Books read in 2021

Since the list of books and reviews and notes for the last couple of years got a little bit out of hand, I’ve only included partial notes and review of each book in this article. This year, the separate article for each book generally includes many more notes and review material, as well as citations and rough notes.

Arsène Lupin, gentleman-cambrioleur (1907)

by Maurice Leblanc

This is a collection of stories about Arsène Lupin, a gentleman thief.

• L’Arrestation d’Arsène Lupin: Lupin travels from France to America on a transatlantic liner. He is arrested in New York City by his nemesis Inspector Ganimard
• Arsène Lupin en prison: Lupin robs a castle while still in prison. He fools the owner by posing as Ganimard.
• L’Évasion d’Arsène Lupin: Lupin escapes from prison twice. Ganimard is flouted in court by a man who appears to be Lupin but isn’t, but is?
• Le Mystérieux Voyageur: Lupin is himself robbed while on a train, teams up with completely unwitting police officers, and hunts down the wanted criminal who’d robbed him.
• Le Collier de la reine: This is Lupin’s origin story, wherein he steals a necklace as a very young boy. The story is told by Lupin himself thirty years later to those from whom he stole.
• Le Sept de cœur: Lupin enriches himself while fooling everyone and thwarting a terrorist plot to steal the plans for an advanced submarine.
• Le Coffre-fort de madame Imbert: Lupin tries to run a con on a couple who have a safe full of money, but they end up fooling him into stealing their “money”—which turns out to be fake. They collect insurance and ends up with nothing but paper.
• La Perle noire: Once again, Lupin solves another robbery and murder while also managing to steal a treasure himself.
• Sherlock Holmès arrive trop tard: Lupin matches withs with Herlock Sholmes, staying one step ahead of him the whole way—and even managing to steal the great detective’s watch from his own arm.

I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.

The Churn (2014)

by James S.A. Corey

This is one of the earliest stories in the entire Expanse universe. It takes place before even Leviathan Wakes. This is Amos Burton’s origin story. It tells the story of how he started as a young thug named Timmy, in the employ of Baltimore crime lord Amos Burton. He ends up running protection for an identity-grifter named Erich who works for Burton. Timmy lives with Lydia, an older woman who rescued him after his mother had died. She also had worked for Amos Burton, as a prostitute. Their relationship is complicated: he protects her, but is also her lover. Timmy’s gift for violence is prodigious. He is taciturn to a fault. This impresses Burton.

On an assignment to protect Erich while he’s on a job, all hell breaks loose. The entire neighborhood is raided by the police/authorities and he, Lydia, and Erich are forced to flee the area and, likely, Burton’s ambit. Timmy had an island prepared where he spirits them away. He even manages to get Erich an identity-building kit. After Timmy has decapitated the organization by killing Burton, Erich uses the kit to rebuild the Amos Burton identity for Timmy, allowing him to escape off of Earth—but he can never return to Baltimore.

I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.

The Butcher of Anderson Station (2011)

by James S.A. Corey

This is one of the earliest stories in the entire Expanse universe. It takes place before even Leviathan Wakes. It is a short story about Fred Johnson. It tells the story of how he started as an Earth marine and how he came to be known as the eponymous butcher.

The present-day Fred Johnson has been taken captive by Anderson Dawes, then-leader of the OPA. But Fred Johnson hasn’t been captured because he’s a danger to the OPA. Quite the contrary: Johnson has become a drunk and is considering ending it all. He regrets his role in the attack that made him famous throughout the system. Anderson Dawes sees this regret as a thin wedge that he can use to convert one of Earth’s greatest assets to work for the Belters. The rest, as they say, is history.

I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.

Leviathan Wakes (2011)

by James S.A. Corey

This is the first book of the Expanse series. The crew of the ice-hauler Canterbury includes Earther XO Jim Holden, Belter Chief Engineer Naomi Nagata, Martian Navy pilot Alex Kamal, and Earther engineer Amos Burton. While they are on an excursion to investigate a distress call from the ship Scopuli, a stealth ship appears and destroys the Canterbury.

We meet detective Miller, learn of Julie Mao, and learn of the Protomolecule. Protogen schemes to harness its power, sacrificing the people of Eros. The crew of the Rocinante—along with Miller—figure out what’s going on and, with the help of the OPA and Fred Johnson, put a stop to it. Eros is lost. When they try to destroy it, the Protomolecule defies physics to save itself. Only Miller’s sacrifice avoids a strike on Earth, crashing into Venus instead.

I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.

Subprime Attention Crisis (2020)

by Tim Hwang

This is a short book about the digital advertising business, including its history, its present, and possible futures. The history is that the advertising business has always struggled with the essential fact that they are selling a largely unquantifiable product. There are feelings about the effectiveness of advertising, but little evidence for the effectiveness of a particular ad. Effectiveness is measured in two ways: directly contributing to a sale (e.g. rebates, sales, etc.), or general brand-name buildup, which leads to familiarity. Basically: the short game and the long game.

Even in the old days, there were a lot of steps in between putting up a billboard along a highway and noticing an uptick in sales months later. How much did the billboard contribute? It’s hard to say because there is no way to control for other factors. The online world is similar, but differs in an important way: the sellers of ad space claim that they can very precisely and accurately identify who looked at which advertisement for how long. This is the core claim that Hwang does a good job of dissecting and refuting.

I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.

Caliban’s War (2011)

by James S.A. Corey

The second book of the The Expanse begins on Ganymede, where we meet Prax Meng, a botanist of consummate skill and education. He has a daughter Mei with a debilitating but controllable disease. She is kidnapped from her pre-school. We also meet Bobbie Draper, a Martian Marine deployed on the surface, opposing the Earth forces that are also stationed there. Tensions are already high when a mysterious humanoid without a spacesuit tears across the surface, eliminating the Earth forces as well as all of the Martian ones—except for Bobbie.

The Rocinante and its crew make their appearance months later, as part of the Fred Johnson-inspired support for Ganymede. They’re there to bring food supplies to a planet that formerly the breadbasket of the outer system. That was before the Martian/Earth conflict in its near orbit brought its primary food domes crashing down.

We also meet Avasarala, who works for the U.N. and is a force to be reckoned with of her own. She pairs up with Bobbie and teams with the crew of the Roci to ferret out a plot in the U.N., find and rescue Mei, as well as defeat the last of the super-soldiers. The protomolecule on Venus finally bears fruit, ejecting it toward the outer solar system.

I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.

The Gods of Risk (2012)

by James S.A. Corey

This story takes place after Caliban’s War, when Bobbie returns to Mars after having retired from the Mars Marines.

She’s living with her brother and his family. Her nephew David is a gifted student, enrolled in the terraforming program at school. He’s also a gifted chemist, so he’s tempted to make extra money by creating drugs for a local dealer. This is the Breaking Bad storyline, I guess. David is infatuated with LeeLee, one of the girls who orbits the leader of the local gang.

In order to protected David, Bobbie starts working for the local gang, but she subverts their plans and manages to extricate David from the situation.

I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.

Abaddon’s Gate (2013)

by James S.A. Corey

This is the third book of the The Expanse series. It tells the story of humanity’s first interactions with The Ring, an alien artifact constructed by the protomolecule on Venus and launched into orbit out near Uranus. The Ring is guarded by a coalition of Belter, Martian, and Earther forces, preventing anyone from approaching it until it can be investigated more thoroughly.

The Roci and its crew are doing well, having improved the ship with a railgun. Miller, after his death on Venus, is “haunting” Holden. He has been resurrected by the protomolecule as a simulacrum to communicate with humanity…and to help the protomolecule search for…something.

The space on the other side of The Ring is a void, with only a mysterious station at the center of it, with ring gates opening on 1300 other systems. Any ship moving in it must stick to a speed limit of 600m/s or the station kills all of its systems and moves it to an orbiting junkyard. No-one has any idea how any of this works, nor how the physics behind it can be explained.

The builders of the protomolecule had been gone for billions of years, destroyed by something even more powerful than them. Despite their ability to span galaxies and billions of years, they were gone. What killed them? Was it still out there?

The Ring Gates are open, the station inert, the Roci is finally owned outright by its crew. Michio Pa is in charge of the Behemoth, which will be converted, once again, to a station named Medina. The protomolecule simulation named Miller is still lurking with Holden, searching for … something.

Humanity must decide what it’s going to do next.

I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.

Automation and the Future of Work (2020)

by Aaron Benanav

This book argues that the paucity of good jobs these days is due not to a rise in automation, but to a massive decrease in manufacturing output. That is, slow growth rates coupled with a system-wide overcapacity are a much better fit for explaining how we got to where we are today: economies in the west with ostensibly very low unemployment, but largely in the service industry with a much different benefits structure than past jobs.

Benanav sees a UBI as a means to an end, but that end has to be getting beyond the kind of civilization that forced us to invent a UBI in the first place. UBI is a band-aid on a broken system. Yes, it will make things better for the lower classes, but it won’t do anything about there even being lower classes at all. Settling for a UBI is aiming too low. If we lived in a world where a UBI was possible, then much more would also be possible.

Still, I’m not convinced we can afford the luxury of that fantasy. Without it, though, we’re doomed to be highly diminished but we’re determined to drive right into the brick wall without slowing down. We’ve passed the point where we can have the nice version. That way is now blocked by past heedlessness and greed. We don’t know how to slow down, so the only way forward is crash.

Since we’ve overall stopped producing new things, we’re stuck financializing everything and pushing money upward to a tiny elite. China grew, but it did so by cannibalizing existing markets, by replacing existing capacity. The standard productivity story is muddled by the fact that we’re not really manufacturing goods anymore and have instead moved into pure services.

The current trend is to reimagine new territory in so-called metaverses. Instead of escaping the planet to travel to Mars, people are now just trying to escape anywhere, even virtual places. The clever ones are capitalizing on this to sell people nothing for something, transforming fairy tales into real assets and actually usable liquidity.

I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.

What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory (2007)

by Ulrich Drepper

This is a 114-page document about various features of processor architectures and of programming languages and techniques that affect performance. It starts with a discussion of how memory (RAM or cache) even works, on an electrical level. How much maintenance overhead does a capacitor in a memory unit need in order to maintain its value? That is, there are cycles during which the RAM is refreshing its capacitance and cannot be read. If a processor request for that data comes at the wrong time, the reply will stall longer than usual.

This takes him into discussing processor caches and how and when data is retained or evicted. How can you align structures and data so that they fit into a cache line? How do you order operations so that a cache line can stay in the cache for as long as possible? What sort of eviction policies do processors even use? LRU? Something else? Can you control them? How do you avoid thrashing?

Next up is concurrency: when multiple processors, each with their own tier of caches, are working with the “same” memory, then they have to coordinate on cache evictions so that no processor is using stale data. The amount of coordination is incredible and an eviction becomes even more costly as the number of processors increases. Changing data in-memory becomes quite costly and should be avoided, if possible. At the very least, one should be aware of how much it costs to change memory. There might be simple things you can do at a high level of abstraction that makes it easier for the compiler to generate performant code for you.

I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.

The Vital Abyss (2015)

by James S.A. Corey

This story takes place after Abaddon’s Gate. It tells the story of Paulo Cortázar, who started life as a somewhat gifted, but lazy student. He gets hooked on amphetamines during his latter years at university and manages to get his degree.

A mysterious corporation takes an interest in him, liking his seeming lack of scruples. This doesn’t bother him at all. He takes the job and begins work at Thoth Station, working for ProtoGen, the Jules-Pierre Mao corporation that unleashed the protomolecule on Eros. That experiment was organized by Cortázar and his team of scientists. The scientists there have had all human empathy worn out of them; they are monsters, seeing only experimental opportunity where most people see fellow human beings. They are in love with the potential of the protomolecule and are more than arrogant enough to believe that they will be able to learn how it works and to control it.

This is the story of what happens to the staff. They are confined to a space station by the precursor to the Free Navy. They are all kept in a single, large, open room with little cover and little furniture, looked down upon by Belter guards. The do everything in the open and in public. The scientists without empathy—the most intelligent and ruthless ones—thrive the best. They openly scheme and openly copulate. Cortázar has a boyfriend whom he ends up betraying.

The renegade Martian contingent headed up by Duarte coerces the Belters into helping them find the most useful prisoner. They play mind games to get them to divulge information about the protomolecule. They slowly feed them information about what’s happened with the Ring.

Cortázar has properly divined the purpose of the Ring and the meaning of the data. The Martians take him away to eventually take him to the planet that would become Laconia, where Cortázar would develop protomolecule technologies, breeding “catalysts” and working to grant Duarte immortality.

I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.

Cibola Burn (2014)

by James S.A. Corey

This is the fourth book in The Expanse series. It follows the Rocinante to a planet called Ilus (colonists) or New Terra (U.N.). The Roci is sent there by Avasarala and Fred Johnson to settle the dispute between colonists and the official science and security team sent by the U.N.

Basia Merton is a colonist, there with his wife Lucia, the colony’s doctor and their daughter Felcia. The colonists are mainly Belters, who arrived on the Barbapiccola. They’d managed to convert their bodies to be compatible with living on a planet and have started mining the planet’s lithium. They think that they can stand on the law of “first come, first served,” but the U.N. is going to land and take everything away from them, claiming their right based on decisions and laws made in a complete other star system.

There are colonists who are unhappy enough with this situation to want to disable the landing pad. Basia is one of them. However, just as they’ve set up the charges and primed them, they hear that the shuttle from the U.N. ship Edward Israel is coming early. The explosives go off just as the shuttle is trying to land and it crashes, killing most of the passengers.

Exozoologist Elvi Okoye is on the shuttle and survives the crash, as does geohydraulicist Fayez Sarkis. Soon after, the dangerous and deadly security chief Murtry comes down to the surface. After the colonists kill most of the remaining RCE security personnel, Murtry is in his element. He’s ready to whip the colonists off of the planet and will feel justified in doing so by any means necessary. He will, in fact, enjoy doing so immensely.

I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.

The Dying Animal (2001)

by Philip Roth

To no-one’s surprise at all, this novel by Roth tells the story of a senior literature professor. His name is David Kepesh, but that doesn’t really matter. This is, apparently, the third in a series that started with The Breast. At least Roth is dead-honest about what he considers to be the most worthy literary subject of all time. It’s really hard not to feel that this is autobiographical to some degree. A Cuban-American named Consuela Castillo is taken one of his courses and she catches Kepesh’s roving eye. An equally apt title for this book could also have been Consuela’s Rack.

He laments the passing of a less-contentious world, one in which it was less a war between oppressed parties. But this world perhaps never existed. He makes a good argument that it did, for a while, but that it slipped away. True equality will have to wait, instead swaying to and fro between pendulum points, going to extremes on a spectrum, avoiding the plurality of territory between.

I don’t know what compulsion drove him to write this book, but I’m glad he did. I am not him, but there is enough of what he writes that rings a bit familiar, or is understandable (nachvollziehbar in German) that it’s nice to see a writer of his capability give voice to that which most would be too ashamed to admit, even in part. The beast lurks within. Taming it is a series of conscious acts we spend a lifetime trying to transform into unconscious ones.

I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.

Nemesis Games (2015)

by James S.A. Corey

This is the fifth book of the The Expanse series. The book starts with a Belter raid on a Martian base on Callisto. A 15-year-old named Filip leads the raid. He is forced to leave a man behind, but the mission is otherwise a success. The managed to capture the stealth shielding from the Martians and made it look like a botched raid on a different warehouse.

The Rocinante is back at Tycho Station, this time for half-year of repairs and upgrades. Amos heads to Earth to take care of an old friend’s affairs (Lydia has died). Alex heads for Mars to try to patch things up with his ex-wife. Naomi gets a message from the OPA that her son Filip is in trouble. She takes off without telling even Holden where she’s going. The crew is scattered to the winds. Holden remains behind, overseeing the repairs—and taking up tools himself to keep himself busy.

Bad things happen and the Free Navy and the rogue elements of the Martian Navy have gotten the drop on Sol System. Their overall plan is multi-pronged. Alex and Bobbie are detected and their ship disabled by the Free/Martian Navy. Holden and Fred are on the hunt for who’s a traitor on Tycho, but they eventually lose the protomolecule sample to an attack. Earth has been grievously wounded, half of Mars’s Navy is under Duarte’s control. The Belters are loose and causing trouble, Tycho is disabled, and Duarte has the protomolecule.

The crew of the Rocinante manages to save the day and get back together. Earth is picking up the pieces. The Free Navy takes over Medina Station, Duarte takes control of his ships and heads off for Laconia, but the Barkeith, the largest of the ships, disappears forever, going “Dutchman” in a mysterious event that seems to be swallowing some ships.

I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.

Babylon’s Ashes (2016)

by James S.A. Corey

This is the sixth book of the The Expanse series. It starts with Marco Inaros and his Free Navy in charge of the Slow Zone and Medina Station in it. Michio Pa is at the heart of the small group of higher-ups in the Free Navy who are beginning to seriously doubt Marco’s qualifications and goals. Those goals always seem to change whenever Marco would have had to admit that he’d failed. He managed to destroy billions on Earth, but the blow strikes simultaneously at Belters because they still obtain most of their volatiles and food from Earth. All other operations have failed in one way or another.

Marco, meanwhile, is employing guerrilla tactics to leave as much territory and population to the “inners” as possible, to increase the burden of people under their care. It doesn’t occur to him that them taking care of these people will make his enemies look like the “good guys” to those people—including a lot of Belters.

The crew of the Rocinante is helping Earth and Mars pick up the pieces and fight the Free Navy. One part of the effort is to work with Monica on mini-documentaries highlighting the humanity of all people—to show Earthers and Belters that they’re all suffering. They hope to show them that they should band together against the guerrilla force that doesn’t seem to care about them—and that seems to be more pirate than government.

Naomi finally notices the pattern that explains all of the ships that went missing in transit, realizing that it is related to and/or caused by the cumulative energy levels of all simultaneous transits. She designs an attack on Marco that sends the Giambattista—filled with junk to increase its mass—through a gate at the same time that Marco’s 15 ships come through. Therewith they manage to force the energy level high enough to cause Marco’s ships to be swallowed up like all of the others.

I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.

Strange Dogs (2017)

by James S.A. Corey

A girl named Cara lives on a planet named Laconia with her parents, who are part of a research team. Laconia is one of the 1300 ring worlds discovered by humanity in The Expanse novels. Cara enjoys visiting a local pond, where she watches the strange and alien local fauna, in particular the sunbirds. At twilight, “strange dogs” show up, but seem to pose no risk.

One day, Cara feeds a bit of her own food to a sunbird. She saw someone do something similar with a duck in a book about Paris on Earth—all of which is completely alien to her. The sunbird chokes on the alien chemistry and dies. Its two children are left alone and cannot reach the nest. Distressed, Cara runs home to get her mother’s research drone, which she hopes to use to airlift the babies back to their nest. She fails, breaking the drone in the process.

The dogs return and leave with the sunbird mother’s corpse. The next day, the mama sunbird is back, but slightly altered. It’s alive, but no longer quite the same. The baby sunbirds interact with her just fine, though. Cara asks the dogs to repair the drone and they leave with it. The next day, the drone has been repaired as well.

Commandante Duarte has taken over the planet with his marines. One of the marines runs over Cara’s brother Xan. Duarte visits her family’s home to apologize and promise retribution. Cara sneaks Xan’s body away from the funeral and brings it to the dogs. The next morning, Xan is alive but, like the mama sunbird, a little off. Cara’s parents are repulsed by the reincarnation of Xan, with her father knifing him and barring him from the house. Cara sneaks out, finds Xan, and they head into the forest together, to seek refuge with the dogs.

I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.

Oryx and Crake (2003)

by Margaret Atwood

This is the first of three novels in the MaddAddam trilogy. This one tells the story of Snowman, a lone, somewhat mad, man living on his own in a post-apocalyptic world, nearly bereft of other human life. The only other “people” around are a tribe of pleasant, but simple humanoids that Snowman calls Crakers.

Snowman remembers a time when there were more people than just the Crakers. He remembers a time when the planet was controlled by supra-national corporations that ran privileged compounds for their employees. Everyone else—the Plebes—lived in lawless hinterlands, where the privileged went to play.

Snowman grew up as Jimmy, where his mother and father both worked for HelthWyzer, a company that bred animals for the express purpose of providing more plentiful and nutritious food. Jimmy befriends Glenn, a prodigy at his school. They spend most of their time playing video games and watching extreme pornography and snuff videos online. Jimmy falls in love with one of the young, Asian girls in one of these films. The girl is Oryx.

Crake is good enough at building stuff his company wants that he’s also able to produce his Crakers as well as a product called BlyssPluss, which is touted as a sexual super-pill but additionally sterilizes its users (to control the population of the most dangerous species). Crake hires Jimmy to market it, but the pill is basically so awesome that is markets itself. Crake just wants Jimmy close by for the endgame of his master plan.

Crake’s master plan involves getting rid of humanity.

I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.

The Boys (2006–2012)

by Garth Ennis & Darick Robertson

The Boys is a story about a world with super-powered beings (“supes”). This is not unusual for comic books, or graphic novels. The distinction is that this story doesn’t make a distinction between superheroes and supervillains. It doesn’t believe that superheroes exist. Or it grudgingly concedes that some super-powered beings seem not to take advantage of their powers for personal gain. The only example of a high-level super-powered being who does so is Annie.

The story starts with Hughie, whose girlfriend is slaughtered by accident by the super-powered A-Train, one of Vought’s Seven. The Seven are the pinnacle of the supe pyramid, at the top of the media and publicity and merchandising and franchising game. It’s all about money, money and power. The supes are a decadent lot, depicting in loving detail in these books, with lots of sex and violence.

I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.

Eva (1997–1998)

by Claude Jaermann & Felix Schaad

Eva Grjdic works at Cosmos, a grocery-store chain à la Migros.

The art style reminds me very much of my well-worn and beloved Mad magazines that I spent my youth reading. It is, perhaps, closest to Mort Drucker, with a bit of Sergio Aragones mixed in. The text is brilliant. It’s subversive, it’s so very Swiss. The context is so very Swiss. You won’t be able to really understand this comic unless you live here or lived her at that time.

Eva is dirt poor and barely makes ends meet in a country otherwise overflowing with wealth. She’s on welfare, but eventually ends up living in a shipping container right next to Cosmos, and the rent “ziehen wir Ihnen wird der Einfachheit halber direkt am Lohn ab”. Then they lose welfare because it looks like they no longer pay rent.

The social worker is happy to make an “arrangement” with Eva’s daughter, though. Things continue in this vein.

I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.

The Year of the Flood (2009)

by Margaret Atwood

This is the second of three novels in the MaddAddam trilogy. The events in this book cover the same time frame as the first novel, but from the points of view of different characters. In that novel, we read about a girl named Bernice that Jimmy knew at the Martha-Graham Academy they both attended. She was a God’s Gardener. In this book, we learn more about her and much more about the Gardeners.

The mythology of the Gardeners is quite scientific. They are highly self-sufficient and very ascetic. Their lifestyle is a combination of vegan, Amish, eco-warrior, rationalist, but also religious. An interesting balance, to say the least. My hat is off to Ms. Atwood, once again.

“Do we deserve this Love by which God maintains our Cosmos? Do we deserve it as a Species? We have taken the World given to us and carelessly destroyed its fabric and its Creatures. Other religions have taught that this World is to be rolled up like a scroll and burnt to nothingness, and that a new Heaven and a new Earth will then appear. But why would God give us another Earth when we have mistreated this one so badly? No, my Friends. It is not this Earth that is to be demolished: it is the Human Species. Perhaps God will create another, more compassionate race to take our place.”

Page 508

They have a whole pantheon of saints and holidays based on environmentally conscious people like Rachel Carson and Dian Fossey, but also on explorers like Ernest Shackleton. They predict a “waterless flood”, which comes in the form of Crake’s virus.

“This was not an ordinary pandemic: it wouldn’t be contained after a few hundred thousand deaths, then obliterated with biotools and bleach. This was the Waterless Flood the Gardeners so often had warned about. It had all the signs: it travelled through the air as if on wings, it burned through cities like fire, spreading germ-ridden mobs, terror, and butchery. The lights were going out everywhere, the news was sporadic: systems were failing as their keepers died.”

Page 24

The story focuses on Toby, a young woman forced to rely on herself very early in life, after having lost her parents to some sort of unclear, corporate debacle. She ends up working at an off-grid fast-food place in the Pleeblands. Simultaneously, she’s more-or-less enslaved to Blanco, the owner of the restaurant and psychotic leader of a small gang that rapes and plunders as it pleases. She is rescued by the God’s Gardeners and whisked away to safety in a rooftop garden called Edencliff.

I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.