Tag Archives: books

Playground, by Richard Powers

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What Richard Powers’ The Overstory (2018) did for the astounding canopy of trees above our heads, Playground does for the super-abundance of seawaters that surround us. 

Part letter of appreciation, part eulogy, each novel employs intriguing characters to weave a scrim upon which to embroider an abundance of colorful facts and observations about the environment which gives those characters and all of us life, purpose and – if our eyes are at all open – a measure of sorrow for how carelessly we are diminishing our descendants’ futures.

Where The Overstory was structured around a tale of eco-warriors campaigning to stop forest destruction, here it is Silicon Valley’s takeover of our time and imaginations that drives the plot. Powers braids together the lives of a poet, an explorer, an artist and a social media software tycoon to create both compelling mystery and satisfying conclusion.  With thirteen previous novels to his credit, it should be no surprise the product feels mostly effortless and ordained.  What does startle though, is how the few moments which do feel effortful – when the wealth of scientific detail seems to veer into pedantry or showing-off – are cast in an entirely different light once it dawns on the reader just who has been narrating the story.  Suffice to say that that realization brings into focus yet another level of questions the novel is raising, about memory and knowledge, about fact versus fiction, brain vs. whatever, and about whether the answers to those questions will diminish the stories we read, hear and watch in future eras as greatly as we are currently diminishing our own and only habitat.

(As angry as Powers clearly is about our destruction of species and environment, he is wise enough to include reminders that nature itself will hardly notice our waste.  For as many species as we destroy and cry over, natural processes will someday create new ones.  Perhaps not as photogenic as the old or perhaps more so – nature has other things to worry about – but either way, new habitats will spring up and new species with them.  Long after mankind departs the scene in whatever fashion we do, natural processes will continue creating and embellishing, erring and correcting.  Only cosmic forces and events can end that process, and those will operate on their own scales regardless of human activities. It is only we and our descendants who will be injured by our carelessness; to the rest, we are irrelevant – as is whether we find that fact reassuring or insulting.)

Heartfelt, informative, moving and timely; the evidence of this outstanding novel suggests that individual human minds will continue to create entertaining and enlightening stories for many generations to come. 

One aspect of our future, at least, to which we can look forward with eagerness.

If you like what you read here or at robinandrew.net, please share any posts as widely as possible – and consider subscribing: it’s totally free!

P. S.: E Unum Pluribus is a new novel that explores multiple themes – language and gender, identity, guilt and even the origins of faith and belief – but speaks loudest in its vision of a post-USA future.

The manuscript is available in six instalments, starting at:

E Unum Pluribus

Novel Words – fictional pronouns for the actual future?

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John McWhorter published an Opinion piece recently* about the evolution of pronouns, with particular attention to a new character gaining attention among users of the Mandarin language. Along similar lines, a new novel, E Unum Pluribus, speculates a future American city/state called Confluence in which government edict directs all official communications to employ non-gendered pronouns. The novel’s events make clear that Confluence’s government has plenty of faults and weaknesses, but this one of its policies merits some consideration.

For generations the convention in English was to use ‘he/him/his’ as default and inclusive of all, regardless of their sex/gender. Appropriately, that has now been perceived as favoring male identity over female; simultaneously reflecting historic inequality and perpetuating it. Replacing all those instances with ‘he or she,’ ‘his or her,’ etc. is hardly workable, especially in spoken communications, and still carries a hint of misogyny by placing one gender ahead of the other, whereas ‘she/he’ risks offending insecurities on the other side of the identity coin.

Recent efforts to innovate ‘they’ as a singular pronoun for persons who choose to declare themselves non-binary run aground first on its pre-existing function as plural, generating confusion where they intend clarity. That usage also seems to open the door to a trickle of additional new pronouns as various groups or orientations demand similar recognition; one need only read the snarky online critiques of how LGBT has grown to LBGTQIA2S+ to know that is not a path to tolerance so much as a guarantee of further friction. Worst, in this opinion, ‘they’ singular requires persons who prefer not to be stereotyped as either ‘he’ or ‘she’ to state that publicly, thereby outing themselves and very possibly inviting prejudice, at least at this point in our societal evolution.

The fictional founders of Confluence have taken another approach; directing official communications to use ‘e/em/eir’ for all individuals. This treats everyone with equal respect and does not require the clunky ‘my pronouns are…’ , which can itself incite prejudices. The specific form, ‘e,” ‘em,’ and ‘eir’ are brief and efficient, similar enough to other pronouns that they quickly feel familiar but with sufficient difference to avoid confusion**.

By applying equally to all possible personal preferences ‘e’ equalizes all in one swoop while tacitly expressing the truth that for virtually all public or official interactions there is no proper reason to indicate what genitalia an individual bears or with whom they choose to become intimate. Those are – and should remain – irrelevant.

There’s nothing revolutionary here, by the way, modern English already has gender neutral pronouns – ‘they’ does not presume the gender of a group or any of its individuals. ‘It’ can be used for all objects – unlike French, say in which some nouns require feminine constructions and other nouns masculine, despite the objects having no actual sexual function or accoutrements. Most prominently, ‘I’ is the same for any individual regardless of sex, gender or other characteristic. It is really only in the second person singular that our language’s evolution has codified an unfortunate and outdated discrimination.

In the world of E Unum Pluribus, that governmental edict for official communications also does not mean ‘e’ is used by everyone all the time. Non-official conversations use gendered pronouns wherever a subject’s preference has become clear and stick to gender-neutral when an individual’ p[resentationis itself gender neutral. As in real life, casual usage and common courtesy have the final word in how language evolves over time.

(For what it’s worth, future posts on this site may selectively incorporate ‘e/em’eir’ pronouns to explore just how functional they are – or are not.)

*“This Novel Word Speaks Volumes About How an Entire Language Works” N. Y. Times online edition, 2026-01-22

** E Unum Pluribus does not claim to have invented the ‘e/em/eir’ construct.  Variations on what are sometimes called ‘Spivak pronouns’ have been noted at least as far back as the late 19th-century.

P. S.: E Unum Pluribus is a tale of murder and conspiracy set a decade or so in our future in one of many small sovereignties sprung up in wake of the USA’s self-destruction. The novel explores multiple themes – language and gender, identity, guilt and even the origins of faith and belief – but speaks loudest in its depiction of how much we all stand to lose if we continue to retreat into factions which each act only for their own needs and interests.

The manuscript is available in six instalments, starting at:

E Unum Pluribus

If you like what you read here or at robinandrew.net, please share any posts as widely as possible – and consider subscribing: it’s totally free!

A free book? Why?

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As the years 2016 to 2020 unfolded, I found myself preoccupied with a particular aspect of human history: that even the greatest empires, dynasties, governments and nations have each eventually ended and been replaced by…something else.  The ongoing self-segregation of Americans along various lines – urban/rural, elites/masses, investors/workers, digital/analog, etc – suggested our own nation’s end might come sooner than later, and not through some external conquest, virulent plague or invasion of space aliens, but our simple failure to appreciate the myriad benefits of remaining ‘United.’ 

Starting in 2021, those thoughts began to coalesce into a speculative fiction, structured as a tale of murder and conspiracy happening a decade or so in our future in one of many new sovereignties sprung up among the remains of the U. S. of A. The novel toys with other themes as well – of language and gender, identity, guilt and even the origins of faith and belief – but speaks loudest in its depiction of just how much we all stand to lose if we remain divided into factions which each act only for their own needs and interests.  

Writing the book took many months and once it seemed ready, the publishing industry proved impenetrable, even as the politics of disorder and division grew stronger.  By the end of 2025 it had become clear I must find another pathway to the public and so I offered the first installment in a post which can be reached via the following link:

E Unum Pluribus

That and all subsequent installments may also be accessed via the ‘E Unum Pluribus’ buttons in the top menu or the right-side Categories list of this website’s home page.

Maybe the novel will find an audience this way, maybe not, but regardless, if you believe in the message that we Americans must overcome our divisions and preserve the USA as a government of all the people, by all the people and for all the people – or if you simply support authors being heard without reliance upon the gatekeepers of corporate commercial publishing – please share this post and the above link as widely as possible.

Sincerely hoping the world of E Unum Pluribus turns out to have been a naïve exaggeration, and wishing this great nation the good fortune of avoiding it, I thank you,

Robin Andrew

Age of Revolutions – Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present

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In the historical/political realm, the word ‘revolution’ is commonly applied to a singular event of momentous change. In the realms of physics and mechanics, as Fareed Zakaria reminds us early in this very timely political history, ‘revolution’ means movement of an object or a system around its center, in which any point other than that exact center moves in a circle, initially getting farther away from where it once was but eventually returning to that same point before repeating the cycle.    

With that in mind, the author cogently and persuasively recounts several significant revolutions of the past 500 years, considering each as a cycle driven by some changed circumstances (new knowledge, new inventions, ravaging disease, etc.) and shaped by human choices (often with crucial contributions by extraordinary individuals).  Most importantly, he points out how in each case, the great upheaval we tend to best remember was followed by counter-revolution, a complimentary (in the geometric sense, that is, not the conversational) effort by those not in favor of that revolution’s effects to roll back the cycle of history.

A second crucial point of Zakaria’s is visible in his choice of ‘revolutions’ on which to focus: not only the political (England’s supposedly ‘Glorious Revolution,’ France’s admittedly horrific one) but also technological, economic and social revolutions.  Innovations in navigation and ship building lead to wider trade which brings different cultures into contact, at the same time it finances urbanization and thus greater education and innovation.  Industrialization creates new occupations and allows leisure for intellectual pursuits while also allowing wealth to be generated with less reliance on slavery, conquest or serfdom.  The printing press disseminates knowledge faster and wider than ever before, fostering ideals of personal choice and expectations that government should be a protector of freedom rather than an instrument of domination.  Paper and print in turn are overtaken by an electronic information revolution leading – well, we’re not yet sure where this one is taking us.

Less bloody than overt political ‘Revolutions’, it is arguably these knowledge revolutions which played the greatest role in enabling most humans today to live healthier, more comfortable and perhaps more satisfying lives than any who came before us, even as they present our greatest challenges for the future.

That’s the bulk of the book as finished in late 2023, and it’s an engrossing and valuable analysis.  Given how long it takes for even a veteran author’s work to navigate the publishing gauntlet, though, Zakaria has added an Afterword composed in the wake of Mr. Trump’s 2025 re-ascent to the highest office in our land. 

This crucial update begins by recounting China’s ‘Cultural Revolution’(1966-1976), a backward-facing assault on what Mao perceived as the threat of modernization and ‘liberal’ thought among his subjects. Tellingly, the excesses and destruction of Mao’s minions soon led to their own counterrevolution; an opening up and partial shift toward capitalism and entrepreneurism resulting in tremendous economic progress for the people of the PRC (though far less on social fronts). This history serves as a lamp under which Zakaria examines the USA’s current leadership and direction, bringing to mind another observation about ‘revolutions’ in classical mechanics: that when a revolving object or system is simultaneously moving along a larger axis – a wheel, say, revolving around its axle as a cart moves along a road, or humankind’s cycle of innovation/reaction/regression/innovation as it moves along the axis of time, for another – what results is not an endless repetition of the same events, but a sine curve of events rising up and then sinking down before beginning to rise up again. At any given moment, in fact, some specific parts of the revolving system are moving ‘forward,’ others rising up or dropping down and some are even, for an equal moment, moving backward, despite the entire system continuing its overall progress along its axis of road or time.

Do not mistake one moment’s regression for permanence, Zakaria’s text reminds.  Humanity throughout known history has been incessantly creative and innovative in seeking betterment.  For all recorded history, despite individual points upon civilization’s wheel moving upward, downward or backward, the overall motion of us all has been forward, in the direction of greater equality, greater freedom and greater physical wellbeing for more and  more of us.  If we can avoid the greatest catastrophe of total self-destruction, there is every reason to believe that future revolutions of time’s wheel will see us our fitful history continuing to move in those directions.

A reassuring conclusion in this very daunting moment…

P. S.: E Unum Pluribus is a new novel that considers where our current divisiveness may lead in the near term, and how even tragic events can spawn possibilities for better futures. It is currently being serialized at robinandrew.net and you can be among the first to read its opening pages there in the post titled ‘E Unum Pluribus.’

If you like what you read here or at robinandrew.net, please share any posts as widely as possible – and consider subscribing: it’s totally free!

Change your party – change the future!

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E Unum Pluribus – a tale of The Big Diss, imagines the United States of America dissolving into chaos because its elected representatives ceased to work together for the common good.  While the novel is fiction, its premise is plausible, which begs the question – what can an individual do to avoid such a tragic outcome?

Plenty of folks more knowledgeable than I have commented that we’ve all gotten so isolated into our own bubbles – republicans/democrats, conservatives/liberals, red states/blue states, urban/rural, blue collar/elitist; however one summarizes it – that it’s easy to dismiss everyone on ‘the other side’ as unreasonable, unapproachable, unsalvageable or worse. 

If (like me) you fear there is some truth to that description, and if (like me) you think forever encouraging division is a dead end – if you’ve ever felt the impulse to disagree when you’ve heard someone say the ‘X’ party is corrupt and they’re all a bunch of ‘z#fqt*^k!s,’ – how about switching your voter registration: to the X Party! 

WTF?

First off, once you switch, you will know for certain that there is at least one reasonable person in the X Party – one grain of sand to begin a beachfront of unification.

Second, you may (depending on your state) gain the opportunity to vote in the X party’s primary and improve the chances of their most reasonable candidate.  If enough of us do that, we could all have a better set of candidates to choose between in the actual election, instead of one we  cannot stomach and one we can support if we have to, but only by holding our collective noses.

Third, although there is no need for any else to know about your switch, should you ever hear someone thoughtlessly badmouthing either party, you might choose to respond by pointing out your agreement or disagreement “even though I’m a registered X!”  A single brick pulled out of a wall can improve communication between the two sides.

For whatever it’s worth: I switched to ‘the other party’ over a decade ago.  Since that time, I have found myself much more open to hearing ‘other party’ statements and proposals. I certainly do not dismiss all members of my new party out of hand – I am one of them, after all!  And I still do not always agree with their (our?) positions, but I feel obliged to at least listen, and much less resistance to acknowledging when a representative of my new party has proposed something worthwhile or productive.

Changing your party doesn’t mean voting for candidates you don’t support. It does mean choosing a future where each side is not so committed to smashing and trashing the other side that it’s virtually impossible to accomplish anything constructive. 

Government of the people, by the people and for the people should not be a cage-fight; it should be – and it can be – a mission in which we all share, together.

Red Gold, Alan Furst

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Through half a dozen novels I’ve read since 2014, Furst has never disappointed.  In a deceptively quiet voice he portrays the complexity of life in situations too often cartooned as ‘dramatic’, ‘heroic,’ or ‘epic.’  Heroes are not sprung from the loins of goddesses, he shows us, but grown from the soil of ordinariness, seeded by terrible circumstances, watered by relationships with other decent human beings and nourished by the force of life itself as they seek the paths which will allow them to go on for another day, a week or if they are very lucky, even longer.

For Red Gold, we travel in the company of one Jean Casson, a Parisian film producer trying to survive under the Nazi occupation.  Having once been picked up by German intelligence and escaped their clutches, he must now hide in plain sight, growing a mustache and dressing poorly as he adopts a false in hopes of not being recognized contacts from his old life.  Learning to watch in every direction at every moment Casson, who is himself no socialist, drifts into contact with Communist resistance fighters, directed and bankrolled by the Soviet Union.  They in turn find his character and connections useful, loosely employing him as liaison to other factions – free French disruptors, conflicted Vichy collaborators and anti-Communist nationalists partially directed and intermittently supported by the Allies’ military for their own ends.  All of these, and also the Nazis, of course, are quite willing to sacrifice any individual at any time, if it serves their particular ‘greater purpose.’

As always, Furst paints a convincing and absorbing picture of life under occupation: the drabness, the cold, shortages and unexpected moments of plenty.  Casson’s inner voice is witty enough to entertain and resourceful enough to keep him and the reader out of the worst trouble, at the same time he manages to find enough minimalist romance to leaven the despair.  These characters have no foreknowledge of how the war will turn out; at any moment this depressing moment in history may take their life and so define it – a tragedy deeper and more painful than the destructive result of any brilliant explosion or dramatic car chase.

Life goes on, even under the heavy hand of war, and as much as some persons may fight for glory or principle, what most really want is simply to keep on living, with perhaps a bit of food, a sip of drink, a smoke or a hint of love to make it worth the effort.

Definitely an author to return to, and with around fifteen novels focused on the war years in Europe (published between 1988 and 2019 and collectively referred to as ‘The Night Soldiers series’) there’s plenty of opportunity to keep Alan Furst on the shelf.

(Note: Furst’s The World at Night (1996) shares a common plot and protagonist with Red Gold, so other readers may benefit from reading that volume first.  His three earliest novels, published in ’76, ’80 and ’81, concern drugs and crime in the U. S.  I’ve not sampled them but hope one day to do so).

My own latest novel is currently being serialized on this site. You can read the first installment in the recent post titled E Unum Pluribus.

If you like what you read here at robinandrew.net, please share any posts as widely as possible, and consider subscribing – it’s totally free!

E Unum Pluribus

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Wondering where our nation’s increasingly divisive politics may lead us? E Unum Pluribus is a new novel which explores one very real possibility:

Amid feudal chaos following the USA’s collapse, one city-state seems promising, until an amateur’s murder investigation exposes its weaknesses and the conspiracies threatening to destroy it.

In order to receive community input, I’m serializing a Beta Test draft of E Unum Pluribus free of charge. (So I can track interest, the final installment may be posted only to subscribers, but even that subscription will be totally free of charge or obligation.) A .pdf of Installment One is included below and may also be downloaded for a more comfortable reading experience. Either way, you get to explore this new novel at absolutely no expense!

2025-01-01 E Unum Pluribus – Installment OneDownload


Succeeding installments are available at robinandrew.net by selecting the ‘E Unum Pluribus’ button in the home page’s top-menu.

In addition to posting the manuscript, I will be sharing thoughts about the novel’s themes and objectives in future posts on both this website and on Substack at nobodysays2025.substack.com

If you find E Unum Pluribus of interest – or if you simply support the concept of authors sharing their work without reliance upon commercial publishing corporations – please share this post as widely as possible.

Have a wonderful 2026!

Robin Andrew

Free Speech on Trial? I. F. Stone’s ‘The Trial of Socrates’

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Isidor Feinstein Stone was widely known and read as a liberal/socialist leaning journalist and newsletter writer from the 1930’s to the ‘80’s.  His introduction to the paperback edition of this book suggests it was the product of a late in life desire to move away from investigating current injustices and stake a claim to something timeless. 

In that, Stone acquits himself admirably, analyzing the works of Plato, Aristotle, Euripides, Xenophon and others like a professor of the Classics, along the way citing a wealth of references both primary and secondary, some of which seem quite obscure.  His commentary on specific words of Ancient Greek – their origins and multiple usages and especially the implications of how they’ve been translated (or mistranslated) over the ages – suggests an ability to read the original Greek language sources, which is impressive in one whose Wikipedia entry records only that he dropped out of the University of Pennsylvania

Greatest take away for this unschooled reader is to reframe Socrates from a revered name in the pantheon of Athens’ great philosophers into a rather disreputable rascal; a gadfly and rabble-rouser accused of corrupting the state’s youth by arguing the efficacy of oligarchic tyranny at a moment when such evils had very recently taken advantage of democracy’s natural disorder to seize power for themselves – twice! – and stood eager to do so again at any time.  Also, as Stone puts it, a man who habitually and resolutely argued the negative side of every issue without ever offering a single positive value to which he would actually commit.  This, in Stone’s view, is the real reason Socrates seemed to actively seek and welcome his death sentence (at an age when he could otherwise look forward only to sickness and decline) and turned his own death into a performance calculated to seal his place in posterity.  As likely as it was that a defense on the grounds of free speech might have saved his life (the last chapters of the book analyze this in extravagant detail), Socrates would not demean himself by pleading a principle against which he had previously argued with all his eloquence.  Even more, he seemed purposely to alienate his judges so as to be sure they would not honor their own and their City’s principles by freeing him on those same grounds.

Which last leads into the second lesson of this author’s analysis. An ardent supporter himself of the right to speak freely, Stone reminds the reader that such a right has very rarely been the policy of any government or governing system.  Even among the Golden Age Greeks it was a niche freedom, always tempered by its applicability only to those accredited for a specific body or forum, or only those of wealth and privilege, only those meeting citizenship requirements, only those owning property, only those not owned as slaves or reviled as foreigners or uncivilized – the list goes on.  That freedom of speech was not a universal value even among those greats in that great time and place is a very valuable reminder for those of us living in this one (U.S. A, 2025)

Certainly worthwhile to read and know, Stone’s analytics in The Trial of Socrates feel repetitive and over-argued; one imagines the same points could have been made in an essay rather than a book. But then, an essay about such a scholarly subject would never have achieved the visibility and stickiness this stand-alone book has (much less been deemed a ‘NATIONAL BESTSELLER’ as the paperback jacket proudly proclaims). Pulling Socrates off his pedestal at the same time it raises the U. S. First Amendment’s guarantee of Free Speech up onto one of its own is pretty good work for a small volume (247 pages plus Notes) by the college-dropout son of an immigrant shop owner? Achievements well worthy of a space on the shelf.

Parable of the Sower – Octavia E. Butler’s 1993 Vison for Today’s Tommorrow

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Following up recent rereading’s of Orwell’s 1984 and Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 I saw this speculative novel recommended for its prescience and found that characterization to be spot on. Writing back in 1993, Butler describes a Southern California that could believably result from just a few more years pursuit of our nation’s current course.  Widespread poverty thanks to an politicians who own power over actual governance, violence and destruction by a populace fragmented and distrustful of one another, worldwide ecological disasters, misuse of new technology for profit and oppression, legal and police powers used not to protect the rights of all but to entrench the power of the few and, overlaying all that, a portion of the populace turning to reactionary religious movements in hope of refuge.  A decidedly dystopian take on our situation, but very convincing and valuable as an eye-opener.  That it is set in our exact time (July 2024 – October 2027) despite having been written over thirty years before is almost spooky to one first reading it today.

Butler (born 1947, died 2006) was a pioneer: at a time when it was striking to find either a Black person or a female making a name writing science fiction she was both, going on to win Hugo, Locus and Nebula awards as well as a MacArthur Fellowship grant.  This first of her works that I have read (there will be more) is partly shaped by her ethnicity, featuring a mixed race band of refugees and touching repeatedly on how race has shaped them, has affected their fortunes and is still affecting them despite the near total collapse of nearly every other social structure. 

Not content to cover that weighty ground, Butler also puts forth a religious theme, with protagonist Lauren Oya Olamina (which surname we learn is from the Yoruba region of Nigeria) the daughter of an Evangelical preacher. Lauren is in the process of devising a faith of her own, which she calls Earthseed in reflection of its vision of destiny – the expansion of Earth’s humanity to live among the stars and spread their ‘ seed’ throughout the universe.  Lauren’s coming to grips with that calling and beginning the process of dissemination is the true theme of the novel, all the others serve to set the conditions and inform the necessity of her doing so.

Butler’s writing is immediate and colorful yet quick and concise, her plotting is complex without falling into the sort of techno traps that affect much Sci-fi.  Resultingly, the Parable of the Sower is a work of literature which uses its genre as vehicle, not a commercial work safely exploiting a comfortable niche. A sequel, Parable of the Talents (1998) presents a further step in Laruen’s and Earthseed’s journey, culminating in departure of their first space craft on a colonizing mission.  That having been Butler’s final published novel, it is sad to consider how she might have continued the tale, had she not struggled with depression and writer’s block before passing away in 2006, at the too-young age of 58.  

Very glad to have encountered both book and author, and highly recommend them to any readers interested in where our politics are leading the USA, exploring the canon of science fiction, alternatives to mainstream religion or just curious about where human society may be headed – in both the near and the far terms.