The Field of Plenty by Luke Beling

I first met Luke in a college computer lab. He’d brought a guitar and was listening to songs with his fellow South African, Mark and plucking strings. When one or the other of them had a song they thought was better than whatever was playing, they’d call out “yield,” and switch. Then we started playing songs on the guitar, with Luke asking me what songs I liked and what songs I could play. I didn’t think much about his questions at the time and we landed on Cat Stevens’ Moonshadow as the greatest song either of us could play from memory.

I came to understand that no one asked more questions than Luke and that he was genuinely interested in the world and in people. He wanted to know. But the questions weren’t just for him. Luke’s questions were a way of helping the people he talked to understand themselves.

And Luke asks the right questions. He asks questions about what drives you, where your head is, where you’ve been and where you’re going. But then sometimes when Luke asks a question to you, you realize that the most vital thing is that you’ve got a question to answer and a friend that cares to listen. Sometimes the question doesn’t have to be meaningful. It can just be, what songs can you play? And that opens a whole world.

Luke’s The Field of Plenty is a book of questions. When a young man, Mitchell, with a future in football loses his father, he loses touch with who he is. After suffering an injury and taking pills to mask physical pain, Mitchell discovers the pills can mask other kinds of pain too. The journey back to wholeness requires Mitchell to look at himself again and accept the broken parts. And simultaneously he has to look at others and accept them—like his mother who has her own substance abuse problem. Ultimately, the great question in this book is, “How do we experience a life of plenty? How do we live in fulfilment?” Like Mitchell, we all have our own answers to those questions, but they aren’t always the right ones. It takes bravery to look in a mirror and find fulfillment in what we see, all the broken parts included.

With Field of Plenty, we have Luke to thank for asking all the big questions and the small ones too.

- Transmission Complete -

The Hard Switch by Owen Pomery

The Hard Switch is easy to love. Owen Pomery's art—the landscapes, the scale, attention to detail, and spartan but central use of primary colors—is reminiscent of Moebius. Pomery is a master at telling the story visually. But where Moebius' comics were mostly a showcase for his art, containing little in the way of explanation for any of the awe-inspiring worlds filling the pages of his comics, Pomery is as much of a storyteller as he is a illustrator. In juxtaposition, his characters are drawn in a comic rather than lifelike style but the story connects us to them, filling in the details missing from their faces.

Androne - Dwain Worrell

Dwain Worrell's Androne wrestles with an American identity as military despot that few Americans care to fully consider. Worrell sets his story in desert wastelands that call to mind the battlefields that the United States has occupied since the beginning of this century—Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, Syria. Regardless of party politics, the US is continuously at war. Worrell points the finger at ideology, arguing that the US guarantees its own survival by not allowing non-Western ideologies to survive. Of course, it isn't every non-Western ideology that gets run through the grinder of the USAmerican military-industrial complex. Foremost, forever wars have been waged to put terrorism in check and to ensure that US interests are maintained, whether that involves keeping various foreign states from expanding their influence, ensuring that the US controls specific resources, and maintaining a military presence in key regions. The justification for war over the past century has been Woodrow Wilson's WW1 rallying cry to "Make for world safe for democracy," a rallying cry echoed in Joe Biden's assertion that we are in a "battle for democracy."

Gundog: A Review

Gary Whitta's Gundog follows Dakota (why couldn't it have been Yoshimi?!) as she escapes a work prison run by the Mek, a hostile alien race of robots. She follows a cryptic map once tattooed on her brother's now missing arm and also tattooed on the arm of a drifter named Falk that shows up in the prison camp. The robotic Mek don't really have any reason to keep the humans around other than perhaps as some kind of trophy. Whitta doesn't give us much to go on about the Mek, other than that they are cruel, advanced, and in the habit of taking over planets. They are easy to loathe and, really, they are cannon fodder. 

Dakota's mother, Rosie, was a Gundog gunner, and a fairly good one, we're told, making her last stand at the Battle of Bismarck and dying with her 'dog. The Gundog is a nod, nearly in name as well, to Gundam Wing. Similar to the wings, the Gundog is a mech piloted by humans with lots of guns (but no dogs). 

Dakota follows the map and finds an AI facsimile of Rosie who has created a bigger, badder Gundog. Dakota, along with a diffident engineering genius named Runyon with an eidetic memory train to run the 'dog and then set out on a big 'ole vengeance tour. Dakota is hell bent on not shooting 'til she sees the whites of the Mek's eyes, which gets her and Runyon in a lot of trouble, as the Mek are tough and like to call in their position to legions of other Mek.

Artificial Intelligence: Ubiquitous Entertainment or the Doom to Come?

Ryan Hyatt’s Enhanced: A Hollywood Murder Mystery is a preview of our future relationship with our phones and, by extension, all of society. The tele- of telephone—meaning distant—has something of a dark promise to it. Yes, we initially used telephones to talk to those distant from us, but these devices are now putting distance between ourselves and the people closest to us. The world that Ryan presents in Enhanced walks the line between creating a dangerous distance and breaking down the distance between us and the world beyond. The hope, of course, is that technology would make everything better. And, yeah, sometimes it does. Hyatt prophesies a world where personality constructs befriend the users that carry them around on their phones, providing everything from the Alexa-like help we’ve come to expect from our phones to more nuanced conversations and finally as important figures that we will come to rely on for our social existence.