Readers recommend "apocalyptic systems thrillers" and an "American giallo" movie for fans of 'Road House'

Roundup 08/08/2024

Greetings from Read Max HQ, and welcome to our weekly roundup column, in which I pick out some worthwhile and often overlooked books, articles, movies, and music to recommend to paying subscribers. For this week’s SPECIAL ECLIPSE EDITION round-up, I’ve got:

• Recommendations from Read Max readers for “apocalyptic systems thrillers” of the kind discussed in this week’s column;

• an American “giallo” for fans of Road House; and

• four songs I’ve been listening to a lot lately.

If any of that sounds interesting -- and if you want to support Read Max in its continuing mission of explaining the future to relatively normal people -- please subscribe below. Subscribers get access to these weekly emails and to the comprehensive Read Max Master Lists of Good Movies to Watch and Good Books to Read--as well as preferred pricing on merchandise like the Read Max “EMAIL SUPPLY” caps. If you’re already a subscriber, thank you.

I love to hear from readers who want to recommend a cool book or movie (or whatever!) to me, or from readers who are looking for specific kinds of recommendations. Just leave a comment or drop me a line at maxread@gmail.com.

Finally, please note that I may receive a small commission if you purchase books via links in this email.

Now, the roundup. First, as always, a dispatch from the future:

The identity of the commander of Israel’s Unit 8200 is a closely guarded secret. He occupies one of the most sensitive roles in the military, leading one of the world’s most powerful surveillance agencies, comparable to the US National Security Agency.

Yet after spending more than two decades operating in the shadows, the Guardian can reveal how the controversial spy chief – whose name is Yossi Sariel – has left his identity exposed online.

The embarrassing security lapse is linked to a book he published on Amazon, which left a digital trail to a private Google account created in his name, along with his unique ID and links to the account’s maps and calendar profiles.

-- “Top Israeli spy chief exposes his true identity in online security lapse,” Harry Davies and Bethan McKernan, The Guardian

Apocalyptic Systems Thrillers, as recommended by Read Max readers

This week, in part because I haven’t read a great book to recommend in a while, we’re going to shamelessly repurpose for profit content generated for free by Read Max users, in honor of the dreams of digital-media investors of the 2010s. In the most recent Read Max column, I solicited recommendations for “Apocalyptic Systems Thrillers,” a new genre (if you’d like, use scare quotes around new, or genre, or both) limned by Hari Kunzru:

Multi-stranded, terse, often anchored in character just enough to drive the action forward, these books invite us to take an elevated, panoramic view of events that extend too far in space and time to be grasped by a single narrative consciousness. Conflict, climate change, pandemics and natural disasters offer ways to contemplate our interconnection and interdependence. At its best, this kind of fiction can induce a kind of sublime awe at the complexity of the global networks in which we’re enmeshed: A butterfly flaps its wings in Seoul and the Dow crashes; a hacker steals a password and war breaks out.

The currency of the A.S.T. is plausibility. It can be counterfactual, but never fantastical. It differs from other kinds of thrillers in its willingness to indulge in essayistic digressions about technology or policy. In some cases, the story may even take second place to these ideas, a mere vehicle for the delivery of an info-payload. In this, the A.S.T. is essentially a subgenre of SF, or at least the kind of science fiction that prioritizes world-building over other kinds of narrative pleasure. Indeed, many A.S.T.s, like “2034” and “2054,” are near-future tales, extrapolating from the present to a carefully imagined next five minutes, designed to elicit a little spark of recognition, the feeling of being shown a possible path from “here” to a utopian or dystopian “there.”

Kunzru lists a half-dozen recommendations in his column, and Henry Farrell as a few non-fiction A.S.T. suggestions in this response. (I also contributed a couple.) I thought paying subscribers might enjoy a collected list of reader recommendations from comments and emails, some of which are familiar to me and some of which are intriguingly new. Please be aware that Read Max Publishing cannot vouch for all of the following suggestions and cannot and will not be held responsible for what might happen if you read these books:

• Iain: “John Brunner - with The Sheep Look Up, Stand on Zanzibar and Shockwave Rider - was the first writer I thought of in the AST genre, but seems to be sadly absent from the discourse.”

• Joshua Hughes: “I think Robert Saviano's Gomorrah about how the mafia is involved in so many different aspects of Italian life might also fit the bill on the non-fiction side. On the fiction side, Stanislaw Lem's His Master's Voice is not necessarily apocalyptic, but it has a real systems bent to it and an undercurrent of unease.”

• Sophie: “Greg Egan's Perihelion Summer probably fits this description. Near-future sci-fi in which a black hole passing through the solar system knocks the earth off its orbit. Summers get way hotter and winters get way colder, like climate change taken to an extreme. it's mostly interested in how the characters try to survive in this world, so it's maybe not as wide in scope as some of these books, but I think it would count. some people might find the focus on nerdy science discussions to be off-putting but I enjoyed it.”

• Hannibal Cook: “Haven’t read it yet but I’ve been wanting to read Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials. It sounds like the ultimate AST. Described as ‘At once a horror fiction, a work of speculative theology, an atlas of demonology, a political samizdat and a philosophic grimoire, CYCLONOPEDIA is work of theory-fiction on the Middle East, where horror is restlessly heaped upon horror’ Apparently imagines petroleum as a basically demonic force working its way through our culture and history. Sounds rad as hell”

• Mark Christopher: “Odds Against Tomorrow by Nathaniel Rich. A young mathematician gets hired to model hypothetical catastrophes so his company can sell insurance against them, then one happens. Seems to fit squarely in the genre.”

• Nathan Taylor with some inventive suggestions: “A few AST suggestions from unlikely places:

  
  - A Mind Forever Voyaging: a text adventure computer game from the golden era of the Infocom company: in brief, the player portrays a sentient AI who is tasked by a think tank to experience and extrapolate potential government policies. Viewed through an AST lens, the player feels in conversation with the author of the game as it progresses, something that's hard to convey in a non-interactive medium. (Of course in reality it remains a one-way conversation since interactive though it is it remains a linear experience.)

  
  - Network Security in the Medium Term: 2061-2561: SF writer Charlie Stross gave this keynote at an academic computer security conference, extrapolating trends that seemed fantastical in 2011 but already exist today like always-video streaming cloud-connect wearables and carries forth implications for the infosec community.”

• Nemo: “Nonfiction is also where my brain went with Systems Thrillers! I read a lot of history, and while I have some pet peeves with the current trend for narrative history (there's an annoying, very common tendency to describe what people of the past *might have felt* or *could have thought* as if it were fact) there are lots of fantastic books in that style. Adrian Tinniswood's The Rainborowes certainly has an air of the apocalyptic, following a single family, on both sides of the Atlantic, through the political and social turmoil of the English Civil War. William Dalrymple's The Anarchy, about the disintegration of the Mughal Empire and the rise of the East India Company, is less narrative but has a lot of fascinating recurring characters, given voice by Indian chronicles of the time. Would highly recommend both!”

• Bryce, via email: “Ever checked out Samuel Delany’s Neveryon books? Kind of Apocalyptic Systems Fantasy! They’re excellent. Trouble on Triton is the more sci fi version from him (which was written with The Dispossessed in mind.)”

• Steve, via email: “I wonder if you're familiar with an even older forebear of this genre, Olaf Stapledon's extremely wild Last and First Men, an extend-the-timeline-till-it-breaks-your-mind classic of future history that records multiple apocalypses. I confess I read it as a teen and it impressed me immensely but not enough for me to find time to reread it since, so who knows how it holds up, but thought you might find it noteworthy if you hadn't already encountered it.” 

• Eliot, via email: “If you're looking for more recs, obviously tooting my own horn here, but my novels are very much ACTs, or at the very least STs, e.g. Foundry is a spy thriller about semiconductor supply chains and Veil plays out a near-future solar geoengineering scenario (fun fact: it came out 6 months before Ministry and when Stan read the advance copy to blurb it we discovered that both novels start with a deadly heat wave and failed monsoon, although they go in different directions from there).”

• Finally, at least two commenters suggested just reading Thomas Pynchon himself--the master of the “systems novel” in its original formulation--instead of the addled techno-thriller versions, and while “you should trying reading Thomas Pynchon” sounds like obvious advice that’s just because it’s good advice. Bleeding Edge is probably closest to Kunzru’s list of “A.S.T.s” but Gravity’s Rainbow certainly qualifies as well.

What else I’m reading

• Kevin Baker’s excellent analysis of “Lavender,” the A.I. system used by Israel to target and kill suspected Palestinian militants, which was reported on last week by 972+ Magazine:

  The accuracy, efficiency, and fairness of these systems is not the point, and thus cracking open the black box will tell you very little about how they work. The true process is more straight-forwardly social: they operate through a process I think of as “technological delegation.” They work by mystifying questions of responsibility and agency behind a veil of technology, by subtly changing the subject. Uber did this by selling an unlicensed, unregulated taxi service as an “app.” Google did this when they used to blame the algorithm for search results. They’re machines for hiding behind, instruments of moral and legal arbitrage. As such, the normal forms of AI critique not only misapprehend the problem, but by focusing attention too tightly on technological politics, they actively help to deepen the illusion.

• As I was writing and thinking about “apocalyptic systems thrillers” I was happy to also be reading Brandon Taylor’s essay on perhaps the original apocalyptic systems thriller, Zola’s famous Rougon-Macquart cycle.

An “American Giallo” for fans of Road House

Striking Distance (1993) dir. Rowdy Herrington

Streaming on Tubi

I recently re-watched the 1989 film Road House, starring Patrick Swayze, in anticipation of the remake with Jake Gyllenhaal (currently streaming on Amazon Prime), and was reminded of what a stupidly wonderful movie it is. Probably the best way to understand Road House is as a story about small-business ownership and hospitality-sector management told in the register of a Homeric epic: violence, honor, legend (one of the great details of the original movie is the idea that certain bouncers have national reputations among bar-goers and employees), regret, and male camaraderie. (There’s even a blind bard in the person of Jeff Healey.) I can’t in good conscience make Road House this week’s official subscriber recommendation--it’s too famous to offer the kind of value for your money that Read Max subscribers expect from these recommendations--but Road House did lead me to watch its director Rowdy Herrington’s movie Striking Distance, which I am pleased to recommend. The main thing Striking Distance shares with Road House is tonal schizophrenia; the movie, about Bruce Willis as a riverboat cop in Pittsburgh tracking down a serial killer amidst drama with his large Irish-Italian family, switches drunkenly, scene to scene, from noirish serial-killer thrills to big-budget ‘80s-style car-and-boat-chases to over-the-top family melodrama. This might be off-putting to some, but if you can get past the fact that there are at least three distinct movies happening in this one movie, you can enjoy that all three of the movies are being done pretty well. What really helped the movie click for me was the Letterboxd reviewer nathaxnne’s description of the movie as “American giallo,” in reference to the lurid Italian serial-killer genre, where black-gloved killers taunt disgraced or outsider heroes over the course of multiple outrageous plot twists. Properly understood as elevated exploitation, Striking Distance rocks; as nathaxnne puts it, “You are the sort of person who knows if they want to see a Bruce Willis Riverboat Police Giallo or not.” Note that there is a scene where Bruce Willis chases a car on his boat while firing a handgun at it.

What else I’m watching

• “Why choose Donghua Jinlong as your partner?” Louise Matsakis explains my favorite TikToks in a minute.

  

  @gangstasportivikWhy is Donghua Jinlong's Industrial grade glycine of high quality? #dasha #glycine #decarbonizers

  Tiktok failed to load.
  
  Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

Four recent singles I’ve been enjoying

“Theta,” Otik

“Doesn’t Matter,” High School

“Suffer One,” Adult Jazz feat. Owen Pallett

“Con Amore La Mi Madre,” Jackie Oates

Please feel welcome to share this newsletter with non-subscribers you think might like it!

For more movie and book recommendations, check out “THE READ MAX READING LIST” and “THE READ MAX WATCH LIST.” Looking for particular recommendations (genres, vibes, authors)? Comment below or reply to this email and I’ll try to satisfy your request in a future roundup.

Thank you, as always, for reading.