Category Archives: YKK

YKK Reaction

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During our roundtable on YKK, TCJ‘s Dirk Deppey took exception to the uncoordinated lukewarm feelings we have for the book. Fair enough, but I still disagree with this:

“So I fail to see how a reasonable person can describe Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou as reactionary.”

If I want to be precise, I should’ve said “So I didn’t see anthing resembling reactionary sentiments in Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou.” You never know — some argument here could change my mind, I suppose.

Both quotes are his, from this comments thread. I introduced the term, then wondered if it was accurate. Dirk defined it in that same thread as “an attempt to roll back some aspect of recent political or cultural change to which the author has objections.”

That’s what YKK is. Here are two reasons, three points:

1.The Park

Google Maps satellite image of the area around Minato Mirai 21, the building complex shown in the art from my first post. On the left, a shot of a part of metro Tokyo that runs uninterrupted to Yokohama. (It’s 30 minutes on the Japan Rail Yokosuka line from Tokyo Station to Yokohama Station.) Click to enlarge; the “A” is the building. Play with it in Google Earth for a while and see how many Manhattans you can fit in metro Tokyo.

In the scene, Ashinano puts Alpha on a picturesque hill by the tallest Minato Mirai building. I’ve been to Yokohama a couple of times, and the two crummy parks I know would be underwater. She might be at the park on top of the International Port Terminal, but it’s mostly twisted metal and boardwalk. Maybe the boards composted.

So there’s no green space in reality but YKK shows some. So what?

There used to be green space, but Japan’s government-mandated construction policies erased it. They have a one-party democracy whose main voting block is the construction industry. In fact, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) is so intertwined with builders that they call it “the construction state” (????), and a main policy platform in the post-Bubble years (90s to now) has been construction subsidy. Thousands of small towns rely on construction of needless roads and monuments for jobs, and fiscal policy ensures that houses don’t gain value as they age. This ensures that the construction state can step in, tear down the “old” houses like Legos, and throw up new ones in a couple of weeks. (A friend of mine bought a plot of land in order to restore the 200-year old farmhouse on it; he had to negotiate hard for the seller not to tear down the house, because the land was worth less with the house on it. Even then the seller thought he was nuts.)

Everyone I’ve talked to about it, from friends to acquaintances, just throw up their hands. There are moments when community groups have blocked a few of the most ridiculous construction projects, but not very many.

(Lately, the Democratic Party of Japan has made some inroads and there’s talk the LDP’s days are numbered. DPJ’s head is an old LDP bruiser, and they both seem to be owned by the guy who runs the Yomiuri newspaper, or whoever owns him. I’ll believe change when I see it– because PM Aso’s stimulus package will be full of construction projects.)

Given this reality, when I see a work of fantasy hit “Reset” to avoid dealing with the present reality– and all works of speculative fantasy deal at heart with their present reality– I call that reactionary, “an attempt to roll back some aspect of recent political or cultural change to which the author has objections.” New Engineering deals with the construction state in an imaginative, ironic way; YKK pretends it never happened.

2. Shopping Street

In YKK vol. 1, the only shopping trip takes Alpha to an old-fashioned shopping street. The stores are like the ones currently dying in all cities and many towns, mom-and-pops where the owners know you by name. It’s like the street markets found throughout Asia, embattled by Western models of efficiency and scale.

The American-style supermarket has taken off in Japan, putting pressure on small family operations, like the two excellent hole-in-the-wall sushi bars shuttered in a one-year span in the town where I lived. Both owners cited the fact that supermarket sushi was just too cheap to compete with. In fact, they survived longer than should have been expected, and you can still buy Panasonic goods in downtown shops as big as a closet. This is a political issue, as the mom-and-pops have enjoyed protections that drive foreign economists nuts. If all that matters is the numbers, they make no sense, but identity and webs of relationships matter here. This is especially true in agriculture, as Japan has fought liberalization of the rice trade for years, even though farmers have a median age in the 900s. As far as I can tell, the core’s Japanese identity. Rice is life is Japan, and our rice tastes different than Thai rice or California rice. I guess eating that stuff throws local identity too much into question, even though coffee shops like Alpha’s probably serve 30 kinds of bread.

While I support a farm subsidy for a variety of reasons, the ag policy’s meaningless unless it addresses wholesale rural depopulation. Some manga, like Iou Kuroda’s Nasu, toy with the idea in a playful, satisfying way. Ashinano hits reset again, rolling back the last 60 years with a convenient apocalypse that kills all the economists but not the supply lines to coffee-growing lands, all while turning tarmac into healthy loam.

Maybe everybody’s dying off with great poignancy and there’s a spaceship towards the end– I’ll find out now that I’ve committed to read later volumes– but under normal circumstances I wouldn’t get that far for all the corn being served up in the first one. Comfy old-fashioned shopping streets and wizened leathery farmers with huge crops of watermelons and no drinking problems. I know it’s a gentle vision, any sins surely vestal, and it does remind me of Miyzazaki’s works, the best compliment I can pay. His works, however, are defiantly pastoral, always furiously engaged with the present. In his script for Whisper of the Heart, the unbelievably romantic ending, an eye-roller for the jaded among us, came as a riposte to what he saw as the failure of the younger generations to commit to much of anything. YKK‘s shares more with unending pop waves of uncomplicated nostaglia, most recently for the 1950s as shown in works like the manga/movie Always: Sunset on Third Street. When you can make the “good old days” the poverty & destruction of the postwar, that’s some doing.

3.

“Reactionary” here I think is more cultural than political, though it’s a reaction against a political reality. And while it mirrors the tendency I see in left-wing Western environmentalists like Derrick Jensen and the Peak Oil cheerleaders, who seem to pray to Ma Nature every night that Western industrialism collapses because then we’ll all surely go back to the ecovillage, and the conservatism of those on the Western Right who pretend Real America lives in dying small towns though half the world lives in cities, while it mirrors those, I think trying to connect the “reactionary” I’ve argued for in YKK to any kind of Western political “reactionary” is a stretch to say the least. Not as much of a stretch as Amity Shales’ creative writing project in WaPo, but a stretch nonetheless.

So I’d say I used the right word with too much brevity, and let the associations it carried get away from my original point. I still have the reasoned view that YKK‘s picture of the world is reactionary, while admitting that someone without knowledge of what I outlined above or the same care for it I have will likely take another view.

To close, I’m reminded of the movie Amélie, which I liked well enough and which was universally praised in the French press on its release. Then Serge Kaganski chewed out Amélie’s throat in Libération, and Frédéric Bonnaud summed up the controversy that followed in Film Comment:

the so-called poetry that trickles through Amélie depends on a profoundly reactionary impulse – the reinstatement of a cliché snapshot image of France in order to reaffirm its enduring value.

Switch France & Japan: while YKK is not like Amélie in scale– there’s no tsunami of fois gras and Renoirs– it is in kind.

That’s it.

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Footnote books in English for further reading, if like me you find this kind of thing interesting:

Alex Kerr, Dogs & Demons. A breezy rant, it’s not great, and FOTB Westerners discover it and overquote it when they’re frustrated that Japan doesn’t flatter their expectations. It’s a poorly-written, or at least translated, book. Kerr wrote it in Japanese, which might explain why the research is so thin. He relies almost entirely on Japanese newspaper sources, which do little investigative journalism and are ruled by press clubs that restrict access to information. I picked up the book hoping for research on par with Robert Jackall’s Moral Mazes. It’s more like a 200-page blog screed with lots of links to nothing but Yahoo News. Still, it’s the English book that will give you some idea of what I’m talking about.

Gavan McCormack, The Emptiness of Japanese Affluence. This is academic version I was looking for.

Or you can just go to The Economist and do a search for “LDP” and “construction.” You’ll get 81 articles, an afternoon’s reading and a sick feeling in your stomach.

YKK fight !, part 2

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Noah linked to Dirk’s post here. Dirk’s post links to one of mine, a post in which I wrote this about YKK:

The atmosphere bits work fine for me, though the smaller they are, the better. For instance, drinking canned coffee in the early morning worked better than Alpha discovering the different meanings behind tears.

Those mellowed-out roads and so on, the landscape’s details, take the principle the furthest. The moment is so small that nothing is happening, all you do is look at something being what it is. Those moments are the best thing in the series.
When Dirk suggests that I didn’t go for YKK because I don’t care for quiet moments and have never sat watching a landscape, I think he doesn’t take the above passage into account. The passage is pretty clear regarding what I like about the series, and elsewhere in the post I’m clear about what I don’t like, which is not the strip’s quiet but its banal streak, “especially in some of the isolated splash pages where Alpha is posing.”
Dirk’s underlying point seems to be that I don’t like YKK as much as I should, which could be true. 

YKK Fight!

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Over at Journalista, Dirk very kindly joins the roundtable discussion. More specifically, he thunders his fist down upon our placid roundtable and accuses us all of being insufficiently mellow:

I must confess that it’s a bit weird reading multiple reviews of the series from people who don’t sound as though they’ve enjoyed many quiet moments in their lives. That sounds like a value judgment, but that’s kinda the impression I’ve gotten this week. None of these reviews found the critics connecting the work to anything in their own experiences, which tells me that the stories didn’t work for them the way Hitoshi Ashinano intended them to work.

Alternate theory: My own perspective is off-kilter by comparison, and I shouldn’t be so goddamned presumptuous. I suppose the reason that I enjoy YKK so much is that I spent a great deal of my childhood outdoors — and since I’m from Arizona, “outdoors” meant “way out in the middle of the fucking desert.” …..

The need to get out and wander has never really left me. I recall one of the ways that I pulled myself out of my post-adolescent funk was to grab a thermos, a pipe and a bag of marijuana and jump into the car around 1AM. I’d drive up to Flagstaff, stop at a convenience store and fill the thermos with coffee; then I’d get back on the highway and keep driving until I was in the middle of Monument Valley, where I’d pour a cup, light up and wait for the sun to rise. I did this three or four times in the space of six months. It was glorious.

Dirk has me dead to rights, at least; I’ve never really smoked pot. (Though Pink Floyd was my favorite band for a while back there…so maybe that counts.)

More seriously…it is true that landscape as such doesn’t play a huge, huge role in my childhood memories in quite the way Dirk describes. My most important meditative recollections involve, not looking quietly at the desert, but thrashing repetitively through the water — I was on a swim team for much of the time I was growing up, and the sense of isolation, of time as elastic, and of connection to a very physical reality which was also spiritual is probably my closest analogue to the kind of romantic sublime that Dirk (and many others) link to contemplating nature.

So is it because I lack the requisite personal experience that I’m not as into YKK as Dirk? I don’t know…I tend to mistrust the kind of aesthetic argument that says “if you’d only been there, you’d understand.” Experience does shape one’s aesthetic responses — but aesthetic responses also, and perhaps even more thoroughly, shape experience. Which memories define you and which get forgotten or seem less important — obviously that’s partly out of your hands, but I think there’s some dialogue there as well. If you’re going to admit free will at all, you’ve got to leave room for the possibility that you make your memories, not just that your memories make you.

Anyway, where I’m going with this is that, to me, it seems like the issue isn’t necessarily what experiences we have or haven’t had, but how we see YKK intersecting with those experiences, and what it seems to be saying about that. And in that context, I think the important factor may not necessarily, or only, be where we’ve lived, but what our ideology is. Which is to say, Dirk’s a good bit more conservative than the rest of us in this conversation, and I think that may matter a fair bit. Bill’s explicit about this when he says of YKK that:

I find it reactionary. Compared to other manga like Hanashippanashi (TCJ #280), which deals with the tensions between a feel for nature and actually living in Japan, YKK feels like a retreat. It’s a fantasy of a return to simpler times and does away with urban complexities with a flood.

Miriam’s less direct, but what she calls her mild “impatience” with the book seems to have at least something to do with feminism and with the portrayal of the main robot female character. Tom’s too; as he says in his post “Fulfilled fantasies tend to be banal and that goes for fantasy girls. Alpha’s a mannequin doll who’s there to make the old guys feel good. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it is a limiting thing.” Certainly for me, at least, the way the romanticized past seems to hinge on the infantilization and (literal) objectification of the female lead is one thing that makes it hard for me to embrace the series fully. (I had similar problems with the similarly nostalgic Ugetsu; though, as I said in my own post on YKK, I also have at least some sympathy for reactionaries.)

LIke Dirk, I don’t want to be presumptuous. I don’t necessarily think that politics wholly determines aesthetic reaction any more than experience does. Moreover, I have a healthy respect for Dirk’s politics in general and for his take on gender issues in particular, not to mention for his understanding of manga. I’m much more inclined to read more of YKK knowing that it’s Dirk’s favorite series ever I was before he said that. But I do think one reason for, at least, my relative lack of enthusiasm is that, whatever my flirtations with C.S. Lewis, I find YKK’s determined idealization of a conservative traditionalism hard to swallow without at least a couple of murmurs of protest.

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In comments to Miriam’s post, Derik B says that Alpha avoids the fantasy/girl trope. I think what he means by that is that she doesn’t have a relationship or isn’t explicitly sexualized. I’m not sure that that would really allay my concerns entirely, though. There are different stripes of fantasy girls; some like the subservient sexual plaything, others prefer the idealized eternal innocent. I can believe the book avoids the first, but I have trouble, giving what I’ve read and later plot summaries, that it avoids the second.

Though I should probably read more before I crawl further out on that limb…not that I usually let mere ignorance stop me, but still….

Update: Bill and Derik both have thoughtful responses in comments, so be sure to scroll down….

YKK Part 4: desire is suffering

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Like with a lot of manga, YKK had the effect of reminding me how much cultural understanding I’m missing when I come at Japanese work for Japanese audiences. Like she’s a robot: ok, but what’s robotty about her? Not much, except she gets slightly different burn treatment, and, as Noah mentioned, fairly mild food allergies. What does it mean to her, or her friends, that she’s a robot? Not much, so far. She doesn’t look or act different, except for maybe more innocent (but you don’t get a frame of reference for how innocent non-robot postapocalyptic women are, so maybe not). Issues I’d expect, like technology or parts for her maintenance being wiped out, or her not aging in comparison to humans, also don’t emerge and there’s no reason to expect they will.

Why is she a robot? I imagine her robotitude means something to Japanese people that it doesn’t mean to me. It reminds me of P. W. Singer who wrote a book about military robotic weapons, who was on the Daily Show and Terry Gross recently. He used a lot of science-fiction canon metaphors, and I believe he mentioned in both interviews that American sci-fi robots are often implacable monsters while Japanese sci-fi robots tend to be lovable heroes. Maybe it is the Buddhist thing of non-humancentricity, that robots are humans without the destructive ego or dark Freudian drives?

Getting into Buddhist mind was the only way I could begin to appreciate the work, and I felt like I should have a few hours with every page. The art really is that beautiful. And even when it’s a portrait shot of characters, it reads like a landscape. This fits in with the idealization of passivity that is the strongest thing in the book. The characters are at their most beautiful when they’re not acting, or even interacting, but just being. When Alpha enfolds Takahiro to herself at the New Year ceremony, I thought for a second, what does it mean? Is this in or out of the bounds of their relationship? Is he attracted to her? Is she attracted to him? And then I saw the sculpture, the rock formation that their bodies made together, and realized that was the real point.

I’d probably read past the first volume (which was one of our metrics for new manga on the manga roundtable), but I think I’d continue to be impatient, getting in there with my Westernness and my feminism and my meaning-obsessed Jewiness, as often as I could manage to be serene, aware, and grateful like a proper Buddhist.

YKK part 3: A quiet inn late in the day ( post b )

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Last post here. This new one started as a comment, but I decided to make a post out of it. 


So, down in comments, Noah and DerikB both assured me that Ashinano, as good as he is, is a long way from peerless. Japan has a lot of artists who would be exceptional over here, but over there they’re just very good artists. 

David Alex asked what I made of Akira. I liked it. This is going back to 1988 when I read 10 issues, probably because Spin mentioned the series in its comics-are-cool issue (white cover with Matt Groening’s Binky).  I bought the series a few issues at a time and felt like I was having a bit of a cross-cultural adventure. The story moved nicely, the panels were worth looking at — detail, as with YKK, but detailed undersides of flying vehicles, not detailed porch floorboards. Then I lost interest. Seeing the movie in, I guess, 1990, I told a kid on line that following comic book series in general was like following a tv show: after a few episodes you kind of got what they had to offer, and then pretty soon you were moving on.  Don’t know if that’s my philosophy now, but it seemed very exact and just at the time. 

Ok, in Comments Bill says the story really is unusual for Japanese comics but that Alpha herself is not — other strips also have a “fantasy girl.” Which brings up something that hit me about the series: yes, it’s beautiful, but it also finds time to be banal. Fulfilled fantasies tend to be banal and that goes for fantasy girls. Alpha’s a mannequin doll who’s there to make the old guys feel good. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it is a limiting thing.

Noah wanted to know how I put up with the shojo, uh, imagery, given the way I complained about googly eyes. I responded:
  
To tell the truth, I was getting to the faces/eyes issue just before the cafe shut down. So, to be stoic … I think the googly eyes are a drawback, but read manga and you’re going to find them. Not everywhere, but pretty often. Maybe I can adjust.

I do think YKK has a streak of banality that is right in tune with the googly-eye motif, especially in some of the isolated splash pages where Alpha is posing. The story itself I don’t mind, but I’m not tuned into it. It seems like an excuse for stringing together little exercises in atmosphere, like a Bolton-Wodehouse book is an excuse for its show’s score. The atmosphere bits work fine for me, though the smaller they are, the better. For instance, drinking canned coffee in the early morning worked better than Alpha discovering the different meanings behind tears.

Those mellowed-out roads and so on, the landscape’s details, take the principle the furthest. The moment is so small that nothing is happening, all you do is look at something being what it is. Those moments are the best thing in the series.


So, the banality again. But at this stage of my manga exploration I’m just getting used to what’s around me. We’ll see how I react down the road.

YKK part 3: A quiet inn late in the day

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YKK, or Record of a Yokahoma Shopping Trip, ran for about 150 episodes. Here at HU we decided to read the first seven chapters and compare notes. Bill started here, Noah continued here. Miriam will talk tomorrow, and tonight I do my post.

This is the first manga I’ve sat down and read thru, not counting 10 issues of Akira back in 1988. It’s all new terrain to me. So I will treat this post as live blogging and just record my impressions.

Two things hit me right off:

1)  the drawing is excellent
2)  the story is close to nonexistent
A third realization hits me:
3)  the setting is the future and everything has fallen apart. But it’s pleasant.
That last one throws me a bit: a pleasant post-apocalypse. But we’re talking Japan, so whatever.
I read the pages fast. They’re printed out from my computer, one page per file, 150 total: the first seven chapters, published back in 1994 for (I gather) middle-aged Japanese men riding the train between office and home. My printer’s ok, and the art is all black and white, but the pictures still drop a notch from the originals. They’re in decent form but not at their best. Even so … that is some great art. A pile of it, just like that.
This is my first time around with right-left pages, but the layouts are huge and that helps. The series has got flow like crazy; every page has a gentle sway that starts in the linework and runs up into the panel arrangements, or vice versa. The detail work is splendid: look at that man draw a sack of rice or a porch’s floorboards or the mellowed, going-to-seed, post-apocalyptic motorways the characters travel along. And everything has life: bodies, trees, clouds in the sky. Page after page. Is this ordinary for Japan?
From Bill and Noah, and from Bill’s links to Dirk Deppey,  Jog, and Madink, [UPDATE: I just found out Madink is DerikB] I gather that this level of play is admirable but not exceptional. I would gather that Ashinano is respected but not held out as an outstanding master. Well, damn. That’s encouraging as to the state of Japanese art.
The story … well, the story’s title is Record of a Yokohama Shopping Trip, that’s for the whole series, and there’s just one shopping trip to Yokohama, in the prologue. When you’ve been gaslighted like that, it’s hard to think straight about story. You don’t expect to be in a frame of mind where you can make reasonable judgments about connections. Does the story make sense? Is it worth following? Yeah, I don’t know.
From the posts before mine, I gather that YKK is especially uneventful. Other Japanese comics aren’t this tranquil.
 The style of caricature … but the counter guy just told me they’re closing the Cafe Depot, so there goes my Internet. I will go now. Miriam can pick up tomorrow.

YKK Part 2: The Past Will Drown the Future

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We’re doing a roundtable on YKK. Bill provides some background and a slightly acerbic take here. My starrier-eyed view…written before reading Bill’s…is below.

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It’s an odd experience going into a series with no expectations at all. I read the first volume of YKK because Bill recommended it and provided scans. Before I opened it up, I’d never heard of it and had no idea what it was about. It was only when I got to the end of the first volume with its (very mild) cliffhanger ending that I even realized that there might be more than one book in the series (I kind of enjoyed thinking that the whole thing just ended on the cliffhanger, actually…but Bill assures me that it doesn’t.)

Anyway, that sense of disorientation — of not being sure what’s going to happen next — was certainly part of manga’s appeal to me initially. The first manga series I saw, I think, was Ranma 1/2, by Rumiko Takahashi. Everything about it caught me flat-footed. I know how romantic comedies work, and I know how action/adventure works, and I even have a sense of how they can be fit together in various ways. So Ranma looked familiar — but then the main character kept changing into a girl…and his adversary kept changing into a pig…and his Dad kept changing into a panda…and there were bizarre martial-arts-figure skating battles…or cooking fights….. It was all just vertiginously, gloriously wrong.

As I’ve read more manga that sense of giddy alienation has died down somewhat; manga has it’s own cliches and interests, and you do eventually start getting a feel for what they are. Ranma does remain fairly bizarre by any standards, though, and YKK does as well, though in a quieter way. Indeed, the determined quietness is itself the strangeness. The series is set (as Bill pointed out) in what seems to be a post-apocalyptic future. Much of the countryside is under-water; travel is difficult, civilization has devolved back to an at least somewhat pre-industrial level. At the same time, remnants of high-technology persist; one of the main characters, Alpha, is a human-looking android.

So…post-apocalypse, dying civilization, androids…we should strap ourselves in for pulp adventure, right? Well, not quite. Alpha, is an unassuming young women who owns a coffee shop; at least in the first volume, her robotness has almost no practical effect on her life (her biggest hurdle is that she effectively has food allergies because of the way her digestive system is designed.) The only gun in sight isn’t fired, or even loaded; Alpha keeps it as a token of remembrance. The narrative drifts forward through mostly mundane episodes; Alpha goes shopping and meets a gas station attendant; Alpha goes to a council meeting and dances and gets drunk. Even when there is something that could loosely be described as “action” it’s played down and smoothed out. Alpha is hit by lightning at one point…but a friend takes her to the hospital, and she’s fixed up in no time. A water spirit appears — but she’s harmless, a passing stroke of beauty, unattainable but mysterious.

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I like especially the way that the boy’s stance does and does not echo the water spirit’s; on the one hand, he’s stiff and awkward, while the lines of her body are fluid, lithe, and animal…but on the other hand, his back is bent in a way that ends up being almost unconsciously graceful, while his hair blows to the right, slanting like the mountain and like the water spirit’s body. He’s watching her, and distanced form her, but he’s also part of the whole picture; integrated into nature and watching it, too.

The water spirit seems to encapsulate the book’s theme and it’s purpose; she’s a mythological embodiment of nature, seemingly unaffected by the cataclysm which has transformed the world. The book is suffused with a longing that goes not so much forward or backward in time, but outside it; a sense that human struggle will end in nought, where it began, and that that’s fine, or good even. Rather than an apocalyptic vision of man destroying the world, YKK presents a world that, at bottom, man can’t affect all that much. That sense of disempowerment doesn’t alienate man from the world, though; on the contrary, it makes him (or her, or it) more at home. And indeed, the water spirit comes, later, and on her own terms, to comfort the boy, before slipping away again.

It’s very difficult for me to imagine a book like this being created by an American; the relationship to nature, and the trust in passivity, just don’t seem like things that would come easily out of a Judeo-Christian culture. At the same time, the post-apocalyptic landscape and the android are clearly borrowed mirrored in lots of Western sources (Bladerunner springs to mind, for example). Again, it’s the familiarity and alienation together which make the work pleasurable and fascinating.
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In his review, Bill argues that YKK seems nostalgic and reactionary; using a utopian apocalypse to avoid the actual intricacies of living with nature. I think that’s a fair cop…though, on the other hand, I’m not sure that “reactionary” is always and everywhere a bad thing. Humanism —the mythologizing and aggrandizing of humanity — is part and parcel of progressivism. The mythologizing of a transcendence which isn’t human tends to be linked to more traditional, often reactionary ideologies; Christianity or, in this case, Buddhism (and perhaps a traditional pantheism?) YKK is certainly somewhat cloying in its conservative serenity — enough so that I’m not sure I’ll ever read the whole thing. Still, that serenity also has an appealing ruthlessness. Humans won’t fix anything, and the planet isn’t going to care. Not practical advice, exactly, but not a preposterous prediction either, as these things go.

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As I was writing, it occurred to me that the themes I’m discussing here (especially the implicit comfort in human disempowerment) are somewhat similar to the themes I discussed in my review of another backward-looking future, C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy. If you’re so inclined, you can read that essay here