A Few Ideas About Reading and Writing

Maybe the Scramblers Have a Point

May 14, 2021 4 minutes

“Imagine you’re a scrambler.” With those four words, Peter Watts’s character Siri Keaton kicks off the final major epiphany of his science fiction masterpiece about first contact, Blindsight. It’s why the aliens have come, and why they’re so inscrutable to the master interpreter, Susan James. Ultimately, we realize the aliens, which the crew name “Scramblers,” are here to wipe out humanity, but as Siri and Susan come to understand, the aliens don’t have a reason humans can understand.

Siri is telling the story as a story. And he tells us straight up that he’s an unreliable narrator. Part of the book’s conceit is that the reader has to puzzle out what’s really gong on in Siri’s head– a head that’s very different from yours or mine.

Thinking about it, I realized that maybe the aliens have a very understandable reason.

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Adele, by Leila Slimani: Vapid and Lacking

February 20, 2021 3 minutes

Adele by Leila Slimani is one of those books that I so desperately wanted to like based on the reviews, and ended up absolutely loathing based on the actual content. It's a book-length bit of New Yorker fiction, you know the type: contemporary, moody, and pointless. meaningful plot. If a story is what happened, and a plot is why it happened, then Slimani has written a story that goes nowhere.

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Sequels must be in a different genre to work

February 17, 2021 4 minutes

So, the subject of Alien and Aliens came up again, and I want to circle back to something I wrote awhile ago., in which I excoriated a writing teacher for completely missing the point of Ripley’s character. Because if you miss the point of Ripley's character, you completely fail to understand why the sequel worked so well.

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