22 rated Exit Strategy: 5 stars
Exit Strategy by Martha Wells (The Murderbot Diaries, #3)
"Martha Wells's Hugo, Nebula, Alex, and Locus Award-winning, New York Times and USA Today bestselling series, The Murderbot Diaries, comes …
Literary gadfly. Profile photo from Ruri Miyahara, “The Kawai Complex Guide to Manors and Hostel Behavior”, volume 5: an ink drawing of a person spacing out with one hand on their cheek, under dappled shade.
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"Martha Wells's Hugo, Nebula, Alex, and Locus Award-winning, New York Times and USA Today bestselling series, The Murderbot Diaries, comes …
I'm not sure if other people do this in book reviews but I like to annotate how I came to the book in question, because I think it's helpful for others to compare their recent life story to mine in order to better make sense of the review.
It's entirely coincidental that this is second book that I came to via Ranjan Roy's tweeting (see my previous review for why Ranjan matters to me). Ranjan ringingly endorses not this book but Julius Krein's longread, "The Value of Nothing: Capital versus Growth". Like Ranjan, I absolutely loved Krein's piece and when I finished it, I began trawling its bibliography, which is how I found this book: cites Davis for the helpful term "Nikefication".
Krein's thesis, which builds on a previous piece also in American Affairs by Herman Mark Schwartz, "Corporate Profit Strategies and U.S. Economic Stagnation" which is also fantastic, …
I'm not sure if other people do this in book reviews but I like to annotate how I came to the book in question, because I think it's helpful for others to compare their recent life story to mine in order to better make sense of the review.
It's entirely coincidental that this is second book that I came to via Ranjan Roy's tweeting (see my previous review for why Ranjan matters to me). Ranjan ringingly endorses not this book but Julius Krein's longread, "The Value of Nothing: Capital versus Growth". Like Ranjan, I absolutely loved Krein's piece and when I finished it, I began trawling its bibliography, which is how I found this book: cites Davis for the helpful term "Nikefication".
Krein's thesis, which builds on a previous piece also in American Affairs by Herman Mark Schwartz, "Corporate Profit Strategies and U.S. Economic Stagnation" which is also fantastic, is that in the US (and less so in other countries), corporate profits and share prices come from specific financial engineering techniques, including share buybacks, spinning off higher-valuation subsidiaries, and recentering on intellectual property. They do not come from the things that you would hope corporations, both public and private, do, like invest in capacity or R&D—those are positively awful ways to try to generate profits and shareholder value. I think you can see this most clearly in looking at American firms' hurdle rates: "In theory, firms should invest in a new project whenever the expected returns on the investment exceed the firm’s cost of capital". In practice, firms only invest in new projects when the expected return is 7% to 15% higher than the cost of capital, a gap that's persisted over decades and over multiple interest rate cycles.
The aforementioned Nikefication is a superb shorthand for this basket of financial engineering mechanisms that American public and private firms use to maximize shareholder value even if it means decreasing competitiveness and accepting malinvestments.
Only the middle third of this book is about Nikefication, but the first third is valuable because it's a deep look at the social and business environments that preceded today's Nikefied field. Beginning with the birth of corporations as mechanisms to raise enormous amounts of capital needed to build American canals and railroads, and their subsequent co-evolution with the American social experiment, was really helpful, because as Davis elucidates, other countries like the UK and Germany, with much stronger central governments and banking sectors, followed a very different path.
After discussing the deep past (pre-Nikefication) and the recent past (Nikefication), Davis discusses the future. The corporate structure is already a thing of the past: the vast majority if IPOs in recent decades didn't need capital, they IPO'd to cash out founders and earlier investors. Gone is the social pact whereby big corporations hire huge swaths of the population and provide jobs and benefits. Vizio and Flip and Google and Nike and Hilton can coordinate huge amounts of business activity with tiny workforces. What comes next? This part of the book is speculative and describes a range of possibilities all along the utopia–dystopia scale—no doubt the future will be two steps forward, one step back.
Davis' prose is clear and approachable, frequently revisiting points and restating them. It's much easier to read than Krein or Schwartz' pieces in American Affairs and just takes longer because it's much longer. I'd love a Krein-ified version of the book but am very glad I read it!
Having read some amazing essay collaborations between Jo Walton and Ada Pamler, including the stupendously important "The Protagonist Problem", when I saw that Jo Walton had written a novel of Medici Florence, I began reading it straightway, only barely registering the title and not even glancing at the blurb—as a lover of the art of Italian Renaissance, especially Florentine art and architecture, I know I couldn't go wrong.
What a story. What verve! I have read a couple of novels steeped in the Catholic mythology (Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow) and gladly add this to that esteemed company—and am especially grateful to avoid even the slightest of spoilers.
I love the color Jo Walton gives us: scraping muck off one's shoes before entering a house, dipping bread in soup. I also find myself very thoughtfully reflecting on how the entire …
Having read some amazing essay collaborations between Jo Walton and Ada Pamler, including the stupendously important "The Protagonist Problem", when I saw that Jo Walton had written a novel of Medici Florence, I began reading it straightway, only barely registering the title and not even glancing at the blurb—as a lover of the art of Italian Renaissance, especially Florentine art and architecture, I know I couldn't go wrong.
What a story. What verve! I have read a couple of novels steeped in the Catholic mythology (Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow) and gladly add this to that esteemed company—and am especially grateful to avoid even the slightest of spoilers.
I love the color Jo Walton gives us: scraping muck off one's shoes before entering a house, dipping bread in soup. I also find myself very thoughtfully reflecting on how the entire Christian mytho-psychology needs you to have both total confidence in your own worthiness but also simultaneously having total uncertainty about it—something Jo Walton's Savonarola had to contend with, as do today's believers. I shudder momentarily.
Ada Palmer holds up several novels as examples of hopepunk in "Hopepunk, optimism, purity, and futures of hard work". Hopepunk is a neologism initially intended to be the opposite of grimdark but as she elucidates in that excellent essay, it's come to mean more: stories about imperfection, about the hard work of trying to make things better even as we know they might get worse:
We also need stories of people who are tired like us. Who are trapped between crises like us. Who are grungy, and sweaty, and compromised, and struggling like us.
One of those examples was The Goblin Emperor and I loved Maia's goodness, perfectly-rendered to fit with the world-building. I love slow-burn slice of life stories where people are basically good to each other despite life's many imperfections, and while very different than my go-to examples of that genre, The Goblin Emperor joins that list. …
Ada Palmer holds up several novels as examples of hopepunk in "Hopepunk, optimism, purity, and futures of hard work". Hopepunk is a neologism initially intended to be the opposite of grimdark but as she elucidates in that excellent essay, it's come to mean more: stories about imperfection, about the hard work of trying to make things better even as we know they might get worse:
We also need stories of people who are tired like us. Who are trapped between crises like us. Who are grungy, and sweaty, and compromised, and struggling like us.
Incredibly tight storytelling. Superb pacing. Delightful grayscale inkwash art. And of course one of the greatest, most moving dramas of our generation. Of John Lewis’ life I’m reminded of Amitav Ghosh who said “Often reality exceeds fiction in its improbability”.
I am left astonished at the quality of this book and have summoned the rest of the series, hungry for more.
Occasionally I have need to refer to "a past life", but I doubt I'll be able to use that turn of phrase or that frame of mind without a deep disquiet thanks to Elaine Castillo, a mighty poet-goddess:
“Hero couldn’t imagine Teresa at eight or nine, gorging herself on tiny oily crablets, but the fact that Hero couldn’t imagine it said less about Teresa and more about Hero. Teresa had been that girl, too, in another life. No—not in another life. The same one. Hero was starting to figure that out, too.”
Forgive me, this is ridiculous but in trying to both describe Castillo's novel as well as my path to it (and through it), the following formula presents itself: Garcia-Márquez, minus magical realism thank god, plus some "Trese", plus "Scrubs", plus a lot of Mao, plus my life in the California Bay Area?
Because, yes, here's a …
Occasionally I have need to refer to "a past life", but I doubt I'll be able to use that turn of phrase or that frame of mind without a deep disquiet thanks to Elaine Castillo, a mighty poet-goddess:
“Hero couldn’t imagine Teresa at eight or nine, gorging herself on tiny oily crablets, but the fact that Hero couldn’t imagine it said less about Teresa and more about Hero. Teresa had been that girl, too, in another life. No—not in another life. The same one. Hero was starting to figure that out, too.”
“Hero opened her mouth, still unsure of whether to use English or Tagalog when talking to Paz. Paz had a habit of speaking to Roni in a mixture of English, Tagalog, and Pangasinan. It felt like Roni didn’t really know the difference between Tagalog and Pangasinan, and moved between the two interchangeably as if they were one language. Nobody had told her otherwise, Hero supposed. But for Hero, listening to the mixture was like listening to a radio whose transmission would occasionally short out; she’d get half a sentence, then nothing—eventually the intelligible parts would start back up, but she’d already lost her place in the conversation. But when Pol would come in, they’d switch to English, and like adjusting a dial to get a sharper signal, Hero would be able to tune in again.”
“She brought things that Hero recognized but rarely ate in Vigan, afritada and adobo and pancit, which Hero associated only with festivals and holidays. She brought the foil-wrapped meat loaf Hero thought of as embutido, but which Paz called morhon.”
Superb—just what I, a big josei fan, needed after the incredible storytelling of the "ODDTAXI" anime. This is a delicately-told tale, as seen through the gauze of memory, curious with poky bits of humor in surprising places.
A couple of notes—I think original title, "Sensei no kaban", meaning "Sensei's briefcase", is much more lovely than the English's non sequitur.
Also something really funny about the opening. In English it goes, "His full name was … but I called him 'Sensei.' Not 'Mr.' or 'Sir,' just 'Sensei.'" I was curious what original text could result in this strange sentence, and I went to look on Bookwalker, and—if I may be so bold as to attempt a non-translation—it is, "… but I called him 'Sᴇɴsᴇɪ'. Not '先生', not 'Sensei', but all in small caps, 'Sᴇɴsᴇɪ'" (先生 is "sensei" in kanji, and the small caps are analogous to katakana, the "uppercase" Japanese syllabary; …
Superb—just what I, a big josei fan, needed after the incredible storytelling of the "ODDTAXI" anime. This is a delicately-told tale, as seen through the gauze of memory, curious with poky bits of humor in surprising places.
A couple of notes—I think original title, "Sensei no kaban", meaning "Sensei's briefcase", is much more lovely than the English's non sequitur.
Also something really funny about the opening. In English it goes, "His full name was … but I called him 'Sensei.' Not 'Mr.' or 'Sir,' just 'Sensei.'" I was curious what original text could result in this strange sentence, and I went to look on Bookwalker, and—if I may be so bold as to attempt a non-translation—it is, "… but I called him 'Sᴇɴsᴇɪ'. Not '先生', not 'Sensei', but all in small caps, 'Sᴇɴsᴇɪ'" (先生 is "sensei" in kanji, and the small caps are analogous to katakana, the "uppercase" Japanese syllabary; for the analogy to hold, the author would have typeset it as Sᴇɴsᴇɪ through the whole book). I laughed and laughed.
The kind of book you take a day off of work to finish. For lovers of stories as rich and cosmopolitan as the cities they are set in (I found this on a list of books set in our beloved New York City).
I read, what, all six Murderbot novels in as many days. Because of that hilarious photo on Martha Wells' website of her reading a Murderbot novel aloud to… search and rescue robots at Texas A&M University. Because I have friends who are just like Murderbot and ART in terms of sarcasm and assholery (respectively). But mainly because Martha Wells is a pen-wielding goddess, whom I humbly beg for more.