Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week – our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! Having finally read The Epic Of Gilgamesh recently, I feel I should in be awe at how the proliferation of certain themes and dramatic modes throughout history speaks deeply to the truths of the human experience. However, gaming has taught me to recognise a dirty asset flip when I see one. For shame, much of storytelling.
This week, it’s Saltsea Chronicles, Mutazione, Thronglets, and much more’s Hannah Nicklin! Cheers Hannah! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?
What are you currently reading?
I’m someone who has a number of books on the go at once. I also have to avoid non-fiction or ‘easy’ reading books unless I’m on holiday/vacation because my specific kind of hyperfocus sees me one-shot books and massively disrupt my sleep schedule. So the books I tend to read are a little more friction-full (in the best ways). In that context I’m currently feasting on a buffet of:
The Mechanic And The Luddite: A Ruthless Criticism Of Technology And Capitalism (Jathan Sadowski)
I’m loving this so far, the dual lense Sadowski articulates as a means of reflecting on contemporary capitalist technoculture is super incisive. I’ll let him describe it, the book orients itself around: “[A] critical study of technological capitalism through two metaphorical role models for how to do materialist analysis: the mechanic and the Luddite. The mechanic knows how a machines is put together, how its parts function, and what work it does. The Luddite knows why the machine was built, whose purposes it serves, and when it should be seized––in both senses of stopped or taken, destroyed or expropriated. […] The materialist analysis of the mechanic provides the basis for the material action of the Luddite.” It’s frankly essential reading for our current moment, and generously arranged as a series of essays which you can dip into in any order.
The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies & the Promise of Direct Democracy (Murray Bookchin)
I’m interesting in representing alternative means of collective decision making in the work I do in games. Saltsea Chronicles definitely approached this by portraying societies and communities with collective decision making, but it wasn’t systematised in the game, something which made sense for the needs of that game, but I hope one day I can think through collective decision making/consensus in a narrative system. Bookchin’s is a book I’ve left far too long (it’s a decade old now I think), to be honest. It’s a proposal for a new left politics based on citizen assemblies. Many recent political trends and upheavals in the world, and certainly in the country I live in (the UK) have shown the paltry nature of ‘representative’ democracy (what does it even mean to vote every 4-5 years in a first-past-the-post system where a King is still technically in charge and vested capitalist technocultural interests have the ear of power?). I don’t think representative democracies will last much longer into the 21st century, and instead of letting strong-man fascists fill the vacuum, I want to know about alternatives which empower people, hold power accountable, and give us means of working past either bottom-up blockers (nimbyism, misinformation, disenfranchisement), or those from above (the interests of capital, the ruling classes, etc.) to building healthier, more humane, more just societies which also tackle the most urgent crisis of our times: that of the climate.
A Place of Greater Safety (Hilary Mantel)
I appear to have written a lot about the previous two books, so I’ll keep this short. This is an 871-page doorstop semi-fictionalised account that follows Danton, Desmoulins and Robespierre from childhood through to the 1789 French Revolution. I’ve been listening to the podcast series Past Present Future on Revolutions, and I’ve always found it a little tough to track the detail of this particular revolution. I’m deeply interested in revolution (can you tell) at the moment: in tipping points, in the people on whom it pivots, on the people they purport to speak for, etc. I felt like a semi-fictionalised account would give me the handhold I need on the history of it all. I’m only 150 pages or so in right now, but it’s quite intoxicating.
What did you last read?
I’m on holiday this week so I’ve allowed myself some one-shot read type books. I read in one sitting: Strong Female Character by Fern Brady (a sort-of-auto biography by Scottish comedian Fern Brady – largely focussed on her mid-30s diagnosis with autism) and The Centre by Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi (a thrilling part-horror part-mystery about translation, language, and what it means to remake yourself as you shift between cultures).
What are you eyeing up next?
The next three on my table are:
- History and Revolution: Refuting Revisionism Edited by Mike Haynes & Jim Wolfreys
- Playing Oppression: The Legacy Of Conquest And Empire In Colonialist Board Games by Mary Flanagan & Mikael Jakobsson
- Disordered Attention: How We Look At Art And Performance Today by Claire Bishop
The first two are fairly self explanatory but the last, by the author of essential read Artificial Hells, is an exploration of what it means to make art in an era of disordered attention.
What quote or scene from a book sticks with you the most?
Hm, I think scenes and words aren’t what stay with me. Instead it’s ideas. I think the idea I return to most at the moment is connected to one of my next answers – the idea that our stories about who we are are built on the biases of a bygone era, and in fact there’s plenty of evidence that at our heart we are a co-operative, egalitarian and playful species. There’s great hope in that idea.
What book do you find yourself bothering friends to read?
Probably these four:
Parable Of The Sower by Octavia E. Butler. An electrifying read. It was published in the year I was born (1984), and begins in 2024. How much she got right is a terrifying act of imagination.
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, by David Graeber and David Wengrow. We have all of these stories about who humans are, all drawn from who we have been and what we imagine our natures to be. In fact a lot of that is built on either fallacious or disputable readings of archeologists, anthropologists or philosophers drawing on a paradigm of knowledge that deeply impacts how they read the evidence. The Dawn of Everything is an immensely freeing exploration of evidence which shows human nature to be deeply egalitarian and playful. It is only the past few centuries which are a blip. And if that’s so, why can’t we return to a life which is co-operative, equal, just and playful?
Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative by Isabella Hammad. A deeply humanising tiny book (it’s an essay based on a speech, really) from a Palestinian author about what it means to be present, to witness at this point in history.
And for craft, I always go back to recommending Stewart Lee’s How I Escaped My Certain Fate – it’s a recommended text in my book Writing for Games: Theory & Practice, in fact. I return to it often, it’s such a masterclass in a life-long practice, so rich in all of his acknowledged influences, so metatextual as he unpicks his performances as a series of creative decisions. It’s a generous gift from someone deeply interesting in why and how language and human feelings intertwine. It won’t suit everyone, but it massively suits my brain.
What book would you like to see someone adapt to a game?
Your Wish Is My Command by Deena Mohamed – which is a comic. I recommend this a lot as a beautiful piece of worldbuilding/imagining. The essential premise is that wishes are real. But, other than that, everything is the same. That means you end up having to ban wishes as a weapon of war in a treaty after World War II, that means a working class Egyptian gifted a First Class wish (there are classes of wish, the cheapest of which always go wrong out of wilfully misunderstanding your intent when wishing, e.g. a wish for a Ferrari hands you a toy car, etc) will find herself bullied by the cops, imprisoned, and forced under duress to hand it over because ‘someone like her’ would never have access to a First Class wish. And like all wonderful worldbuilding, the three stories at the heart of the book are also deeply human. At the heart of the act of wishing are seeds of human desire. Mohamed has planted and tended and grown into a perfect reflection on what it is to be… us. I’d love to adapt it myself, if anyone wants to build a game dev team with me as creative director or narrative lead, please let’s find Deena Mohamed and make an anthology game oriented around wishing!
If you’ll allow me to be unforgivably earnest for a moment: thank you to everyone who has told me they miss the column when it’s gone, and appreciate it when it’s here. The idea that something I do is valuable or at the very least fun to people is hugely meaningful to me, at a time in my life where meaning feels elusive. Of course, I do have to now grapple with the failure to name all the books, cascading with each subsequent column. Eh, we’ll work it out. Book for now!
