The No Body Problem: The Light Brigade, by Kameron Hurley
And see what happened to America, after. It became everything it accused others of being. It tore itself apart, riddled by the rot of unfettered free speech, drowned in a deluge of propaganda foisted upon an uneducated public with no formalized training in critical thinking. Liberal democracies and scheming socialist regimes were doomed from the very start. You give a human being freedom and personhood as an innate right, and what do they have to fight for?
I came to the Hugo-nominated novels late this year. forgive me. Kameron Hurley (I remember her from The Geek Feminist Revolution) is the author of the book the library happened to have on hand when I went looking.
I had to keep reminding myself that this was written in 2019, long before the George Floyd protests. It is insanely topical. It begins with the destruction of a major city, continues with a war to fight the aliens that caused it, and segues into both an action-packed war adventure centered around a technological innovation we've all seen on Star Trek, and a blistering commentary on corporate Feudalism and the weaknesses in America that can cause it to replace Democracy. Which leads us to...
Byzantiumin Space: A Memory Called Empire, by Arkady Martine
Through the groundcar's windows--smoky glass, paling to clear--what Mahit saw made very little sense. People didn't break things on Lsel--not property, not with cavalier abandon. The shell of a station was fragile and if some part of the machinery of it snapped, people would die, of breathing vacuum, of icy chill, of the hydroponics system shutting down. Casual vandalism on lsel was a matter of grafitti, elaborate hacks, blocking off hallways with the hull-breach expanding foam cannisters. But here in the streets of the City she was watching a Teixcalaanli woman, in a perfectly reasonable suit jacket and trousers, swing what looked like a metal pole into the window of a shop, and shatter the glass there. Do that, walk onward, and do it again.
...the book that actually won the Hugo. I learned from the author's page that Arkady Martine is a scholar of the Byzantine age and that she writes fiction and nonfiction "about border politics, rhetoric, propaganda, and the edges of the world." She has managed to re-create an approximate Byzantine Empire in space, complete with an incomprehensible system of government, far-reaching assertion of dominance over other civilizations presumed to be Barbarian and therefore not worthy of agency, and layer upon layer of political intrigue.
Enter Mahit Dzmare, an ambassador from one of the "Barbarian" colonies who is sent to the Empire to replace the previous ambassador. Dzmare is implanted with the previous ambassador's memory chip, containing his personality and memories from five years ago and before, such that they can converse in Dzmare's head.
At which point they have to solve the prior ambassador's murder. And I've taken you through chapter one. It becomes a labyrinth after that. A Byzantine one, in fact.
Like Light Brigade, it contains staggering commentary on events that have happened in Americasince the book was published. Very highest recommendations.
Dollars into Sense: the General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, by John Maynard Keynes
If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coal mines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it private enterprise on well tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again (the right to do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of the note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is. It would indeed be more sensible to build houses and the like, but if there are political and practical difficulties in the way of this, the above would be better than nothing.
Keynes's economic theory deserves a place with Adam Smith and Marx, in that he revolutionized economic thought. prior to Keynes, economists spoke of "economic law" as self-justifying and inviolable; one could no more change laissez-faire economics than one could break the law of gravity. There were reformers like Ricardo and Henry George who called for better treatment for the poor, but they were regarded as silly utopians. How fortunate that we've come so far since those days.
It was Keynes who discussed economic behavior, such as the tendency of the business class to maximize profits, as a bahavior that could be regulated by the government just as it regulates criminal behavior. He proved that a 'down' market would not necessarily correct itself--as we saw during the twin Bush recessions, where no amount of rate-cutting spurred new investment or innovation, and that 'up' markets were inherently self-saturating and would cycle downward.
His solution was for the State to prime the pump judiciously. Decades later, Thomas Pyketty would speak of the need to judiciously redistribute the wealth from time to time to head off violent revolution.
Oddly, Keynes was more conservative than I had thought. Although he favored government spending, he was against raising taxes on the rich to pay for policies that would ultimately benefit the rich the most, which raises the question how the government was expected to pay for pump-priming.
Keynes is intensely mathematical in some parts, but generally easy to follow and equipped with several bon mots. Highly recommended.
A Beery Swine Who Was Just as Sloshed as Schlegel: Philosophical Investigations, by Ludwig Wittgenstein
If you trained someone to emit a particular sound at the sight of something red, another at the sight of something yellow, and so on for other colours, still he would not yet be describing objects by their colours. Though he might be a help to us in giving a description. A description is a representation of a distribution in space (in that of time, for instance).
If I let my gaze wander around a room and suddenly it lights on an object of striking red colour, and I say "Red!", that is not a description.
Are the words "I am afraid" a description of a state of mind?
I say "I am afraid"; someone else asks me "What was that? A cry of fear, or do you want to tell me how you feel; or is it a reflection on your present state?" Could I always give him a clear answer? Could I never give him one?
I have five lists cataloguing the 'great works' of philosophy through history. Three of them end before Wittgenstein, one ends with him, and one ends with Wittgenstein and Sartre. Was Wittgenstein the climax of philosophy, or have the professors simply failed to agree on who gets to be considered great after 1950? Philosophical Investigations, the final philosophical work in the Great Books revised set, would be an odd choice for the culmination of world philosophy.
Like Marcus Aurelius and Pascal, it consists of a series of related paragraphs and fragments, not intended by their author to be published in the final form they appear in, and arranged by others after his death. The unifying theme is language as a game and a tool for understanding, and it digs into what exactly we MEAN when we say certain things, with a thoroughness that eventually renders itself almost ridiculous, like if you repeated "tree" dozens of times, over and over, until it became just a sound.
He also makes the reader aware of the thick layer of fog that lies between two consciousnesses, such that efforts to communicate are artificial and through a glass darkly. Nevertheless, we mostly manage to make one another aware of what we mean. Or....do we?