Sunday, June 11, 2023

Best SciFi

What type of science fiction book?

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Action & adventure Fantasy Literary Apocalyptic & post-apocalyptic Thriller Dystopian Space opera Romance Hard science fiction Time travel Classics Suspense Horror Alien contact Epic fantasy

Topic

Dystopia Extraterrestrial life Time travel Earth Artificial intelligence Survival Interstellar travel Apocalypse War Robot Magic (supernatural) Zombie Close encounter Extraterrestrial intelligence New York City

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Dies the Fire

By S. M. Stirling

Book cover of Dies the Fire

B.K. Bass Author Of What Once Was Home

From the list on ordinary people surviving the extraordinary.

By B.K. Bass Author

Why did B.K. love this book?

Unlike the typical post-apocalyptic fare of nuclear war or other identifiable disasters, Dies the Fire posits an interesting question: What if everything just stops working? Everything we rely on to drive modern society, from combustion to electricity, fails. Against this backdrop, a cast of characters from varied backgrounds all must struggle to adapt to this new reality. Civilization falls apart, and new orders spring up in their place. What drew me most to this was the different ways in which the characters responded to this situation. Some seek simply to survive, while others seek to exploit this new reality for their own gains at the expense of others.

Ice Planet Barbarians

By Ruby Dixon

Book cover of Ice Planet Barbarians

Avalon Griffin Author Of Unbound by Shadows

From the list on romance for empowering escapism.

By Avalon Griffin Author

Why did Avalon love this book?

No, this isn't the title of a B-movie—it's the fun, sexy, and surprisingly sweet start of a series with wonderful world-building and likable characters.

This book is about how a group of human women abducted by evil aliens crash-land on a planet full of hunky, endearing aliens and the adventures they share.

I loved how the aliens cherished and celebrated the women in this story instead of reviling their humanity, as I've seen in other sci-fi stories. The spicy scenes are hot, and the heroine is a natural leader who doesn't passively wait around to be rescued.

This is a dual-POV story, and the alien hero's confusion over human quirks is quite funny. Escapism at its best!

Tea From An Empty Cup

By Pat Cadigan

Book cover of Tea From An Empty Cup

Aaron Conners Author Of Tex Murphy and the Tesla Effect

From the list on combining science fiction and detective stories.

By Aaron Conners Author

Why did Aaron love this book?

Cyberpunk Noir isn’t everyone’s cup of tea (sorry), and this story is dark and downbeat, with two female protagonists who aren’t especially sympathetic, so readers tend to love this book or hate it. For me, the kinetic writing style, crackling dialogue, and richly-detailed descriptions of cyberspace—as well as the fresh take on the “locked-room murder” (a virtual reality parlor in this case)—makes it a highly-recommended read.

The Year of Our War

By Steph Swainston

Book cover of The Year of Our War

Stuart Kurth Author Of Blades Lost

From the list on authors who mastered writing fantasy fight scenes.

By Stuart Kurth Author

Why did Stuart love this book?

This series is very elegantly written, but that’s not what makes it the most unique on this list. For a start, the protagonist is a skinny womanising drug-addict immortal with enormous wings. Yes, you read that right. He can fly, he drinks coffee, and when he overdoses he trips into a parallel universe. Several, actually. What else inhabits these strange worlds? Giant ants. And it’s these horse-sized monsters that the people of the Fourlands are embroiled in bitter conflict with. They pour through dimensional tears in waves, and the fighting is frenetic, bloody, and gruesome. Swainston has an almost forensic approach to the description of violence in these books, and it adds a dash of realism to an otherwise wildly fantastical setting and premise. A criminally underappreciated series.

The Adoration of Jenna Fox

By Mary E. Pearson

Book cover of The Adoration of Jenna Fox

Betty Culley Author Of The Name She Gave Me

From the list on adoption feels.

By Betty Culley Author

Who am I?

I went into foster care at nine months old, was adopted three years later, and as an adult I was reunited with five siblings I never knew I had. I’ve spent my whole life wondering or searching for the truths about my past.

Betty's book list on adoption feels

Discover why each book is one of Betty's favorite books.

Book cover of The Adoration of Jenna Fox

Book cover of Coo

Book cover of For Black Girls Like Me

Book cover of American Baby: A Mother, a Child, and the Shadow History of Adoption

Book cover of Klara and the Sun

Why did Betty love this book?

Jenna Fox wakes from a year-long coma after a terrible accident and tries to figure out who she is now. This is a book with futuristic medicine and technology, but the feelings and emotions are universal. Jenna’s struggle to find out the truth about her past, and her place in the present make this one of my very favorite books, which I’ve read and reread many times.

Blindsight

By Peter Watts

Book cover of Blindsight

Nadia Afifi Author Of The Sentient

From the list on sci-fi that draws you in with worldbuilding.

By Nadia Afifi Author

Why did Nadia love this book?

What is consciousness? I wish more science fiction novels explored this question, so when I found one that combines an alien encounter with big ideas about life and the human condition, I got excited. Very excited. This novel explodes with creativity, from the way it depicts aliens who’ve arrived at the edge of the solar system to observe Earth, to a resurrected vampire (yes, you read that right) who’s been included on the space crew sent to investigate the alien outpost. The novel wrestles with the idea of what it means to be conscious, and whether humans, with their sense of selfhood and empathy, might be a deviation in the universe.

Memory

By Lois McMaster Bujold

Book cover of Memory: Volume 11

Dan Moren Author Of The Nova Incident

From the list on sci-fi overflowing with intrigue and mystery.

By Dan Moren Author

Why did Dan love this book?

This is probably my favorite book of all time, from my favorite series of all time, The Vorkosigan Saga. Miles Vorkosigan, spy and accidental leader of a mercenary fleet, comes face to face with his mortality when he’s injured during a mission. As he recovers, he has to rebuild his life and his identity and find a new purpose in an empire that prizes warriors—a long-running challenge for this diminutive disabled hero. Meanwhile, one of his mentors, spymaster Simon Illyan, is dealing with a threat that could not only unravel his own life but decades’ worth of the Empire’s secrets. It’s funny, tense, and touching all at turns; I can’t think of that many sci-fi adventures that will have you laughing and crying.

Bone Rider

By J. Fally

Book cover of Bone Rider

Casey Wolfe Author Of A Mage's Power (Inquisition Trilogy)

From the list on LGBTQ fantasy and science fiction.

By Casey Wolfe Author

Why did Casey love this book?

This sci-fi adventure seems insane when you read the premise – a cowboy, a hitman, and an alien AI armor? Somehow, this manages to actually work, and becomes a thrilling adventure, with a pretty unique romance and fun world-building. It’s just one of those books you need to read to believe.

Re-Start

By Dan Sugralinov

Book cover of Re-Start

Edwin McRae Author Of Skulls of Atlantis

From the list on characters who empower others as they level up.

By Edwin McRae Author

Why did Edwin love this book?

Phil is given a singular gift, the ability to roleplay his own life. He’s able to convert all of that useless World of Warcraft experience into character points, which he then uses to upgrade himself. At first, this is an encouraging story about a young man turning his life around. But it soon becomes a story of gratitude with a main character who gives back as much as he gets. Level Up is about how privilege should be acknowledged and appreciated, and how self-improvement can be a shared experience with those around you.

Cat Zero

By Jennifer L. Rohn

Book cover of Cat Zero

Jamie A. Davies Author Of Life Unfolding: How the Human Body Creates Itself

From the list on to make you think about biology.

By Jamie A. Davies Author

Why did Jamie love this book?

This is the best scientific novel I have ever read. The story is fiction (not 'science fiction' in the sense of fantasy, but a story that could easily take place in the real world right now), but its portrayal of how science is done, by a bunch of completely believable characters, is really true-to-life. It's a great way for young people considering a research career to taste what they are really like, and a great way for everyone to ask why we do science the way we do, while enjoying a well-paced multi-layer story, that is written with real wit. [Declaration for transparency: I know the author as a scientific collaborator, but this is nothing to do with my recommendation of her fiction].

The Offset

By Calder Szewczak, Natasha C. Calder + 1 more ⌄

Book cover of The Offset

Redfern Jon Barrett Author Of Proud Pink Sky

From the list on sci-fi and speculative stories depicting queer lives.

By Redfern Jon Barrett Author

Why did Redfern love this book?

Presenting one of the darkest futures I’ve ever read, The Offset plunges us into a neo-medieval world ravaged by climate destruction. The debut novel of writing duo Natasha C. Calder and Emma Szewczak, The Offset is set in a sinister, depopulated London which murders people for reproducing, yet it also weaves in a strange social acceptance. As with Becky Chambers’s A Psalm for the Wild-Built, queer and nonbinary people are completely and unquestioningly accepted – yet though the latter takes place in a quiet utopia, while here we’re dealing with a dramatic dystopia. This tolerance adds depth and nuance to an otherwise bleak setting, and it’s not just relegated to the background: The central protagonists form a queer family, one threatened by the omnipresent cruelties of a decaying future.

Ciaphas Cain

By Sandy Mitchell

Book cover of Ciaphas Cain: Hero of the Imperium

Andrew Claydon Author Of The Simple Delivery

From the list on fantasy and sci-fi to make you laugh.

By Andrew Claydon Author

Why did Andrew love this book?

Nothing about the Warhammer 40,000 universe says ‘funny’. The fact that it’s fans call it the ‘grimdark’ is a proud testament to this. I’ve read a lot of Warhammer books, but was surprised when I came across this series. It follows Ciaphas Cain, a Commissar who is trying to survive and find the cushiest job for himself in a universe of constant war, yet somehow, he constantly ends up being the hero.

This book really opened my eyes to the fact that you can humor even in the grittiest settings, and that just because a book is funny, it doesn’t mean it can’t be action-packed and have high stakes. Much of the humor comes from Cain’s futile attempts to avoid any sort of combat and save his own skin.

When You Reach Me

By Rebecca Stead

Book cover of When You Reach Me

Jennie Yabroff Author Of If You Were Here

From the list on young readers set in old-school NYC.

By Jennie Yabroff Author

Why did Jennie love this book?

Miranda Sinclair is a latchkey kid who lives with her single mom on the Upper West Side of New York City in the late 1970s. I love the way Miranda navigates her dirty, dangerous, yet enchanting city – her street smarts, her fears, her relationships with the adults in the neighborhood who keep a watchful eye over her. And the book, while totally gritty and real, also has a lovely, melancholy element of magical realism that makes the story mysterious and poignant.

Time Signature

By Carlo Kennedy

Book cover of Time Signature

James Papandrea Author Of From Star Wars to Superman: Christ Figures in Science Fiction and Superhero Films

From the list on thought-provoking time travel.

By James Papandrea Author

Why did James love this book?

I just love the idea of a time machine that’s driven by music.

We all have strong memories that are sparked by hearing a particular song, and this turns that idea into a surprisingly plausible time travel story. I also love the 80s music themes, and the themes of love and family that are woven throughout.

It’s all very real, except the parts that aren’t, but those are fun. There’s even a bit of martial arts, this book ticks all the boxes. The characters talk and think like real three-dimensional people, and I could relate to them.

And for what it’s worth, the book actually passes the Bechdel test, which you don’t always get in sci-fi. I wish Netflix would turn it into a show or movie!

The End of Men

By Christina Sweeney-Baird

Book cover of The End of Men

J.A. Christy Author Of SmartYellow™

From the list on women in dystopian worlds.

By J.A. Christy Author

Why did J.A. love this book?

I read The End of Men recently during the pandemic. Without giving the plot away, this book is about a pandemic written before the actual pandemic. The thing I love about this book is the deep feelings it invoked. It is written from many viewpoints and I really cared about the characters – if a book can resonate so deeply that it makes you wonder how your life would be in the same circumstances, the author has succeeded. The women in the book face an almost unimaginable struggle and I rooted for them all the way.

Alien Safari

By Robert Appleton

Book cover of Alien Safari

Brian Enke Author Of Shadows of Medusa

From the list on science fiction about living on another planet.

By Brian Enke Author

Why did Brian love this book?

On future worlds with diverse plant and animal life, how will daily struggles for survival shape the inhabitants? This book highlights some thought-provoking biology concepts such as competitive cooperation. Hesperidia can be a scary world, but one filled with beauty, wonder, and endless imagination. Humans, of course, remain the ultimate predators… or are they? Detective Ferrix Vaughn is about to find out. Good space-settlement books always require deep characters, and this series excels. Stopper, a genetically engineered wonder-dog, has become one of my favorite fictional characters. I almost cried in the sequel when… well, that’s giving too much away.

Wild Cards I

By George R. R. Martin, Wild Cards Trust

Book cover of Wild Cards I

Blake M. Petit Author Of Other People's Heroes

From the list on superheroes outside of graphic novels.

By Blake M. Petit Author

Why did Blake love this book?

In the days after World War II, an alien device explodes in the skies above New York, blanketing the planet with an extraterrestrial virus. Most of the victims die horrible deaths. A smaller percentage – the “Jokers” – find their bodies mutated in various unpredictable ways. And a scant few draw an “Ace” – superpowers without the consequences of a Joker mutation. Wild Cards is the first in a series of “mosaic novels,” books of stories featuring the work of several writers contributing their own pieces of a larger tapestry that helps build and flesh out a remarkable world. The Wild Cards series is perhaps the most elaborate and provocative superhero universe that exists in prose fiction.

As much as I love comic books, it's always bothered me how many people think comics are superheroes and vice-versa. This was one of the first really successful attempts at doing something with… show more.

Firelord

By Parke Godwin

Book cover of Firelord

Catherine Wells Author Of Macbeatha

From the list on legendary characters from the British Isles.

By Catherine Wells Author

Why did Catherine love this book?

This is perhaps my favorite historical novel ever, not only because of Godwin’s evocative prose (“Half a baby in a ditch.” Brrr!), but because it contains an extended section on the “little people,” the mound dwellers who predated the Celts in Britain. These people became the fairies, elves, and gnomes of legend, but in Firelord they are the last of a dying culture, trying desperately to survive in a changed world. They capture a wounded Arthur, and as they take him underground, the author’s voice alters radically. It brilliantly captures the alien nature of the mound dwellers and their hypnotic effect on Arthur. Only after Arthur leaves them behind does it return, like Arthur, to something familiar.

Damiano

By R. A. MacAvoy

Book cover of Damiano

J.S. Watts Author Of Witchlight

From the list on if you are seeking witchery.

By J.S. Watts Author

Why did J.S. love this book?

The first in a trilogy of books of magical fantasy set in Renaissance Europe and beyond that looks at magic and witchery at an unusual slant. Centre stage is Damiano Delstrego: son of a wizard and alchemist with an inheritance of Dark Magics. Forced out by war, he goes on pilgrimage to seek the aid of the powerful witch Saara, but the road he is obliged to walk is a dark one. R. A. MacAvoy is another writer I have admired for a long time and I was very sad when ill health stopped her from writing. I believe, however, that she has started to write again, so I can but hope for new novels while recommending her older, skillful work.

Towing Jehovah

By James K. Morrow

Book cover of Towing Jehovah

Jass Richards Author Of The Blasphemy Tour

From the list on that dare to make fun of religion and/or gods.

By Jass Richards Author

Why did Jass love this book?

I confess I'm more attracted to Morrow's themes than his actual writing, but still. Towing Jehovah is premised on God having died and his corpse needs to be towed to the Arctic for preservation. It's part of a trilogy (the second and third books are titled Blameless in Abaddon and The Eternal Footman); to be honest, I don't remember reading the other two, but I must have... Also worth mentioning is Morrow's Bible Stories for Adults. All irreverent. All funny in a dark way.

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Wednesday, June 7, 2023

The problem with antiwoke centrism

CNN’s Chris Licht showed the problem with anti-

By Perry Bacon Jr.

Columnist

June 6, 2023 at 6:37 p.m. EDT

Chris Licht, chief executive of CNN, on May 17 in New York City. (Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images)

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In a roughly 15,000-word profile published last week by the Atlantic, CNN chief executive Chris Licht, who has complained that the network’s journalists were too opinionated when Donald Trump was president, gave a lot of, well, opinions.

He expressed skepticism about defunding the police and about using trans-inclusive language when referring to people who give birth to children. He implied people of color with Harvard degrees don’t add diversity to newsrooms and suggested that the news media should have more reporters who are religious, who own guns and who lived on food stamps as kids. He speculated that covid-19 deaths might have been overcounted by public officials. He said journalists should not “virtue signal” and that it’s hard to have “difficult conversations without being demonized or labeled.”

Licht is being mocked for his comments, but all the harsh criticism is a bit unfair. Licht’s skepticism of left-wing causes, and his view that people who don’t agree with the left are constantly attacked and shamed, isn’t some outlier stance. These ideas are regularly expressed in many of the nation’s most prominent news outlets. If you spend a lot of time talking to White men in Democratic politics, as I do, you have to nod along as comments like Licht’s are made, even if you don’t agree with them, to signal that you are a reasonable person worth talking to.

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Licht’s comments embody an anti-woke centrism that is increasingly prominent in American media and politics today, particularly among powerful White men who live on the coasts and don’t identify as Republicans or conservatives. It’s deeply flawed, and it’s pushing some important U.S. institutions to make bad decisions.

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By anti-woke, what I mean is skepticism of progressive causes and ideas, especially on issues of gender, race and sexuality. The term “woke” is vague and imprecise. But I think it does capture the movements toward greater equality such as Black Lives Matter that have gained strength and prominence over the past decade, particularly since the protests after the killing of George Floyd.

What I am describing is softer than the outright opposition on the political right to ideas such as critical race theory. Licht, for example, did not say he wants to see racial diversity initiatives at workplaces overturned or to ban gender-affirming care.

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You might call this centrism — and, to some extent, it is. But this is not the centrism of say, President Biden, who opposes some left-wing causes but doesn’t spend a lot of time deriding people who support them. Anti-woke centrism is really about emphasizing differences with progressives, who are inaccurately cast as Twitter-obsessed college graduates who constantly use terms like Latinx and are out of touch with ordinary Democratic voters.

Also, this kind of centrism isn’t usually described with that term by the people who practice it. Instead, they cast themselves as nonideological and neutral, while arguing that those who criticize them are dogmatic and nonobjective. Licht repeatedly referred to those who don’t share his journalism vision as looking to do “advocacy.”

Likewise, Chuck Todd, in his announcement this past Sunday that he is stepping down as moderator of “Meet the Press,” cast those who didn’t like how he hosted the show as “partisans.” New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger and former Washington Post executive editor Martin Baron have recently written pieces suggesting critics of the mainstream media don’t properly understand and appreciate objectivity and journalistic independence.

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It really matters that these anti-woke centrists often live in deeply Democratic areas. If you are in a red state, like me, you are constantly in fear of your state government adopting conservative policies — such as new limitations on reproductive freedom, transgender rights and honest education about race. But if you live in D.C. New York City or San Francisco, a much more realistic concern is that a “woke” liberal with whom you don’t agree gains political power — or sharply criticizes you in public.

“Americans are losing hold of a fundamental right as citizens of a free country: the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned,” the New York Times declared in the first sentence of a March 2022 editorial.

In reality, there has never been a right to voice your opinion without the possibility of being shamed or shunned (terms without precise meanings) — and there shouldn’t be. Shaming and shunning people are free expression, too. What I suspect this editorial was actually calling for is for self-described Democrats and liberals to be able to express more conservative views (such as skepticism about transgender rights) but without being attacked in the way that conservatives often are for such views (being called bigots).

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People who are not White men sometimes express Licht’s sentiments. (See Democratic Mayor Eric Adams of New York City.) But it’s hard to ignore that the people most invested in these sentiments tend to be White and male. The left-wing movements of the past decade, particularly Black Lives Matter, say America is dominated by white supremacy, patriarchy and out of control capitalism. So it is not surprising that rich White men view these movements, particularly their more radical ideas, with some skepticism.

Licht and Elon Musk, who has expressed similar sentiments, control two hugely important media platforms. Their views matter. That they have become consumed by this anti-wokeism has meant that great journalists were fired at CNN for being too anti-Trump and that Twitter’s verification system was disabled it seemed because Musk felt it gave too much prominence to left-wing people.

It’s discouraging that Sulzberger is caught up in Twitter bashing, recently casting the platform as “fostering a type of groupthink inside the profession.” Is Sulzberger carefully reading tweets from local news organizations in small and midsize cities across the country and concluding that the coverage is groupthink? I doubt it. He is just rebuking left-leaning activists who use the site to critique the Times. There was plenty of groupthink inside elite news outlets such as the Times before Twitter existed — but not really an easy way to alert their reporters to police shootings of unarmed Black men.

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There can and should be open debate about police reform, diversity, covid-19 policies and other issues — both between the two parties and among progressives and other non-Republicans. But when we have a left that is pushing America to finish the work of the 1960s and create a true multicultural democracy and a right that is banning Black intellectual ideas from public schools, it’s a huge mistake for powerful non-Republicans in society to spend so much time bashing the left. This anti-woke centrism often sounds as though people are auditioning to be today’s version of the “white moderates” the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. castigated six decades ago.

Chris Licht doesn’t have to be woke. Everyone in America doesn’t need to put their preferred pronouns in their Twitter bios or use the term “birthing people.” I don’t do either of those things.

But Licht and others like him should definitely stop being so anti-woke. It is disappointing that some of the most powerful people in the country think the problem in America is that people are too critical of the police and insufficiently critical of transgender activists. I can’t tell if the anti-woke don’t understand what’s actually happening in America — or if they actively oppose a more equitable country.

Wednesday, March 22, 2023

The Accidental Truth-Tellers of the Post-Privacy Era

Under Review

The Accidental Truth-Tellers of the Post-Privacy Era

In “Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs,” Kerry Howley searches for hidden links among whistle-blowers, conspiracy theorists, targets of the surveillance state, and the rest of us.

Peter C. BakerMarch 22, 2023

Illustration by Ard Su

It is only in the penultimate chapter of Kerry Howley’s “Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State” that we properly get to Satan. The previous two hundred pages have traced an odyssey through the post-9/11 American security state, searching for rhymes and resonance among the lives of its whistle-blowers, accidental truth-tellers, targets, and victims—and also the rest of us, tapping at our phones, constantly feeding data onto the Internet, aware that it’s all accumulating somewhere, much of it accessible to the government. The book is full of suggestive swerves and leaps of association, Howley’s attempts at getting us to look again at subjects and stories that might have been shocking once upon a time, but which we’ve grown used to living with. When the devil shows up, we’ve been reading about Reality Winner, who, when twenty-five years old and working as a National Security Agency contractor, leaked to the press a document about Russian cyberattacks on U.S. election officials. Right after narrating the 2018 hearing at which Winner was sentenced to five years and three months in prison, Howley cuts to the Monster Energy drink company, describing a 2014 viral video of a woman with a story to sell:

She has perfected her argument—that Monster Energy drinks are primarily a vehicle for Satan—into a crisp patter punctuated by forays into Hebrew, textual analysis, paranoid semiotics, and moments of well-timed eye contact. There is in her presentation a genuinely remarkable union of speech and physicality. She is tremendously good at this. “If God can use people and product,” she says, folding up an illustrative poster and picking up a can, pointing with crisp and clean gestures that focus the attention precisely where she intends, “so can Satan. You cannot deny that that is a cross.” She points to a cross on the can. “And what is witchcraft? When the cross”—meaningful pause—“goes upside down.” Here she inverts the can, as if taking a sip. “Bottoms up,” she says, tips the can a bit. “And the devil laughs.”

Howley presents the video as a harbinger of our present—its subject an amateur conspiracist piecing together far-flung fragments into an absurd, morally Manichaean fiction; its Internet-friendliness and focus on Satan presaging QAnon and other twenty-first-century conspiracy theories. But the video is also a useful (and, I suspect, intentional) point of comparison for Howley’s own project. Picking the best fragments from the infinite universe, stitching them together, making formal and stylistic choices in hopes of encouraging the audience to cast off conventional wisdom and move closer to the truth as you see it: the work of conspiracy-mongers online and the work of writers of critically acclaimed narrative nonfiction have considerable overlap. “All narrators, I say, are fiction,” Howley wrote in her first book, “Thrown,” which was about mixed-martial-arts fighters, and concerned with questions of artifice and truth. “All. The reliable ones have the decency to admit it.” We can’t say we weren’t warned.

To the extent that “Bottoms Up” has a main character, it’s Winner, whom Howley profiled for New York magazine in 2017, and who represents, to a remarkable degree, a convergence of the author’s preoccupations in a single, colorful character (with, as a writerly bonus, a name straight from Thomas Pynchon). When Reality—as Howley typically refers to her heroine—is on the page, we feel the intimacy of a novel. Born in small-town Texas, Winner started teaching herself Arabic after 9/11—she was nine years old at the time—hoping to one day use the language to prevent another attack. After high school, she joined the Air Force and became fluent in Farsi, Pashto, and Dari. She was assigned to support drone operations abroad from Fort Meade in Maryland. She worked long days, watching people from above, and interpreting their conversations to help decide whether they would be killed. The work was classified, so she couldn’t talk about it with family or friends. In 2016, she left the military and started applying for jobs with N.G.O.s in Afghanistan. She never got one, perhaps because she had no college degree.

In 2017, Winner took a job with Pluribus, an N.S.A. contractor, using her language skills to translate classified documents related to Iranian airspace—subject matter in which she had little interest. She worried about where her life was going, what contribution she was making. She soothed her anxieties with weight lifting and yoga. At home, she had a dog and a cat and several guns, including a pink AR-15. She worried about global warming and racial inequality. She hated Trump. At work, TVs everywhere were set to Fox News, and she hated that, too. In a note to herself—later confiscated by the F.B.I. and presented as evidence at her trial—she wrote, “I want to burn the White House down. Find somewhere in Kurdistan to live or Nepal. Ha, ha. Maybe.” In a message to her sister, she wrote, “I have to take a polygraph test where they’re going to ask if I plotted against the government. #gonnafail [. . .] Look I only say I hate America three times a day. I’m no radical.”

One day, bored at work and browsing the ever-expanding world of classified material available via her work computer, Winner came across a five-page document about the 2016 election. Russian intelligence, this document said, had orchestrated a cyberattack that sent malware to hundreds of U.S. election officials, attached to e-mails that looked like they’d originated from a reputable election-software company. Winner experienced a yawning disconnect between the world that her security clearance let her access and the world that everyone outside her professional life seemed to think they were living in. She folded up a printout of the document detailing the cyberattack, stuffed it in her pantyhose, took it home, and mailed it to the left-leaning investigative news outlet the Intercept, which used a bafflingly sloppy process to verify the document’s legitimacy. On the same day the Intercept published their story, the F.B.I. put out a statement: Winner was in custody. She was eventually imprisoned, then transferred to a halfway house in 2021 for good behavior; she is under probation until 2024.

Howley’s central claim—the thread with which she seeks to string her wide-ranging material, including Winner’s story—is that American life since the early two-thousands has been increasingly marked by two developments. First: the mass collection of personal data by the state, with help from tech companies. Second: most individuals’ daily participation in this process, as we deposit more and more digital fragments of our life on the Internet, some of it notionally private, some posted publicly, accessible to the government. This creates a near-infinite well of details that can be used to tell stories about us. These stories—“sticky fiction” pieced together from facts, but not wholly true—get built to rationalize decisions about who gets charged with crimes, who gets tortured, who gets targeted by drone strikes, who gets imprisoned, and for how long.

Before the leak, Winner lived primarily on one side of this process, helping the state watch and listen and assemble its stories. Afterward, she was on the other side—someone the state wanted to tell one particular story about, in the service of punishment. In this story, supported amply by choice fragments (“I only say I hate America three times a day”), she was one thing: a young woman long determined to harm America. In Howley’s telling, Winner is, like all of us, many things. We contain multitudes. We communicate in different registers depending on whom we’re communicating with. We say things we don’t mean, or half-mean, or say things to see how it feels to say them, and learn something about how our minds work. Human multiplicity, and irreducibility to data points, seems to be Howley’s North Star, the principle that she is invested in more than any other, and is writing to protect. (When she describes Winner’s mother as “incredibly cagey and deeply opaque, among the most unknowable people I have ever tried to capture in writing,” it sounds like a compliment.) We change our minds, and we forget, and we lose parts of ourselves (sometimes intentionally, sometimes not), and we call this process becoming a self.

It’s as if Howley, in profiling Winner with such care, is trying to wash off the state’s sticky, simplifying fiction and reveal the human underneath—suggesting how easily anyone could be reduced to a version of themselves they wouldn’t recognize. The extent to which you’d share this concern might depend on your baseline feelings about the power of the government. Howley worked and has written for years at the libertarian magazine Reason; in “Bottoms Up,” the L-word shows up only in passing, but its traces are apparent in the insistence that we would all do well to treat the state—any state, but especially the sprawling post-9/11 American security apparatus—with a reflexive wariness, even if we believe we have nothing to hide. “The radical transparency we have accepted, step by step, these past years, is a bet we have made: that we and the people with the guns and cages will stay on good terms,” she writes.

Even though Winner is the center of Howley’s narrative mosaic, she doesn’t appear much in the first hundred pages. Instead, quickly drawn character studies form a montage of the post-9/11 era in which Winner came of age, the mood board of her psychocultural inheritance. There’s John Walker Lindh, the American who, at twenty, joined the Taliban, and, after being captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan, became a national symbol of treachery. There’s Abu Zubaydah, the Saudi man mistakenly thought to be a high-ranking Al Qaeda member, and as a result subjected to a nightmarish cycle of confinement and torture, many details of which have been destroyed. (When dealing with the C.I.A., it turns out, there may be no receipts to keep.) There are whistle-blowers of different temperaments and ideological inclinations, including John Kiriakou—a former C.I.A. officer who characterized waterboarding as an effective interrogation technique, but who also went to prison for leaking to a journalist the name of a colleague allegedly connected to the government’s torture program—and Chelsea Manning, who sent troves of classified data to WikiLeaks. There’s Joe Biggs, who joined the Army after 9/11 and got sent to Iraq and Afghanistan, and later became a correspondent for the conspiracy-weaving Infowars, then an organizer for the Proud Boys, charged with seditious conspiracy relating to the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. (Biggs has pleaded not guilty.) Julian Assange gets a few pages, too.

Howley doesn’t strongly demonstrate how these stories relate to one another or to her stated arguments, which roam far beyond her central point about the state’s digitally supercharged storytelling powers and into the broader culture. Americans, she asserts, have lost touch with the skill of defining themselves as individuals; relatedly, they have “lost the knack for anonymity.” Our lives have become not less physical per se—screens and the like are as physical as anything else—but less sensual, and this has created for some a hunger for extreme physical experiences. “Bottoms Up” is peppered with such confident aphorisms, and it’s often hard to tell whether Howley is working to validate these claims or whether she assumes that readers will accept as common sense her descriptions of the world. Focussing on them in isolation, I sometimes felt skeptical. Did we ever really—before smartphones, before cloud storage—construct our selves through some fundamentally private, internal process? Haven’t individuals’ identities always been bound up with the gaze of others—sometimes experienced as a comfort, sometimes as oppressive or burdensome, sometimes as both?

In her attempt to connect government surveillance to the way we live now, Howley leans especially hard on the way our old opinions, stray thoughts, and jokes accumulate online, and how these decontextualized pieces of our former selves can make trouble for our careers and reputations. Though it’s true that the practice of combing through someone’s old blog posts and tweets looking for ammunition does bear resemblance to how the government might seek to cook up a case against a target, concerns about malicious and ungenerous misinterpretation of the words we leave online are, it seems safe to say, much more salient to a professional writer like Howley than to the average citizen.

As a fellow nineties kid, I sometimes wondered whether Howley was placing outsized significance on gauzy nostalgia for what it meant to be a teen-ager before smartphones, selfies, and social media. I get it: I do the same thing. It’s easy to forget that the challenge of becoming a person has always meant negotiating pressures between inside and outside, self and group, the stories you tell about yourself and the stories the world tells about you. Digital technologies have, of course, changed the texture of these negotiations—but technology didn’t create them. Similarly, state institutions have told powerfully distorting stories about their targets—and used those stories to justify injustice—since long before anyone ever sent an e-mail or left a trail of metadata.

For another, more conventional book, objections like this might be fatal. But “Bottoms Up” proceeds less by the sequential logic of the proof, or of typical journalism, and more by the associative logic of the mood board. And it works. Howley’s prose reminded me of Don DeLillo’s, not just in its preternatural attunement to invisible currents of feeling which course between varied pockets of the globalized American project, but also in the feeling that she’d taken her experience of the world and melted it down into a weapon meant to puncture our hardened habits of perception. “American surveillance is partly made of electrons and partly made of tubes and partly made of dogs,” Howley writes. This sentence is the sharp tip of a longer passage designed to remind us that, when we hear about surveillance on the news, we’re hearing not just about software programs running silently through the cloud. We’re hearing about thousands of middle-class Americans working in generic-looking office buildings in generic-looking office parks, and also—at the N.S.A. server farm in Utah, anyway—a crew of on-site security dogs, with, presumably, a stash of dog food and poop bags. Stories about government surveillance have a strange tendency to make an abstract concept even more abstract. Dogs, in Howley’s hands, deliver a jolt of the real.

The more of these jolts Howley produces, the more “Bottoms Up” restores the world to something akin to its original strangeness. It’s a daring approach, and an invaluable one: seeing the world anew makes it feel, in some small way, up for grabs, and this feeling is a precondition for real thought. I still haven’t decided whether I agree with at least half of Howley’s arguments, or the arguments suggested by her method. In writing as in intelligence analysis, there’s always the possibility that the connection you’re tracing isn’t actually there, or isn’t meaningful (bottoms up!). But that’s hardly a reason not to try.

As penance for its mishandling of her leak, the Intercept’s parent company funded Winner’s legal team, which eventually ran up a two-million-dollar bill. Thanks to the byzantine workings of security clearance, she was able to speak with her legal team only on the rare occasions when everyone involved—including lawyers in Washington, local counsel in Georgia, and Winner herself—could all get to secure-communications facilities at the same time. Details of her case, including the content of the document she’d leaked, were routinely discussed in the press, but her lawyers were afraid that, by accessing it themselves, they would run afoul of regulations on the handling of classified material. Winner never became a celebrity on the level of Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning, perhaps in part because of whistle-blower fatigue, but also, it seems possible, because she fell between political fault lines. No one on the right wanted to support someone providing possible evidence to the Russia-Trump collusion narrative, and many on the left didn’t, either, viewing that narrative as an attempt by the Democratic establishment to dodge responsibility for its losses. Her mom, Billie, tried holding a protest on her behalf in her Texas home town, but only twenty people came.

The longer we stay with Winner, the more we sense Howley’s admiration for her subject—less for the impulsive leak itself, and more for the strength of her commitment to figuring out, however imperfectly, the world and her place in it. This explains why we hear so much about Winner’s time behind bars. (In fact, just from reading Howley’s book, you wouldn’t know Winner has been released.) We read in granular detail about the needless, punitive difficulty of simple visits. We read about the horrible food. We read about Winner asking her mother to give money to her fellow-inmates, leading in yoga classes, worrying about the health of a pregnant peer, arguing with a Bible instructor. These are, we come to understand, examples of Winner trying, under extraordinary pressure, to remember who she is and to work out who she’s going to be—or, more modestly, to remind herself that she’s alive. Sometimes, this means sticking her tongue out at the experience of constantly being watched, her every mood and appearance scrutinized by someone else. Like her courtroom sketch artist:

Baker Donelson filed and filed and filed again. Reality was ferried back and forth to the courthouse, which she hated, because these were days in which she would not get her time outside. When she was back at Lincoln the women would gather around the television to watch the evening’s local news, on which a story about Reality would appear. This story was inevitably accompanied by a color sketch. These sketches looked nothing like her; the face long and hard and mature, the nose aquiline; her youthful moon face replaced with a kind of sinister bony angularity. She grew to recognize the sketch artist in court: big white hair, big bushy eyebrows, a set of tiny binoculars, opera glasses, through which to watch her. He looked, to her, like “Jim Carrey dressed as Mark Twain in Bruce Almighty.” Once, seated next to her attorney Matt Chester, she felt the sketch artist’s eyes on her. She picked up Chester’s pen. She stared directly at the sketch artist staring at her. She began to draw.

“No,” said Chester.

In jail, on the phone with her sister, and aware their call is being surveilled and transcribed, they amuse themselves by saying “vodka” to each other again and again in a Russian accent. Sometimes they phone up the White House, and ask for Donald Trump. These are small moments of silliness, but they contribute to an intimate portrait of Winner as someone fighting to be meaningfully human under constraints of the very sort that disturb Howley most.

In her introduction, Howley recalls being pregnant and worrying about the world her daughter would be born into. “I despaired many times [. . .] about my ability to protect the thing I was growing from a world that had abandoned walls, that asserted its right to invade, to amass electrons against wholeness, that had forgotten what it was like to construct a self in the dark.” She wants things to be different, but isn’t sure how. “She is here now, in the world, and there is nothing to do but help her remember.” The hope Howley is expressing is that, by trying as hard as possible to figure out exactly what story she wants to tell, and how to tell it, a writer can come to know something she didn’t before, and that, in the private space of communion with the text, the reader will learn something new, too, and feel the possibility of learning more. Like Winner’s small acts of resistance, this is a modest hope, but a fierce one. ♦

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Peter C. Baker is a writer based in Evanston, Illinois. His latest novel, “Planes,” was published in May, 2022.Read More »

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Wednesday, September 14, 2022

Getting from Naples to Pompeii

Heading to Pompeii on a day-trip from Naples? In this post, we've shared all the essential information on your transport options from the city to the famous Roman ruins at the foot of Mount Vesuvius.

Article updated with summer 2021 visitor + ticket information - Pompeii is open!

THE ESSENTIALS
// A Naples to Pompeii train costs €2.80, takes 35 minutes.
// The bus costs €2.80, takes 45 minutes.
// Various Pompeii tours from Naples, including transport.
// Round-trip private transfers cost €25+.
// Buy your Pompeii ticket in advance.

HOW TO GET FROM NAPLES TO POMPEII

TRAIN FROM NAPLES TO POMPEII

The most accessible and convenient way to travel to Pompeii from Naples is via two regular train services, both of which depart from the same station.

It’s highly recommended to book your Pompeii ticket in advance online before you travel, especially as entrances are now allocated to specific time slots - book your Pompeii ticket here.

THE EAV CIRCUMVESUVIANA

This slow public train connects locals with towns and suburbs along the Gulf of Naples, and brings thousands of visitors each day to Pompeii.

It departs from Porta Nolana Station (Google Maps), but the easiest access point for you to get on will be at the next stop in Napoli Piazza Garibaldi (Google Maps), which is a separate station within the same building as Napoli Centrale Train Station (the city's main one).

That may sound complicated, but it's nothing to worry about.

Simply make your way to Napoli Centrale (Google Maps) and, once inside, follow the blue signs for the Circumvesuviana. This will take you downstairs to the lower floor and along a covered walkway toward the staffed ticket office of Napoli Piazza Garibaldi, which consists of three or four kiosks opposite the barriers on the left hand side.

From the main entrance of Napoli Centrale to Piazza Garibaldi station, it's about a 5-minute walk

You want to take the blue 'Sorrento' line; when purchasing your ticket, ask for ‘Pompei Scavi’'; there is also 'Pompei' station but this isn't the right one to go for!

It's €2.80 per person one-way, and travel time is around 35 minutes. A one-way ticket is fine. There are a lot of station stops along the way, but some services run a little quicker as they skip a dozen or so.

Note that you can only buy tickets in person at either Porta Nolana or Napoli Piazza Garibaldi station. Cash is definitely preferred by the staff, but you can pay by card (don't bank on this working though). As this is not a TrenItalia train service, you will not find tickets online or on their website. There are no seat reservations.

Once tickets are purchased, pass through the barriers and go downstairs to the platforms. There are screens with departures/arrivals information, and just make certain that you get on the train with 'Sorrento' as its final destination, as there will be other Circumvesuviana lines passing through.

The Circumvesuviana timetable we saw taped up at the kiosk in September 2020 had services starting at 06:11, with departures twice an hour at 11 minutes past and 41 minutes past. There was also an additional service at 08:13.

You can see current schedules here - click 'Orario Treni' then select 'L1 Napoli-Sorrento'. Note that 'DD' on the schedule denotes an express service.

In our experiences of riding the Circumvesuviana to Pompeii, it's a relatively small, surprisingly tired, and worn down service in comparison to some of the excellent Regionale trains you'll find across Italy. It's more like an old, crap commuter train in London than a sparkly tourist shuttle service, but that's no big issue.

It can become frightfully hot and a bit crowded though.

Disembark at Pompei Scavi station (sometimes written as 'Pompei Scavi-Villa Misteri'), and you'll be a two-minute walk from the Porta Marina entrance to Pompeii!

POMPEII CIRCUMVESUVIANA TRAVEL TIPS

// This train route is notorious for pickpockets, so keep your daypack on your person and don't leave your phone or wallet temptingly positioned in a back pocket. Also, note that both city stations are in an area which may feel a little rough around the edges at times, so be aware of this if returning back late to Napoli.

// If arriving for an early train and you've got time to spare, you can buy your ticket first and then grab a coffee and pastry at the coffee stand around the corner from the ticket booths or after the barriers. Alternatively, you'll find a few options outside the Pompeii entrance.

// This Napoli-Sorrento line will always be busiest in the morning hours and ticket queues from other visitors are likely throughout the day - it's best to arrive to Napoli Centrale with 15-20 minutes to spare before the next departure, and don't bank on getting a seat for your journey.

// If travelling in peak summer season at peak times, then boarding at Porto Nolana station (one stop before Napoli Piazza Garibaldi) is the best way to guarantee a seat for the journey.

// We don't recommend staying in and around Napoli Central Station unless you really have to - find out more in '10 Things to Know Before You Visit Naples' (published soon).

// Stops are announced in advance and there's also a little route map above the doors in each carriage for you to keep track.

// Note that the green line to Poggiomarino, also part of the Circumvesuviana network, will take you to 'Pompei' station - this is however not the correct one for the archaeological site. If you end up going there by mistake, don't worry though as you'll just be a 10-minute walk from one of the three site entrances.

// The blue Sorrento line is also the one to take if you wish to visit the Herculaneum ruins (disembark at Ercolano Scavi) or take a day trip to the Amalfi Coast.

If you'd like to have a guide in Pompeii, then this tour with an archaeologist is highly-rated and will meet you at the site or station.

THE METROPOLITAN LINE

Although the Circumvesuviana is the most popular, there is an alternative Napoli to Pompeii train.

The Metropolitan service also departs from Napoli Piazza Garibaldi, but does not stop at 'Pompei Scavi'. Instead, it will take you to 'Pompei' station in the modern town of Pompei, from which you're a 10-minute walk to one of the site entrances.

Note, the easiest way to tell the difference between the site and the town is that the Pompeii ruins always have an extra 'i’ (except on the train station names!).

It's €2.80 per person with a travel time of 38 minutes, and you can buy your tickets for this service online or at the various TrenItalia ticket machines in the station.

There are two departures per hour - see schedules on TrenItalia or Italiarail.

This option would be better if you're basing yourself in Pompei for a night or two, rather than just taking a day trip from Naples, and therefore carrying luggage. However, it's absolutely fine to take this train for your day trip too, providing you're happy with the slightly longer walk from the station to the entrance.

Plan | For lots of free resources, tips on tickets, and advice on how to improve your Pompeii day trip experience, take a look at ‘17 Things To Know Before Visiting Pompeii’. You can buy your Pompeii ticket here.

BUS FROM NAPLES TO POMPEII

The train is affordable and more frequent, but the bus may be your preferred option if your accommodation is close to Naples's docks and cruise terminal, Nuova Marina.

Make your way down to the SITA Bus Station & Ticket Terminal (Google Maps), and buy a ticket for the Napoli-Salerno line. Departures are on the hour and the half hour, starting from 7.30 am; note that not every service running this route stops at Pompei, so you should always double-check before boarding the next departure.

Note that 'Pompei Scavi' is again the best place to disembark (it's the 3rd or 4th stop), but don't worry if you get dropped off elsewhere within the town of Pompei.

Travel time is about the same as the train (35-45 minutes, depending on traffic), and costs €2.80 per person. You can buy you ticket on board if the ticket office is shut. If going for the bus during peak times or summer months, note that this will naturally have limited capacity versus the train and is also used by locals for non-Pompeii journeys.

The SITA bus company website is horrendous to navigate, but if you go here, and input 'Napoli' as your departure and 'Pompei' as your destination, then click 'ricerca', it should bring up a PDF for the 5001 SALERNO - NOCERA - NAPOLI which includes updated schedule information.

Alternatively, check out this page on Moovit which has various details about the route and service.

A NAPLES POMPEII TOUR

Travelling to Pompeii independently with public transport actually opens up several interesting, highly-rated tour options which meet you at the site. For example, this two-hour small-group tour led by an archaeologist has fantastic reviews, whilst this three-hour small-group walking tour, with maximum 15 people, also has glowing reviews and offers an excellent in-depth introduction to Pompeii and its stories.

These also give you a bit more flexibility as you can stay in the site and explore independently after the tour concludes.

However, we fully appreciate the some of you may prefer the convenience of joining a tour which includes transport from/to Naples, as well as a guide and tickets. If that’s the case, then it’s definitely worth taking a look at this half-day tour from Naples.

Lastly, if you’d like to combine your visit to Pompeii with a walk around the crater of Mount Vesuvius, then make sure you read this post: How To Visit Pompeii and Mount Vesuvius in One Day.

A TAXI OR PRIVATE TRANSFER

You won't find a taxi driver willing to take you one-way for a one-way fare, so you'll have to pay the return rate even if simply going from Naples. You may be able to negotiate a fare return trip fare with waiting time, and price we've found in our research are €70 - €90.

Therefore, if you'd like and a private transfer from Naples to Pompeii, your best and most affordable bet is one of the services available to book online. Note that these provide two to three hours to explore the site (make sure to confirm), rather than an unlimited amount of time to explore.

Naples to Pompeii Shared Shuttle | Hotel pick up and drop-off in air-conditioned shared transport which will wait as you explore the ruins.

Private Shuttle | Alternatively, you could go for this private door-to-door option in an air-conditioned vehicle. Find out more here.