Pre-P.S.: Follow The Usonian’s new IG page! @theusonian. The Achaeans thank you in advance.

Few films have been as highly anticipated as Christopher Nolan’s take on The Odyssey. (Spoilers below, so don’t read if you want to get spoiled on a 3,000 year-old poem.)

It’s territory that the elite director has been circling for a while. He was attached to direct Troy (2004) but traded the project with Wolfgang Petersen for the Batman reboot that evolved into Batman Begins, the start of the trilogy that made Nolan’s career.

I have to admit I was skeptical. In the casting, Matt Damon struck me as too modern (he excels in roles from 1930s to now, but no earlier1) to play Odysseus.

And the film’s first half hour, with its Oppenheimer-style expositional dialogue, which conspicuously feels out of time and place, seemed to confirm my suspicions.

And while ostensibly an adaptation of Emily Wilson’s 2017 feminist translation of The Odyssey (it is in the sense that female characters like Penelope, Circe, and Helen are more developed), the film’s more interesting contribution is how it weaves in what was actually going on during the end of the Bronze Age. Rather than glorify Odysseus’ ingenius role in the Fall of Troy, Nolan casts it, more modernly, as an act of horror, an original sin that leads to the fall of an age.

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This is the twenty-sixth chapter in a long-simmering miniseries called “Narrative Architecture” about storytelling choices in fiction. There are many ways to tell a story, and in this series, I’ll examine the literary choices a particular author made and their impact on the story at hand. This week, I’ll engage with Alan Moore’s classic graphic novel, Watchmen, and how it “subverted expectations” long before Rian Johnson was getting up to his schtick.

This post is a revised version of an essay I composed as part of my MFA program at UNR.

The standard James Bond villain is a debonair mastermind who arrogantly explains his plan to the secret agent right before his plot is set in motion. The trope has been parodied many times, memorably in The Incredibles, when the villain Syndrome tells Mr. Incredible “you caught me monologuing!” But Alan Moore’s Watchmen is perhaps one of the most notable genre stories where the twist is that the villain reveals his plan after he has set it in motion.

Adrian Veidt, aka Ozymandias, is initially presented as an ally of the main cast of superheroes within the graphic novel. Set in an alternate 1980s in which Nixon is still president and superheroes have been outlawed, Watchmen follows four former “masked adventurers” after the death of one their former colleagues, “The Comedian.” Gradually, Rorschach, Nite Owl, Dr. Manhattan, and Silk Spectre realize that Ozymandias is behind the conspiracy; they confront him at his Hellenistic-Egyptian-inspired Antarctic base, at which point Ozymandias reveals his plan.

As revealed in Watchmen Issue 11, Ozymandias explains to Rorschach and Nite Owl that he plans to forestall thermonuclear holocaust by faking an alien invasion, thereby motivating the US and USSR to end hostilities and collaborate to face the extraterrestrial threat (Moore, Issue 11, p. 25).

By genetically engineering a squid monster with the aid of psychics and teleporting this monster to New York, the creature’s death upon arrival “would trigger mechanisms within its massive brain, cloned from a human sensitive… the resultant psychic shockwave killing half the city” (Moore, Chapter 11, p. 26).

This plan is of course very strange, even for the world of Watchmen (which features a naked blue Superman in the form of Dr. Manhattan). That’s probably why the squid was omitted from the 2009 Zack Snyder film adaptation and replaced by a nuclear blast meant to represent the work of Dr. Manhattan, as opposed to that of a GMO alien squid.

The plan is strange enough that Nite Owl says that Ozymandias needs “help,” and asks, “Christ, you seriously planned all this mad scientist stuff? I mean… when were you planning to do it?” (Moore, Chapter 11, p. 26). The plan is so outlandish that Nite Owl thinks Ozymandias is insane—or at least crazy in the way that mad scientist villain Lex Luthor is.

Ozymandias responds to Nite Owl by saying, quite devastatingly:

“Do it? Dan, I’m not a Republic Serial Villain. Do you seriously think I’d explain my masterstroke if there remained the slightest chance of you affecting its outcome?... I did it thirty-five minutes ago.” (Moore, Chapter 11, p. 27)

Ozymandias already set his own plan in motion; it’s too late for the heroes of Watchmen to stop him. He’s also self-aware of his actions in explaining his plan—he recognizes he’s behaved in a manner similar to a “Republic Serial Villain,” presumably a serial comic book trope in this universe.

Of course, this is what a smart Bond villain should do, if they want to succeed—explain their plan only after it is irreversible. This moment—the fact that the bad guy wins—is part of Watchmen’s lasting appeal. A realistic superhero story would have a supervillain smart enough to see through his plan to the end. Ozymandias is that villain. The ambiguity of his plan—that his mass-murder of millions of people supposedly will prevent nuclear war and therefore save lives—also adds dimension to his plot.

The 2019 HBO TV sequel series wisely brought back Ozymandias to show that such a plan cannot succeed for long, as the interdimensional squid plot (still present in this version) falls apart once Ozymandias is apprehended for his mass-murder in New York.

Watchmen still shocks readers today for its subversion of the supervillain trope. If only half as many genre entries today tried to be half as clever….

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America celebrates its 250th anniversary of independence in a couple days, and though the vibes are kinda bad, with algal blooms fungifying reflecting pools and the performance of The Running Man-esque feats of violence on federal grounds to satiate His Excellency, we do have a lot to think about, and appreciate, despite the nation’s ongoing post-COVID fever.

The United States is most definitely not a perfect place, and has an exceptionally dark history (the two strains that have infected the American consciousness the most may be the fact we were founded by religious fundamentalists in Boston and greedy pirates in Virginia).

However, the virtue of the country’s design is that it is explicitly always striving for a “more perfect union”—reaching toward life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in a democratic, garrulous Philly-Quaker style, goalposts most other nations were not initially founded upon. These values are worth preserving. And we must work hard to preserve them.

I’m reading Sarah M. S. Pearsall’s excellent new history of the American Revolution right now, Freedom Round the Globe, which situates the march toward U.S. independence with a global perspective. If the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) (a.k.a. the French & Indian War) was sort of the first world war, then the American Revolution, she argues, was also sort of a world war, as other British colonies in Canada and the West Indies mulled over—and sometimes violently resisted—joining in the tea-dumping fun. (Meanwhile, a rebellion in South Asia drew down British reserves so that they didn’t have as many troops and resources to subdue the Americans—sounds a bit familiar, doesn’t it?)

But back to America’s unfinished pyramid. Usonia as an idea came from James Duff Law, who in 1903 envisioned an American name without colonial connotation (as in, not named for an Italian dude). In 1905, linguist Gaston Moch added the word “Usono” to refer to Americans in L.L. Zamenhof’s constructed language of Esperanto. And in the 1920s and 1930s, Frank Lloyd Wright adopted the label to apply to a style of buildings that could be singularly American, as opposed to European. (It was in his architectural style, of course.)

Usonia, as such, is an utopian ideal, and this newsletter tries to plumb the depths of what it means to design an ideal city, design an ideal narrative. (Sometimes other things, like examining a divided island and various clanker incursions).

If you’ve enjoyed this newsletter over the past five years, thank you so much for your support. I’ve appreciated being in a conversation with my readers, and I hope the conversation can continue for years to come.

That said, if you do want to support me a little bit more, I am doing a promotion for paid subscriptions timed with the anniversary…

The Usonian 5-Year Discount

As part of The Usonian’s milestone:

• I’m offering 25% off new subscriptions (both MONTHLY and ANNUAL) through the end of July 31, 2026. Our BEST DEAL EVER! DON’T MISS IT!

• New and returning paid subscribers will receive an EXCLUSIVE COMMEMORATIVE PENCIL. Now you’ll be able to write your own blogs by longhand!

• Paid subscribers will continue to receive monthly Usonian+ exclusive posts (paywalled to everyone else).

Get 25% off for 1 year

A Century of Route 66

Meanwhile, for more patriotic milestones, I encourage you to check out AllRecipes’ editorial package celebrating 100 years of excellent homespun dining along Route 66.

I was proud to participate in this initiative celebrating the Mother Road, contributing a story about the best restaurant in the rural (and historic!) Pecos, New Mexico—located INSIDE A SHELL-BRANDED GAS STATION.

I’ve spent a lot of time on Route 66, whether at its Western home stretch in Pasadena and Santa Monica, but also in New Mexico.

So the next time you’re on America’s most cherished highway, you’ll know where to stop for lunch.

That’s all for now, folks. Enjoy the barbeque.

Route 66 on AllRecipes

When you ask a child what they want to do when they grow up, they might say astronaut, paleontologist, or truck driver. You know what never comes up? “Book development consultant.”

It’s true—I didn’t always envision becoming a “book development consultant,” either.

I’d spent years building up an eclectic résumé: cub reporter in Taos, MFA student, Fulbrighter, Hollywood screenwriter, and of late, Princeton alumni whisperer.

Eventually, would-be authors started asking if I’d read their manuscripts. After a while, I realized I was good at it. And so began my side hustle as a book development consultant—what some call a “literary midwife.”

Book Midwifery

Most people think a book consultant reads a manuscript, says “you’re a genius,” and if they have to, maybe work in some line breaks.

A book consultant does more than that. I read and evaluate a client’s vulnerable creative work, a story they’ve been carrying around for years and help them figure out how to tell that story in the best possible way.

The primary problems usually structural. Maybe the story starts in the wrong place. Often, the text doesn’t have chapters, or heck, paragraphs. Put another way, it’s usually the “narrative architecture” that needs work.

That’s part of the reason why I’ve spent five years writing about narrative architecture for The Usonian. The similarities between designing a building and a story have a lot more in common than you might think.

A story is like a Le Corbusier building: it needs pilotis, curtainwalls, and staircases between levels. Occasionally, a story (like a failed modernist housing project) needs to be completely razed and rebuilt. That may be the most difficult advice to give and receive, but in the long run, it can be the most rewarding.

Part of the role is helping clients keep the faith that their story is worth telling. Losing faith happens to everyone in this business. What you felt was brilliant in the middle of the night might feel like a hot mess when you read over the MS a month later.

In that very common and relatable scenario, I can recognize the value in what you’ve accomplished—and where we need to go from there.

And I get something out of it too, besides fees. Each project has allowed me to travel into a different world. I’ve learned about the hard-fought battles of the Lebanese Civil War, what it was like to grow up in a Syrian village, and the singular pain of an earth-shattering breakup as a celebrity actor. But learning about other lives? That’s pretty cool, and it’s why I became a writer in the first place.

Clanker City will exclude the library

The specter of AI has made it seem like it will replace us in our jobs and even cause us to lose our ability to think and write. (Case in point: an AI recently solved an extremely difficult math proof that no human has been able to figure out). In a landscape like that, does anything we do actually matter?

The reason why we read stories is to hear the human voice. I buy a book at the indie bookstore (or certain unnamed mega-retailers) because I’m curious about the perspective of the human author and how their experience is brought to bear on the world. I’m not all that interested in what an AI has to say about growing up whirring and grinding code and draining electricity and water reserves in a Nevada data center. (Though I guess that COULD be interesting).

So yeah—this week I wanted to share a little bit about this side of my business. It may not be the sexiest aspect of being a working writer, but it is definitely an unexpectedly rewarding part of it.

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“Working with Harrison on my father’s memoir was one of the best decisions I made. He had an extraordinary ability to listen deeply, ask the right questions, and translate scattered memories and disorganized stories into a coherent, compelling narrative.

“Throughout the process, he was thoughtful, organized, and cost-conscious. The final manuscript exceeded my expectations — honest, engaging, and beautifully written. I’m profoundly grateful for his dedication, and I recommend him without hesitation to anyone considering telling their story.”

– Mike Rustum on Youcef Mikhail Rustum’s A Journey of a Lifetime

“Harrison helped me translate my dramatic life story into prose with the needed pacing and emotional reflection to make my manuscript a gripping, powerful read. His attention to detail and sympathetic, collaborative personality made a challenging project a highly rewarding one.

“That goes without saying — Harrison’s deep knowledge of my region of the world (the Middle East) was an added bonus in a terrific partnership.”

– Fady Rizk, bestselling author of My Fight for Survival

If you’ve got a story you’re trying to figure out—a memoir, a novel, a family history, something that doesn’t quite have a name yet—I’d love to hear about it. Find out more about my book development consulting services at harrisonblackman.com, or reach out directly at hb.batonentertainment[at]gmail.com.

And if you found this useful, consider sharing this post with someone who’s been meaning to write their book for the last five years.

Learn More About My Book Consulting

The following is an excerpt of an academic article I wrote with Myrto Exacoustou, presented at the 2024 Space Syntax Conference in Nicosia, Cyprus. Read the full article on academia.edu.

On May 23, 1960, the evening before the Greek consulting planning firm Doxiadis Associates presented its plan to the Pakistani authorities for the design of their country’s new capital of Islamabad, Constantinos Doxiadis proposed a footrace.

The visionary architect and city planner was keen on reviving ancient Greek traditions, and the night before the presentation, Doxiadis held a small running competition with his staff of architects, planners, and engineers in the courtyard of Flashman’s Hotel in Rawalpindi.

To his colleagues, it was no surprise that Doxiadis was the victor.

The next day’s presentation was hailed as a success. In front of President Ayub Khan and officials across the Pakistani government, Doxiadis spoke for three hours about his 20-year plan for Islamabad, as well as the immediate 5-year goals of construction. The lecture was followed by a jeep tour of the Margalla Hills, the building site in question. By the end of the day, Khan—who had seized power in Pakistan through a military coup two years before—had agreed in principle to Doxiadis’ master plan.

So it was decided. Doxiadis Associates, a major planning consulting firm based in Athens, Greece, would supervise the construction of the new Pakistani capital. Their project, like Lúcio Costa’s capital of Brasilia that had come before, was an experiment in tabula rasa planning, but Islamabad would be unique in that would be pursued under Doxiadis’ trademark design philosophy of “ekistics, the science of human settlements.” Doxiadis’ ekistics was an interdisciplinary approach to urban design, but one that still featured many design precepts of modernism.

As Abbasi wrote, “functional zoning and total design are the fundamental conceptions of the 20th century modern urbanism, particularly when it is concerned with master-planning the new capitals”; ekistics as implemented in Islamabad was no exception. However, Islamabad’s novelty went further, crafted from a more specific ekistical framework. Doxiadis had also developed the concept of a “dynapolis,” a city built on a gridiron system so as to dynamically grow along an axial line. Islamabad, built on a grid to expand from the nearby city of Rawalpindi, would be a test of the dynapolis concept.

The stakes were clear. In Islamabad, Doxiadis’ ekistics and dynapolis would be put to the ultimate test— could they form the framework of a fully-functioning, inorganically growing city? Members of the Doxiadis team, who worked from 1959 to 1963 to create the layout of this city (as well as several complementary and overlapping projects that included aspects of the initial implementation of the plan, understood that the full results would not be evident for another two generations.

As it happened, the joy and confidence that Doxiadis enjoyed in the footrace and the ensuing presentation was not shared by all of his collaborators. After the city plan for Islamabad was formally approved by the Pakistani Federal Capital Committee (FCC) in October 1960, Orestes Yakas, one of the principal designers of the plan, examined the model of Islamabad with mixed feelings. General Yahya Khan, chairman of the FCC (and a future president himself), took note. “Why are you melancholic?” Khan asked, adding, “This is a day of joy for all of us.” Yakas replied, “this is the first time in my life, that I see the model of an important work, in which I participated, that I shall not be alive to see in reality, after forty or fifty years.”

More than sixty years have passed since the construction of Islamabad. The city has reached a stage of maturity that Yakas only dreamed of—an iteration that now allows us to assess the successes and shortcomings of Doxiadis Associates Master Plan. With the analytical tools of space syntax, we can finally evaluate Islamabad’s design using axial analysis.

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Doxiadis in Pakistan

Doxiadis earned international acclaim as a planner during the Marshall Plan period in Greece, when he served as a governmental liaison between the American authorities of the European Recovery Program in Greece and the reconstruction authority in Athens.

In 1959, Doxiadis was assigned the project of designing the new capital; the plan was approved in November 1960. Construction began in October 1961 under the supervision of Pakistan’s Capital Development Authority (CDA), the successor to the FCC; in Pakistan, Doxiadis Associates consulted on many different facets of implementation. By 1963, however, Doxiadis Associates’ involvement in Islamabad waned as American funding of the projects through the International Cooperation Administration and Ford Foundation concluded. The city was essentially “completed” in 1966.

In the initial years since Islamabad’s foundation, locals and international experts alike saw the Doxiadis plan as an extremely thorough document which made considerations for nearly all aspects of life. “The scheme is looked upon with pride by many of the people who referred to it,” wrote British architect Janet Pott
during a 1963 visit to the city.

By the 21st century, the plan has been criticized for its suburban character, its failure at facilitating adequate transportation, and the inadvertent creation of what now amount to informal settlements housing 50,000 in the city’s Class V superblocks. Reflecting on modern Islamabad, Robert Allen Mohr cited a local proverb: “Islamabad is a short drive from Pakistan.” Indian researcher Maneesha Tikekar has gone so far as to call Islamabad “a beautiful city without soul.”

With the use of the space syntax axial analysis, we aim to reconstruct and analyze the experience and possibilities of movement flows, to study the accessibility and integration of the street and pedestrian system, and to determine the relative circulation of these networks, as designed by Doxiadis Associates for the core of the city. These include sectors G6 and F6, two superblocks of Class V (2.2 km by 2.2 km); the administration, governmental, and diplomatic enclaves; and finally, the commercial zone named the “blue area.” By juxtaposing the space syntax axial analysis with an evaluation of the planners’ intents, we aim to uncover new insights into the effectiveness of the plan in practice.

Read the rest on Academia.edu.

This is the twenty-fifth chapter in a long-simmering miniseries called “Narrative Architecture” about storytelling choices in fiction. There are many ways to tell a story, and in this series, I’ll examine the literary choices a particular author made and their impact on the story at hand. This week, I’ll engage with Kobo Abe’s Inter Ice Age 4, an early example of a climate thriller from Japan, currently out of print in the United States. (There are spoilers, so come back here later if you intend to read this book).

This post is a revised version of an essay I composed as part of my MFA program at UNR. You might also enjoy my related essay in Ploughshares on Inter Ice Age 4, which I published in 2021.

“I decided to try to grasp the image of a future that intrudes on the present, a future that sits in judgment,” wrote Kobo Abe in the postscript of his novel, Inter Ice Age 4 (Abe 209). I’ve been thinking about this quote a lot in terms of understanding the purpose of Abé’s climate-centric thriller. In this case, Abe—a Japanese novelist better known for his existentialist or Kafkaesque works which were made into landmark films by Hiroshi Teshigahara (such as The Woman in the Dunes and The Face of Another)—wrote a novel which feels more pulpy, propulsive, and speculative; I’d describe Inter Ice Age 4 as a mashup between the suspense sensibilities of Michael Crichton and the mind-bending qualities of Philip K. Dick. Much of the book’s runtime is devoted to thriller-y elements and surprise reveals and reversals, but all that builds to a climactic moment of even greater revelation on the scale of a Man in the High Castle-cliffhanger ending. Despite its odd title, Inter Ice Age 4 is not a sequel Inter Ice Age 3, but a short novel serialized over nine months in Sekai Magazine, a monthly politically-progressive magazine in Japan. In novel form, this amounts to essentially two narrative sections that comprise about 22 and 25 short chapters, respectively. Astonishingly, though this novel is not often discussed today, it has been identified as one of Japan’s first “hard sci-fi” novels, and probably one of the earlier examples of “cli-fi” more generally.

The premise starts out simple enough: Tokyo-based university professor Katsumi is in charge of a computer which can forecast the future. But because a Soviet forecasting computer keeps making political predictions that Communism will prevail over liberal democracies, Katsumi decides to avoid politics and program his machine to forecast the future of an individual human being. Assisted by his employee, Tanomogi, they select a man at random for the experiment, but this man is mysteriously murdered. After several reversals and surprises, we learn that Tanomogi is really an agent of a cabal of government scientists who are supervising the genetic engineering of a race of human hybrids with gills, known as aquans. They are doing this because the melting polar ice caps will lead to a rise in sea levels; rather than solve the problem of climate change directly, they figure it is better to design the successor to homo sapiens.

If that wasn’t bonkers enough, they also abort the unborn child of Katsumi’s wife (?!) so that they can genetically engineer the fetus to become an aquan. By stealing fetuses on a massive scale they have produced the necessary population base for the aquan race, and also given regular humans empathy with an alien race since they are genetically their children. Furthermore, by creating an aquan that is technically a son of Katsumi, he is implicated in the scheme which makes it harder for him to rebel against it. The novel ends on a surreal note as the forecasting computer predicts what will become of the aquan race, featuring a scene of a young aquan who, curious about his past, swims around the sunken ruins of Tokyo and dies on dry land (evoking the evolutionary cliché of the first amphibian that made the transition to land).

Not all the plot elements add up, and the abortion plotline is deeply weird and alarming, but Abe’s inventiveness and narrative dexterity comes to a forte in this very strange book. Notably Inter Ice Age 4 has two climaxes, the first a cliffhanger at the novel’s midway point, when Katsumi confronts Tanomogi and accuses him of murdering the man they were supposed to study. Like a private detective in a Dashiell Hammett novel, Katsumi systematically lays out Tanomogi’s motives:

If we assume for the moment that you are the murderer, a motive is simple to find. For instance, I met the murdered man quite by accident, but he might have been the one you were after from the beginning. That day we had no particular goal in mind, and we were exhausted too. It wouldn’t have been all that hard to get me to the café and bring my attention to the man you had previously lured out with the Kondo girl. You were very successful. You trapped me beautifully. You planned for me to fear the police, yet you managed to avoid suspicion yourself by pretending to co-operate in the pursuit of the criminal… What a pity to find yourself exposed by what you least expected. (Abe 83)

By this point of the book, we’re still in hardboiled mystery territory and not quite yet in the realm of science fantasy; the murder plotline is something out of The Thin Man or The Maltese Falcon, with Katsumi assuming the Sam Spade role in the archetypal moment when the detective lays out the logic of the case and explains how they found out the criminal. While this speech serves up what you might expect in a genre piece, I am in awe of it because it is only the first reveal. We’re only halfway through the book, and despite that Katsumi can solve some of the problems posed by Tanomogi’s involvement, he can’t solve every problem, because he is still in the dark about so much, adding to the helplessness of his situation. From this confrontation, Tanomogi views it important to bring Katsumi in on aspects of the plan which have thys far been hidden, enabling the last half of the book to explore the existence of before-unmentioned aquans.

Abe has provided a roadmap for how to fashion a double-reveal, though his reason for the staggered reveal is probably more to do with the fact that his novel was serialized. Thematically, there is something unsettling in the fact that the protagonist thinks he’s solved the case halfway through the story, but quickly learns he’s in way over his head. As Abe states in his postscript, he’s created a story where the “future” intrudes on the present, and forces his protagonist to come to terms with a destiny that is completely out of his control.

Once Katsumi is finally captured by the government scientists, they proceed to explain the aquan development and fetus-stealing scam, similar to how O’Brien explains the world order to Winston Smith in 1984 and Mustapha Mond elucidates the same to Bernard Marx in Brave New World. Abe spices up the presentation of this exposition by forcing his protagonist to watch a TV documentary about the creation of the aquans, presented in the novel as a script, a startlingly postmodern technique for the book’s publication in 1970:

–Sorry to have kept you waiting.

[A voice interrupts, and the screen grows light. Underneath the water in an enormous pool, as far as the eye can see, long shelves partitioned into small compartments stand side by side in many rows and on numerous levels. In each compartment aquan sucklings are floating in whatever position they please.]

–This is the nursing room, part of the infant-rearing division. They’re brought here directly from the delivery room; we exceed five hundred a day, on good days a thousand. It would be ideal to keep them here five months until they’ve weaned, but if we did that we’d have to provide berths for at least a hundred and twenty thousand… (Abe 169-170)

By mimicking the style of a public access documentary, Abe can explain the process of aquan development in a way that can also establish its credibility as a concept; make the scheme seem believable enough by having an “expert” explain the process, through dialogue and stage directions. It also speaks to the extent of the scheme, that the government is even producing videos about it.

Which leads us to the final section, where the forecasting machine explains to Katsumi what the future holds for the aquans. Abe tells this scene in summary, almost like the opening of a thriller, rather than the ending:

At fifteen thousand feet the thick mud of the lifeless sea floor was spotted with holes, and fluffy as if covered with the hair of some atrophied animal. Abruptly it heaved up. Instantly dispersing, it transformed itself into a dark, upward-welling cloud that wiped out the star points of plankton thronging over the diaphanous black wall. (Abe 194)

This augury signals the arrival of the mature aquans to the attention of the human race just as the titular “Fourth Inter Ice Age” concludes and precipitates rapid sea level rise. This scene builds into a future where the aquans gradually supplant the humans as the sea levels rise. One of the aquans feels a yearning to go ashore, and this is what transpires:

With the last of his strength the youth crawled up onto land. He had imagined that in order to hear the music of the wind he would have to stand upright on the land surface, but when he had crawled up he was unable to move and lay flat on the ground… it was all he could do to raise a single finger… He was happy. Perhaps these were tears, it occurred to him, obviously a land sickness. He no longer felt like moving. Soon he stopped breathing. (Abe 206)

In spite of its surreal nature, I find this scene strangely affecting, a metaphor for a future humanoid who mourns the loss of the Earth and dies for a taste of that past. This is the perfect moment which sums up what cli-fi as a genre is capable of addressing. Our protagonist Katsumi thinks, upon seeing this simulation: “Now I wonder if I can raise my own fingers, I mused. No, maybe not. Like those of the aquan youth who had crawled up on land, my fingers were asheavy as lead,” bringing in another dimension of reflection, as the man from the present mourns the death of the youth from the future (Abe 207). In this way, he is building out the theme of the novel spouted by Katsumi’s computer doppelgänger earlier in the novel (which I neglected to mention previously because the computer’s adoption of Katsumi’s identity is a minor reveal in the grand scheme of the book): “A crime against the future is different from one against the past or the present. It’s fundamental and definitive” (Abe 162). Human-caused climate change is a crime against the future, and by showing the death of the aquan, Abe can demonstrate how that crime plays out.

Inter Ice Age 4’s finale establishes a method for handling such grave moments, when a character realizes the world is ending and the future itself is doomed. In Abe’s postscript, he describes being “tormented” by the idea of the future:

The future, properly speaking, is already cruel by virtue of being the future… Yet I shall have fulfilled one of the purposes of this novel if I have been able to make the reader confront the cruelty of the future, produce within him anguish and strain, and bring about a dialogue with himself. (Abe, “Postscript” 209–210)

Inter Ice Age 4 succeeds as genre-bending climate fiction because Abe designed it to force readers to confront the consequences of their lifestyles and project those consequences onto a nightmare scenario, making the reader reconsider their daily actions. Few have done so as successfully as Abe did in this criminally-forgotten work.

Works Cited

Abé, Kobo and Saunders, E. Dale, (translator). Inter Ice Age 4 (Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 1970).

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When I was a Princeton undergrad, I took a course with sociology professor Miguel Centeno titled “The Western Way of War.” The course was a broad survey of the evolving nature of Western conflict from antiquity to the present.

Of course, we started from the beginning, reading The Iliad, the world’s first war epic about the Trojan War, and also Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, the Greek historian’s testament to the series of conflicts between the city-states of Athens and Sparta.

Thucydides captivated me. There was something electrifying about history teleported so far from the past, especially when so much of Athenian rhetoric, touting the singular beauty of their democratic system, mirrored our own in the United States. When Pericles, the leader of Athens, addresses the attendees of the funerary procession for the Athenian army, he says things that might as well be in the words of Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, or heck, George W. Bush (albeit with fewer grammatical errors):

Let me say that our system of government does not copy the institutions of our neighbors. It is more the case of ours being a model to others, than of ours imitating anyone else’s. Our constitution is called a democracy because power is in the hands not of a minority but of the whole people.

It was the people who gave their lives for their city who made it great, Pericles intoned. “What I would prefer is that you should fix your eyes every day on the greatness of Athens as she really is, and should fall in love with her,” Pericles said. “When you realize her greatness, then reflect that what made her great was men with a spirit of adventure, men who knew t­­heir duty, men who were ashamed to fall below a certain standard… it is for you to be like them.”

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On a Saturday afternoon in the bohemian neighborhood of Silver Lake, Los Angeles, I convened a focus group of California-based creatives for an experiment in attention. In a grassy park bordering the neighborhood’s eponymous reservoir, we sat in a circle and read an excerpt of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s classic children’s novel The Little Prince. The passage considered a scene in which the interstellar-traveling boy prince encounters a talking fox, who encourages the royal to observe and cherish a particular rose among a field of flowers. After we finished reading, each participant chose an object in the park to focus on — their very own “rose,” to which they would pay attention for four minutes. One participant observed a flower, another an abandoned basketball. I tracked the pacing of a wandering Labrador retriever.

“How often do I just sit in the park and just listen and look at the humanity of it?” reflects Anya Jaremko-Greenwold, an editor at The Week who chose a nearby ironwood tree as her rose in the exercise. “If you’re a writer or creative type, you get a lot of ideas and inspiration from just sitting with your thoughts and not being distracted by your devices.”

The unconventional lesson plan was a product of the Strother School of Radical Attention (SoRA), a Brooklyn-based organization devoted to reclaiming society’s experience of human attention, which in the past 20 years, the leaders argue, has been completely hijacked by the monied interests of big tech and social media. They call the architects of social media apps such as TikTok and Instagram “attention frackers,” weaponizing their algorithms to entice attention for the purpose of extracting an immense stream of advertising revenue. According to SoRA’s rhetoric — echoing the positions of tech ethicist Tristan Harris and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt — the digital-based attention economy has inflicted a substantial human cost. While tech companies such as Apple, Meta, and Alphabet (Google) have become among the most profitable in the world, their success has simultaneously left a long shadow of teen depression and suicides.

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For three weeks, I had embedded myself within SoRA’s Zoom workshops, two-hour-long seminars that explored how participants might experience life liberated from the addictive pull of the smartphone and build attention “sanctuaries” for other like-minded thinkers. Much like a university-level course, the workshops included reading packets of scholarly writings, office hours, and the promise of open-ended inquiry. Unlike a college class, enrollment only cost $99.

The school itself is just one pillar of a larger project orchestrated by the Friends of Attention, a group that is in turn supported by the Institute for Sustained Attention, a nonprofit founded in 2015 by Princeton history professor D. Graham Burnett ’93. The Friends of Attention have a podcast (Attention Lab), a newsletter (“The Empty Cup,” named after a quote from novelist Henry James), and as of January, a Penguin Random House-published polemic (Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement) written as a collective among various contributors from the Friends of Attention group, and edited by Burnett, his partner, filmmaker Alyssa Loh ’12, and SoRA director Peter Schmidt ’20.

The reason for all these efforts, the self-described “attentionauts” and “attentionistas” contend in their manifesto, is that “something is seriously wrong,” and if activists don’t organize against tech’s exploitative grip on the human mind soon, then future resistance might be futile.

Read the rest in Princeton Alumni Weekly

When writers are in the position to write a sequel, they’re often faced with a dilemma. How do you continue a story that was successful enough to warrant a sequel? To give the story a new narrative engine, you probably have to change a few things. In a genre story, you might need to create a new villain and mystery surrounding them for your hero to confront (the format of every successive James Bond film). But at the same time, you’re also mandated with meeting the expectations of retaining the elements that made a story “successful.” You have to reproduce the feeling, themes, and elements of the first story, while delivering a story that is new enough to surprise and satisfy.

This is an almost impossible task. Season 2 of The Wire (2003) famously shifted the focus of the plot from the Baltimore task force stinging the Barksdale drug-dealing organization to a mystery about human trafficking on the Baltimore docks, sidelining many of the series’ established characters for an entire season. This season was polarizing—on the one hand, it demonstrated narrative courage and inventiveness for trying to reinvent the show so broadly while retaining its investigative DNA. On the other, it had drifted far from what the show was sold as—a flailing police force tries a last-ditch task force as a salve on the war on drugs.

In hindsight, The Wire’s second season may go down as one of the most successful, critically speaking, attempts at a sequel. Because then we have shows that try to have it both ways—try to reinvent the show but slavishly reproduce the dynamics of the original series. And here we have to discuss the second season of The Night Manager.

John Le Carré’s 1993 novel The Night Manager is one of his last truly great novels, in which he managed to shift his espionage fiction into the disorienting world that emerged after the Cold War. The titular hotel employee, Jonathan Pine, is radicalized after he helps a whistleblower fax some sensitive documents at his hotel, leading to the woman’s murder. At fault is a nefarious arms dealer named Richard Roper.

MI6 operative Leonard Burr persuades Pine to join the agency and go undercover to expose Roper, leading to a quest in which Pine infiltrates Roper’s inner circle, falls for Roper’s mistress, and becomes something of a surrogate son to Roper himself. But Roper will not be defeated so easily, as it turns out he’s working for a rival faction of MI6 that Burr must confront.

The original Prime series that adapted the novel (2016) casted Tom Hiddleston as Pine, Hugh Laurie as Roper, and Olivia Colman as a gender-flipped Angela Burr, and delivered a unenviable product—it was a faithful adaptation that also updated the setting to be more current (swapping Curaçao/Colombia for Turkey/Syria) and improved upon the original novel’s convoluted, inconclusive ending, so much so that even Le Carré praised the adaptation.

But after that, with The Night Manager a hit for Prime, and with the original source material exhausted, came the inevitable dilemma: if this were to continue, how would you go about it? Start anew, or reboot the old? (Spoilers below).

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In each installment of “The Usonian Interviews,” The Usonian spotlights a storyteller from a different corner of the globe. This week, The Usonian speaks with architectural historian Kostas Tsiambaos about his new essay anthology, The Architect and the Animal (MIT Press, 2025). Structured as a whimsical “abecedarian” collection of essays, in which each letter of the alphabet prompts a short essay about an animal and its place in the imagination of a noteworthy architect, The Architect and the Animal is an engaging collection that reexamines how animal images and biological forms have entered the imagination of modern architects. Since the dawn of modernism, the conventional narrative states that architects have drifted away from ornamentation of animals in support of a house as “a machine for living,” but Tsiambaos’ book, featuring contributions from 26 different architectural historians and experts, reveals that animals have never been too far from the mind of even the most forward-thinking modernists.

You can order the book directly from MIT Press, Penguin Random House, Bookshop, and Amazon.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length. The views presented by the interview subject are the opinions of the subject and do not represent the views of the article’s author or this newsletter. Browse the full interview archive here.

THE USONIAN: In the acknowledgments, you mention that this book came out of research you were doing on animals in modern Greek architecture during your fellowship at the Princeton Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies. What drew you to the subject of “The Architect and the Animal?”

KOSTAS TSIAMBAOS: It started with my work on this Greek architect, Dimitris Pikionis, who’s one of the most important architects in 20th century Greece. And because a considerable part of my research, including my Ph.D. and part of my postdoctoral research, was focused on Pikionis’ work, I knew that he often referred to and represented animals in his work—not only in his buildings, but also in many of his texts, drawings, and sketches.

I also had in mind architects like Le Corbusier who made multiple references to animals in his work. He identified himself with “the crow,” but other times he was identified as a donkey or dog.1

Why did these important architects have this interest in animals? What is the argument they’re trying to make? And what makes it even more interesting is the fact that we’re talking about some of the most important architects of the 20th century. The most interesting and creative public intellectuals like Le Corbusier or Pikionis have this interest in animals.

Unlike previous eras in architecture, when animals were always present, in modern architecture animals seem to disappear. Go back to Göbekli Tepe, in Turkey, considered the first monumental architectural construction (5,000 years before Stonehenge), representations of animals were found everywhere at that site, but they gradually disappeared from the architecture of the 20th century.

The research that I did as a visiting fellow at the Princeton Seeger Center2 was focused on Greek architecture, but I already had in my mind that I wanted to extend it to a global history of animals in architecture, and the academic resources and the colleagues available at Princeton were an ideal environment for such a project.

TU: In the introduction, you explain the idea of the book through the example of Noah’s ark as envisioned by Diderot and d’Alembert’s Enlightenment-era Encyclopédie—a piece of architecture, the first (at least in various religious traditions) designed specifically to house animals. How does your abecedarian book of essays resemble the ark, and in which ways does it differ?

KT: It’s true that few theorists of architecture have written about Noah’s ark in general and Noah’s ark in the Encyclopédie in particular, even since the 19th century. For example, architects like Joseph Gandy had written that the ark is the origin of architecture in general, because it was the first architectural construction of the new world after the flood.

One thing that I found interesting about the ark as it was depicted in the Encyclopédie is the ark’s abstract form, which is also almost like a simple 3D grid. And this grid expresses this kind of rational formality related to the Enlightenment, in contrast with the freedom of the nature which surrounds it, which is also represented by the trees, the sea, and the mountains, as well as the animals that inhabit the ark. The fact the animals are inside this kind of rational grid suggests to me that their protection is also a kind of detention, or a kind of disappearance from the world.

In other words, it’s not a coincidence that animals gradually disappeared from architecture since modernity, because animals were all over architecture in ancient Mesopotamia, in Egyptian and Greek temples, in Hindu shrines and Gothic cathedrals, but they’re missing from the modern design.

However, I also realized that they’re not completely missing from modern or postmodern architecture. They’re just not in plain sight. Of course, they’re not appearing as ornamentation on buildings. But they are everywhere as references and representations, despite the prevailing belief that modern architecture was related to the machine and not to the animal.

But no matter how much we as architects want to be rational, factual, and have everything under control, there are important aspects of architecture that we cannot explain or cannot control. Very often, these are architecture’s most interesting aspects.

TU: How did you assign the specific animals, some mythic and real, some extinct and abstract, to the particular contributors?

KT: That was the most challenging part of the work. To create this abecedarian was challenging. Initially, I had in mind some specific architects, animals, and case studies of animal representations, references to animals in various texts by architects—and often more than one animal per practice.

For example, Superstudio represented many animals in their work, and even wrote about animals, cows, horses, tigers, and baboons. Architects like John Hejduk also represented many animals in their projects, whether sketched or included as mythical/imaginary animals; he had even illustrated a book of Aesop’s Fables. I had also read some texts by architectural historians who had written something about an architect and an animal as part of a case study.

So my initial proposal to Thomas Weaver, then the art and architecture acquisitions editor at MIT Press, was for a more traditional book, with 10 chapters by 10 authors. Now Thomas, who had a huge experience as an editor of the AA Files, the Journal of the Architectural Association in London, and sent me more case studies of architects and animals over the years and he finally proposed that we make an abecedarian with 26 architects and 26 animals. We were almost at 26, so why didn’t we give it this form?

It proved to be a very challenging and demanding task, and almost impossible in some aspects. We had to be imaginative and inventive, and match the right authors, animals and their letters. We had to find an architect who writes or represents a specific animal, and together with other animals, make a continuous queue. And this is why it took me almost four years to complete this project. So it was complicated, as every book project is, but specifically it was complicated because of this decision to make it as an abecedarian.

TU: The essays themselves are all sort of trifles, with just enough time to sketch out a concept to inspire thought without overstaying their welcome. Was this part of your intent, or how did it end up that way?

KT: Since we agreed that this was going to be a book with 26 chapters, they had to be shorter. Each chapter would start from one illustration—just one sketch, a drawing, a collage, or a photograph. And this image would trigger the discussion and would pose the question about the purpose or intent behind the animal in the image.

After the author explains the context of each one of these visual artifacts, the text opens to more theoretical directions regarding the specific architect.

I really appreciated structure as an editorial concept in Tom Weaver’s approach. Particularly, I appreciated the value that he attributed to the quality of writing. He was always telling me that what is more important is to invite people who are good writers, have interesting ideas and can write an interesting text.

Of course, all of the contributors are distinguished professors in very well-established schools all over the world; they are also good writers. In the last few years, I had been experimenting with this hybridity between architectural history, fiction and narrative; I also believe that writing is important to the promotion of architectural history. Now, I’m more and more persuaded by this because artificial intelligence can produce traditional adequate academic writing. Many academic journals would publish something that is produced by AI, and nobody would know. So what is left for us?

Architectural historians must find other ways, themes, topics and new ways of writing. So this book not only focuses on the fresh theme of architecture and animals, but it proposes a way of writing that is less formal and more playful, less explanatory and more inviting and addressed to a wider public.

It was very important to me to have a book that someone who is not an architect or historian could read—instead, any person who has many interests would enjoy reading it.

TU: Your own essay on the Vulture in regards to Dimitris Pikionis’ Church of Saint Demetrius, I found very interesting. How does the vulture (and I guess we are actually talking about the eagle) figure its way through antique Hellenic, Roman, and finally modern Greek architecture?

KT: In the case of Pikionis, he does not really explain which animal he represents. Of course, the eagle is the common symbol for many architectures and for many cultures and civilizations, especially the Romans and the Christian Byzantines. And the eagle is related to the etymology of the Greek word for the gable, which is aétōma, aetós being the eagle in Greek. However, what Pikionis draws looks more like a vulture than an eagle because of the bird’s bald head. In my opinion, he intentionally did not want to be precise. Of course, the eagle is important as a cultural symbol for Greece as the symbol of the god Zeus.

But the vulture is also important. And in antiquity, the word vulture had multiple meanings, so it meant both what we call the vulture and the eagle today. In some cases, the vulture is often mentioned as the bird that Zeus sent to eat Prometheus’ liver, but it could also be an eagle.

There is an ambiguity, and I remembered that as I was writing this chapter. But to make it short—in the end, I had to find an animal starting from “V,” and “vulture” was convenient.

TU: I won’t hold it against you, but your book also takes some liberties with the alphabet, choosing King Cobra for “K”, “Queen Bee” for “Q” and “X-tinct Dodo” for “X.” Are you telling me there wasn’t an animal that actually started with “X?”

KT: Actually, there are very few animals that start from “X” or “Q” or but the thing is that there’s none that appear as a reference or representation in the architecture of the 20th century, at least that I’m aware of.

This is a book about animals in architecture, and not animals in general. One of the anonymous reviewers, I would guess that they were not an architect or an architectural historian, they made the point that a unicorn is not an actual animal, or that the word dog is vague because it describes many different breeds of dogs that are very different from one another, etc. For example, Manuel Orazi, who wrote about Yona Friedman and the unicorn, explained that the unicorn was really important to Yona Friedman. He had produced many drawings and paper figures of unicorns. He had described a land called “Unicornia,” etc. So if there is this fantastic animal that is that much important for an architect like Yona Friedman, it had to be in the book. I would also struggle to convince my three-year-old son that the unicorns aren’t real.

TU: Some of the animal motifs and the architects they describe feel immediate—the crow and Le Corbusier (and as M. Christine Boyer reveals, the ass), the nautilus and Frank Lloyd Wright in reflection of the Guggenheim design, Aldo Rossi and his dead horses, Rem Koolhaas and the giraffe. Others dig up stories that feel quite obscure—like Eduardo Iglesias and the fish in related to the history of canneries, the “polochon” pig-creature created by Lina Bo Bardi. As an editor, what were you looking for to guide this kaleidoscopic quest to understand how animal forms have inspired architects?

KT: Most of the books on animals in architecture or in architectural history see animals as formal inspirations. So the form of animals, or sometimes the form of the constructions that animals do, become formal inspirations for architecture. Of course, I included some prominent examples, like Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum.

But in general, my intention was to go beyond this formalistic approach. So even in these cases where there is an obvious formal analogy, authors explain how there are also other meanings. There are various esthetic, social, cultural, ethical, and even environmental issues. Lina Bo Bardi is a great example, because she produced this kind of imaginary pig, the “polochon,” which has an actual formal presence that is very intense with its form, its color, its two heads or two tips. But there are also a lot of things that one can discuss in relation to Brazil—the wild, the surreal, the cannibalistic, even in the meta-colonial framework that Martín Cobas poses in his chapter.

For example, the horse in the case of Aldo Rossi, is a kind of formal influence. I can imagine Rossi admiring the form of the skeleton of the horse, but at the same time, it is something that opens a discussion about the symbol and its power. I had recently read All the King’s Horses by Indra Kagis McEwen, which actually focuses on the horse as a symbol of Italian Renaissance and as an imperial symbol generally, and how it was almost necessary for artists and architects in the 15th and the 16th century to represent the horse as this official representative of power, carrying a cultural burden that goes back to ancient Rome. So from ancient Rome and Vitruvius to, Renaissance-era Florence and Alberti, the horse is a constant symbol, and not just a beautiful form.

TU: What surprised you the most about the research from this project? What did you learn? What do you want to uncover next?

KT: I was surprised to see how little has been written about this subject, which proved to be so interesting and productive and multivalent.

A few weeks ago, I sent the final manuscript of a second, more traditional book on the subject to be published by Routledge later this year. But it’s interesting that what we called “critical animal studies” are everywhere in the humanities, in art history, in philosophy, in cinema, and critical theory. This is a topic which is very hot in the last 15 years or so, but in the history and theory of architecture, few books have been published. There are a lot of things left to be said and written about this topic.

Another thing that I also find interesting—and there are also very few things mentioned about this—is how animals serve as a kind of a machine in architectural construction. Of course, we know that animals were always used in architectural construction. Since prehistory, builds have used animals to lift weights with various technologies, but animals were used also in 20th century construction sites. So this discussion—involving an examination of animal labor, energy consumption, animal rights in architectural history—would be very important.

Societies who have idealized animals are at the same time societies who have exploited their power the most. One would argue that this is the same for us humans as well. I believe that a discussion on animals is always a discussion about humans.

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Kostas Tsiambaos is an architect and Associate Professor in History and Theory of Architecture at the School of Architecture of the National Technical University in Athens (NTUA). He studied in Athens (NTUA) and New York (GSAPP Columbia University). He is Chair of do.co.mo.mo. Greece and member of the board of the Hellenic Institute of Architecture (EIA). His research has been published in international journals (The Journal of Architecture, Architectural Research Quarterly, Architectural Histories, APENA Journal of Architectural Research, etc.) and edited volumes. In the fall semester of the academic year 2019-2020, he was a Stanley J. Seeger Visiting Research Fellow at Princeton University. His books include The Architect and the Animal (MIT Press, 2025) and From Doxiadis' Theory to Pikionis' Work: Reflections of Antiquity in Modern Architecture (Routledge, 2018 and 2020).

In January 2025, the Santa Ana winds whipsawed through the canyons and mountains of Los Angeles, spurring 14 fires and burning 90 square miles of land, an area larger than the entire District of Columbia.

The fires devastated the L.A. communities of Altadena and the Pacific Palisades, but it wasn’t the only recent disaster to afflict the Los Angeles megaregion of 18 million people. The COVID-19 pandemic was one thing, the 2023 WGA/SAG-AFTRA strikes another, unsettling a film industry already on the AI-and-streaming rocks. Then came the 2025 ICE raids and the unrest that followed. A couple of Dodgers World Series wins may be sweet, but those don’t rebuild neighborhoods.

So when my friend Anthony Shu told me he, Jeffrey Liu and Haylie Chan were founding a charity zine about Los Angeles food culture, I jumped at the opportunity to join the editorial team.

To-Go Zine’s first issue, “Care Package,” spotlights the stories about how food bridges culture and crises. From stories about servers dealing with the first night the pandemic became real, to reflections of how Altadena’s devastated restaurant scene has shown its resilience, to investigations of how phone calls during late-night drive-thru visits can build community, To-Go Zine showcases a panoply of stories centered on the thing L.A. is best known for, outside of the pleasant climate and the botox—incredible and delectable food.

We’re hosting a launch party Saturday, April 11, from 4 to 7pm at Good Neighbor Bar in Altadena, one of the surviving Altadena venues featured in this issue.

If you aren’t in L.A. and can’t attend the event, you can buy our issue on shopify and also in select stockists in Los Angeles (we’re still working on the second part).

Our beautifully-designed issue is $30. It also features some interactivity—a crossword puzzle! Personality quizzes! Remember when print media was fun?

Profits from sales until 5/31/26 will benefit The Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA), a non-profit advocating for and supporting immigrants, the lifeblood powering the kaleidoscopic diversity of the City of Angels. We can also offer free shipping for two copies until 4/25/26.

We hope that this issue is the first of many.

So… why don’t you be an angel and buy a copy here?

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As I look up, the Middle East is in a renewed round of war yet again, and this time the conflagration has reached all the way to the Eastern Mediterranean island of Cyprus, with Iranian drone attacks on the UK Sovereign Bases in early March.

These bases, typically enlisted by RAF surveillance flights over Gaza and strikes on Iraq, have drawn increased controversy for the Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot communities in Cyprus. However, because their existence is engraved into the 1960 Cypriot constitution, these bases are not going anywhere anytime soon.

In quick succession, two Greek warships were dispatched to Cyprus as a show of force, and at the same time, the Turkish military deployed more F-16s to the “Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus” (“TRNC”), the unrecognized state in the north of the island, known internationally as the “Turkish-occupied area” and home to most Turkish Cypriots (as well as an estimated 30,000 Turkish soldiers). The move, like that of the Greek ships, seemed to be part of a defensive posture toward Iran.

While in this case the moves are arguably defensive, the renewed armament of the divided island—where British forces, United Nations Peacekeepers, the Greek Cypriot National Guard, and Turkish armies are all clustered on a landmass half the size of Connecticut—reflects the ingrained nature of the conflict, a stalemate so broadly accepted that the competing geopolitical interests remain at loggerheads.

Which brings me to my next point. Last month, I had the privilege of seeing a fascinating exploration of this inexorable conflict—and the seeming unending nature of Middle East wars—through an exhibition of Ali Cherri’s 2024 short film “The Watchman”1 at the Giovanni’s Room gallery in Hollywood, California.

Cherri is a Lebanese artist and filmmaker based in Paris whose work, per his website, engages with “geographies of violence.” His film explores the experience of a Turkish soldier on guard in a watchtower of the Green Line outside the village of Lourijina / Akıncılar, a village almost completely surrounded by the Green Line that separates the two sides of Cyprus.2

I visited the village in 2022, when I met older Turkish Cypriots at a gas station who were completely fluent in Cypriot Greek; I also attended a festival where I’ve had some of the best baked lamb I’ve ever had.3

Louroujina / Akıncılar serves as an eerie setting for the film, where the bleary-eyed guard watches the “Dead Zone” in earnest through Cyprus’ hot, oppressive days. On his break, he meets an old woman in the village who tells him about how long the conflict has been going on—a de facto division since 1974, with origins even earlier, during the Cypriot troubles between the two communities in 1963 and 1964.

In the night, the guard witnesses mysterious lights along the Dead Zone and though he informs his superiors, they dismiss his reports. As the guard goes to investigate, he is shocked to encounter a troop of soldiers marching along the path. The soldiers, strangely dressed in mid-century uniforms and caked in dust, are not real people, but phantoms. When they reach the soldier, they stop, open their mouths, and emanate a menacing, Lynchian howl.

The film is only a half-hour, but it’s a poignant, magic realist representation of how long this form of conflict has been going on—not just in Cyprus, but across the Middle East. Generations have lived and died, been destroyed or defined by these wars. The Watchman is a singular and insightful way to drive at that truth.

Though “The Watchman” exhibit has concluded at Giovanni’s Room, the film is available on Mubi to stream.

Five years ago, when I lived in the old city of Nicosia, Cyprus, I would park my Honda Jazz in a dirt parking lot atop one of the Venetian battlements. A lot of people parked there — truck drivers, tourists, visitors, and there were no restrictions on leaving your car overnight. After all, in this country, people parked on the sidewalk, so I was actually doing the city a service.

One day, as I walked from my apartment to my car, headed out to buy groceries at the supermarket, I was approached by a Greek Cypriot woman wearing Apple headphones, the old-fashioned wired kind. She introduced herself as a casting agent, and she insisted that I must appear in a commercial she was producing, suggesting I film an audition tape in a nearby office building.

What followed was my brief encounter with the strange contours of a peripheral film industry.

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As they zip and bobble down the sidewalk, they turn heads. Little coolers on wheels, food delivery robots from Coco appear like colorful automated coolers, their standard design subconsciously evoking the classic toy little red wagon for Radio-Flyer. The net effect might be—here’s a friendly bot straight out of Pixar’s WALL-E.

They also can nearly impede first responders. A few months ago, as an ambulance and police car—sirens blaring—advanced along Olympic Boulevard in West LA, motorists pulled over to allow the emergency vehicles to proceed. But the Coco crossing the street? It kept going across a crosswalk — nearly striking the police car as it approached the intersection.

Outside of the radar-spinning Waymo driverless taxis, food delivery robots are the most visible sign of Los Angeles at the forefront of being a Clanker City. But it’s important to note that many of these robots aren’t actually autonomous. Assisted by remote operators, they’re more akin to drones.

That hasn’t stopped the general feeling of amusement around the robots’ whimsical design. Once I encountered a group of children “bullying” a Coco robot, surrounding it so that it could not continue on its journey. (This may be prove to be bad juju for Judgment Day, when Skynet becomes self-aware and the robot revolution commences.)

Some of these robots (including from Coco’s competitor, Serve) feature product placement — topical ads for Prime Video’s apocalyptic video game adaptation Fallout, Netflix’s The Electric State (a sci-fi film about robots), and, well, TNT Sports.

And that ad placement comes with wide coverage. According the Los Angeles Times, Coco has completed more than 500,000 deliveries and plans to expand from its current field of operations in Chicago, Miami, and L.A., launching 10,000 more robots to service in 2026.

But Coco is a L.A.-specific project, founded by a UCLA student in his dorm room, and headquartered in Santa Monica. Notably, Coco robots only have about a 2-mile range, and they partner with specific restaurants that use them as an alternative and supplement to human delivery drivers from DoorDash or Uber Eats.

One wonders if food delivery robots may face the growing pains of other efforts to “disrupt” the sidewalk. When Lime scooters launched in 2018 in Northern Nevada, they were faced with a cease-and-desist for violating state law, and had to pull out of the market. And given Los Angeles’ large unhoused population, it seems like only a matter of time before desperate people start cracking them open for the hot dinners inside.

The frequent obstructions on L.A. sidewalks — like construction and homeless encampments — might also impede Cocos from fulfilling their deliveries. Then there’s the inclement weather that might prevent the success of Cocos in colder climates. But, in a landscape often choked with traffic, there are cases where robots might be speedier on the sidewalks than human-piloted cars on the roads.

If you want to order to receive food from a Coco specifically (as I did for the purpose of this post), that’s a little bit harder. Coco partners with existing food delivery apps like Uber Eats, so you have to select a restaurant that you know uses Cocos, and roll the dice hoping the restaurant will enlist a Coco rather than a human driver. The economic benefit to the consumer (but not to the delivery driver)—is that a Coco doesn’t expect a tip.

For my experiment, I ordered from a nearby burger joint I knew used Cocos, because I had seen Cocos parked outside their storefront.

To my great fortune, my Uber Eats order was met with the notification that a Coco would handle my delivery. Like a conventional ride-share situation, the robot’s progress and route were displayed on my phone, as well as its ETA.

When the Coco arrived at my apartment, the app asked you to unlock the Coco by pressing a button. And voila, the Coco’s lid opened, my now-lukewarm burger inside. Once I had done that, the compartment closed and the Coco waited for commands for a moment before it returned, presumably, whence it came.

Coco seems to make sense for the college campus market, as the hungry college student might be the most likely customer of fast-food on delivery.

But, not unlike a debate inspired by robotaxis, if we as a society can’t give bad jobs to people (like being an Uber driver), what are the societal costs of automating food delivery? Surely, there must be maintenance teams for the bots and people to clean their interiors when a food container inevitably spills. We may be trading one form of labor for another, with benefits that are hard to perceive.

One thing is for certain. At present time, food delivery bots are not the correct shape to transport a standard-sized pizza. So the pizza delivery guy can rest assured his or her job is safe for at least a little while longer.

This is the twenty-fourth chapter in a long-simmering miniseries called “Narrative Architecture” about storytelling choices in fiction. There are many ways to tell a story, and in this series, I’ll examine the literary choices a particular author made and their impact on the story at hand. This week, I’ll engage with John Gardner’s classic craft book The Art of Fiction, influential but perhaps in need of an update.

This post is a revised version of an essay I composed as part of my MFA program at UNR.

On September 14, 1982, John Gardner died in a motorcycle crash. He was only 49. At the time, his third marriage was fast approaching—and his career was falling apart. Through his harsh criticisms of his contemporaries, such as Philip Roth and Saul Bellow, Gardner had alienated himself from the literary community. Today, his most remembered novel is Grendel, his subversive retelling of Beowulf. Of his few books which have remained in print, it is somewhat ironic his craft book—in which he expressed his disdain for his fellow writers—has withstood the test of time. The Art of Fiction was published posthumously in 1984, and has since become a staple text for writers starting out.

Notwithstanding Gardner’s opening note expressing the apparent futility of teaching writing to an audience that may not have the “gift” (“What is said here, whatever use it may be to others, is said for the elite; that is, for serious literary artists” (Gardner x)), the haughty author did offer some useful craft observations. Gardner’s text is split into two parts. The first section is characterized by Gardner’s opinions on literary theory; the goals a writer for which a writer must strive. These most prominently include his emphasis on “fiction as dream”:

If we carefully inspect our experience as we read, we discover that the importance of physical detail is that it creates for us a kind of dream, a rich and vivid play in the mind. (Gardner 30).

I agree that a lot of good fiction creates this “dream” in the mind, but in my experience, I would describe it more akin to seeing a movie in your head. When I write, I see a movie in my head that I am then trying to transcribe and translate into prose so that others can “watch” the movie I’m witnessing. That being said, for the purposes of this piece, I will focus mostly on craft techniques detailed in the second section of Gardner’s book, because that section focuses on mechanics. It explains how writers can craft this dream/movie with their prose—and the “common errors” of novice writers that disrupt the ‘dream-weaving’ process.

“In bad or unsatisfying fiction, this fictional dream is interrupted from time to time by some mistake or conscious ploy on the part of the artist,” Gardner wrote. “We are abruptly snapped out of the dream, forced to think of the writer or the writing. It is as if a playwright were to run out on stage, interrupting his characters, to remind us that he has written all this” (Gardner 97). Gardner used this concept, that of a writer interrupting his own work, in his explanation of the problems of the ‘common errors’ of novice writers. But I think the idea also applies to metafictional techniques that, when sloppily executed, alert readers to the artifice of the work in general, an opinion Gardner expressed at a later moment in his book:

On one hand, showy technique is thrilling… On the other hand, cleverness can become its own end, subverting higher ends, as when style overshadows character, action, and idea. (Gardner 134-135)

I think about this problem a lot. Once I wrote a neo-noir story in the voice of Raymond Chandler. My writing instructor at the time recommended I read Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn, a work of literary fiction that satirized Chandler’s voice and put it in the head of a detective with Tourette’s.

I ended up disliking Motherless Brooklyn because the text was constantly acknowledging that the whole thing was an extended joke—that Raymond Chandler’s iconic hardboiled voice was nothing more than something to mock, a ridiculous tone that only a narrator with a disability could possess. By constantly acknowledging its own artifice, Lethem’s novel seemed to shoot itself in the foot. But since the time of Motherless Brooklyn (1999) (later adapted as a much-maligned 2019 film)—the whole “meta” thing has gone mainstream, and now most popular movies, especially Marvel and Disney ones, constantly make jokes at dramatic moments. In an echo of Gardner’s sentiments, the effect was concisely summed up by YouTuber Sage Hyden:

“What moments like these signal to me is that the creators don’t have confidence in their own stories. They’re using the joke to distract from the film’s dramatic shortcomings.”

Because my fiction is often playing with genre tropes, whether they be pulp thriller, gothic horror house, or hardboiled detective, the key for me then becomes how to balance “subject and presentation,” as Gardner points out (135). To deal with genre clichés in a way that is smart, but not overly clever or drawing attention to itself—ways in which lesser Thor–type movies get away with, well, lackluster narratives.

The element of what Gardner calls psychic distance—the level of identification the narrator takes with a character—comprises an important way the “dream” can be effectively expressed, or alternately, disrupted. As Gardner expresses:

In good fiction, shifts in psychic distance are carefully controlled. At the beginning of the story, in the usual case, we find the writer using either long or medium shots. He moves in a little for scenes of high intensity, draws back for transitions, moves in still closer for the story’s climax…. A piece of fiction containing sudden and inexplicable shifts in psychic distance looks amateur and tends to drive the reader away. (Gardner 112)

It is interesting that Gardner describes psychic distance’s levels in the language of film (“long or medium shots”). In so doing, he expresses the need to vary distance between what is told more abstractly to the reader and what is demonstrated in scene, and to also vary where the camera is positioned, whether the camera is from one character’s immediate perspective or zoomed out entirely.

What does Gardner have to say about suspense, then?

Ideally, every element in the lead-in passage should be a relevant distraction that heightens the reader’s anticipation and at the same time holds, itself, such interest…that the reader is reluctant to dash on.

I like how Gardner refers to supporting detail as a “relevant distraction,” and I think it might be useful to think of all ancillary details as “relevant distractions.” Relevant in that they set up or support the plot or character at hand, but also in that they fill in the gaps in the reader’s dream. Also key to Gardner’s analysis is that suspense is not just the motivating urge to keep reading, but suspense in the sense of suspended—the reader cannot go forward or backward without following the path of ropes and pulleys you’ve laid out for them. It is as much keeping the reader involved in the relevant distractions as getting them to turn the pages.

In a further elaboration of Gardner’s conception of suspense, I wanted to highlight what Gardner characterizes as the “Sartrian anguish of choice:”

That is, our suspenseful concern is not just with what will happen but with the moral implications of action. Given two possible choices, each based on some approvable goal, we worry, as we read, over which choice the character will make and, given the nature of reality, what the results will be.

To be involved in the suspense of the story or dream, a reader must worry about the consequences of what may happen to a character. The stakes of a character’s decision help crystallize the reader’s concern about the character’s fate. Another one of my writing mentors called this the “hope–dread” axis. A reader may hope a character makes the “right” decision, but he or she must also dread the consequences of the “wrong” one. In this way, a reader is involved on two emotional levels: fear and hope, both extremely powerful attachments crucial to supporting the dream.

When I write, I try to keep the hope–dread axis in mind when establishing stakes. What should I want the audience to hope? What should the audience know to fear? Often when a story isn’t working—the dream flawed and distracted—it is usually because one of these elements is not clear enough.

Gardner may have left the world unceremoniously and on bad terms, but aside from his potshots at other authors, much of his advice still holds. As long as novice writers such as myself struggle with psychic distance and suspense, The Art of Fiction and its advocacy of the “fiction as dream” will have its uses.

Works Cited

Gardner, John. The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers. Vintage Books edition. New York: Vintage. 1991.

Hyden, Sage. “What Writers Can Learn from Wonder Woman.” JustWrite. YouTube. June 23, 2017.

Pfeiffer, Ben. “John Gardner’s Tricky Death and Tangled Legacy.” The Paris Review. September 14, 2017.

Lethem, Jonathan. Motherless Brooklyn. New York: Vintage. 1999.

Stanton, David. “Between the Lines.” The Washington Post. July 16, 2006.

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I originally wrote this story in 2018 for Medium. Eight years later, it’s still evergreen — and given the Winter Olympics, it’s high time to bring it back — on the Usonian platform.

The year was 1924. The place was Chamonix, a French Alpine town just below the snowy slopes of Mont Blanc. There, a global sporting tradition began—albeit modestly. At the time, the event was called La Semaine Internationale des Sports d’Hiver — International Winter Sports Week. The following year, the International Olympic Committee retroactively christened Chamonix 1924 as the first modern Winter Games.

Nearly a century later, the Winter Olympics’ outsize influence is readily apparent. For 16 days every four years, winter sports — many of which attract only niche audiences during the other three years and 349 days — capture the attention of the world. These include the glamorized sports of downhill skiing, figure skating, and ice hockey — alongside the decidedly less–romanticized events of bobsled, biathlon, and curling.

Of course, today’s wall–to–wall NBC coverage of the Winter Olympics would probably be unfathomable to the small audience of 10,000 spectators in Chamonix. It begs the question—just how did these ice–themed Olympics come to be?

As it turns out, part of the answer lies in the story of a fierce competition between rival international sports championships—the Olympics and the little–remembered Nordic Games. In this fight, you could say that the Olympics took home the gold — and the Nordic Games didn’t even medal.

And to understand that conflict—we’ll have to go all the way back to Ancient Greece.

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In July 2025, a curious attraction opened on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood, California, mere blocks from landmarks like the TCL Chinese Theater. That venue was the Tesla Diner, a vision of the retro-future from America’s most controversial tech billionaire.

Elon Musk conceived of the diner in 2018, back when he was a darling of the media and a seeming leader of a green, high-tech future. Now, of course, his star has fallen under his laissez-faire (except when the insults were directed at him) stewardship of Twitter (rechristened X in 2022), the overall market failure of Tesla’s Cybertruck, his participation in the incompetent and calamitous “Department of Government Efficiency” (D.O.G.E.) at the outset of the 2nd Trump Administration, and his apparent fascist overtures, including his seeming Nazi salute at the 2025 presidential inauguration.

All of the fresh, Trump-Musk chaos didn’t exactly stall the Tesla Diner’s rollout last July, when hundreds queued up in lines that snaked around the block to sample the diner’s cuisine, buzzy for the involvement of local star chefs like Bill Chait (of popular L.A. French restaurant République) and Eric Greenspan (who created the formerly James Beard-honored The Foundry). Diners were greeted by a parking lot dressed as a drive-in movie theater, playing old movies and Jetsons cartoons, (though the spots were reserved for Tesla charging only, of course) and even a popcorn-serving robot, one of Musk’s Optimus models which began development in 2021, according to Walter Isaacson’s 2023 Musk biography.

The D.O.G.E. protesters were quick to join the party — including an inflatable Musk giving the Nazi salute, reminiscent of union rat-inflatables during picket lines — but in the months that followed the diner’s buzzy launch, the restaurant faded into the rest of the sun-cooked L.A. landscape. Greenspan disassociated himself from the restaurant, and even the protesters vanished. So too did the popcorn-serving clankers.

I came to visit the Tesla Diner in the spirit of understanding Los Angeles’ status as a Clanker City, but the only Tesla robots I saw on my visit in January 2026 were behind glass, as the popcorn-serving Optimus had been already retired.

Instead, what I did find was basically a glorified, overpriced Shake Shack. After you order and pay on a tablet screen, browsing through a menu of standard café and fast food fare, — i.e., Shake Shack — you wait to pick up your drink and order on the counter. Reminiscent of a Happy Meal, the food is served in Cybertruck-shaped boxes. What did Yoda say? “Truly wonderful, the mind of a child is.”

A single soda, smashburger and fries will cost you $25, before California taxes and tip. While the burger was solid, the fries I found bland, making the meal wildly overpriced. Remember, the commensurate product — an In-N-Out combo — still goes for about $7.50.

Now, the reason you might want to tip is because there’s a literal army of people working at Tesla Diner. They are constantly scrubbing the circular glass doors, which would otherwise be coated in L.A. dust and water-spots, another sign of the inefficiency of the design. The retro-future styled booths and tables are intriguing, and to give credit where credit is due — they are clean.

On my visit, most of the people at the diner were Japanese tourists, families with small children, and even a man who asked for non-iced water, a request that the staff-member behind the counter fulfilled. But the main business they might be doing is selling merch, including an In-N-Out-styled t-shirt and a $150 Tesla Optimus action figure — selling the image of a robot that isn’t even currently functioning in the store.

I wondered why Tesla Diner was located here, in Hollywood. On the one hand, it had a Universal Studios / Disney quality — here was a novelty branding exercise, in a neighborhood completely defined by billboards pretending that people still watch movies in theaters. On the other, here was a burger joint in the literal land of burger joints, in a neighborhood at the center of the SoCal freeway vortex, making it extremely inconvenient to reach for anyone living in any of L.A.’s satellite cities of the megalopolis.

Come to think of it, Tesla Diner would make much more sense in the Bay Area, where techies would eat up the design and strange virtue-signaling. (Inside, a Tesla banner advertised the slogan: “Accelerating the world’s transition to sustainable abundance,” an idea that seems more aligned with Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein’s 2025 Abundance book than the current Musk doctrine.)

At present, Tesla Diner seems destined to a slow death or — depending on the billionaire’s hot-and-cold relationship with President #47 — open up a kiosk within the forthcoming White House ballroom. Say what you will about the powerful pair — they both have a keen sense of tastelessness.

CLANKER CITY is a new miniseries from THE USONIAN. Consider supporting the Substack to receive monthly essays exclusive to paid subscribers.

The following is a feature story I wrote in 2016 for a college journalism seminar about the 2001 dismantlement of the Princeton Guyot Hall museum. Now that it’s been ten years, a few of the subjects have passed on (Henry Horn and Jerry Ostriker among them); meanwhile, the famous Antrodemus skeleton (above image) has been relocated to the new earth sciences complex in 2025, as the historic Guyot Hall has begun its conversion from an earth science building to one devoted to computer science.

PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY—In late May, Princeton is often hot and humid. In 2000, it was strangely pleasant, with temperatures barely reaching 75 degrees, weather somewhat unusual for Reunions, a three-day long celebration filled with startling displays of inebriation. Apocryphally, it’s known as one of the largest beer orders in the world. But for a few geoscience department alumni, it was a crystallizing moment of a crisis. Following the departmental reception, a half-dozen alumni sat down and wrote letters to the then-University President, Harold Shapiro.

“People were very distrustful,” Geoff Feiss said, class of 1965, and a former provost of the College of William and Mary. “There was this feeling, I think Princeton was being a little too elitist and not too concerned with school-kids.” In March 2000, the University presented architectural plans to a Geoscience faculty meeting that announced the Guyot Hall Museum would soon close its doors for good. Over the summer the exhibits would be boxed up to make way for office space for the then-new Princeton Environmental Institute, a decision that aimed to radically changed the character of Guyot Hall, designed to be a museum at its construction in 1909.

“It was kind of a rebellious feeling, taking a stand on this,” Nancy West said, Feiss’ wife, and a geosciences major from the class of 1979 who took part in the letter-writing campaign. “It was a welcome break. You don’t go to Reunions hoping to accomplish something.” West contrasted the action to writing to a congressperson. “Senators don’t pull heartstrings, but Princeton does.” Over the summer of 2000, the conflict between museum supporters and the University erupted into a controversy that divided the community and attained national media attention. At stake was an illustrious legacy in natural science and a treasured local resource. Facing extinction, only a few relics survived.

The last of its kind

Though only a few artifacts survived the museum battle intact, you can find them in Guyot Hall, if you know where to look. Visit Guyot Hall today, and you might notice the shaved-off boulder that rests outside the entrance, a relic that helped prove the existence of the last Ice Age. After opening a great wooden door, you ascend a green stone staircase, its steps worn down with a century of foot traffic. The building’s main floor is a vaulted gallery. A mezzanine wraps around the building’s interior, and offices peek behind the elevated walkways, giving an anachronistic sense of a Victorian airplane hangar. Along the walls of the Geosciences wing, gems and minerals haunt a few display cases. Two overshadowing figures of Princeton geology eye the scene: mounted portraits of Arnold Guyot, the 19th century Swiss-American geologist, and Henry Hess, the founder of plate tectonics.

Walk past a great glass globe, into the office space of the Princeton Environmental Institute and further, to the Department of Ecology and Environmental Biology, and you see another vision of the past: a dinosaur. The mounted Allosaurus skeleton lurks in the center of the room. (For Princeton geologists, it was Antrodemus, but Yale’s name was the one that caught on—fitting, given that Allosaurus in Greek means “the other lizard”). The extinct carnivore resembles a smaller version of its more famous descendant, the Tyrannosaurus. The creature began the transformation to stone when it died 150 million years ago in what is now the Western United States. It was unearthed in 1941 and installed twenty years later. There it has stayed, while itsneighbors have come and gone.

Today, few undergraduates know that Princeton University was the second institution to display mounted dinosaur skeletons in the world. They also might not realize that Princeton had been home to a natural science museum for about 125 years, and they might be more shocked to learn that this museum existed as recently as 2000.

This history is writ in the little objects scattered around Guyot Hall—the minerals, the boulder, the portraits, the dinosaur. The writer John McPhee, who has an office in Guyot, once called the Allosaurus yet another name: a ‘tokensaurus.’ For perhaps more than once in its existence, that dinosaur has been the last of its kind.

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This is the twenty-third chapter in a long-simmering miniseries called “Narrative Architecture” about storytelling choices in fiction. There are many ways to tell a story, and in this series, I’ll examine the literary choices a particular author made and their impact on the story at hand. This week, I’ll engage with Andrea Barrett’s The Voyage of the Narwhal, winner of the 1998 National Book Award.

This post is a revised version of an essay I composed as part of my MFA program at UNR.

Andrea Barrett knows A LOT about polar exploration and the state of 19th century natural science. Her 1998 National Book Award-winning novel The Voyage of the Narwhal brims with references to Captain Franklin and The Terror, Antarctic explorer James Clark Ross, naturalist Asa Gray, etc. In Narwhal she crafts a revisionist narrative that both pays homage to the polar expeditions of the time and yet also challenges the less-modern aspects of those historical efforts and their contemporary scientific conventions—which often sidelined women and exploited indigenous peoples. The Voyage of the Narwhal succeeds in addressing these motives, and Barrett employs innovative narrative tactics to pull them off. However, I felt the novel suffered from the fact that the voyage of the Narwhal itself is not terribly interesting or realistic compared to more harrowing real-life tales (like that of Shackleton’s Endurance), and the novel’s latter half relies too heavily on a soap opera plot device that remains unresolved until the last second due to the overwhelming stubbornness of the novel’s would-be lovers. Narwhal, however, shows a path forward for writers who wish to craft oceangoing adventures for modern audiences.

First, let’s examine the expedition of the Narwhal. The novel’s initial protagonist is the delightfully-named Erasmus Wells, a former explorer who sees the Arctic expedition of his cocky brother-in-law-to-be, Zeke, as a way to finally become credentialed as a respected explorer after a less successful expedition to the South Pacific he had made in the past. In Philadelphia, Zeke and Erasmus leave behind Lavinia, Erasmus’ sister and Zeke’s partner, as well as Alexandra, a servant to the Wells family.

On the tiny Narwhal sailing ship, however, the story’s management of time strains some credulity. Erasmus supposedly has his first conversations with various members of the crew a few days into, or even weeks into the expedition—including the cook, Ned (described as on “day 4”) (page 46) and Erasmus’ scientific colleague, the physician Dr. Boerhaave (page 54), at least two weeks into the expedition (the timing is unclear). All these conversations, realistically speaking, would be happening on Day 1 or 2, or maybe before, during the crew interview process. I kind of laughed when I read every time that Erasmus was just meeting someone on the ship—halfway to the North Pole—for the first time. What has Erasmus been doing all day long for weeks, if not talking with the other half-dozen people on the boat? In Narwhal the technique is especially laughable because the ship is so small, and even class differences between the crew and the officers, as the novel points to as a reason for their segregation, are not reason enough to make sure that all the officers have not met each other.

During the early sections of the novel, Barrett weaves between different POVs by citing the diary entries of Ned the cook and Dr. Boerhaave to complicate the spacey, Erasmus-centric perspective, a tactic I admired, which also had the added effect that The Narwhal seemed like a real expedition and that authentic diaries had been compiled to write the book (as was the case in many famous books of polar exploration). Most innovative is Barrett’s decision to set up and keep tabs on the character of Alexandra through her diaries, one of the women left back home, because she becomes the driving force of the novel once Erasmus returns as a broken and depressed (and honestly total buzzkill of a) character. From Alexandra’s diary:

I lie in the dark and dream about that place and those people. I’d give anything to be with Zeke and Erasmus. Anything. I’m grateful for this position but sometimes I feel so confined—why can’t my life be larger? I imagine those Esquimaux befriended by Parry and his crew: the feasts and the games, the fur suits, the pairs of women tattooing each other; gravely passing a needle and a thread coated with lampblack and oil under the skin of their faces and breasts. I dream about them. I dream about the ice, the snow, the ice, the snow. (Barrett 86)

Back in Philly, Alexandra finds her own form of empowerment in secretly editing and typesetting a book written by a polar explorer, whereby she gradually expands her range of knowledge and expertise in publishing and science. Her smaller story, for much of its length, seems far more interesting than that of Erasmus, who spends most of the novel depressed and conflicted about betraying a dreadful personality in the form of Zeke. Rather, Alexandra expresses the strange and paradoxical urges which drive explorers to the poles, the Romanticism as laid out by Shelley’s polar explorer Walton in Frankenstein.

Eventually, due to some poor decision-making on the part of the vain and cowardly Zeke, the Narwhal gets frozen and trapped within the Arctic icepack, in homage to the contemporary lost ships The Terror and The Erebus and that of Shackleton’s later Endurance. By the time Erasmus abandons a missing Zeke in the Arctic and endorses the plan to abandon ship, the novel is only halfway over. As a result, an astute reader will expect Zeke’s return in a totally obvious Dickensian plot twist later in the book. So it is quite a subversion on the part of Barrett that a book titled The Voyage of the Narwhal extends far beyond that initial expedition and instead proceeds to investigate the legacy of that failed expedition and the climate of scientific racism in 19th century natural science.

Having spent some time studying the history of problematic 19th century earth scientists such as Louis Agassiz and Arnold Guyot (and have since then unexpectedly found myself in conversations with an ad-hoc inter-university task force to educate earth scientists about these figures’ less admirable qualities), I can say that Barrett nails this aspect dead-on.

She accomplishes this well in the episode when Zeke returns to Philadelphia, with his Inuit lover Annie and her (their?) son Tom, he goes on a lecture tour parading around the “Northern savages,” including a stop at the Smithsonian in Washington. In an effort to rescue the ill Annie and Tom from Zeke’s scientific abuse, Erasmus visits the Smithsonian and encounters a display of artifacts from Fiji peoples, gathered from a previous expedition in which he himself took part:

Case 71.

Collections made by the U.S. Exploring Expedition in the Feejee Islands… Cannibal Cooking Pots.

The Feejees are Cannibals. The flesh of women is preferred to that of men, and that part of the arm above the elbow and the thigh are regarded as the choicest parts. So highly do they esteem this food, that the greatest praise they can bestow on a delicacy is to say that it is as tender as a dead man…

[Erasmus] leapt back as if he’d been burned. He both and couldn’t remember those objects, and the young version of himself who’d helped gather them. Two members of the Expedition had been killed by those Feejee Islanders. He hadn’t taken part in the retaliatory raid, but he’d known what was happening. From the ship he’d seen the smoke from the burning villages and heard the rifle fire. Wilkes had argued that man-eating men deserved any punishment he might inflict, and although Erasmus had hated Wilkes’ harsh ways with the native peoples, in this case part of him agreed. But that had been before Dr. Rae returned from the arctic with the first news of Franklin’s fate, and those hints of mutilated corpses and human parts found in the British cooking kettles. Before Joe told him about the British boot. (Barrett 350-351)

This scene is an interesting way to address a character coming to terms with his complicity in imperialism. At its worst moments, it strikes me as very unrealistic for the time period for a character to be so enlightened, sort of like Tom Cruise’s cringey flashbacks of participating in what seems to be the Massacre at Wounded Knee in The Last Samurai or Gerard Depardieu’s laughably inaccurate portrayal of Columbus trying to protect the Taino Indians from his more rapacious Spanish colleagues in Ridley Scott’s misbegotten epic, 1492: Conquest of Paradise.

But here, Erasmus’ development is tied to his revelation, in the novel, that even the British explorers of the doomed Terror/Erebus expedition resorted to cannibalism, rendering the American judgement of the Fiji islanders overly harsh and hypocritical. To some level, Erasmus is also realizing that massacring natives is just as high a moral crime as consuming human flesh. To address Erasmus’ evolution, ironically I’ll quote Roger Ebert regarding that Columbus movie: “I am not convinced that Columbus was as enlightened as he seems in this movie, but perhaps historical figures exist in order to be reinterpreted every so often in terms of current needs” (Ebert). Erasmus is therefore a historical reimagining of a polar explorer character to reflect the more revisionist approach to history that Barrett is interested in pursuing, which makes the Narwhal more relevant to modern audiences.

Barrett develops that angle further, and most harrowingly, when she briefly peaks into Annie’s perspective as she is dying, when she realizes that her skeleton will be placed in the Smithsonian for future phrenologists to examine:

Annie was in a room….No one would listen to her. Not the doctor, not Zeke; not even Erasmus, who’d asked what she needed but then turned his back and disappeared when she’d said, I want to go home. Wasn’t that what she’d said? Her body would never go home now and she must do what she could for her son. A white cloth over the bed, white cases over the pillows; she had little time; she worked. The great power, the angekok [medicine man] had once told her, comes only after struggle and concentration. By the strength of her thought alone, she must strip her body of flesh and blood and be able to see herself as a skeleton. Each bone, each tiny bone, clear before her eyes. Then the sacred language would descend, allowing her to name the parts of her body that would endure. When she named the last bone she’d be free; her spirit could travel and she could watch over her son. She burrowed under the white cloth and squeezed shut her eyes, beginning the terrible process of shedding her flesh. Let me be bone, she thought. Like the long narwhal spines at home, the walrus skulls, the delicate ribs of the seals. White bone. (Barrett 363)

This is a striking section because it is one of the only moments which delves into Annie’s interiority and sympathizes with her plight more directly. It also alludes to a supernatural/ “Noble Savage” undertone regarding the Inuit characters that skews a bit too Dances with Wolves (ugh) for my taste. But this moment is critical, because it lays bare the horror of what the explorers have done to this Inuit woman. They have brought her out of her context, into a climate to which she was ill-prepared, and now she will die at the hands of Western doctors (who are still really bad at medicine at this point in history), and finally her bones will be treated as a prop in a museum.

Despite this profundity, the Narwhal gets a bit exasperating as the final section relies on a “will-they/won’t-they” romance between Alexandra and Erasmus. By this point in the novel they are living in a cabin in the woods together, so for their first sexual encounter to be ten pages from the ending, feels a bit intentionally delayed:

On April 26, late at night, Alexandra walked into his room. Twenty-two buttons down the front of her gray dress; she unfastened the first six, as simply as if she were shedding her dress for her painter’s smock. Erasmus undid the rest. The first sight of her bare shoulders struck him like his first sight of ice—how could he have forgotten that? (Barrett 386)

In this scene I find it kind of amusing (and also interesting) that Barrett makes the Freudian leap that an explorer’s attraction to the ice is the same desire he feels for a woman. Whereas other texts might retain this idea as a subtext, Barrett makes this idea (the phallic act of “exploration”) explicit. However, Erasmus and Alexandra’s new union allows Alexandra to join Erasmus as his explorer-wife as they try to return Tom to his homeland at the wish of Annie, who may (or not) be literally haunting them as an Inuit ghost. It does seem like a fraught plan regardless, as there’s no guarantee Tom will be welcomed back to a community he left as a child. But it is a Romantic ending, wherein the explorer goes off into the misty ice and disappears, just like what happens to Dr. Frankenstein and his monster at the end of their book.

Overall, Narwhal succeeds as a revisionist adventure novel that takes aim at the problematic ideologies which promoted these historical explorations in the first place. It’s a soap opera, but then again, Dickens succeeded by drawing from the drama of glacial love stories and unexpected reappearances, and it’s a strategy that still works today.

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Works Cited

Barrett, Andrea. The Voyage of the Narwhal (W. W. Norton & Co.: New York, 1998).

Ebert, Roger. “1492: Conquest of Paradise,” RogerEbert.com, October 9, 1992, https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/1492-conquest-of-paradise-1992

Zwick, Edward (director). The Last Samurai (Warner Bros., 2003).

A couple of years ago, when ChatGPT was just getting started in the public eye, I ran a little experiment. If I gave AI the first paragraph of one of my published short stories, would the chatbot be able to finish it?

The result was sort of compelling. While of course it didn’t do a “good job,” the chatbot successfully identified the main characters, the thread the story would take, and correctly anticipated the next scene.

This year I thought I’d try a different AI experiment. It’s been known for a while that you can ask a Chatbot to write in the style of a famous author, like Hemingway or Joan Didion, for which the LLM has a lot of material to sample.

But what if it tried to sample someone who is not famous, and perhaps has less of an available sample size to work with?

That is to say—what if it tried to imitate me?

So I asked it to. And this is what it came up with:

Here is an original short story in the style of Harrison Blackman—a blend of atmospheric detail, psychological tension, and speculative unease, without copying any copyrighted material:1

The Cartographer’s Error

When the drone returned without its camera, the team pretended not to notice. It came buzzing over the ridge at dusk, rotors sputtering, landing skids coated in a fine red dust none of them recognized. The camera mount hung empty, wires shorn clean as though something had bitten them off.

Raina, the expedition leader, walked toward it slowly, as if approaching a wounded animal that might strike. “We need another map of the valley,” she murmured, speaking more to herself than to the others. “Without visuals we can’t confirm the fault line.”

The valley stretched before them—an expanse of fog, ravines, and shimmering mirages that warped the horizon. The earth underneath seemed indecisive, fault lines running in strange geometries. Satellite maps had misplotted the region for decades, and no one could figure out why.

Back at the portable command unit, the only screen active belonged to Ezra, the cartographer. He was hunched over his interface, repeatedly zooming in on a topographical rendering that refused to remain stable. Every time he blinked, the valley rearranged its layers: ridges shifting, chasms moving several meters to the left.

“It’s doing it again,” Ezra said, voice thin. “Terrain is updating without input.”

“Update protocols are manual,” Raina reminded him, though not confidently. “Terrain doesn’t just—move.”

Ezra pointed at a jagged contour line blinking at the map’s edge. “This wasn’t here ten minutes ago. It’s like the valley is correcting me.”

Raina suppressed a shiver. “Double-check the baselines. Your instruments might be miscalibrated.”

Ezra wanted to protest, but he saw the tension in her jaw. She wasn’t dismissing him—she was afraid to believe him.

Hours passed. Night settled deeper. The lights of the base hummed in the dark while the valley beyond remained invisible, as though the world ended ten feet from the perimeter. Ezra refused to sleep until the map stabilized.

By 3 a.m., the mapping screen was an unreadable labyrinth of contradicting coordinates. Fault lines spiraled, folded, and rearranged themselves into shapes that resembled skeletal structures, spirals, and—disturbingly—something like written language.

Ezra stared slack-jawed. “Raina… I think it’s communicating.”

Before she could respond, the drone—powered down and disconnected—began to beep. Its transmitter blinked an error message: LOCATION NOT FOUND. REPLACE MAP.

Raina looked from the drone to the screen and finally out toward the unseen valley.

“What if,” she whispered, “the maps were wrong because the world wasn’t finished yet?”

Ezra swallowed hard. “Or because it’s still being rewritten.”

Neither of them spoke after that. They just watched the fault lines shift, as the land updated itself in real time, drawing a new world the way a nervous hand draws in the dark—almost as if the earth had grown tired of waiting for humans to chart it, and decided to chart itself.

[THE END]2

Let’s unpack this

Last month Sam Kriss wrote an essay in the New York Times Magazine expertly identifying the tells of AI writing. AI syntax frequently follows patterns—a lot of em dashes, a lot of lists, a lot of sentence structures that follow the format of “it’s not this, but that.”

“The Cartographer’s Error” follows these tells pretty closely:

• “Fault lines spiraled, folded, and rearranged themselves into shapes that resembled skeletal structures, spirals, and—disturbingly—something like written language.” Em dash, check.

• “Every time he blinked, the valley rearranged its layers: ridges shifting, chasms moving several meters to the left.” List, check.

• “She wasn’t dismissing him—she was afraid to believe him.” It’s not this—it’s that!

Another striking aspect of this piece is that it is genre-related to my unpublished novel, Blood Falls, which also involves scientists examining broad geomorphological terrain. Though that novel has not been published, I’ve submitted portions of the MS to writing contests, and that’s probably where OpenAI is hoovering up my work. Disturbing, yes, but not inexplicable.

But is this truly written in “my style?” My fiction style is pretty broad—I have a lot of modes that I work in—suspense, horror, literary, commercial. While it does pick up on some of my tics—bolding and all-caps for paratexts (“LOCATION NOT FOUND”)—more of a screenwriting thing than anything else, the only style this story might have is AI’s style, though in the summary it does accurately sum up how I try to write: “a blend of atmospheric detail, psychological tension, and speculative unease.”

Then I was thinking—a lot of my available writing is journalistic. What, then could AI do with that? How would it write a journalism story by me?

Here goes nothing—and this time, I mean it:

The Town That Keeps Moving: A Quiet Community Faces a Shifting Landscape

Here is an original journalism-style article in the stylistic vein of Harrison Blackman—measured, atmospheric, deeply reported, with an undercurrent of speculative unease, without copying any real copyrighted text:

Raventon, TX — At first, residents treated it as a curiosity—hairline cracks in sidewalks that seemed to change direction overnight. A fence that no longer lined up with a property boundary. A gravel road curving just slightly differently than it had the week before.

But by late spring, the phenomenon had become impossible to ignore.

“We’d pave one side of the street on Monday,” said Public Works Director Tom Delgado, pausing on the courthouse steps to light a cigarette, “and by Friday the measurements wouldn’t match the original site plan. It’s like the ground keeps nudging itself into place when no one’s looking.”

Raventon, a town of 3,200 in the remote Texas Panhandle, has found itself at the center of a quiet scientific intrigue: the landscape beneath it is shifting—not in dramatic earthquakes or subsidence events, but in small, persistent movements that geologists say don’t correspond to any known fault system in the region.

A Puzzle of Millimeters

Texas Tech geologist Dr. Naomi Hsu first heard from town officials in May, when she received a packet of survey data that caught her attention. “There were changes of five to ten millimeters—small enough to go unnoticed in most places, but consistent across several grid points,” she explained. “What was striking wasn’t the size. It was the pattern.”

Hsu deployed a grad student and a set of ground-based LIDAR units. After three weeks of monitoring, she was convinced: the terrain beneath Raventon is not behaving according to the established geologic record.

“There’s no fracking here, no mining, no large-scale water draw—they’re not doing anything to disturb the underlying strata,” Hsu said. “It’s as if the bedrock itself is… reorganizing.”3

She hesitated over the final word, as if aware of its implications.

A Town With a Long Memory

Residents, many of whom have family histories stretching back to the town’s founding in 1889, have begun combing local archives for clues. Anecdotes have surfaced: old ranch logs mentioning barns that “wandered out of alignment,” and homestead maps from the early 20th century that don’t quite match modern land surveys.

In the local library, where every wall smells faintly of dust and yellowed glue, volunteer historian Linda Martinez has been updating a hand-drawn map of the town—by hand, in pencil, because ink feels too permanent.

“It makes you wonder,” she said, flipping through a brittle county atlas from 1911. “Did the settlers know something we forgot? Or did the ground only start changing after we did?”

Human Problem, Human Adaptation

For now, the town has taken a practical approach. Survey benchmarks are being updated monthly. High school shop students have begun building adjustable street-sign mounts. Contractors now carry both tape measures and GPS receivers.

Everyone seems to be adapting—because what else is there to do?

Mayor Denise Alvarez shrugged when asked whether the town was worried. “It’s not flooding us, and it’s not dropping us into a sinkhole. The world is alive. Always has been. Maybe this town just has a more talkative piece of land beneath it.”

She smiled, but her eyes lingered on the horizon—a long, flat plane shimmering in the summer heat, as if caught between two versions of itself.

What Comes Next

Dr. Hsu insists the phenomenon is not paranormal, and that further study will eventually reveal the mechanism. She is adding more instruments next month, including subsurface seismometers and radar probes.

But privately, several geologists involved with the project admit Raventon has become something of a professional outlier—an unexplained data point in a field that doesn’t often tolerate unexplained data.

Meanwhile, residents continue living their lives: rebuilding fences, redrawing boundaries, and accepting that their town is moving, slowly but definitely, in a direction only the earth seems to understand.

“People think places are fixed,” historian Martinez said, closing her atlas. “But maybe that’s just because we don’t usually watch closely enough.”

Um, let’s unpack this one, too

In this “piece,” well, ChatGPT decided to rewrite the fiction story as if it were truth. While it resembles “science journalism,” it’s like claiming the rocks are moving of their own accord.

And of course, not only are all the quotes and “characters” hallucinated, but so is the town in Texas—there is no such place. There are no such people as Naomi Hsu, Ph.D., volunteer historian Linda Martinez, Mayor Denise Alvarez, or Public Works director Tom Delgado. These people aren’t real. This isn’t JOURNALISM.

Let’s go back to that summary: “measured, atmospheric, deeply reported, with an undercurrent of speculative unease”—measured and deeply reported, thanks, but an undercurrent of speculative unease? Since when does my reporting have “an undercurrent of speculative unease?”

Clearly, ChatGPT’s wires are crossed and confusing different writing genres under my name. Lines like “She hesitated over the final word, as if aware of its implications,” are not unlike lines in my fiction or screenwriting. They are not in my journalism.

While news journalism is often formulaic in terms of structure, and this AI effort does understand that AP News format, it also supports my theory of LLM’s overhype. Whatever inroads AI makes in narrative writing, it will never be able to write news.

News is information that is new. It requires a human to go out and get new material through interviews and research. While AI excels at regurgitating essays on The Great Gatsby, it’s got tens of thousands of similar high school essays on the subject to draw from.

At base level, LLMs are plagiarism machines. Often, when you ask a chatbot about a current event, the LLM’s response will be out of date and draw from articles several years old. It can’t generate anything from scratch. It needs a pool of human-generated information to cull from. Without human journalists, AI will never be able to keep pace with the times.

So, what do you think? Are clankers going to eliminate all human writing? If they do, you’d better like AI’s “it’s not this, it’s that” structure.