Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It
by Cory Doctorow
338 pages, Hardcover
Published October, 2025 by MCD
Short but thoughtful review on the way.
Thursday, July 30, 2026
Book Review: Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It by Cory Doctorow
Book Review: TV 2000 Edited by Issac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, Charles G. Waugh
352 pages, Mass Market Paperback
Published January, 1982 by Fawcett Crest
Full review and Amazing Stories column....
Re-read Book Review: Bannerless by Carrie Vaughn
As a frequent user of the library, many of my favorite Science Fiction Books I have read that were written in the 21st century were taken out from the Library. I decided I needed to have these books in my collection and take a deeper look at them. At this time, I do not have an actual ranking, but I am working through them, and one that will be high on that list is Carrie Vaughn’s Philip K. Dick Award-winning novel Bannerless.
Around the time the sequel, The Wild Dead, came out, I interviewed Carrie, the very first interview for the Dickheads podcast. I have often pointed to this novel as easily pitchable for TV. Mare of Easttown meets The Road—a murder mystery show set against a society on the California coast trying to rebuild after climate collapse. Many elements make this a compelling story, but the many messages naturally woven into the story (without coming off preachy) are what make this novel special.
Bannerless has very unique elements, mainly the time and setting. A few generations after an economic and environmental collapse along the California coast. Memory of our technological society is fading as the generations pass. The only technologies the community isolated from the rest of the world include a few solar-powered emergency vehicles. The birth control implants carefully maintain ecological balance.
Our main character, Enid, lives in a seemingly utopian village known as Haven. Her aunt, who had recently died, was the last to remember the time before. Enid is an investigator, the closest thing these villages have to law enforcement. The villages operate from an almost anarchist ideal of mutual aid, so the investigators are not often needed. They are mostly called to settle disputes.
The most important law is the one that balances the ecology. On the surface, this may seem ideal or utopian. The right to reproduce is tightly restricted by an implant that all women are given. Why this falls on the women is one of the things that keeps Haven from being ideal. What comes of those ideals to me is the idea that the entire community is organized tightly around what it will take to keep a tight balance with nature.
Haven is not a reflection of our culture; it is a new and different thing. Families are structured beyond what we think of as a nuclear family, and once they can prove they can support a child, they are given a Banner to hang outside their house. That banner is the permission. One of the biggest crimes in this world is having a Bannerless child. You have to consider this society as reformed after ours collapsed due to an inability to balance with nature. It informs the way they make up their families and laws.
“…Kath always remembered exactly when her parents died, exactly the last time she spoke with her brother, and exactly when she herself left the old world behind. Right to the end, she’d been able to tell stories about her friends, the people who’d helped her and taken care of her, and spoken of where and how they died, from accident, disease, or simple old age. The world might not remember, but she would.”
That almost mythical memory of the world before haunts the people of the coast road, who see the existence of children the land cannot support as the crime that ended civilization. Is how they handle it right or wrong – there is no easy answer in this novel.
The Banner system is imperfect as Enid will learn when she investigates a death at a nearby village; she learns the dead man was a Bannerless child. Through a series of flashbacks that parallel, we see Enid travel to the post-California ruins, which might be LA or the Bay area, not sure which. Enid’s travel partner Dak is a guitar-playing busker, and in their travels to ruins they see a very different kind of survival. “ Lots of skinny children running around. Lots of children. It shocked Enid, and she looked for where the banners would hang, on a wall or a line or a pole, but there weren't any banners. No implants.”
This is not exactly a pro-choice society; women do not have control over their bodies, but Enid believed in the system as it is. Unlike religious moral control, this is a pragmatic ecological position that is meant to save the greater culture. In the ruins she saw children starving, resources spread thin.
“Did you think of anyone else?” Enid had asked the folk of this household. “Did you think of the next generation that’ll have to work this land and wonder why they’re getting half the yield they should? Or the ones who’ll starve when the land gives up because you”—she had pointed at them, with two stiff fingers—“couldn’t be bothered to take care of it?”
This is as on the nose as the message gets, but many excellent points are made throughout the novel. Everything is complicated, not simple. Bannerless sets up a rich environment for story, very unique. A story we can compare to others but it is like nothing else. The dynamics of the collapse and the society that rebuilds in this very special location provide complications for the mystery that express challenging ideas. No matter your political leanings, there is much to chew on.
“The worst storms were the ones that changed you. The ones you remembered not for how bad they objectively were, but for how much damage they did to your own world. Banners, planted in memory.”
This novel operates as a mystery, but it also challenges readers with complicated warnings. Are Banners ultimately the salvation of the people? You’ll have to read it and consider for yourself.
While very worthy of the Philip K Dick Award, the author's work that Bannerless reminds me more of in tone and subject matter is Ursula Leguin. While Vaughn has her own voice, I mean this with the utmost respect. The Coast Road is a post-end-of-the-world setting, and there is a fine tradition of novels like this set in California like this, from Le Guin's Always Coming Home, Gene O'Neil's Cal Wild books, and Kim Stanley Robinson's Three Californias trilogy. Bannerless is a strong entry in this sub-genre.
To me, it is one of the SF novels of this century so far, not just because it rewarded a second read, although my second time through was just as powerful.
Thursday, July 16, 2026
Book Review: Ballroom of The Skies by John D. MacDonald
Ballroom of the Skies by John D. Macdonald
176 pages, Mass Market Paperback
Published
September 1, 1968 by Fawcett Publications, Inc
Being a genre author in the pulp era had a bit of a different meaning. While we think of Tony Boucher as a godfather of mystery and crime fiction, his impact on SF was almost as intense. In the case of Boucher, it is my opinion that he was a better SF writer. John D. Macdonald, on the other hand, was hugely successful as a crime writer with the Travis McGee books and most famously the novel that inspired Cape Fear. Writing in balmy Sarasota, his Florida novels drip humidity and tension.
He wrote three works of Science fiction in the early 50s, and it seems that he was chasing the market; had they sold better, it is possible he would be remembered for SF. The reality is many serious JDM fans have no idea he wrote in this field. In fact, recently Brian Evenson, who wrote for the Cape Fear series on Apple TV, told me he didn't know that John D. MacDonald SF existed.
I didn't either before I happened upon this book at Footnote Books here in Hillcrest, judging from the low price inside the cover (1.95) the annoyed shop owner thinks he priced it 25 or more years ago, and there it sat. Today he would price a rare JDM SF novel higher. Too late. IT was mine now.
For three years it sat on my TBR.
Ballroom of the Skies comes with a very helpful afterword by the author who gives some origin on the work. Already in 1968, he thought that his SF writing was lost to time, and he himself didn’t remember much of writing it eighteen years earlier. He found himself wondering what would happen next as he read the proofs for the 1968 paperbacks of both I have. “I confess to being particularly jolted by finding in Wine of the Dreamers that the Paris peace talks were still going on in 1975, that the Asians were quarreling with Russia about the orbits for snooper satellites, and that a substance was being advertised and sold to millions of Americans as a non-alcoholic, non habit forming beverage that would heighten the sensory response to such stimuli as a kiss for a sunset. I wish I could have equivalent prescience in personal matters.”
Wine of the Dreamers is the other SF novel reprinted at the same time. I am not sure if they are connected story-wise, but I saw in the wold the other day a hardcover that includes both novels and a third novella.
The reality of Ballroom of the Skies is that it starts slow, real slow. The first six chapters I was a little bored and lost. Now, having finished looking back at it, it makes a bit more sense. But the first time through I was bit lost. We follow a group of journalists in a post-atomic-war Philadelphia, and the dominant political force is Pak-India. I am not sure that alliance made sense in 1952, but today doesn’t. Everyone is chasing rupees.
There are little details showing that some of the characters have ESP powers.
“30,000 rupees, girl, let's see the illusion.
Jake took the money Karen handed him. He handed it to Miguel. “Here's 30,000 rupees, Mr. larner I wonder if you could use it to get me a spot where the article will get decent readership.”
If he's latent, wouldn’t that help?”
The journalist characters are chasing a story that another war is brewing, and it seems these folks with intense mental abilities are going to be important to the future. Knowing what is coming as I looked over the novel with an understanding of where it was going it felt stronger. I admit I didn’t get hooked on the book until page 68.
Chapter seven is when it gets weird, and the alien invaders arrive. It is not just that this out-there alien invasion concept is introduced; the writing and world-building are well done and interesting. “Ten parsecs beyond the outermost star system, the great ship rested; it had been built in space. No planet crust could withstand its weight, and thus it had never felt the tug of gravity at close range. It was the flagship for a full division. On the master control cube, a three-dimensional diagram of our galaxy, tiny red spheres showed the placement of each ship in the division. In this hour, it was a nervous ship. Quick flick of eyes. Lick of tongue tip across dry lips. Silence. The launch had arrived an hour ago. And at last the bell called all officers; they hurried to central assembly and stood in formation at attention
After five minutes the Earthling arrived with his cold and bitter eyes, a flat iron slab of his face, wearing his symbols of command. The prisoner was taken to the vast open space in the middle of the hollow square of the formation.
They said he could give you a rising agony with a mere glance, read your most secret thoughts, turn you into a mindless thing; the officer stood like statues.”
Look at some of the details of how this is written. I love the description of the huge ship built in space and has never felt the tug of gravity. The “Master control cube and a three-dimensional map. The way he describes the nervous ship with short sentences Quick flick of eyes, licking dry lips. Just great stuff here.
The best idea in the novel came in the back half. “This room is so constructed that it aids the projection and reception of thought. When you have learned to give your thoughts to each other you will find that together you can open the door.” I thought it was a very PKD-like (although this novel pre-dates him, a room that won’t open until the people inside can receive each other’s thoughts.
So how did JDM feel about it after 18 years? His afterword lays it out.
“My most signal satisfaction in rereading these two novels and in authorizing their reappearance was to discover that I had not, as I suspected, sacrificed story to message. They move right along. It had been so long since I have written them that my recall was fogged by fifty intervening novels. And so I had much ironic amusement in finding myself for the first time reading my own work with considerable curiosity as to what would happen next.”
After a rough start, the back of the half of the story was much more interesting. Ballroom of The Skies is not a classic work of SF, but as an artifact it is valuable. It is really fun to see a novel by a man famous for his crime novels play with ESP-soldiers, alien invaders, global conflict, atomic wars, and the like. Also, his commentary on future TV written as it was just being born in 1952, is very interesting, but I am saving that for a separate essay.
If you are a Macdonald fan, I think you should read this. If you are just interested in 1950s SF that weird pocket between the golden age and the new wave that is dominated by Cold War fears, then yeah, I recommend it as well. However, there are about two dozen fifties novels from PKD, Leigh Brackett, and Moore/Kuttner I think are better.
Cover of First edition:
Speaking of Tony Boucher this edition has a fold-out in the center
Book Review: The Place Frafka Nim
165 pages, paperback
Published December, 2025
It is hard to really break new ground in horror at this point, but this is an interesting case. This was handed to me by a friend who was interested in my take on it. Frafka Nim, according to a quick search, is an indie author, and that is an understatement. From what I am told, this collection started as a series of micro-fictions, or flash fictions, on Substack, and spread through threads.
Normally when I read an author I have some idea of who they are, or where they come from. In horror, we are a tight-knit community and word spreads. I have never heard of this author. While the stories varied in quality, a few of them didn’t work for me at all. The most effective ones really did work.
One thing I can say is these stories are sparse in a good way. Much is left for us to fill in the gaps. There were three stories I found most effective.
Cucum - was a story about the most organized sister, who plans everything, who disappears. The clue of her unfinished shopping list was a great hook.
?She never finished the list.
Because she never got the chance."
I was curious about what happened, although the mystery is the point. I felt the narrator's unease. That unsettling feel is easier to pull off on the page, but the story that best captured this feeling for me was one called Check the Door.
The narrator is in the grocery store when a person hands them a key, but not just any key
"I said, Öh thanks,¨ and took it without thinking."
Because I recognized it.
It was the key to my childhood home."
I found the idea that this was the key to a long-lost house coming out of nowhere to be haunting, and an idea that I thought would make a great short horror film, or episode in a horror anthology.
@guest.303 was the most inventive tale using Instagram to be the source of suspense.
IS this book worth. Not a huge investment, I would suggest it but reading the stories online would make more sense. It would be nice if libraries would stock it. The reason to buy is to support an interesting artist, doing something different. Is it a must-read? No, but it is cool. I hope to see a longer work from this author.
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