy addition — perhaps the best in the series — to the Area X universe. The book works well in audio format and Pinchot in particular was an inspired choice.
Pursuit of Humane Computing
Recently via my Mastodon friend Paolo Amoroso, I was informed about the existence of a Lisp book called “A Programmer’s Guide to Common Lisp” by Deborah G. Tatar — the book, it turned out, was a stepping stone. It was a remarkably lucid programming book. And often, when I find such a capable author, I look them up to see how their research and career went.
After Dr. Tatar’s auspicious contributions at Harvard, DEC, and Xerox PARC, she appears to have returned East and is now professor emerita at Virginia Tech. As I stepped through her CV and research interests, I found a number of mouldering and stale web pages, but I also found her articulating questions that seem particularly trenchant in 2026:
- conceiving of programming as a social endeavor
- identifying the social education that equips technologists to participate in said endeavor as originating in playground games
- comprehending the emergent social structure of the programming endeavor as holding as primary user non-disabled, white, men: in her words, “overwhelmingly designed by very young, white, American men” where “quality of life, kindness, and equity are secondary”
- recognizing that the warp and weft of the social fabric underlying software development was actively losing its utopianist streak (Steve Jobs barefoot getting vegetarian food) in exchange for a capitalist maximization culture
Her critique reached beyond the profession itself as an adjacency to her human-computer interaction research and psychology doctorate. She wrote that we have lost the civilizing influence of our interactions with animals, and “instead gained a computational mirror of the self.”
Fall of Hyperion
Hyperion Cantos is a four book set. Hyperion gets a lot of press because of its device of a Canterbury Tales structure: tales of the main protagonists as told by themselves. As a single book that is remarkable, unusual, and stands as a testament to Dan Simmons’ skill at characterization and plot-by-indirect narration. But in its sequel Fall of Hyperion, we see why he made that choice. Having crafted beautiful sci-fi dollies with backstory and motivation and conflict, he puts them into an Armageddon doll house with a boogeyman called The Shrike.
So while the second book is more of a plot-driven sci-fi story (and, to be fair, it’s a really interesting plot), the book gets to ride on the rich characters established in Hyperion. Simmons originally wrote the first two novels as one book, and it shows. I can see the cut-and-paste operation that must have turned a single manuscript into two well-wrought books. Hyperion loads potential energy into the universe by winding the springs of the principal characters; Fall of Hyperion lets loose the sweep of history and then releases the characters whose kinetic actions can, hopefully, master events.