Book Review: Atoms Never Touch

 Image: The cover of the book is a black background with spirals and lines scribbled all over in thin white ink. In the center, in red, green, and blue rounded letters outlined in white is, "atoms never touch." Across the top in small green letters in a box is "emergent strategy series." Across the bottom in blue letters in a white box is micha cárdenas. Below that in red letters in a box is "foreword by adrienne maree brown."

This is a review I have admittedly dreaded writing. I already feel anxious writing a negative review for any book that isn't obscenely oppressive because writing is difficult and I generally think exploring one's creativity regardless of skill is a worthwhile endeavor. I admire micha cárdenas' organizing work on behalf of migrants and have enjoyed the nonfiction writing of hers that I have read. In fact, her essay in another emergent strategy series book - Pleasure Activism - was one of the few that made an otherwise mediocre book a worthwhile read. Given that she has such a wide array of talents, I was looking forward to reading her foray into fiction with Atoms Never Touch. Unfortunately, she is mortal like all of us and there is a limit to her abilities.

To be frank, this book reads like a first draft of a first fiction attempt written by someone who thinks fiction is different from nonfiction in terms of skill needed to write it successfully. An analogy to cárdenas' academic work would be if I decided to write an academic essay in the field she has a PhD in, did no research and no editing and then submitted it to be published in a journal alongside hers. Perhaps blame also lies at the feet of adrienne maree brown who writes a gushing foreword showing that she has read and should have edited or given feedback to her friend before sending this to press. Even if the story was good and the plot and subject matter made sense and were well researched, the writing style is unskilled and very obvious edits would have made it easier to read. In the first paragraph I could already tell what I was in for. It's the kind of writing with repetitive and unnecessary descriptions, "she took her bag to the sink, she put it on the counter by the sink, she washed her hands in the sink then picked up her bag from the counter by the sink," (this is not a direct quote but a fake example since I am reading from an ARC.) It's also one of the biggest examples of writing by someone who has not heard the phrase "show don't tell."

I do not think that this book could have been saved by better writing or editing however. The story itself does not make sense and the book does not know what it wants to be. A large chunk of it is essentially, "so I time traveled to another dimension again, anyway, here's 15 pages on why I like going to the gym and 20 more about this girl I met. Oh yeah time travel is like a huge part of my life but let's not even talk about or describe it, it's completely destroyed everything I know and love but it barely deserves mention and hasn't affected me emotionally really at all, here's 25 more pages about my date." If the science fiction part, which tries and fails to have some basis in fact, was attended to at all, this would be a different book. I was already put off by the title because it in itself represents misinformation. I was willing to forgive this until the titular line inside the book itself where two womens "atoms touched" causing a cascade of events which again made no sense. People who write successful science fiction books- especially those that include things rooted in reality like physics- do research on the topics they include rather than just putting what they think they might mean onto a page.

This book maybe could have been a lesbian love story with all of the half cocked scifi stuff left out of it. Also, the randomly added part where a new trans girl enters the chat (to avoid spoilers you will understand what I mean when you get to it,) felt tokenizing and kind of gross. This might have been able to be fashioned into a near future cyberpunk lesbian love story given the "auglens" technology involved, but the politics within the story necessary for a decent dystopia are also incredibly transparent and carbon copies of a Trump presidency. It's nearly word for word retelling something from real life with no metaphor or allegory in sight. The love story itself is not good, but it at least offers something that we don't see very often in a lot of romance writing. We know from books like This is How You Lose the Time War that a skilled author can indeed write an excellent time travel queer romance novel that draws in fans of all genres. ANT unfortunately fails in all of the ways TiHYLtTW succeeds.

Do I believe the author should never have tried her hand at fiction? No. Creative endeavors are always a good idea. If you want to publish though, take some classes, do a lot of practice writing, get people to read it who will offer actual constructive criticism, scrap the bad drafts, and start over. Choose a topic- time travel OR dystopia OR near future critique of technology, etc- and spend a ton of time doing research to build a believable narrative. If you can pull it off, maybe you can pull off more. The only way this book would have succeeded is if those who read it were honest with the author and told her they love her passion and to start again by including a ton of feedback they had for her. Decent fiction writing, like all of the nonfiction writing that the author has successfully done, takes talent, time, practice, and help. I hope that the next time she gives it a shot, she has a better foundation to draw from, puts more time into researching the story and outlining a structure, and has better folks in her corner with the willingness and ability to help her make it better. Until then, I will stick with where the author's talent and training lie- in her nonfiction work.

This was also posted to my goodreads.

Book Review: Better Living Through Birding

Image: The cover of the book is a photograph mostly composed of a blue sky with sparse white clouds. At the bottom of the image, shown from the waist up is Christian Cooper- a man with brown skin wearing a gray shirt with a rainbow flag in the pattern of an american flag, a blue bandanna around his neck, a strap across his chest, a wrist watch, holding binoculars up to his eyes as he smiles, looking upward through them. In black letters across the top is "better living through birding" with a small cartoon of a red winged blackbird perched on the g of through. Below that in orange letters is "notes from a black man in the natural world." And below that in black letters is the author's name.

Like many people, I was introduced to Christian Cooper through his viral video in central park as a woman called the police and lied about him threatening her when he asked her to leash her dog in a protected area of the park. I am surprised though that I had not encountered him sooner since he has been involved with a variety of causes and mediums that I interact with regularly. There are too few people in the world with so much overlap of gay stuff, nerd stuff, and bird stuff. The more I learned about him, the more surprised I was that I was just encountering him now.

A friend of mine read Better Living Through Birding before me and told me to go for the audiobook when I was trying to decide which format to choose. She was not a fan of the structure on the page and thought his voice would take it up a notch for me. It was a good decision because I have had even less time and focus for reading pages than usual and hearing Cooper tell these stories added something enjoyable to the text. The audio version also implemented bird songs between various chapters, but it was done without proper editing. There were times that the song did not even match the bird species of the chapter that followed and since they never explicitly tell you who the song is from, it risks misinforming more than adding to the knowledge and experience of the listener. The recordings were also extremely different in volume from the rest of the book, and some of the recordings felt awkward or too long.

The book is a mixture of memoir and general essays about Cooper's experiences with birding. I can see how some readers felt misled. The title and hype for the book make it seem like a birding book when it is really a book about growing up as a gay Black boy and man, working in the world of comics when it was even less inclusive than it is now, navigating travel and gay culture across the world in various decades, and of course, lots of birding along the way. I loved the overlap of these different parts of Cooper's life, so I was not let down at all by it not being a birding-only book. I really enjoyed the sections where he would focus on a specific species of bird and go into detail about how he discovered them and what made them so special. I also really enjoyed his stories of when cultures would overlap and intersect, especially around birding and comics. My favorite story about his comics career was when he decided to turn the once sexist marvel swimsuit issue into what Warren Ellis affectionately called, "The gayest thing you ever saw." I laughed out loud and immediately had to google it and was not at all disappointed. Most of my interactions with comics were through DC Vertigo (with the exception of the X-Men,) so I never ran into any of this until I listened to this audiobook.

There were a few things I found disappointing about this book. Most of them were the ways in which Cooper fell in line with problematic but very common attributes of society and subcultures. In terms of birding, he refers to all birds as the objectified "it" even when speaking directly of male or female birds. He focuses almost entirely on flashy rare birds or males of the species. We do get a section about appreciating grackles (my favorite backyard birds) through the eyes of children, but only after he describes a bunch of arbitrary negative qualities he perceives in them. He has a section where he decries the keeping of birds (meaning some species of birds like parrots) in cages, but remains completely oblivious to the conflict that view has with another chapter in which he discusses wanting to kill the chickens at a monastery because he didn't prepare enough for his vegetarian trip (where some trail mix and protein bars easily could have solved his issues.) He, like many other birders, seem intentionally ignorant of the fact that chickens (and turkeys, ducks, and all other farmed/hunted species,) are indeed birds. Much like people who say they are "animal lovers" who only love dogs and cats. Farmed species are birds who are killed and suffer in unimaginably greater numbers than the already awful amounts in wild species. And even if he and other birders cannot bring themselves to care about these relatives of jungle fowl, water fowl, and wild turkeys, their exploitation and oppression is directly linked to the decline of wild species from deforestation to climate change to industrial farming and loss of avian biodiversity. 

His politics are very run of the mill centrist liberal. He even has a small section talking about all of the "good cops" out there because one time a cop didn't murder him or whatever. He talks about not understanding #defundthepolice at first, but later becoming enlightened. He then goes on to speak badly of #abolishthepolice because he clearly does not understand that either, but instead of educating himself, he defends cops some more. He, like many people, is most interested in understanding issues that affect his own demographics personally. Black women are never factored into his many discussions about police violence and other members of the LGBTQ population aside from gay cis men don't get much play either. He also has interesting views on tokenization/fetishization that can be understandable but still troublesome. In other words, Christian Cooper is just an average gay dude with average beliefs and understandings of various things in a lot of ways. This is fine. It would be unfair to expect him to be exceptional in every way after viral fame. I just didn't expect to run into quite so many examples of him lacking awareness or consideration of others related to him and the wild birds he so loves.

I feel a little guilty giving such a long take down of his faults, but chose to do so to balance out the massive amount of fawning over him that others are doing. The unfortunate problem that comes with being a minority of a minority of a minority in the public eye is that people outside those groups will look to him as the authority on everything. It's not fair to him or the rest of us. So, these criticisms are also to say that he does not represent everyone and is allowed to be an average gay dude birder like any other. I have immense respect for everything he has accomplished and all of the joyful trail blazing he has done. I love that there are no doubt Black and gay folks and comic nerds who were connected to birding through becoming aware of him and his work. I believe he has had and will continue to have a positive influence on birding culture in general. I hope that over time he can open his mind more and expand his consideration to all birds and more marginalized people. I would also really love if he wrote another book that was solely a birding book. It would be nice to see something in the reference section produced through his unique lens.

This was also posted to my goodreads.