Summer reading roundup
Adam's Notes for July 31, 2025
The Midnight Project by Christy Climenhage
Wolsak & Wynn, 2025; 294 pages.
Things are bad. The world is falling apart a little bit more everyday, with species termination notices littering holo-screens and gangs of mutant frog beasts attacking people in the streets. Disgraced genetic engineers Raina and Cedric are barely getting by, running a reproduction clinic after getting screwed over on some NDA business by their former employer, Wheat Kings and Pretty Things, a whimsically-named Agro business. Things change when billionaire Burton Sykes walks into their life: he wants them to create a sort of hybrid creature that can bring human culture where it’s never gone before: under the sea. Initially reluctant, Raina and Cedric eventually create the Ceph, a mix of different marine creatures—but mostly cephalopods—endowed with human consciousness.
This reminded me a lot of an older kind of science fiction, stuff like Arthur C. Clarke. It’s not ‘hard’1 science fiction, but characters do seem to exist to serve ideas. Also it reminded me a lot of Robert J. Sawyer, although that might just be because both authors are Canadian.
A big plot point in the back half of the book involves a hurricane swamping the Maritimes, and it made me feel a little nostalgic for back home. I think it’s wrong to call it a carinvalesque atmosphere, but I can’t think of a better term for the anticipation and occurrence of a hurricane, when normal life and commerce come crawling to a halt for a day or two (if you’re lucky).
Something that bugged me though: why does the book use screenplay formatting for the vignettes where Cedric is talking to the camera? Transcripts have their own formatting.
Bodies of Summer by Martin Felipe Castagnet
Translated from the Spanish by Frances Riddle
Dalkey Archive Press, 2017; 106 pages.
More science fiction, this time from Argentina. I found this one clunky, sometimes endearing but sometimes crude. The premise is that when people die they live on in the internet and can be burned/reincarnated into new bodies, and some bodies get re-used up to three times. It’s clunky in how there’s no pretense to how the new technology is described, it’s truly just, “now we’re in the future, and this is what’s different.” It’s one of those sci-fi books throws a lot of ideas at the wall, something that used to bug me because I generally prefer novels that try to work out systemic implications of one or two big ideas, and these everything-at-the-wall books end up having ideas that contradict each other, that have implications that aren’t really explored. But I’m learning to enjoy these things. The Flintstones don’t need to come to the realization that they’ve oppressing the sentient domestic creatures who work for them—it’s just a fucking cartoon. This sort of stuff used to be a dime a dozen, it didn’t have to be good to get published, and I kind of miss that world. That said, the book has some really crude attitudes towards stuff about sex, gender, and even race—and it goes back to what I said about working out the implications, because you’d think a society that can swap bodies would move beyond the sort of normative values our society imposes.
The Wheelman by Duane Swierczynski.
Minotaur Books, 2006; 223 pages.
I think I found this because it was recommended in the back of an Ed Brubaker comic once. A getaway driver pulls off a heist, everything goes smooth, they stash the money in a car in a longterm parking lot, and just as they’re leaving a vehicle rams them. It’s thieves robbing thieves. The Wheel Man is all action: short vignettes that resolve the last cliffhanger only to set up a new one, with just a bit of character or plot thrown in for good measure. I find these sort of action-packed thrillers tend to lose me after a while, once I catch the rhythm, and this one did have a bit of a longueur towards the end, but I still think I enjoyed it overall. Part of what worked is that it was audacious: maybe a third of the cliffhangers end with some big character revelation, which quickly feels ridiculous, but in a way that makes you feel a bit giddy, revelling in the commitment to going over the top.
More Books
Eurotrash by Christian Kracht and Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico
Permafrost by Eva Baltasar and The Private Lives of Trees by Alejandro Zamba
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