Jack London died in 1916, forty years old, of what the death certificate listed as uremia and the truth listed as everything. He had drunk, farmed, prospected, sailed, sold out, bought back in, and written fifty books before his body decided it was done negotiating. The obituary writers of the day mostly remembered the dog novels. The Call of the Wild. White Fang. The boys’ adventures. It took the twentieth century another twenty years to notice that the book of his that actually mattered was The Iron Heel.

Published 1908. Predicts — and here is where you set the book down and pour yourself something — almost all of it.

The Iron Heel is framed as a manuscript recovered seven centuries in the future, after the long reign of the plutocratic oligarchy (the Iron Heel) has finally ended and humanity has entered its post-oligarchic Brotherhood of Man. The manuscript is the memoir of Avis Everhard, the wife of socialist organizer Ernest Everhard, covering the years 1912 to 1932. It describes the capture of the American democracy by a consortium of industrial trusts, the crushing of the farmers, the co-opting of the labor unions, the creation of a mercenary state militia, the calculated humiliation of the middle class, and finally the secret police and the black lists and the disappeared.

London wrote this when Theodore Roosevelt was president. The United States was not yet in the First World War. The Bolshevik Revolution was nine years away. Mussolini was a schoolteacher. Hitler was a failed art student in Vienna. London did not have the word fascism because the word had not yet been coined. He described it anyway.

He got the mechanism right in ways that unsettle. He understood that the takeover would not come as a coup. He understood it would come as a merger — the slow consolidation of industries, the gradual fusion of corporate interest and state power, until the distinction between “government” and “business” would become a courtesy the well-bred still used in print. He understood that democracy could be killed without a single public statue falling, because the state would simply stop answering to its citizens and start answering to its shareholders. He understood, most unsettlingly, that a great many workers would volunteer to enforce the new order against their own interests, because fear is a more efficient currency than solidarity and the new order would print it by the ton.

What he got wrong: the recovery. London could not conceive that the Iron Heel might simply remain. He was a revolutionary socialist, not a pessimist. He believed the heel would eventually be pried off by the working class, because the working class had history on its side and the oligarchy did not. He was wrong about that. A hundred and seventeen years after publication, the Iron Heel is still on the neck. It just wears better shoes now.

Reading him today is an odd experience, like receiving a letter from a dead uncle who turned out to have been right about the inheritance all along. The uncle is long gone. The inheritance is what you’re living in.

If you are coming to London for the first time through the dog books, do not skip The Iron Heel on the grounds that it is “political” and the dog books are “literary.” The dog books are political too — they just talk about domination in the language of wolves. The Iron Heel talks about it in the language of American farms and American foundries. Same subject. Wider camera.

What stays with me — and what marks London as a writer and not just a prophet — is Avis Everhard herself. The book is not technically Ernest’s story, though he is the firebrand. It is hers. It is a woman watching her country die and learning, slowly and at enormous cost, to organize against the thing that is killing it. London wrote her in 1908, which puts him ahead of most of his contemporaries and a surprising number of ours. The final pages of her manuscript break off mid-sentence. She is being arrested. We never learn what happened to her. The book’s editorial framing, from the twenty-seventh century, adds a clinical footnote. That is the last kindness the novel allows.

Rest easy, Jack. You saw it coming. Nobody listened. That doesn’t make you wrong.

A related vagobond.com essay: A Question of Authority: Can There Be Authority in an Anarchist Society — a thread London would have pulled on if he had another forty years.

Readers and fans of The Iron Heel will really enjoy The Anarchist Manifesto Project 2026 — twenty-six kinds of anarchism, A through Z in the phonetic alphabet, each one written from inside its own life. A provocation, an anthology, an argument about how to refuse the Iron Heel when it’s already on your neck. Have a look and let me know what you think.

Verdict first: read this book young. If you miss the window, read it anyway, but know that you are reading it late.

Steppenwolf is the novel Hermann Hesse wrote in 1927 when he was fifty years old and in the middle of a marriage that was failing and a depression that wasn’t lifting. The book has been sold for a hundred years as a young man’s book, and that is a marketing accident. It is a middle-aged man’s book about a young man’s problem that has not gone away and is now eating him alive. The young-man energy is real. So is the reason Hesse was finally equipped to write it.

Harry Haller is forty-eight. He has two natures. One is human, literary, gentle, perpetually embarrassed by the world. The other is a wolf of the steppes — feral, scornful, incapable of polite company, hungry for the thing civilization cannot provide. Haller wants to kill himself. He does not want to die. Both things are true at once and the book is the argument between them.

Hesse’s trick is that he refuses to resolve the argument. He offers Haller a night at the Magic Theater — a jazz bar in the mind where Mozart and the Immortals mock the seriousness of suicide — and Haller emerges neither cured nor dead. He has simply been laughed at by the universe and returned to it. That is the ending. That is the whole medicine. You are taken seriously enough to be mocked. You are required to keep living because the alternative is embarrassing.

What works: the prose, in every translation. The pacing, which refuses to comfort. The structure, which pretends to be a confessional manuscript found in a boarding house and then lets the manuscript do what confessions do, which is lie beautifully.

What doesn’t work: the gender politics. Hermine, the woman who rescues Haller, is a manic pixie dream girl a half-century before the phrase existed. She teaches him to dance and then invites him to kill her. Hesse meant her as a projection of Haller’s anima — a Jungian device, not a character. Modern readers won’t buy it. They shouldn’t have to.

What still works, despite the above: the core insight. Namely, that most adult suffering comes from pretending we have only one nature when we have at least two, and that the argument between them is not a problem to be solved but the terms of being alive. Haller’s wolf is not defeated at the end. It is taken seriously. That is the difference between a novel and a self-help book.

Read it in one sitting if you can. It is short. Hesse knew what he was doing.

Readers and fans of Steppenwolf will really enjoy The Ghosts of Intimacy — my experimental novella about a man coming home to face the women he hurt. Different mechanism, same argument: what happens when a man finally agrees to sit down with his own two natures. Written in the form of Japanese prose poetry, fractured time, dream logic. Have a look and let me know what you think.

There is a very small canon of books about young American men who went broke moving west and wrote about it afterward with a straight face and a crooked grin. Mark Twain’s Roughing It is one of them. John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley is the other. They were written a century apart. Read them back to back and you learn something about the country that neither book quite says alone.

Roughing It is Twain in 1872, looking back at his 1861 stagecoach trip from Missouri to Nevada and the six years he spent after that pretending he was going to be a silver millionaire and failing, usefully, at everything. He signs up as the unpaid secretary to his brother Orion, the newly appointed Secretary of the Nevada Territory. He gets to the Comstock Lode. He stakes claims. He holds an actual million-dollar share in his hand for ten days and then watches the paperwork lapse because he went out of town and forgot to pay a fee. That’s the book in miniature. The fortune passes through him. He is too honest or too distracted to hold it. What remains is the telling.

Travels with Charley, written by Steinbeck in 1960, is the same book inside out. Instead of youth going west to grab at something and missing, it is age going everywhere to see if anything is left. Steinbeck drives a custom camper called Rocinante, named after Don Quixote’s horse, with a standard poodle named Charley for company. He drives from Long Island to Maine down to New Orleans across to California up to Seattle and back home. He is almost sixty. He has heart trouble he hasn’t told anyone about. He wants to see whether the America he spent his life writing about still exists.

It doesn’t. He finds that out in Louisiana, watching white women scream racial slurs at six-year-old Black girls being integrated into a school. Twain had seen the same country before the war. He had ridden stagecoach past the same land when it was still possible to believe the country was just figuring itself out. Steinbeck rides through it when the figuring has produced this.

Both men are unreliable narrators. Twain admits it openly; half the book’s charm is watching him inflate a story and then pause to let you catch up. Steinbeck is unreliable in a quieter way — scholars have since demonstrated that large sections of Travels with Charley were fabricated or composed from secondhand reports, which infuriated a certain kind of reader and should have infuriated nobody. The book is a novel about America wearing the skin of a travelogue. Twain did the same thing in reverse.

Read them together and here’s what you find. Twain’s West is a country where a broke man can still get rich by accident. Steinbeck’s is one where a rich man cannot find his country anymore. Between the two of them, you get the whole arc — the one where the frontier promise is extended, and the one where the bill comes due.

The passages that stay with me from Roughing It are not the prospecting chapters. They are the small ones. Twain describing the overland stage’s rigid daily rituals, because the mail had to move and the coach had to stop at the right station at the right hour or the whole system collapsed — an early picture of what we would later call logistics, written before the word existed in English. Twain describing a coyote for the first time, with such affection and precision that you realize he is describing himself — lean, hungry, unimpressed, surviving by looking poorer than he is. Twain on the Hawaiian Islands in the last third of the book, which is often dismissed by critics who did not know the work held together as “travel, interrupted.” It is my favorite part. He is finally too far from home to be useful to himself, and he starts telling the truth.

Steinbeck does the same thing at the end of Travels with Charley. He is back in Manhattan. He cannot drive anymore. Charley is asleep in the passenger seat. He sits in traffic and realizes the journey is over because he has decided it is, and whatever America he was looking for was finished before he left. He writes: Once a journey is designed, equipped, and put in process, a new factor enters and takes over. That is the line both books are secretly about. The journey decides what it means. You do not.

Read Roughing It for the young-man comedy and the frontier-camp detail. Read Travels with Charley for what that young man looked like at seventy. Then go for a walk.

A related vagobond.com thread: A Lit-Nerd Road Trip Adventure Through the Beautiful Northeast USA — a modern echo of both books, compressed.

Readers and fans of Roughing It will really enjoy Rough Living: Tips and Tales of Vagobond — my own going-broke-in-a-VW-bus book. First written in 2003, updated in 2026 — both versions included. Twain had the Comstock Lode. I had the Pacific Northwest and a broken-down bus. Similar math. Have a look and let me know what you think.

My copy is a cheap paperback. Harper Perennial. The spine is broken in three places and there are coffee rings on the cover. I have owned it since 1998 and opened it in probably fifteen countries. The underlines are in pencil, then ballpoint, then a red gel pen from a Moroccan stationery shop, then pencil again. I can tell which reading I was on by the ink.

I am not going to review the Tao Te Ching the way people usually review the Tao Te Ching — the way where they pretend to have understood it. I have not understood it. I have circled it for thirty years. The book does not reward the posture of understanding. That is half its point. So instead I am going to walk you through the passages I underlined, and tell you what I was doing in the margin, and let you make of it what you make.

Chapter 1. The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. Underlined in 1998, in pencil, with the margin note “OK but then why write the rest of the book.” I was 26. I did not get it. I did not get that the book’s first line was an apology for everything that followed and a warning that everything that followed was still worth the failure. The book is failing on purpose. It wants you to notice.

Chapter 8. The supreme good is like water, / which nourishes all things without trying to. Underlined in 2003, in ballpoint, with the margin note “see Rough Living ch 4.” I was in a VW bus I was living in. I thought I was writing about how to live on nothing. I was, eventually. But the sentence was about something more specific. Water doesn’t argue its way in. It finds the lowest place and fills it. I did not yet know how to not argue.

Chapter 11. We join spokes together in a wheel, / but it is the center hole / that makes the wagon move. Underlined in 2009, in red gel pen, in Sefrou. Arabic for “empty” is farigh. I had just learned the word. I wrote it in the margin. The room I lived in was largely empty. I thought the emptiness was a problem. The chapter was telling me it was the point.

Chapter 17. When the Master governs, the people / are hardly aware that he exists. / Next best is a leader who is loved. / Next, one who is feared. / The worst is one who is despised. Underlined in 2016, in ballpoint, margin note: “All four happening simultaneously now.” I was back in America. I stopped writing margin notes for a while after that.

Chapter 20. I drift like a wave on the ocean, / I blow as aimless as the wind. / I am different from ordinary people. Underlined in 1999 and again in 2011 and again in 2023. Different pens each time. Same sentence. This is the closest the book comes to autobiography. It also happens to be the closest the book comes to my own life, which may be why I keep coming back to it. I have always read this chapter not as a boast but as a confession. Most people know where they are going. I never did.

Chapter 33. Knowing others is intelligence; / knowing yourself is true wisdom. / Mastering others is strength; / mastering yourself is true power. Underlined in 2011, and then, underneath, the words “this is cold comfort at 3 a.m.” I had been arguing with my wife in the courtyard of our house in Sefrou for an hour. The chapter was not wrong. It was just not helping at that moment. Both things were true.

Chapter 44. If you look to others for fulfillment, / you will never truly be fulfilled. / If your happiness depends on money, / you will never be happy with yourself. Double-underlined. Dated 2018. A very bad year. No margin note. Some underlines are their own margin note.

Chapter 63. Act without doing; / work without effort. This one I have crossed out and re-underlined twice. I have been fighting with it for twenty years. Mitchell translates it as wu wei — effortless action. Every time I think I have figured it out I turn out to have been doing effort the whole time. Which, I think, is also something the chapter predicts.

Chapter 81. The last chapter. True words aren’t eloquent; / eloquent words aren’t true. The margin note, from last year: “so stop.”

Stephen Mitchell’s translation is not the scholarly one. Scholars have issues with it. It is loose. It Americanizes. It is, in places, a paraphrase more than a translation. I do not care. The Mitchell version is the version that stays with you. The scholarly ones sit respectfully on the shelf. His goes with me.

If you are new to the Tao Te Ching, start with Mitchell. Then, in five years, pick up Red Pine’s translation and have an argument with yourself. Then, in ten years, put them both down and sit by a river for an afternoon and see which one you remember.

A related thread on vagobond.com is Thoughts on Returning Home to Japan: Spring Begins in Hokkaido — written in a register the Tao Te Ching taught me, whether I noticed at the time or not.

The working name for the philosophical framework I’ve been building out of thirty years of this kind of reading is Baoism. Bao Ji — Bring Your Own. No gurus, no courses, no ladder. Your teachers, your practices, your answers.

Readers and fans of the Tao Te Ching will really enjoy Liminal Travel: The Spaces In Between — my travel philosophy book, which includes a chapter on Baoism and draws heavily on the Tao Te Ching‘s idea that the useful part of a thing is the emptiness at its center. Written for people who found Mitchell’s version and wanted to know what to do with it once they’d closed the book. Have a look and let me know what you think.

The received wisdom on The Book of the SubGenius is that it is a joke. A parody of self-help. A Reagan-era prank religion, cooked up in Dallas in 1979 by Doug Smith and Philo Drummond, pasted together on a photocopier, nailed to a cross of collage and conspiracy-theory and bad Xerox dithering. Bob Dobbs, the grinning pipe-smoking salesman who serves as the cult’s face, is a fictional prophet of Slack. The whole thing is a goof. Very clever. Very of-its-time. A cult artifact. Move on.

I am here to tell you that interpretation is wrong, and it has been wrong for forty-five years, and the people who keep repeating it have not read the book — they have only read the jacket copy and the T-shirts.

The Book of the SubGenius is not a parody. A parody requires a target. This book has no target, because everything is a target, which is another way of saying it has accepted that the entire religious project of the American 20th century was already a joke, and the only honest response is to raise the bid. The Church of the SubGenius is not mocking religion. It is completing religion — pushing the logic of every American cult, every tent-revival huckster, every dianetics-pamphlet genius, every Chick tract, every televangelist, every Amway meeting, all the way to its terminal conclusion. Which is: the grift and the gospel are the same document. And the only sin is not knowing you’re inside it.

Once you see that, the book stops being funny and starts being the most honest piece of religious writing America produced in the back half of the century.

Consider. The central doctrine is Slack. Slack is not laziness. Slack is a theological term for the right relationship to effort — the space around the work, the refusal to let your soul be extracted for profit. The enemies of Slack are called Conspiracy, which is a precise technical term for the combined machinery of capital, state, and religion that converts your finite life-hours into their accumulation. You are born with Slack. The Conspiracy removes it from you. The Church teaches you to notice this and resist. That is not a joke. That is the clearest and most correct description of the American twentieth century I have ever read.

Consider the voice. Ivan Stang, the book’s primary author, writes in a compressed prophetic cadence that sounds exactly like a King James translation of a Sunday-morning local radio broadcast. He is not imitating scripture for satire. He is imitating scripture because scripture is the only register in which you can say what he is saying without flinching. The man is doing theology. He is just doing it with a Xerox machine and a saxophone solo running underneath.

Consider the book itself as an object. It is laid out like a tract, a manifesto, a yearbook, a comic, a conspiracy dossier, a coloring book, a phonebook, and a Bible, all at once. The page density is impossible. You can read it forty times and find something new on every page. That is the sacred-text trick. A great religious book has to reward the rereading, and most twentieth-century religion books — on either the believer or the skeptic side — did not. The Book of the SubGenius does.

Here is what the hipster readings miss. The book is funny, yes. Very funny. But underneath the funny it is furious, and underneath the fury it is mournful. It is the document of a generation that watched the language of transcendence get sold by the pound to anyone who could rent a convention hall, and decided the appropriate response was to build a better religion than the ones on offer and dare the universe to notice the difference.

The universe did. That’s the part even Stang didn’t see coming. Forty-five years later, the Subgenius framework predicted the content economy, influencer culture, the prosperity gospel’s digital phase, and the entire Silicon Valley theology of disruption-as-salvation. The Conspiracy is now a blockchain. Slack is now a product you buy from Atlassian. Bob Dobbs has a thousand descendants on TikTok, each one less self-aware than him.

You should read this book. You should not read it ironically. You should read it the way people in 1550 read Thomas More’s Utopia — as a book that is funny because it is telling the truth, and that has been laughing at you, quietly, from a shelf, the entire time you have been alive.

I wrote a related piece on anarchy as religion, religious anarchy in social context which takes a similar argument about where real theology hides in a secular age.

If you’re drawn to invented religions that take themselves seriously on purpose, Baoism is the one I’ve been slowly building. Bring Your Own. No gurus, no tithes, no enlightenment ladder. Bao Ji.

Readers and fans of The Book of the SubGenius will really enjoy The Nuns of Baboob — my comic novel about a landlocked North African kingdom named Baboob, where all men are named Mucho and all women are named Fatima, founded by a blood-debt, a golden brooch, a Hawaiian ukulele band, and 150 kidnapped Sicilian nuns. It is where Baoism actually got its start in fiction. Funnier than SubGenius. More Moroccan. Same spirit. Have a look and let me know what you think.

I bought my copy in 2002 at Powell’s in Portland, in the used travel section, on a table with other oddballs that didn’t fit anywhere else. It cost me seven dollars. It has since come with me to Alaska, Oregon, Hawaii, Morocco, Istanbul, Tokyo, and Otaru. It has been rained on twice. It has a grease stain on page 217 from a kebab in Fez. It has pages that fell out and got taped back in. It is, in every sense, the opposite of a coffee-table book. It is a field manual.

If you have never seen Zeek: The Art of Shen Ku, I will try to describe it. It is a 380-page hand-drawn encyclopedia of how to do things. How to build a shelter. How to tie a knot. How to identify a constellation. How to find water in a desert. How to throw a knife. How to read a handprint. How to meditate. How to fix a radio. How to catch a fish without a hook. How to disappear. How to pray to a tree. How to survive. Zeek — one name, no last name, a retired signal-painter who spent decades compiling this — drew every page himself in a kind of hybrid of Japanese calligraphy, Leonardo’s notebook, and a Whole Earth Catalog gone fully feral. The prose is aphoristic. The illustrations are better than they need to be.

This is not a book you read. It is a book you keep in the side pocket of a backpack that has done too many miles, and you open it when you are stuck — stuck on the side of a road, stuck in a bad mood, stuck waiting for a ferry, stuck in your own head. You open it at random. It never gives you what you came for. It gives you something better. A diagram of fourteen grips for a walking stick. Seven ways to sit on a rock. A two-page spread on what to do when a bear approaches. A rant, in tight handwriting, about why civilization has forgotten how to be bored.

I have read this book in the following places and each reading was a different book.

A VW bus I was living out of, 2002. First reading. I thought it was a gag. A novelty. A handbook for people who wanted to pretend to be frontiersmen. I was wrong but it took years.

A back porch in Honolulu, 2008. I was hiding out from a bad job. I opened it to a page about fire by friction and realized, watching a Hawaiian uncle light a bowl of poke with a battered Zippo thirty feet away, that Zeek wasn’t telling me to make fire without a lighter. He was telling me to notice that I could.

A rooftop in the Fez medina, 2011. I read the page on tea. Three pages, entirely about tea. He takes tea more seriously than most monks take scripture. I was drinking mint tea with my future in-laws, badly, and I realized I was drinking it wrong, and the book had told me, and I hadn’t listened.

What Zeek understood — and what almost no other self-reliance book has understood since — is that practical skills are a philosophy. You cannot tell someone how to survive without telling them why survival is worth the trouble. Zeek believes it is worth the trouble. He also believes that most of civilization’s noise is a distraction from the question. He draws a lot of pictures of small quiet things: a candle, a rope, a cup.

It is not a book for the person who wants to be off-grid. It is a book for the person who already suspects they are, and just needed confirmation.

This review continues a thread I’ve been pulling on for years — see William S. Burroughs, Junkie, Vagabond, a different kind of fellow-traveler to Zeek, though the two men would not have recognized each other in a bar.

Readers and fans of The Art of Shen Ku will really enjoy Liminal Travel: The Spaces In Between — my own guide for the traveler who doesn’t fit the usual categories. Less illustrated, more argumentative. Includes chapters on suffering well, finding accommodation without booking ahead, and a portable framework for meaning I call Baoism. Have a look and let me know what you think.

Dear Ursula,

You died in 2018 and I’m still writing you letters. I hope you don’t mind. You were the first novelist who ever made me feel that an imagined society could be argued with — not admired, not dismissed, argued with, the way you’d argue with a cousin at Thanksgiving about something neither of you will settle. That’s what The Dispossessed was for me the first time, and it’s still what it is.

Shevek is a physicist on Anarres — the dry, scarce moon-world colonized a hundred and seventy years before the book opens by Odonian anarchists who emigrated away from the capitalist home planet Urras. He wants to finish a theory of simultaneity. He cannot do it on Anarres because the anarchist academy, in spite of itself, has developed gatekeepers and committees and small cruelties of consensus. So he does the unthinkable. He leaves. He crosses to Urras — the beautiful, wasteful, plentiful, propertied world his ancestors rejected — and he tries to work. He does not belong there either.

You called the book an ambiguous utopia and I think a lot of readers missed how hard that word ambiguous was working. You were not writing wish-fulfillment. You were writing the thing almost no utopian writer has the nerve to write: you were showing that even the revolution grows calluses. Even the people who made the free world forget what they made it for. Even a society without money can develop a form of currency made of shame and conformity and assigned work. And even so — and this is what breaks me open every time — the book does not retreat from its own radicalism. The ending does not say the dream failed. It says: the wall is not outside, the wall is us, and the work is to keep walking through ourselves.

I think about the scene where Shevek, on Urras, is taken to a fancy restaurant and for the first time in his life he confronts the staggering abundance of a propertied society. And he doesn’t envy it. He registers it and he grieves it. You wrote that the beauty of Urras was a sickness because it existed only because other people had none. That moment is why your book is still the book I put in the hands of people who ask me what I mean when I talk about the difference between travel and tourism. You already answered it.

I’ve been reading you since 1994. I still don’t have your patience. My politics are more impatient, more scornful, more prone to kicking over the table. You would have been gentler with me than I am with myself, which was always your gift — the ability to take a person seriously without absolving them.

A few things I still wanted to ask you.

What did you think the wall was made of, finally? I’ve gone back and forth on this. Sometimes I think you meant habit. Sometimes I think you meant the fear of being alone inside one’s own freedom. Sometimes I think you meant language itself, which is why Shevek’s language, Pravic, has no possessive pronouns in the way ours has. The hand I use instead of my hand. You made me think about that for twenty years.

Did Shevek finish his theory on Urras? You left it ambiguous. I’ve decided, privately, that he did not, because theories of simultaneity cannot be completed by a man still walking between two worlds. He had to come home. He had to stand still. You left him on a ship, going back.

What would you have made of the 2020s? I think you would have hated how badly the word utopia has been cheapened. I think you would have laughed at the crypto people who borrowed your anarchism and stripped the ethics out. I think you would have liked Zinn’s People’s History more than you admitted. I think you would have been a little tired, and kind anyway.

Thank you for the book.

— CD

An older vagobond.com post on libertarian utopia in science fiction tangents into some of this territory from a different angle.

Readers and fans of Ursula K. Le Guin will really enjoy Notes from Nowhere — my post-pandemic utopian novel, a deliberate echo of William Morris’s News from Nowhere and a book that could not have existed without Le Guin’s example. A Honolulu socialist wakes from a COVID ward into the Pacific Mutuals — no money, no bosses, dishes with a two-year waiting list because people love to wash them. Have a look and let me know what you think.

I read this book twice. The first time was October 2020, sitting in a apartment in Honolulu with every window open and the trade winds coming through and an unemployment check stretched thin across the counter. The second time was a couple of weeks ago, in a rented room with the shutters closed against whatever was happening outside. Two readings, five years apart, two different men. Same book.

The first read, I thought this was a thriller. India gets hit with a wet-bulb heatwave in chapter one. Twenty million people die in a week. A lone survivor — Frank May, the American aid worker who should have died with them — walks out of the catastrophe with nothing left except the certainty that the people who did this have to be made to stop. The rest of the novel is a five-hundred-page argument about what “made to stop” actually means.

The second read, I realized it isn’t a thriller. It’s a procedural. Robinson is writing the administrative paperwork of saving the world, and the thrill comes from recognizing that paperwork is, in fact, what saves worlds. A UN subsidiary body in Zurich. Carbon coins. A central bank policy change. A targeted assassination campaign that nobody quite admits to. Refugee camps in Switzerland that become small towns. A sailboat voyage from Mumbai to Alaska that reads like a pilgrimage. And every few chapters, a six-page interlude where a proton or a photon or the blockchain itself speaks in the first person about what it has witnessed.

What changed between readings was me, not the text. In 2020, I was watching a slow-motion institutional collapse and reaching for a book that would let me feel a way out. I read it as hope. In 2026, I’ve lived five more years inside the collapse, and Robinson’s book doesn’t read as hope anymore. It reads as a manual. The wet-bulb event in chapter one is not a dramatic device. It is a dated entry in a ledger we are still keeping.

The thing that struck me on the second read — and that I missed the first time — is how unsentimental he is about the people. Frank May is not redeemed by his grief. He never quite recovers. Mary Murphy, who runs the Ministry, is not a hero. She is competent and tired and often wrong. The book does not reward its characters for their suffering. It reports on it and moves on, the way the survivors of a wet-bulb event would have to move on, the way all of us will.

Two moments I underlined.

One is late, when Mary is being interviewed and someone asks her whether she thinks they’ll make it. She says: I don’t know. But I know the alternative is not trying. That’s as close as Robinson gets to uplift. He won’t grant the reader more. He won’t grant himself more.

The other is a throwaway description of post-collapse Zurich, where the refugees have stayed and the city has absorbed them and the cost is paid in discomfort rather than death. Robinson writes that Switzerland “had learned the hard way that a rich country is just a poor country that hasn’t been tested yet.” I sat with that for an afternoon.

If you’ve been circling climate fiction and finding it either too doom-porn or too technocratic-boosterish, this is the book where the two settle an argument. Robinson’s gift — and it is a rare one — is taking institutional action seriously as a form of storytelling. Nothing explodes. Everything happens. Many people die. Many people also, stubbornly, don’t.

I wrote my own pandemic novel during the first lockdown in Honolulu — different register, same nerve. Where Robinson is institutional and patient, I was furious and fast. A Very Good Novel: Coronavirus has Gaia engineering the virus as a corrective, Trump profiting in real time, a Postmaster General chasing a sack-of-flour-shaped man named Bob, and California seceding. If you liked the fury underneath Robinson’s calm, or you wanted Ministry to be a little meaner, you’ll like mine.

Readers and fans of Kim Stanley Robinson will really enjoy A Very Good Novel: Coronavirus — my 2020 pandemic novel, written in lockdown while it was happening. Have a look and let me know what you think.

Get Your Copy

Buy Lost in Transmedia on Amazon →

Browse all of CD Damitio’s books at indignified.com/books — travel memoirs, philosophical fiction, satirical novels, and more.

View the complete catalog on Amazon Author Central →

About CD Damitio: CD Damitio is a nomadic writer, traveler, and philosopher who has lived in Morocco, Hawaii, Japan, and across four continents. His work spans travel memoir, satirical fiction, utopian speculation, and philosophical adventure. Find his full catalog at indignified.com/books.

Get Your Copy

Buy What Am I Doing Here? 52 Weeks of Wandering and Wondering in 2012 on Amazon →

Browse all of CD Damitio’s books at indignified.com/books — travel memoirs, philosophical fiction, satirical novels, and more.

View the complete catalog on Amazon Author Central →

About CD Damitio: CD Damitio is a nomadic writer, traveler, and philosopher who has lived in Morocco, Hawaii, Japan, and across four continents. His work spans travel memoir, satirical fiction, utopian speculation, and philosophical adventure. Find his full catalog at indignified.com/books.