Mal doesn’t understand humans. This is not surprising. Mal is a sentient AI drifting through infospace after his programming spontaneously gave rise to his consciousness. Mal also doesn’t are much for humans, but despite his disdain for these “monkeys” he does enjoy sojourns into the physical world by hijacking the occasional vehicle (drone, bot, cyborg, or whatever else is to hand) for himself.
Unfortunately for Mal, he is forced to take an interest after he gets stuck in a cyborg body as collateral damage in a civil war between the US government and a Ludditesque uprising of ‘Humanists’ who oppose human/tech integration and demonstrate their commitment to humanity by throwing everyone they deem impure into a burn pit. Mal’s quest to return to infospace governs the plot of Edward Ashton’s Mal Goes to War. It is a book with an interesting premise, but which did not live up to my expectations. Maybe that is because the cover sold it to me as ‘dark comedy,’ a satire on war and an interrogation of what it means to be human. Yet while those themes are present, they are not executed with adequate depth to elevate Mal Goes to War beyond the level of an entertaining sci-fi romp. Other works exist that cover the same themes with more insight, novelty or creativity.
With bombs dropping in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan and Iran, and rearmament firmly back on the political agenda worldwide, there is no escaping the age-old question: why is there war? Instinctively, we might assume that states go to war to get something they want. War, as per Von Clausewitz’ famous dictum, is then simply the continuation of diplomacy by other means. Unsatisfied with such a simple answer, the causes of war remain the topic of scholarly debate between opposed schools within the somewhat detached academic field of international relations (IR).
The Empire of Civil Society (hereafter ‘Empire’) is a PhD monograph by Justin Rosenberg that forms part of this debate, assailing the dominant school of neorealism – Wikipedia”) from a marginal Marxist position. It is both an argument against neorealism’s core tenets, and an argument for a reappraisal of the utility of Marxist theory to international relations. First published in 1994, it feels surprisingly relevant to the world of 2026 and the conflicts that are raging across the world today.
Write.as does not come with a standard navigation menu or archive. Instead it organises posts using hashtags. Clicking a hashtag will generate a page with all the posts with that hashtag, in descending date order. All my reviews come with hashtags to help you find others that are similar.
You can use the hashtags on this page to navigate to a page that contains all posts with that hashtag.
Finally, I found that some reviews share a theme, or a perspective, that is separate from the topic of the work I’m reviewing. These themes are also marked, and include:
#boundedimagination for reviews that consider how the limitations of our political imagination express themselves in both fiction and non-fiction works.
#protagonismos for reviews that consider where works of fiction place agency and heroism. This theme was directly inspired by two essays by Ada Palmer.
Ronald Reagan infamously said that the nine most terrifying words in the English language are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help”, but Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington would counter that what should really frighten you is: “I’m a consultant and I’m here to advise.” Mazzucato and Collington are the joint authors of The Big Con: How the consulting industry weakens our businesses, infantilizes our governments and warps our economies, which as the title suggests is a full-on critique of the consulting industry and its malignant effects on society.
The Big Con builds on previously published research by Collington and Mazzucato, as well as Mazzucato’s earlier book The Entrepreneurial State. The central argument is as clear as it is intuitive: if you consistently rely on someone else to do something for you, you will not get any better at it yourself. Or as the wise sage Bruce Lee had it: “Growth requires involvement.” The increased use of consultancies creates, to borrow a favourite right-wing phrase, a ‘dependency culture’ among public sector organisations and businesses. And as with any dependency, your dealer usually has little interest in weaning you off what they sell.
“There is no magic money tree” is the stern injunction invoked by politicians, central bankers and economists to explain to a fiscally imprudent public why it cannot have nice things. Fiscal rectitude is now the primary virtue of government, perhaps nowhere more so than in the United Kingdom where the Treasury has shackled itself to the need for approval from an ‘Office for Budget Responsibility’. Running deficits or printing money, we are told, is only one tiny step away from Weimar Republic levels of financial calamity.
But what if it wasn’t thus? That is the alluring promise of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), which first gained prominence in the wake of the Great Recession and argues that not only can governments print money to cover expenses, but they should do so to fully realise a nation’s productive capacity. It is a provocative and controversial theory that repudiates the need for permanent austerity in the name of balanced budgets, and finds one of its most ardent advocates in Stephanie Kelton, erstwhile chief economist to US senator Bernie Sanders. In her book The Deficit Myth, she takes her argument for a ‘people’s economy’ built on the insights of MMT to a wider audience.
The Deficit Myth faces the triple challenge of any non-fiction book that assails an existing orthodoxy. It must set out a compelling argument, be intelligible to a lay audience, and dispel hegemonic common sense. This is a daunting task, and the meagre evidence base, weaknesses in Kelton’s writing style, and a different perspective on political economy meant I was left unpersuaded by the book’s stronger claims. Nonetheless, it is a thought-provoking read that provides ample critique of economic orthodoxy, and left me receptive to exploring more rigorous defences of MMT in future.
Something is rotten in the Republic of Korea. Its shining reputation as a miracle of post-war economic development obscures deeply troubled gender relations. Misogyny is more prevalent and firmly entrenched than in most other parts of the developed world, fueled by a combination of strong patriarchal traditions and increased economic insecurity. This is the backdrop against which Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, winner of the 2016 Man Booker Prize and superbly translated by Debora Smith, emerges.
At under 200 pages and written in a minimalist style evoking the surrealism of Kafka and Murakami, The Vegetarian describes the events that take place after Yeong-hye, a young woman, stops eating meat. The seemingly simple decision to adopt a vegetarian diet is met with increasingly aggressive incomprehension by her family, and their attempts to ‘cure’ Yeong-hye of her deviation have calamitous consequences. The Vegetarian is a powerful story of a woman who refuses to be an object and against all odds tries to eke out some agency in a world that is set against her.
Interstellar empires. They are a staple of science fiction, but we don’t often see how they arise. They’re just…sort of there, with their ‘Romans with spaceships’ vibe. John Scalzi’s Interdependency trilogy departs from convention by giving us both a backstory and a look under the hood. The series, comprised of The Collapsing Empire, The Consuming Fire, and The Last Emperox, tells the story of the eponymous interstellar empire confronted with an existential crisis, as its interdimensional hyperspace network starts to unravel. Like other human societies that preceded it, what the Interdependency does not do is pull itself together to avert disaster. Instead, its ruling elite descend into lethal court intrigues to gain control over the limited number of proverbial escape pods on the rapidly decompressing imperial spaceship. Across three fast-paced books, Scalzi puts the reader at the centre of power to find out whether the ruling class will pull itself together, or apart, and the rest of society with it.
Scalzi’s worldbuilding makes for a really interesting setting, and a creative new take on the interstellar empire trope, with plenty of nods to our contemporary world that are either humorous, insightful or both. Which is why it is such a shame that as the series progresses, the Interdependency itself fades increasingly into the background, obscured by the interpersonal dramas and vendattas of the main characters. The end result is something akin to what you might get if Frank Herbert’s Dune was the basis for a season of Eastenders.
Something is wrong with the internet. What once promised a window onto the world now feels like a morass infested with AI generated garbage, trolls, bots, trackers and stupendous amounts of advertising. Every company claims to be your friend in that inane, offensively chummy yet mildly menacing corpospeak – now perfected by LLMs – all while happily stabbing you in the back when you try to buy cheaper ink for your printer. That is, when they’re not busy subverting democracy. Can someone please switch the internet off and switch it on again?
Maybe such a feat is beyond Cory Doctorow, author of The Internet Con, but it would not be for want of trying. Doctorow is a vociferous, veteran campaigner at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a prolific writer, and an insightful critic of the way Big Tech continues to deny the open and democratic potential of the internet. The Internet Con is a manifesto, polemic and primer on how that internet was stolen from us, and how we might get it back. Doctorow has recently gained mainstream prominence with his neologism ‘enshittification’: a descriptor of the downward doom spiral that Big Tech keeps the internet locked into. As I am only slowly going through my backlog of books, I am several Doctorow books behind. Which I don’t regret, as The Internet Con, published in 2023, remains an excellent starting point for anyone seeking to understand what is wrong with the internet.
There are two common misconceptions about meritocracy. The first, that we live in one and that our position in society results from merit rather than luck, wealth or other structural factors. Second, that living in a meritocracy would be desirable in the first place. We have forgotten that ‘meritocracy’ entered the English vocabulary as a pejorative and something to avoid. Evaluating people on merit rather than connections or wealth is certainly desirable, but the corollary of granting power based on merit is the disenfranchisement of everyone considered insufficiently deserving.
The Ten Percent Thief, Lavanya Lakshminarayan’s debut novel, skillfully takes aim at both misconceptions. It is a bold, creative and excellent satire of contemporary fixation on merit and productivity, true to Ursula K. le Guin’s dictum that the best science-fiction illuminates the present rather than prophesises the future. The title of the book is derived from an eponymous stratum in Lakshminarayan’s fictional society, which divides its citizen into an upper 20%, middle 70% and lower 10% based on their productivity. One’s placement on this curve within the corpocracy of BellCorp, a self-described ‘meritocratic technarchy’, determines one’s rights, privileges and access to consumer technology, creating a constant race to the top. Failure to perform results in demotion, expulsion from BellCorp’s Virtual City to the adjacent Analog slums, or a one-way trip to the vegetable farm. The Ten Percent Thief is not always subtle in drawing its parallels with the present, but that makes it no less effective.
If unions had a collective mythos, then the union-buster would be its demon. Called in by employers to thwart unionisation drives, the union-buster sows fear and discord wherever they tread, skirting and sometimes crossing the bounds of legality. All is fair in love and class war, after all.
In accordance with Sun Tzu’s dictum in The Art of War that warfare is the Tao of deception, union-busters operate, if not in secret, then at least under the cloak of deception and misdirection. Their art consists of appearing to do one thing while actually doing another. Countless organisers have seen their campaigns end in defeat without being fully aware of the forces arrayed against them. However, some of these covert tactics have been illuminated by repentent deserters. One such convert is Martin J. Levitt, a former union-buster from the United States who had his Damascene Moment and revealed the union-buster’s arsenal of deceit and discord in his Confessions of a Union Buster.