As I’ve been working through Octavia Butler’s Dawn, I’ve realised why science fiction as a genre rarely resonates with me. It isn’t the aliens or the starships; it’s the scaffolding. Sci-Fi carries the weight of the Modernist project – questions posed and quickly answered, problems rationally explained, the reader guided toward the “lesson.” It feels like indoctrination: tidy, didactic, instructional.
Fantasy, strangely enough, I tolerate even less. Where science fiction pushes forward, fantasy looks backward. Sci-Fi imagines the future of the Modern experiment: technology, politics, survival scenarios, all with a rationalist bent. Fantasy imagines the past of the same experiment: kings, bloodlines, prophecies, destiny. One proclaims progress, the other tradition, but both insist on role conformity.
This struck me as almost political: science fiction reads like fodder for Liberals and Progressives, those who believe we can build better systems if only we’re clever enough. Fantasy, meanwhile, often aligns with a Conservative ethos – a return to order, hierarchy, and providence, just with dragons and spells thrown in. Both are catechisms of Modernity, just oriented in opposite directions.
It may just be me. I don’t identify with the Modern project, and so the genres that proselytise it – looking forward or looking back – leave me cold. I prefer literature that unsettles, that leaves silence where there might have been certainty, that lets ambiguity breathe. But for many, Sci-Fi and Fantasy provide something else entirely: reassurance.
Sustenance (available here) was free for everyone on Kindle on 8 and 9 September. My goal was to provide access to the book for exposure with the hope of getting ratings and reviews. It’s still early, but I’d like to report that over 100 people downloaded the Kindle version. Now, I’ll share some details.
The Kindle version was downloaded 106 times in the past two days.
Some read it from their KindleUnlimited accounts
Some bought physical copies
Some people rated the book; some even left reviews on Amazon or Goodreads
The ratings and reviews are mixed, but all are welcome. Few people rate books; even fewer review them, so I appreciate the effort.
I got 3 ratings and 2 reviews on Amazon: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐, ⭐⭐⭐⭐, and ⭐. A one-star review. Thanks for that, too.
The ⭐rating didn’t leave a review, so I don’t know why they didn’t like it. I don’t know what types of books they read or this is exatcly what they prefer – they just didn’t like this. Still, at least they took the time to do it.
As a former statistician who has worked with survey data, I find this to be similar – most people don’t respond to surveys. Most people don’t engage in call-in shows. Most often, the people who respond either love or hate the topic so much that they feel compelled to broadcast their opinions. The people who say “meh” won’t even bother.
KindleUnlimited notwithstanding, I have no idea how people engage with a book. I have purchased and downloaded more books than I can read in a lifetime – probably multiple lifetimes. Sometimes, I just want to have access to a classic in case the mood strikes me; sometimes a book comes into view, and I convince myself that when I have the time, I might read it. I have no way of knowing.
Image: Sustenance Trope Board
I’m guilty of some single-star ratings without leaving a review, so I am in no position to point fingers. Sometimes a book seems bad that you want to warn the world, but you don’t want to expend more time on the endeavour that you already have.
I took this screengrab of 1-star ratings from Goodreads – some have reviewers, others don’t.
Image: 1-Star Reviews
Only one of these books is non-fiction, though I might argue that point, hence the single star.
One Ayn Rand was a class assignment. The other was someone telling me that I hadn’t judged her best work. In this case, her best work is one star, so I can skip anything else. Ditto for the Bible – complete dreck.
Authority, I only recently read. it was part of a trilogy. The other two books got 4 and 3 stars, so I’ll consider this one a dud. I’m not in good company, as it rated worse than the other two on average, yet still managed a 3.55. Some people liked it.
The last one was a class assignment for my son that I read with him. His rating matched mine. How it became an assignment is just testimony that there is no accounting for taste.
Also, as a public service, I’d be willing to bet that if you liked these books, you won’t like mine.
Octavia Butler’s Dawn
On the topic of rating— I am midway through Dawn. It’s mid. I was asked why I hadn’t read it as part of the dystopian Venn, so I picked it up. To be fair, I thought several of the stories on the Venn were mid themselves, classics or otherwise. Perhaps I’ll write a separate post on that someday.
Honestly, I’d give Dawn 2 stars. However, I also know that Sci-Fi is not a genre that resonates with me, so I’ll be generous and give it a star because it may just be my personal bias of not relating to Sci-Fi that’s the problem, and the book might be better received by fans of that genre. Offhand, the only fiction genres I dislike worse than Sci-Fi are Fantasy and Romance.
Aside from being Sci-Fi, it reads like YA fiction. There’s nothing inherently wrong with YA, but I am clearly not its target demographic. Other than that, it’s serviceable, but I prefer to read content that’s more complex and layered, not spoonfed to me.
Conclusion
Anyway, I’ve derailed this thread, but I wanted to clarify how I approach rating books and want to thank those of you who have taken the time on Sustenance. If you haven’t yet, I’d appreciate any rating from 1 to 5. Reviews earn extra karma points.
On 7–8 September 2025, the Kindle version of my novella Sustenance will be available free to everyone on Amazon. (It’s always free if you’re a KindleUnlimited member, but these two days open it up to all readers.)
So what is Sustenance?
It’s a novella that begins with the dust and grit of rural Iowa – soybean fields, rusted trucks, a small town where everyone knows your name (and your secrets). At first glance, it reads like plainspoken realism, narrated by a local mechanic who insists he’s just a “regular guy.” But then the ground literally shifts. A crash. Figures glimpsed by firelight in the woods. Naked, violet-skinned beings who don’t laugh, don’t sleep, don’t even breathe.
What follows is not your usual alien-invasion story. It’s quieter, stranger, and more unsettling. The encounters with the visitors aren’t about lasers or spaceships – they’re about language, culture, and the limits of human understanding. What happens when concepts like property, law, or even woman and man don’t translate? What does it mean when intimacy itself becomes a site of misunderstanding?
Sustenance is for readers who:
Gravitate toward literary fiction with a speculative edge rather than straight genre beats.
Appreciate the mix of the banal and the uncanny – the smell of corn dust giving way to the shock of alien otherness.
Are interested in themes of language, power, misunderstanding, and human self-deception.
Enjoy writers like Jeff VanderMeer, Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, or Denis Johnson – voices that blur realism, philosophy, and estrangement.
This isn’t a story that offers tidy answers. It lingers, provokes, and resists easy moral closure. Think of it less as a sci-fi romp and more as a philosophical fable wrapped in small-town dust and cicada-song.
This version of the book is available in these Kindle storefronts: United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, Japan, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Australia, and India
I found Hour of the Star to be an interesting experiement, but I would have preferred a short story over a novelette. A Room of One’s Own is interesting and well-written, though the content resonates with me historically rather than personally. I’ve already written a bit on Trainspotting, which hit me quite close to home. I liked it the best but needed a change of scenery before engaging in its prequel, Skagboys. I need more motivation before I embark on a 500 page journey. I like Welsh’s writing, but it’s not an easy read, I I need more stamina or a break first.
Five chapters down, and Anna Kavan’s Ice is already proving itself to be less a novel than a feverish novelette-length hallucination. It hits differently than the sprawling sagas I’ve been chewing through – leaner, sharper, like a shard of frozen glass pressed against the skin.
This isn’t realism. If you try to read it as realist narrative you’ll only tie yourself in knots, muttering that the protagonist keeps chasing a girl he half-admits isn’t even there. He catches glimpses, shadows, phantoms – and follows them anyway. Contrived? Yes, if you expect logic. Coherent? Absolutely, if you treat it as dream grammar, where compulsion replaces causality and the world obeys obsession more than physics.
The point-of-view is the real hall of mirrors. Not so much “unreliable narrator” as unreliable perspective: the voice flickers, sometimes inside his skull, sometimes inside hers, sometimes perched like an outside observer. As in a dream, identities blur. The supposed rescuer blurts out sadistic fantasies, sounding alarmingly like the blue-eyed Warden he claims to oppose. It’s less “out of character” than a reminder that character itself is already compromised.
So, no, you can’t hold this text to the rules of straight narrative. You have to read it the way you stumble through a nightmare: half-convinced, half-sceptical, fully captive.
Where it all leads? I’ve got perhaps seventy pages left to find out. For now, I’m letting the ice close over me, listening for the crunch of those imaginary bones.
EDIT: I’ve finished Ice and left a review on Goodreads. tl;dr: I gave it a 3 of 5 stars. ⭐⭐⭐ It was good. Mercifully it was short. As it reads like a dream sequence, there are no stakes. From the start, I wasn’t heavily invested in what happened to the protagonist nor the subject of his attrction. There were some good scenes, but not enough for me to give it more than a 3.
Film has an extraordinary talent for turning jagged, difficult novels into cultural smoothies. Hand Hollywood a text about drugs, despair, and the grotesque collapse of youth, and it will hand you back something fit for a date night. Less Than Zero was gutted. Trainspotting was diluted. Both survived, after a fashion, but only one crawled back out with its bones still rattling.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
Ellis’s Less Than Zero was a flatline pulse of Californian ennui, a catalogue of hollow gestures in which the children of wealth consume themselves into oblivion. The backdrop was Reaganism in full bloom—an America drunk on consumerism, cocaine, and the fantasy of eternal prosperity. The kids in Ellis’s Los Angeles aren’t rebelling; they’re marinating in the very ideology that produced them. The film, by contrast, became a tepid morality play, complete with Robert Downey Jr.’s photogenic martyrdom. The void was swapped for a sermon: drugs are bad, lessons have been learned, and the Reaganite dream remains intact.
Welsh’s Trainspotting was messier, darker, harder to pasteurise. His junkies live in Thatcher’s Britain, where industry has collapsed, communities have rotted, and heroin fills the crater where meaningful work and social support once stood. Addiction is not just chemical but political: it is Thatcher’s neoliberalism rendered in track marks. Boyle’s film kept the faeces, the dead baby, the violence—but also imposed coherence, Renton as protagonist, a redemption arc, and that chirpy “Choose Life” coda. Welsh’s episodic chaos was welded into a three-act rave, all set to Underworld and Iggy Pop. Diluted, yes, but in a way that worked: a cocktail still intoxicating, even if the glass had been sanitised.
And yet, here’s the perennial fraud: drug films always get high wrong. No matter how grim the setting, the “junkie experience” is rendered as theatre, actors impersonating a template someone else once performed badly. The reality of heroin use is crushingly dull: twenty minutes of near-unconsciousness, slack faces, dead time. But you can’t sell tickets to drool and silence. So we get Baudrillard’s simulacrum: a copy of a copy of an inaccurate performance, dressed up as reality. McGregor’s manic sprint to “Born Slippy.” Downey’s trembling collapse. Junkies who look good on screen, because audiences demand their squalor to be cinematic.
And here’s where readers outpace viewers. Readers don’t need their despair blended smooth. They can sit with a text for days, grappling with jagged syntax, bleak repetitions, and moral vacuums. Viewers get two hours, max, and the thing must be purréd into something digestible. Of course, not all books are intellectual, and not all films are pap. But the balance is clear: readers wrestle, viewers swallow. One is jagged nourishment, the other pasteurised baby food.
So Less Than Zero becomes a sermon that spares Reagan’s dream, Trainspotting becomes a rave-poster that softens Thatcher’s wreckage, and audiences leave the cinema convinced they’ve glimpsed the underbelly. What they’ve really consumed is a sanitised simulation, safe for bourgeois digestion. The true addict, the tedious, unconscious ruin of the body, is nowhere to be found, because no audience wants that reality. They want the thrill of transgression without the boredom of truth.
And that, finally, is the trick: cinema gives you Reagan’s children and Thatcher’s lost boys, but only after they’ve been scrubbed clean and made photogenic. Literature showed us the rot; film sells us the simulacrum. Choose Life, indeed.
I’ve just finished Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex – all 800 pages of it – and have now started Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting. Both are classics in their own way. I’ll review Second Sex properly on my Philosophics Blog, but here I want to think about Trainspotting in relation to my current manuscript, Needle’s Edge.
Interestingly, Trainspotting was a ChatGPT recommendation. I fed in my draft of Needle’s Edge and this was one of the books it said my work resembled. Two chapters in, I see the connexion. First, the subject matter – drugs and addiction. Second, the rawness of the experience.
There are differences, of course. Trainspotting is rooted in Leith, Scotland; Needle’s Edge belongs to the East Coast of the United States – Delaware and Philadelphia. Welsh draws heavily on dialect and vernacular, with a narrative voice that’s linguistically dense and aurally charged. In Needle’s Edge, the style is pared down. Sentence fragments, middle dots instead of full stops, and an intentional “lower” register mirror the protagonist’s fractured perception and limited resources.
That gap in register creates a different authorial challenge. With every edit pass, I find myself policing intrusions of my vocabulary into her voice. Welsh, by contrast, can deploy a broader lexicon and trust the dialectal texture to keep it authentic. Listening to Trainspotting, I’m struck by how words and turns of phrase leap out – sometimes apt for Needle’s Edge, but often just a shade too polished for Stacey’s world.
Both texts orbit around environments that resist glamour. Welsh’s squat flats and pubs are grimy and feral; Needle’s Edge’s motel rooms and sidewalks are littered with fast-food wrappers, orange caps, and fading unicorn posters. Addiction erodes bodies in both stories, but the textures differ – Scotland’s industrial gray versus the East Coast’s cheap motels and suburban detritus.
As for the film version of Trainspotting, I saw it long ago and remember almost nothing. The novel isn’t refreshing my memory either; it feels like a separate creature altogether. Which is fitting: both Trainspotting and Needle’s Edge are less about plot than about capturing a lived texture, a rhythm of voices and environments that mainstream narratives usually discard.
Some bloke on social media posted to celebrate hitting his 10-book milestone for the year. It made me reflect on my own. I don’t keep a running tally, but I do use Goodreads, so I reviewed my list. I share it here. Evidently, I’ve read 22 so far. In all honesty, I cheated, because I won’t finish The Second Sex until later this evening or tomorrow morning. Sue me.
The Second Sex —Simone de Beauvoir In its day, I may be given this 4 stars. NONFICTION. Today, perhaps 3, but it’s a seminal work, so I’ll give it 3½.
Notes from Underground —Fyodor Dostoevsky 5 stars. FICTION. Perhaps 4½, rounded up. This came with Apropos of the Wet Snow, where it all falls apart (in a satisfying way).
Crash —J.G. Ballard 3 stars. FICTION. This was a ChatGPT suggestion*. Generous 3. Probably a 2½ if I’m being honest.
Acceptance —Jeff VanderMeer 3 stars. FICTION. This was not as good as Annihilation, but it got the bad taste of Authority out of my mouth. It closed the loop in the Southern Reach universe.
Authority —Jeff VanderMeer 1 star. FICTION. This was horrible. I wanted to read more about the Southern Reach universe. This prequel should have been an email.
Annihilation —Jeff VanderMeer 4 stars. NONFICTION. This was a ChatGPT suggestion*. I liked it. Much better than the movie with Natalie Portman.
Never Let Me Go —Kazuo Ishiguro 4 stars. NONFICTION. This was a ChatGPT suggestion*. It took a few chapters to see where this was going, but it was worth the wait.
The Left Hand of Darkness —Ursula K. Le Guin 3 stars. FICTION. This was a ChatGPT suggestion*. Read 8 or 9 chapters. Didn’t realise it was #7 in a series. Was OK. Not a Sci-Fi fan. Love her short stories.
English after RP —Geoff Lindsey 3 stars. NONFICTION. I liked this book and the author, but I can’t justify completing a linguistics reference book at this time. Maybe later.
* ChatGPT recommendations stem from my feeding draft manuscripts and prompting who it reads like.
She’s Come Undone is a novel published in 1992, written by Wally Lamb, no relation to Shaun the Sheep.
I haven’t read She’s Come Undone, and it’s unlikely that I ever will. I read a social media post where the author supplanted The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy as his top book. These don’t appear to be the same genre, so don’t ask me how the list was structured. Perhaps books about bears. Does She’s Come Undone have any passages on bears – prequel to The Revenant? We may never find out.
The reason this blog post exists is that I was reading the reviews on Goodreads – 3.91 of 5 stars. So, I read some reviews. This woman offered only one star and swore she’d have given fewer if she could. Odd, how zeros don’t carry the same weight. They act more like NULLs than zeroes. Sad, that.
Evidently, some commenters were furious at her revealing the spoiler. I share her defence here. For those who have yet to watch Citizen Kane, I warn you of the spoiler in her response. Read on at your own risk.
Addendum: Every so often, someone comes along and flags this review as having spoilers. Complaining about spoilers in this review is, not to put too fine a point on it, really stupid. Most of the plot points I mention here are either in the actual cover copy of the book, in the Goodreads summary, or occur somewhere within the first ten pages or so. The rest are so vague (e.g., hooking up with a bad boyfriend — a plot point that probably occurs in some form in, oh, half of the books ever written) that if you consider them “spoilers,” I’m not really sure why you read book reviews at all.
Further addendum: If you’re about to complain about spoilers in this review, please see comment 55 below. If you’re that hysterical about spoilers, maybe stop reading online reviews before you read the book. Also, the book was published 25 years ago and I think the statute of limitations has really run on this one. Rosebud was his sled!!
There’s a peculiar little ecosystem out there called the author’s forum. You’ve probably seen it – digital watering holes where writers congregate to swap tips, trade war stories, and, inevitably, flog their latest magnum opus like a Victorian street hawker with a sack of dubious oysters.
Don’t get me wrong: I don’t begrudge other writers their moment in the sun. We all want our roses sniffed. But here’s the problem: I’m not looking for fellow gardeners. I’m looking for bees. Readers. Pollinators of stories. The ones who carry your words away, let them germinate somewhere else, and maybe if you’re very lucky leave a little honey in return.
Instead, these forums are like a row of market stalls where every vendor is shouting, “Buy my book!” at every other vendor. It’s a deafening loop of mutual advertising in which no one is actually in the market to buy anything. Imagine a cocktail party where everyone is giving a TED Talk at the same time. You can’t even taste the hors d’oeuvres for the noise.
Yes, there’s theoretical overlap; writers are often readers, and some might genuinely enjoy a novel by an unknown author. But the ratio is wildly off. Authors’ forums are not where most readers live. And when you do find a forum of book lovers, they’re usually busy discussing the books they’re already reading, not soliciting a cold pitch from a stranger waving around their unrecognised genius.
Bookseller and library forums? Same issue, just with a corporate gloss. They’re less like communities and more like speed dating events where every participant turns up with a PowerPoint presentation and a sales target.
I suppose it’s a rite of passage for indie authors: you wander into these places thinking you’ve found the gates to literary Shangri-La, only to discover you’ve walked into a multi-level marketing convention where everyone’s selling the same product in slightly different packaging.
So, I’ll keep my profile there, post occasionally and drop in to wave, but I know the audience I’m after isn’t there. The real trick, as ever, is finding the places where the readers live, and learning how to be interesting enough that they might actually care.
