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Flowers for Algernon, Daniel Keyes

(Another review I originally posted on Facebook a couple of years ago.)

Flowers for Algernon (1966, USA) seems to be one of those science fiction novels most people know about, even if they haven’t actually read it. Perhaps because it was adapted into a movie in 1968, Charly. But I suspect it’s more because its central premise is one that resonates – although it hasn’t been used all that often, I think (another example that comes to mind is Thomas M Disch’s Camp Concentration (1968, USA)).

The Algernon of the title is a mouse whose intelligence has been artificially boosted through surgery and drugs. The experimenters get permission to use the same technique on a human being, a man called Charlie Gordon who has an IQ below 70. The experiment is a success and Charlie develops into a genius. Unfortunately, as Charlie soon discovers himself, the effect is not permanent.

The novel is told through Charlie’s journal entries, initially childish and misspelt and ungrammatical, but becoming analytical and introspective and dropping references to the genius-level things Charlie is now capable of doing. The novel is an expansion of a short story, initially published in 1959, but didn’t itself appear until 1966. It’s clearly set in the 1950s – lots of mentions of cafeterias, for example (thankfully no mention of hats) – and while it could at a stretch take place in the present day, at one point genius Charlie visits a home for the mentally impaired, where he also briefly lived before the experiment, and the home has thousands of patients, a number I found somewhat boggling.

I admit the basics of the story are affecting, but its setting, and its sensibilities, reminded me far too much of JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951, USA), a book I studied at school and hated. I can see why Flowers for Algernon has such a high profile – it’s one of a handful of US science fiction novels to have been taught in US schools – but it’s still an historical document and I suspect it’s better regarded as that and not as a science fiction novel.


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Exhalation, Ted Chiang

Chiang is the science fiction short story writer non-genre readers all praise (one of his stories was a question in this week’s University Challenge, for example). Which is not to say lots of genre readers don’t praise him too. And he’s won plenty of genre awards: eleven Hugo nominations, four of them wins; six Nebula nominations, four of them wins; and two BSFA Award wins. If he wrote novels, he’d probably have been nominated for the Clarke Award several times too. The only thing is… I find his fiction a bit, well, boring.

It’s not so obvious when you read his stories in isolation. They’re clearly well-crafted, and that’s what mostly comes across. But in a collection like Exhalation (2019, USA), read one after the other, it soon becomes clear that the way he constructs stories leads to a uniformity of approach which, in spite of the story’s plot or setting or trappings, quickly palls. Take the opening novella, ‘The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate’, which I’d previously read as a standalone book published by Subterranean Press. (Technically, it’s a “novelette”, but that’s a fake story-length, invented by genre publishers to justify paying less to writers, and only kept alive by genre awards because it means they can hand out yet more prizes.)

But, ‘The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate’. It’s explicitly a told story, narrated by the, er, narrator to the caliph of Baghdad, a story format famously used in 1001 Nights. The narrator explains how he met a man who had built a time-gate, which allows him to step into the future or the past, as long as it’s within the operating lifetime of the gate. The man explains this by telling stories – about other men who have used the gate. The narrator determines to use it himself in order to spend additional time with his wife, who died years before. The story’s time paradoxes are all carefully constructed, but it goes nowhere.

The title story is another case in point. In a world populated by mechanical beings whose metabolisms are powered by gas pressure, the gas being argon, a scientist investigates why clocks seem to be running fast. He more or less dissects his own brain – which is mechanical and pneumatic – and discovers the ambient pressure of argon is dropping, spelling the slow death of his race. The story is a blow-by-blow description of the narrator’s investigation, and completely lacking in drama.

‘The Lifecycle of Software Objects’, an actual novella, I also originally read as a standalone book published by Subterranean Press. It also takes a straightforward idea – the creation of artificial life in virtual environments – and then takes the idea past the point where there is anything interesting to say about it. The story follows a pair of “digient” creators who keep their creations “alive” long after the environment in which they existed has been shut down and the company which ran it has folded. There’s something quaint from today’s perspective – the story was originally published in 2010 – in hanging onto old version of software, and of course the tsunami of LLMs sold to the public as AI, has changed the nature of the debate around actual AI, leaving the novella even further behind.

‘The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Fiction’ is far too long for the story it tells. “Lifeblogging” allows people to record every instant of their day, and then later access those instants. It is the perfect defence against confabulation and misremembering. In the “novelette”, a journalist realises accurate instant access to moments in the past changes human dynamics, which feels somewhat banal given that LLMs now have achieved something similar. This narrative is interspersed with a story from a native village which finds life more difficult after moving from an oral tradition to a written one after a western nation occupies their country.

The novella ‘Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom’ was nominated for both the Nebula and the Hugo in 2019 and 2020. It has a simple premise: a company markets a device which forces the creation of a new reality according to the many worlds hypothesis, people can then message or speak to or video-call themselves in that other reality. Chiang then walks through a couple of scenarios showing where people’s lives are different in each reality. The overall plot is based around a scam run by a buyer and seller of the devices.

I’ll grant ‘The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate’ and ‘Exhalation’ are memorable – the premises if not the actual plots. The rest of the collection’s contents are forgettable. Even now, a fortnight after reading the collection, I can’t remember the stories. Chiang’s fiction reads like… code. They’re meticulous workings-out of some elements of a premise, to the point where all possible permutations and ramifications have been documented, by which point the reader no longer cares what the story is actually about.

I bought the signed limited editions of both The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate (2007, USA) and The Lifecycle of Software Objects (2010, USA) from Subterranean Press when they were published. They’re attractive books. (And it’s a shame Subterranean Press is closing down; it’s an excellent small press.) But the shine rubbed off Chiang’s fiction for me soon after, and there’s nothing in Exhalation which persuades me I was wrong to feel that way.


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Venomous Lumpsucker, Ned Beauman

(A Facebook review)

This won the Arthur C Clarke Award in 2023, and throughout much of the award’s history that would be reason enough to read the book. But the shortlists in recent years have been… variable. Some of the judges’ choices have been absolutely baffling. The Last Astronaut (2019, USA)? Sea of Rust (2017, USA)? Never mind. Venomous Lumpsucker (2022, UK) sounded quite good – although having now read it, the marketing around the book didn’t sell it very well.

It’s set later this century, when nations and corporations trade “extinction credits” much as nations and corporations now trade carbon credits. Now, it’s to offset climate change (it’s not working); in the novel, thousands of species are being made extinct as corporations mine further afield for necessary elements and ores. The title refers to a fish which lives in the Baltic. It’s a cleaner fish, and cleaner fish are supposed to be the most intelligent types of fish. The venomous lumpsucker is even more intelligent than other species. It is also endangered.

An Indian corporation is mining the Baltic sea-floor, and has hired Resaint to assess the intelligence of the lumpsuckers, as that affects how many extinction credits they will have to pay for destroying their habitat and wiping them out. Unfortunately, Halyard, an executive with the firm, saw a way to make a quick buck, and sold the credits on the open market, expecting their value to drop so he could short them. The opposite happens: hackers wipe out all the digitised DNA of already-extinct species, which drives the price of credits sky-high. And then it turns out the company has already accidentally obliterated the lumpsuckers.

The novel is Resaint and Halyard chasing about the Baltic, trying to find a living colony of lumpsuckers, and being given a rude awakening into how the “extinction industry” works. Meanwhile, the UK has turned into a western North Korea, an isolated island nation ruled by a kleptocracy, but a powerful billionaire has bought up Cornwall and Devon and is seeding it with extinct species for his own reasons…

The targets of Beauman’s satire are pretty clear: not just the corporations putting profits above climate change, but also Brexit and Elon Musk. The novel is surprisingly funny, and the near-future stuff is inventive. Not everything works – the billionaire’s motives don’t add up, and the super AI reads more like a deus ex machina than actual near-future technology. But a good winner of the Clarke Award, nonetheless.


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Occupy Me, Tricia Sullivan

Sullivan has long been a writer I wanted to read. I tried one of her novels, Maul (2003, UK), which was shortlisted for the Clarke, BSFA and Tiptree Awards, several years ago, but I remember finding it hard-going. In fact, I’d chosen it as one of twelve books for a reading challenge that year. I reviewed ten of the books, failed to review Maul, and never even read the final book, Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979, USA). (For the record, the other books in the challenge were: Winterstrike (2008, UK), Liz Williams; Zoo City (2010, South Africa), Lauren Beukes; Dark Space (2007, Australia), Marianne de Pierres; City of Pearl (2004, UK), Karen Traviss; The Year of Our War (2004, UK), Steph Swainston; Spin State (2003, USA), Chris Moriarty; Shadow Man (1996, USA), Melissa Scott; China Mountain Zhang (1992, USA), Maureen F McHugh; The Steerswoman (1989, USA), Rosemary Kirstein; and Winterlong (1988, USA), Elizabeth Hand.)

Which brings me to Occupy Me (2016, UK), which was nominated for both the Clarke and BSFA Awards. In it, Sullivan pulls no punches. For the first third of the novel, you’re struggling to figure out what’s going on. The narrator is called Pearl, she is not entirely human, if human at all. She arrived on Earth in an abandoned fridge in a junkyard in New York. She is sort of an angel – at least, she has wings, but they are usually kept hidden in Higher Dimensions (HD). There are other things hidden in HD, including parts of Pearl’s organism? metabolism?, her powers, and her origin. 

She is tricked into flying past a helicopter carrying a billionaire called Austen Stevens, who was responsible for a series of atrocities in an invented African nation while controlling an oil company. He then left the oil company, having embezzled millions, and set up an investment company. Now, he is dying. He has hired a native of that invented nation, the sole survivor of a family who died in the atrocities, who was then educated in the US and qualified as a doctor, to manage his palliative care in his last few months. Because Stevens believes the doctor has a briefcase which contains a spaceship or time-machine or some other science-fictional device which can make the billionaire immortal.

In fact, the briefcase is part of Pearl’s body, stolen from HD. And she wants it back.

To be honest, that plot summary doesn’t do Occupy Me much justice. There are three narratives: Pearl’s, told in the first person; the doctor’s, told in the second person; and one told in the third person, which describes the events leading up to all the main characters meeting on an oil platform in the North Sea, where certain truths about Pearl, the briefcase, the billionaire and the doctor are revealed. The novel is relentless – the narrative’s sheer momentum carries you through passages that you simply don’t have enough information to parse (but those explanations do come later), and sentences that tip from sense to a sort of nonsense that seems entirely in keeping with the narrative voice.

I didn’t think I’d like Occupy Me when I started reading it – to paraphrase a remark I made to a friend a few months ago, I may have a catholic taste in fiction, but I have a protestant ethic to reading. I will finish a book, even if I think I don’t like it or think it’s shit (and yes, that probably explains a lot of the reviews on this blog). But the further I got into Occupy Me, the more fascinating I found it, the more the shape of it became apparent, and the more its arguments began to make a strange kind of sense.

There are novels you’re not sure you like, but you can’t stop thinking about them. Tiptree’s Brightness Falls from the Air (1985, USA; my review here) is one such novel I read in the last twelve months. Occupy Me is another. I’ve come to the conclusion both novels are much much better than I initially thought, but I’m not sure why and I’ve not really convinced myself I’m right. But now I want to read more of Tricia Sullivan’s novels, and perhaps even revisit her Maul. 

Who knows, perhaps I’ll think it’s really good on my second read…


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Deep Black, Miles Cameron

Deep Black (2024, Canada) is the second book in the Arcana Imperii trilogy, following directly on from Artifact Space (2021, Canada; see my review here). In the first book, Marca Nbaro, orphaned daughter of a patrician family, faked her credentials to get a position as a “midder” on the Great Ship Athens. Great Ships are the main trading fleet of the DHC, Directorate of Human Corporations, which rules twenty or thirty worlds, and is instrumental in the trade for “xenoglass” with the Starfish, the only alien race so far encountered by humanity. Living alien race, that is, as there’s evidence of a long-dead alien race on some of the worlds colonised by humans. Nbaro foils an attempt to sabotage Athens, proves to be talented at pretty much everything ship-related, catches the eye of the Master of the ship, and is deemed “lucky” and so a good person to have onboard. The book ends with Athens in a space battle, defending the Starfish against a mysterious alien race in “bubble” ships. Nbaro, natch, manages to capture one of the aliens.

Deep Black opens as Athens cleans up after the battle and sets about trading gold and heavy metals for xenoglass with the Starfish. Nbaro’s boyfriend, the super-brainy dork Dorcas, tries to translate the Starfish language. Meanwhile, from the alien Nbaro captured, they learn the Bubble-ship aliens are called the Hin, are sort of furry octopuses, and are much more like humanity than the Starfish. They have also been enemies for millennia of the Starfish, who they accuse of genocide.

Meanwhile, there is a conspiracy within the DHC which needs to be dealt with. Athens’s AI, Morosini, has determined a cabal, possibly led by an AI, is determined to turn the DHC into a tyranny in order to enrich themselves. They have allied with some independent worlds, and even some Hin. Athens jumps to the next planetary system. There is a big space battle. A missing-presumed-destroyed Great Ship, Dubai, reveals itself – it had been hiding in order to team up with Athens. There’s another big space battle.

And so on…

Deep Black is basically about an aircraft carrier in space. It’s all about living on the Great Ship, launching and flying fighters and pinnaces, training to defend the ship from boarders. And because Nbaro is such an over-powered protagonist, she gets to do everything – and thanks to the handy “neural lace” installed in her head by Morosini, she gets to know everything too.

The level of invention in these two books is amazingly low for a space-based science fiction. Worlds are called New London and New Texas and New India. All the fancy futuristic tech is straight off the shelves at Tropes R Us. Nbaro is every mil sf hero rolled into one, with added extra special self-annotating humility and a mild dose of impostor syndrome. I wrote in my review of the first book that its only redeeming feature was its plotting. Not its plot, which is pretty straightforward and has been much used. Cameron keeps his story flowing by revealing new worldbuilding insights and dramatic scenes at regular intervals. The same is true of Deep Black – but where Artifact Space did some heavy lifting to outline the universe, Deep Black spends all its time on the routine and minutiae of life aboard a Great Ship. And space battles. Lots of space battles.

There’s a third book, which is odd as Deep Black seems to wrap up its story: conspiracy defeated, Nbaro married, Nbaro and husband voted onto the DHC council, friendly relations with both the Hin and the Starfish… I have Whalesong (2025, Canada), so I guess at some point I’ll find out where the story goes next. Can’t say I have especially high hopes, however.


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The Simulacra, Philip K Dick

(Another Facebook review)

I am not, I will happily admit, a fan of Dick’s books, and the only reason I read this one is because it’s in the SF Masterworks series (and the series has way too many books by Dick in it, as well). I find his novels slapdash, the good ideas wasted on haphazard plots and inconsistent settings.

In The Simulacra (1964, USA), The US and Germany have formed the USEA, the president is a simulacrum (although only those in the know, er, know it), and the country is effectively ruled by the First Lady. There are also colonists on Mars, spaceship dealers who sell craft capable of reaching the Red Planet to those wishing to emigrate. The dealers are apparently mobile and unregulated.

The novel opens with all psychotherapists, except one, being banned from practising. And that one is needed to treat a psychokinetic pianist who is a favourite of the First Lady. Meanwhile, the current president, or the der Alte (“the” and “der” are tautologous), is about to be retired and a new one built – but this time by a small firm and not a large German cartel.

There’s also the Sons of Job, which seems to be a neo-nazi popular movement which no one finds offensive, whose leader has access to a time-travel device. As indeed do the upper echelons of the USEA. A handful of ordinary people sort of bounce around the US – well, California and Washington, DC – stumbling into various plans and conspiracies, and so bringing everything crashing down to a somewhat abrupt end.

And that’s it. A pretty fast read, and mildly amusing, but certainly not a Masterwork and not even one of Dick’s better books.


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The Corporation Wars 2: Insurgence, Ken MacLeod

So, they sent robots to another planetary system, and some humans whose consciousnesses had been uploaded when they died, and the robots started mining an exo-moon and then accidentally developed self-awareness. Meanwhile the uploaded humans were living in a very realistic virtual reality, and fighting while piloting small humanoid robot bodies, called “frames”, against… Which is where it gets a bit complicated…

There were two political factions on Earth, the Reaction (Rax) and the Acceleration (Axe), both of whom were fighting against late-stage capitalism through various acts of terror, the former wanting a return to earlier political systems, the latter trying to power through capitalism to something better. Out of this war arose the Direction, a global government. It’s the Direction which is trying to colonise another planetary system, which features a super-habitable exoplanet. But a legal dispute has come up in the exo-system and two law firms (both subsidiaries of another firm), each controlled by an AI, are now settling their dispute. With war.

Meanwhile, the Axe uploaded humans have settled in a VR based on a popular fantasy MMRPG while they plot to prevent the Rax in the other VR (where much of the first book, Dissidence (2016, UK) was set) from actually physically settling on the exoplanet. Except the Rax are no longer in charge of that other law firm, and some of the Axe have defected to the self-aware robots, who have decided they’re neutral.

Despite the complexity of the background, and the politics which drives the plot, Insurgence (2016, UK) is a fast-paced read. The narrative focuses on a handful of characters, each representing different factions, so giving the reader a pretty good overview of what’s happening. The level of invention is light, but clever, and MacLeod manages to keep the reader guessing as to who are the actual good guys (although pretty much everyone has something really bad in their past). Like most middle books of trilogies, there’s a lot of movement, as characters move around and events are set in motion for the final volume. If you’re going to read one book about self-aware robots and uploaded humans fighting a complicated political war over an exoplanet, make it these three. If that makes sense.


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The Coral Bones, EJ Swift

This is the first book I’ve read by EJ Swift, although her name was not unknown to me. Mostly because of her appearances on the BSFA and Clarke Award shortlists – in fact, The Coral Bones (2022, UK) was nominated for both (it lost the Clarke to Ned Beauman’s Venomous Lumpsucker (2022, UK) and the BSFA to Adrian Tchaikovsky’s City of Last Chances (2022, UK)).

The Coral Bones is structured as three narratives set in three different times. The first is in the present day, or perhaps a few years hence. Hana is a marine biologist, helping map the slow death of the coral of the Great Barrier Reef. She and a colleague discovered a dead man floating in an inflatable dinghy. He has been painted white, and the words “This is what it looks like when coral dies” painted on the side of the dinghy. Later, the man is found to have drowned, so it wasn’t murder, just someone trying to make a political point with his corpse. Hana has split from her partner, after the two had decided to have a child and the partner is now pregnant. Hana also begins to obsess about the dead man, who was also helping document the reef.

Judith is a precocious seventeen-year-old in Sydney in 1839. Her father is a celebrated captain, who has been mapping the coast of Australia. She is also a naturalist. After her mother returns alone to England, Judith persuades her father to let her accompany him on his next voyage. She documents the creatures she encounters along the way, and eventually marries the naturalist on the voyage, despite initially hating him.

Telma works for the Restoration Committee in 22nd Century Australia. The climate is now too hot for humans during the day, and most animal species are extinct. The Restoration Committee tracks down animals thought to be extinct in order to preserve them. An informant tells the Committee he has spotted a leafy seadragon near the northern end of the Great Barrier Reef (which has long since died). Telma heads north to meet him. It takes him weeks before he finally reveals his secret, and the secret behind the seadragon’s survival.

The narrative flips between the three, which eventually prove to be connected – Hana learns about Judith’s career, and fate; and the secret Telma uncovers also links back to Judith’s career. Of the three stories, Judith’s is the most interesting, perhaps because she’s an adventurous and headstrong young woman, where the other two have so much personal baggage it almost overwhelms the role they play in the plot. The future narrative thread, however, is cleverly done. The present day one – well, the mystery behind the man’s death is pretty easy to figure out, although Swift drags it out to the end. The prose is good, the research deep but worn lightly, and I don’t recall any road-humps during my read.

On the strength of The Coral Bones, I certainly plan to read more Swift – which is fortunate, as I have her BSFA-Award-winning When There Are Wolves Again (2025, UK) on the TBR (it has also been nominated for the Clarke, and may well win it). Recommended.


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The Defector, Chris Hadfield

(A review from Facebook)

Yes, that Chris Hadfield, astronaut, recorded a video of himself playing ‘Space Oddity’ on the ISS and it went viral. That Chris Hadfield. The Defector (2023, Canada) is his second work of fiction, after The Apollo Murders (2021, Canada), and also features one-eyed ex-test pilot Kaz Zemeckis in the lead role.

A Soviet pilot defects with a MiG-25, landing in Israel the day before the Yom Kippur War. He and his aircraft are shipped to the US, to Groom Lake, AKA Area 51, where USAF plans to learn as much as possible about the MiG-25. Complicating matters are the three cosmonauts assigned to the Apollo-Soyuz Project, two real historical figures and the invented female cosmonaut who was the first Russian on the Moon in The Apollo Murders. I enjoyed the first book in what is now plainly a series because of the hardware – I mean, just look at the fiction I’ve written – and this one is centred around a topic also of interest to me: Cold War supersonic military aircraft. But not, unfortunately, to the same degree.

I must admit, Zemeckis is starting to smack a little of Dirk Pitt. I was a fan of Clive Cussler’s novels when I first read them back in the early 1980s, but the writing grew too bad to be forgivable and I eventually gave up on them over 20 years ago. Sadly, recent rereads of those early Dirk Pitt novels have shown they were always bad – as is evident from the reviews I’ve posted her – and I’m somewhat surprised I ever bothered reading past the first one. (I didn’t read them in order, so I’ve no idea which of the first half-dozen or so I read first.) Hadfield is a marginally better writer than Cussler at his best, although this is not a field in which writing chops count for much – in fact, it’s possibly the reverse. But when Zemeckis dogfights in a F-15 after one leg has been shredded below the knee by a shotgun blast, some of Dirk Pitt’s more incredible physical exploits spring to mind.

If Hadfield sticks to areas that interest me, my “enthusiasms” as I call them – deep sea exploration next? – then I’ll probably continue to pick up cheap copies of his books.


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New York 2140, Kim Stanley Robinson

I’ve read pretty much every book Kim Stanley Robinson has published, except perhaps a couple of collections, and I’ve probably read most of their contents anyway. I buy his books in hardback as soon as they are published. This probably makes him a favourite writer.

He’s a good choice to have as a favourite author – his novels cover a wide range of subjects, and they’re never less than interesting. And I mean that in a good sense. True, he clearly has an agenda in each one – people who don’t understand how fiction works would call it “message fiction”. It makes his work a damn sight more appealing than the warmed-over middle America of the 1950s plus spaceships that far too much science fiction of last century was, even if, yes, he does tend a little to US-defaultism… although, to be fair, this particular novel is about New York.

The title of New York 2140 (2017, USA) tells you where and when the novel is set, but not what it’s about. Which is two things: climate change and late-stage capitalism. Most of Manhattan is flooded – fifteen metres in the book, which most experts agree is unlikely, and by 2140 would probably be no more than a third that high – and people use boats and skybridges between buildings to get about. The novel centres on a handful of residents of the MetLife Tower, which was originally constructed in 1909. These include: the building’s maintenance engineer, a broker, a senior NYPD police officer, the head of the residents’ board, an influencer who travels about in her own airship, and a pair of orphaned homeless boys who are eventually “adopted” by the building.

There are two major plot-threads: equity funds have decided to force ownership of the flooded buildings, currently not subject to property laws, and are trying to buy the MetLife Tower, improving their chances with some sabotage; and a huge storm hits New York, throwing everything into chaos, and forcing a new social and economic order. The novel opens when two unemployed “quants”, programmers for a brokerage, who are staying in the building go missing. Their disappearance ties into the sabotage, and the movement of capital between a number of shell companies, all of which seems to be targeting the MetroLife Tower.

Then the storm hits, destroying parts of the city and in the aftermath Central Park becomes a giant refugee camp. A move to occupy vacant buildings in a safer part of Manhattan – buildings owned by one-percenters – leads to a violent clash. Which in turn prompts a plot by the central characters to safeguard ownership of their building, which involves deliberately crashing the economy and then forcing the US government into taking over the banks, thus curtailing their power.

There’s also a hunt for some lost British gold, a bit about the life on Herman Melville, an attempt to prevent the extinction of polar bears by migrating half a dozen to Antarctica, and a new way to colonise intertidal land. Robinson once said exposition is just another form of narrative, and there’s certainly a lot of lecturing in New York 2140, either between characters or directly to the reader. It’s mostly fascinating stuff – the bits about capitalism, however, are mostly enraging. Having said, the characters are all! a bit! excitable! With liberal use of exclamation marks in dialogue! It makes most of the cast come across like those super-perky Americans they have in bad US sitcoms.

I’ve heard New York 2140 described as Robinson’s best novel to date. I’m not sure I agree, although it’s certainly one of his better ones. It feels more didactic, and less modernist, than his other works, and its perkiness does give its prose a weird flippancy that seems at odds with the seriousness of the topics it covers. Nonetheless, definitely worth reading.