Havana Nocturne

Posted on August 22, 2025 by smellincoffee

I used to be obsessed with la cosa nostra, but its Cuban ambitions never popped on my radar until I watched The Godfather II. I’ve long been curious about the Mafia’s role in developing Cuba and inadvertently feeding the revolution that swapped out one dictator for another, but not until recently did I come across this book. I went for it it immediately, teasing me as it did with the promise of information as to how Lucky Luciano and the Syndicate helped the Allies in World War 2. As it happens, that WW2 connection is marginal at best, but this is still the fascinating story of how the Italian-American Mafia began building Cuba up as an off-shore power base, only to lose everything to a rich boy turned revolutionary. (Odd how left-wing dictators are so often the children of privilege and right-wing dictators begin as poor populists, Stalin being an exception.)

The story of the Mafia and Cuba begins with the close friendship of Meyer Lansky and Charles “Lucky” Luciano, two men who revolutionized organized crime in the United States. As his last name might hint, Lansky was no Siciliano; he was, instead, the son of Polish Jews who’d fled pogroms in Russia to come to the United States. Meyer, despite his small stature, was cunning and ambitious, and as he aged he joined forces with similarly ambitious men like Luciano: “Lucky” would conspire to knock off the heads of the two largest Mafia families in New York, Massiera and Marazano, and create something new: the Syndicate, modeled on corporation-esque lines. Lansky, a man whose fortune grew on gambling operations, saw in Cuba an opportunity for expansion — but his dreams continued to be deferred, first by economic depression and then by the incarceration of Luciano. The Syndicate wasn’t as ethnically closed-off as the traditional Sicilian Mafia, but it still wasn’t going to let some “little Jew” dictate policy: for that, Lansky needed his buddy Charlie, who despite his imprisonment and later exile remained the de facto CEO of the syndicate. Luciano legally escaped prison by using the muscle of the Mafia to rout German saboteurs on the New York waterfront, then later supplied information to help the Allies invade Sicily; then, pushing his luck, he decided to emigrate to Cuba to begin realizing his and Lansky’s dream of a gamblers’ paradise in the Caribbean.

Cuba was enormously popular with Americans, both for the climate and the emerging Afro-Caribbean musical scene. Capitalizing on the amount of traffic already coming in by creating new entertainment venues to suck up tourist dollars was a no brainer. This was accomplished through both the mob’s existing money and Lansky’s longstanding contact with a certain Batista, the on-again off-again ruler of Cuba. The timing couldn’t be better, since American lawmen were taking an inconvenient hard line against gambling operations in the States. As it happened, Lansky and Co.’s desire to make big moves in Cuba coincided with Batista returning to power — this time as a coup disguised as a pre counter-coup. Although Luciano wouldn’t be part of it, DC having pressured the prior government to deport him back to Italy, the door was already open to Mafia investment. Soon financial institutions were in place that bought Cuba’s government and Syndicate money into full collusion, even as resentment to Batista’s bare-faced power grab brewed on the streets. The disparity between those in power and those not grew ever larger as casinos and nightclubs — the latter hotbeds of license, libertinism, and outright depravity — became gathering places for both Batista’s people and those connected to the Syndicate. Big names from the United States, including Sinatra and JFK, especially enjoyed the fleshpots. With firebrands like Castro in jail, though, and business booming, all seemed well.

Unfortunately for the mob’s ever-expanding array of hotels, clubs, and one-armed bandits, Batista got a little too cocky. He released the Castros from prison, and they fled the country to foment revolution in Mexico the way Khomeini worked from France during his own exile from Iran. Castro’s attempt to stage a comeback was at first a dismal failure — he and his men returning by boat were delayed by bad weather that failed to sink him, and his men in place in Cuba were slaughtered by Batista’s army. Upon finally landing, Castro linked up with his remaining men and continued to meet defeat after defeat, until Batista unwittingly declared him dead when in fact he was merely in hiding. Castro and his followers began rebuilding their numbers, importing weapons, and antagonizing the government through petty actions like raiding banks and setting things on fire. Disaffection towards Batista continued to grow even wealth flowed into the island: Lansky was actively planning Havana’s largest, most entertainment-oriented resort yet when the bottom fell out. Although some of the mafiosi were aware of Castro’s rising influence, they dismissed it: even if he did take over, he wouldn’t be so stupid as to close the casinos. Then, on New Years Eve, Meyer Lansky was told that Batista had taken money and run: Castro was on his way to claim Havana. Although Lansky scrambled to tell the Syndicate’s casinos to get their money out of the country, the people on the ground were slow to move, and soon Castro was actively working on undermining Cuba’s tourist-based economy by closing the casinos and nationalizing the hotels. Although some wealth managed to escape the country, the principal investors were largely ruined: Lansky died with less than $50,000 in the bank.

This was a fascinating history on two levels, both in providing a very cursory introduction to Castro’s takeover, and in diving into how the Mob had worked its way into so much of Cuba’s government and financial sectors. Thinking about what might have happened had Castro and his inner circle died at sea during the beginning of the “July 26 Movement” — as they very nearly did — is tantalizing. Imagine no Cuban Missile Crisis, a redoubt for the Mob after RICO hits, a Caribbean war between wiseguys and Escobar’s organization! It appears the author has written a lot on gangs of the 20th century, including Irish gangs, so I may read more of him: he may be a modern Herbert Asbury.

Related:
The Little Man, biography of Meyer Lansky. Later released as The Thinking Man’s Gangster.

Quotes:

Siegel was always the wild card in the group. Devilishly handsome even at a young age, he was a ladykiller metaphorically, and a killer of men in a more literal sense.

“When the day comes that a person becomes beyond the pale of justice, that means our liberty is gone. Minorities and undesirables and persons with bad reputations are more entitled to the protection of the law than are so-called honorable people. I don’t have to apologize to you or anyone else for whom I represent.”
“I look upon you in amazement,” said the senator.
“I look upon you in amazement,” countered the attorney, “a senator of the United States, making such a statement.”

In March, Life magazine published an article entitled “Mobsters Move in on Troubled Havana.” Complete with photos of Meyer, Jake Lansky, Trafficante, Fernández Miranda, and Batista—a virtual who’s who of the Havana Mob—the article suggested that the mobsters were swooping in to take advantage of political instability in Cuba. Of course, nothing could have been further from the truth. The mobsters had been there from the beginning.

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WWW Wednesday

Posted on August 20, 2025 by smellincoffee

WHAT have you finished reading recently? Gandolfini: Jim, Tony, and the Life of a Legend, Jason Bailey.

WHAT are you reading now? Havana Nocturne: How the Mob Owned Cuba, T. J. English

WHAT are you reading next? Frequent readers should know that’s a silly question, but here’s my Kindle shelf. New York City Cartmen: 1650 to 1850 sounds like exciting reading, no?

Today’s prompt from Long and Short Reviews is books we had to read in school and liked. As with the “not liked” books, I’ll have to go back to college for this one. One of my favorite books from college was A Life of her Own by Emilie Carles: it’s the memoir of a French schoolteacher who taught from the beginning of the Great War until after the end of the Second World War. She encouraged her students to resist the insularity of their little village and to develop a broader perspective. This book was extremely formative for me, as it introduced me to left-wing libertarianism/anarchism: before I’d associated the left only with authoritarianism, and this began a brief period where I read more deeply into the writings of the Frankfurt school and so on. Ultimately the association with libertarianism would end up in me exploring American libertarianism, but that was a junction in the road I’d yet to encounter. This is one I’d like to go back and read, because while I know I’d still find a lot of common ground — especially in rejecting the state’s aggressive wars — after nearly two decades of reading and thinking about politics I’d probably find something to argue with her about.

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Gandolfini

Posted on August 19, 2025 by smellincoffee

Like many, I was awed by James Gandolfini’s performance throughout The Sopranos,  which made him an actor whose presence guarantees I’ll watch any movie he’s in. Gandolfini is a professional biography of an actor whose charisma and commitment to his work made nearly everything he was in exceptional. (The less said about Surviving Christmas, the better.)  After the book begins by slightly skimming over Gandolfini’s childhood spent in a working-class Italian neighborhood in Jersey,   Jason Bailey shifts to his subject’s growth as an actor, production by production, drawing heavily on interviews with both Gandolfini himself as well as those of his friends and peers.

Although Gandolfini was resistant to playing mobsters,  two of his early breakout roles saw him feature as charming-but-menacing figures that were excellent practice for the character who would overshadow the actor for most of his life.  He developed a speciality as a character actor,  someone whose intensity could be brought in to “crush” a handful of scenes and add a strong seasoning to whatever movie he was in.  Although he struggled with memorizing lines, his deep investment into developing characters and performing them – the persons, not merely the lines – opened the door to future projects. It was The Sopranos, though, that took him from “solid acting talent” to celebrity.   The success of The Sopranos took the entire cast by surprise,  as it completely disrupted their lives. Drea de Matteo, the young woman who played Adriana,  suddenly had to be escorted through airports by security in a cart,  or otherwise be mobbed by fans. Gandolfini was remarkably resistant to celebrity, though: he was grounded in Jersey’s working class, and despite taking advantage of his sudden ability to get last minute reservations at any restaurant he wanted, fame never went to his head. When he celebrated his 50th birthday party, the party included a few of his fellow actors, yes, but also a lot of people from the old neighborhood. 

Tony Soprano dominates the midsection of this book, as he dominated Gandolfini’s life during the production years and continued to follow the actor in his remaining working years.  Gandolfini’s research and intensity meant that even as he continued to breathe more and more life into the complicated gangster that Tony was also pushing his way into Gandolfini’s life. The actor would seek relief from the sheer emotional darkness through drinking and partying,  sometimes not being able to work the next day, and this was habitual enough that his friends and family attempted to throw an intervention for him. It didn’t help that he was undergoing a divorce around the same time that Tony would, and  Gandolfini began wondering if the showwriters weren’t mining his own personal misery to add fuel to the show.  

His seriousness and intensity as an actor are remarked on throughout the book, but so is his warmth and generosity.   He frequently treated the cast and crew to dinner at week’s end, and when the Sopranos wrapped up filming he dispensed nearly a half-million dollars in gifts.  He’d been similarly generous during an actors’ strike,  giving the cast money in gratitude for their support. He’s frequently noted here for his consideration of other actors, including young actors — helping coach those new to the stage, and always checking his acting peers to see if the take had worked for them. It didn’t matter if he’d been at work for over 10 hours,  doing take after take: he wanted other actors to know that their art was collaborative – despite the fact that no one will argue  Tony Soprano was the heart of The Sopranos and its success.  

After The Sopranos wrapped,  Gandolfini moved on to other projects, from serious dramas to rom-coms like Enough Said.  When former cast members met him, they remarked on how dramatically he had changed: without having to channel Tony all the time, without living in the anxious, violent, and cruel don’s skin: it was if a cloud had lifted. He was also able to explore a bit, profesionally: he found he liked doing nonfiction documentaries, especially those focused on members of the US military who were dealing with physical and mental trauma from the terror war. Unfortunately,  his post-Sopranos life would not be long: he died in June 2013 of a heart attack, one presumably brought on by weight,  past stress, and past substance abuse.   

As a fan of both The Sopranos and Gandolfini in general, I loved this book. As with Kaplan’s biography of Sinatra, it doesn’t ignore his weaknesses as a human – his own temper,  his excesses – but it puts the man’s  virtues and talent center-stage.  I must note that it’s added several titles to my to-watch list – from his early stuff like Get Shorty to his later work like The Taking of Pelham 123. 

Related:
Woke up this Morning: The Oral History of The Sopranos. Michael Imperioli and Steve Schirippa

Quotes:

Jim had built an entire character for Bear that he came out of the South,” Patty Woo says, laughing. “None of this was ever discussed. None of this was in the plot. But for Jim, it was important. And then he had to work on his Southern accent, and it became an issue—he got himself a coach, because Jim, from New Jersey, does not have access to an au then tic Southern accent. And now he’s killing himself to be au then tic to it!

Gandolfini despaired, “Oh my God, Roberto, I’m gonna be unemployed in less than a year. Who the hell is going to see a television show about Mafiosos in Jersey?”

He does much of his best acting with his eyes, carefully choosing when to bore them into a potential enemy, when to lower the hoods of his eyelids to shield his real feelings, and when to let them pierce one of his underlings so they know he means business.

“If there’s one thing I hate, it’s an actor getting up on a soapbox,” he told Matt Zoller Seitz, before chuckling and miming a “scratch that” motion. “Hey, forget I said that. If you print me saying that, it’s me getting up on a soapbox.”

Gandolfini’s take on Tony:

What you see in Tony is that a life of materialism, of constantly feeding on the world, leads to nothing but emptiness. Someone like Paulie Walnuts has his way of life and he is what he is. He can be happy. But Tony is smart enough to know that there should be more, a bigger picture. He sees through all the bullshit around him. So he’s empty. That’s what eats at him: Why can’t I be happy?

Most intriguingly, he met with brass at NBC to discuss joining the cast of its hit The Office when star Steve Carell departed in its seventh season. At the time, trades reported that Gandolfini “wasn’t interested”; years later, on an episode of the podcast Talking Sopranos, Steve Schirripa revealed that they got as far as an offer from NBC of $4 million per season, but, according to Schirripa, “HBO paid him $3 million not to do it.”

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Top Ten High Pagecount Books

Posted on August 19, 2025 by smellincoffee

Today’s TTT prompt is books with a high pagecount. I’ve read the entire Story of Civilization, so this should be easy. But first, a tease from Gandolfini: Jim, Tony, and the Life of a Legend.

Jim had built an entire character for Bear that he came out of the South,” Patty Woo says, laughing. “None of this was ever discussed. None of this was in the plot. But for Jim, it was important. And then he had to work on his Southern accent, and it became an issue—he got himself a coach, because Jim, from New Jersey, does not have access to an au then tic Southern accent. And now he’s killing himself to be au then tic to it!

(1) The Age of Louis XIV,  Will Durant. 816 pages.
(2) The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky.  840 pages.
(3) The Age of Napoleon, Will Durant. 870 pages.
(4) The Age of Voltaire, Will Durant.  898 pages
(5) Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, Simon Schama. 949 pages.
(6) The Reformation, Will Durant. 1025 pages.
(7) Our Oriental Heritage, Will Durant 1048 pages.
(8)The Age of Faith, Will Durant. 1200 pages. 
(9) War and Peace,  Leo Tolstoy. 1444 pages. 
(10) The Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solyzhenitsyn. 1915 pages across three volumes.

….can you tell I was a history major?

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Husk

Posted on August 16, 2025 by smellincoffee

A plague has destroyed much of human civilization, but in Texas, at least, there is a remainder. Before the plague and subsequent collapse, pioneering scientists had created a way for human consciousness to be transferred to a digital world — a playground, almost, where transferred minds could be and do anything they like, and be in connection with all other residents of the digital world Meru. At first, few people were interested, despite the fact the creator had transferred himself and his wife — at least, that is, until a new disease began killing pretty much everybody. People began fleeing the real world into the playground Meru in droves, creating a network of transfer stations across Texas and beyond. While the plague has long gone, “transferring” into Meru has become an adult right of passage — and Isaac is looking forward to his own Transfer, despite it meaning that he can’t cuddle his IRL girlfriend anymore. But then his closest friend Luke urges Isaac not to go through with it, that there’s something more to Meru and its inventor-administrator than meets the eye. After Luke takes drastic action to disrupt the transfer equipment, Isaac finds Luke’s self-sacrificing passion disturbing enough to wonder for himself — and finds himself in a world of trouble. Husk is an interesting SF mystery-thriller with a focus on the possibility of digital immortality/post humanism, and a memorable villain.

I thought at first this would be a book about the lure of digital worlds as an escape from physical reality, a bit like Ready Player One‘s use of the Oasis. It’s certainly easy to see why in a shattered world like that of Husk that people would want to escape to live in some fantasy, one peopled with their family and friends who had also become digital rather than human consciousnesses. Instead, it’s more of a thriller with lots of surprises, set in a daunting world of fortified tech-centers, sometimes connected to the ruins of former cities. Although these tech centers (Alpha, Epsilon, etc) have a shared background, they’re not in communication with one another, and in fact one is outright rebellion against the system that Isaac unwittingly finds himself a part of. Without drifting too much into spoiler territory, Isaac has a narrow escape and finds himself in the wilds where he finds friends and continues searching for answers, a search that will take him through more of this post-collapse world and into constant danger. The novel sometimes waxes philosophic about the nature of consciousness, but not so much the reality of death. Possibly the best element of this novel, aside from the Fallout-esque landscape, was the villain: I’ve tried to steer clear of anything spoilery, but imagine if Big Brother was a distributed machine intelligence, a bit like DAEMON . There’s added emotional weight in the book when Isaac is forced to confront those who think he’s betrayed them, or those he knows betrayed him.

All told, this was a cool find. When I saw it at booksirens I clicked immediately because of the server room cover art, but the premise hooked me and I wound up reading it constantly. I’ll be looking for more from this author, but I understand this is his first novel.

Over time we realized that technology, including the bots, wasn’t really the problem. It was the total surrender to them, especially surrendering what made us human.

“If you only experience the world through a screen, it’s hard to say what world you’re really experiencing. Could be the real one. Could be one someone wants you to think is real. And besides, the best way to trap someone is to let them build the cage. Those walls…not just to keep people out, you know.”

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The Henchman’s Book Club

Posted on August 14, 2025 by smellincoffee
“When has anything we’ve been involved in ever been a cake-walk?” I asked. “[If] we were to organise an actual cake-walk, to pick up cakes as we walked, we’d still lose three men along the way. You should know that by now.”

Mark is a henchman who has served the Agency for several years, surviving numerous bosses’ demises at the hands of talented superspies. The overwhelming majority of the time, he and his fellow minions are sitting bored, waiting for something to happen. Mark, being a reader, has an idea: why not start a book club? Such is the premise of The Henchman’s Book Club, a loosely organized novel that sees Mark and other mooks surviving a series of misadventures while occasionally mentioning books. Were it not for the ending, I’d say the books have a fairly marginal role. This is largely a comedy-action book, with fun writing and exaggerated characters. There’s an obvious James Bond expy — the man who keeps ruining Mark’s various bosses’ plans — as well as a foul-mouthed American equivalent. The latter is so violent and obscene another character asks him if he doesn’t have Tourettes. As a parody of action-crime films, its fun enough: I enjoyed the writing far more than the actual plot. There’s an edgy playfulness that sometimes dips into crassness, though, especially in the treatment of women who are femme fatales or eye candy. I’m fairly sure that’s meant to mock the macho posturing of spies and supervillains—especially considering that in Cancelled, most of the characters were women and presented without objectification (the main character’s girlfriend being a partial exception). If you enjoyed spoofs like OSS-117, you may enjoy this.

“WELL, I THOUGHT it was bollocks,” said Mr Cooper, stunning no one. This was Mr Cooper’s assessment of everything: films, music, museums, exhibitions or roller coasters. In fact, if you’d thought of it, spent five years developing it, registered patents to protect it, trademarks and copyrights, then employed a team of highly skilled and dedicated professionals to put it all together, Mr Cooper would take one look at it and dismiss it as bollocks without breaking his train of thought. In this case, we were talking about a book.

But most of all, Bill just missed making a difference; even if that difference was invariably a terrifying plot that threatened to destabilise the entire free world. But like Bill said, it was just nice to be a part of something.

“No,” she replied. “But my father’s Professor Days… or at least, was.”
“Who’s your dad now?” I asked.
“No, I mean, he’s dead,” Glory amended

If there’s one rule I’ve tried to live my life by it’s never get taken away to be dealt with later. If you’re going to get killed, try to get it done and dusted in the first few minutes because no good ever came of giving disgruntled sadists a few hours to ponder the problem at their leisure.

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Of Ben Franklin and Andy Jackson’s America

Posted on August 14, 2025 by smellincoffee

For whatever reason I’ve been struggling to find inspiration or motivation to review two history books I’ve read in the last month or so, and since they’re similar — early American history — I’m going to regretfully short-round them.

Most recently I finished Waking Giant, a history of Jacksonian America. It proved be quite surprising, because it revealed that a lot of what I regard as characteristic of the late 19th century — immigration, the penny press, etc — had already begun expanding dramatically in the 1830s and 1840s. Irish immigration was especially significant: the number of Catholics roared in this period, moving from Catholicism being insignificant to becoming the Union’s third-largest religion. (By the end of the 19th century, it would move into the number one slot.) Suffrage was expanding to include most white males, at least those who could pay a $1 poll tax, and with that less selective voter base came more varied candidates. Jackson was not a respectable lawyer voted in by other landed lawyers; he was a hero of the people, and they loved him. The author begins by following politics from Madison on to Jackson, allowing us to see the formation of the Whig and Democratic parties and caps the book off by looking at Tyler and Polk. In the middle there’s the expected history of Jackson himself, but also sections on how American culture was changing in this period — diving into religious expression, the popularity of individualist writers like Thoreau and Emerson, and so on. It made for fun reading, but I’m wary of some of its claims and want to read more into the era.

Some highlights:

Andrew Jackson was one of the rarities of American politics: a man whose personal magnetism transcended his flaws. To his opponents, he was ignorant, violent, politically inexperienced, even immoral. But few could deny his courage, his self-reliance, and his ability to rise above adversity.

Many Americans worshipped him—not as a god, but as one of them. He was Everyman writ large. The crowds didn’t just clap or cheer for him. They screamed at the top of their lungs. They mobbed him, they tried to touch him and shake his hand.

Legend has it that after Jackson’s death one of his slaves was asked if he thought the General had made it to heaven. The man responded, “If General Jackson wants to go to Heaven, who’s to stop him?”

Another preacher, Billy Hibbard, attacked Calvinism so strongly that a Presbyterian approached him and said his feelings were hurt. Hibbard replied, “O, I’m sorry you took that,—I meant that for the Devil, and you have stepped in and taken the blow. Don’t get between me and the Devil, brother, and then you won’t get hurt.”

When the revivalist Jesse Lee was asked by two lawyers if he ever misquoted the Bible in his unscripted sermons and had to correct himself, Lee admitted he often made a mistake but did not correct it “if it involves nothing essential.” He gave a pointed example: “The other day I tried to repeat the passage where it says the Devil ‘is a liar, and the father of them’; I got it, ‘The Devil is a lawyer, and the father of them’; but I hardly thought it necessary to rectify so unimportant an error.”

The Log Cabin campaign represented what would become a common phenomenon in American politics: the triumph of illusion over reality. In the twisted melodrama of the 1840 race, Van Buren, the self-made son of a humble farmer and tavern keeper, became a dissipated lord, while Harrison, scion of Virginia’s ruling class, became a plain frontiersman.

Many letters went undelivered. For instance, when Zachary Taylor won the Whig nomination in 1848, he did not know of the victory for weeks, because he refused to pay COD on several official notifications sent to him, and the letters went to the Dead Letter Office in Washington instead.

Back in July, I read Walter Isaacson’s biography of Benjamin Franklin, which I enjoyed enormously. Franklin was the first founding father I ever read a biography of, though I was young enough to remember it came with colored drawings. Franklin is quite the character, running away from an apprenticeship and starting over as a kid in Philadelphia, then making so much of a success of himself that he retired at age 42. The chapters on Franklin’s life as a printer were hilarious at times because he was an absolute fiend at marketing: he once predicted the death of a competing printer, then carried on pretending that the man had died and that his firm was lying about it. When the printer did die, Franklin then had the cheek to post an article written by the man’s “ghost” asserting that yes, he did in fact die last year. The man would have been a menace on social media! Although Franklin is largely remembered for his participation in the Revolution and the early Republic, I think he cuts a more interesting figure as a citizen — founding as he did multiple civic organizations, including a lending library and an early fire brigade. There’s a fair bit in here on Franklin’s issue with the Penn family that controlled Pennsylvania, an issue that took him to Britain where he served the colonies — until he realized the King and Parliament were so obdurate that only rebellion could answer their policies. He continued to be amusing, though: when he and Adams journeyed to France, Adams was the serious-minded statesman who studied his French, while Franklin learned his by flirting with ladies at court. Isaacson’s biography was extremely readable, and I intend to read more of his works.

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WWW Wednesday

Posted on August 13, 2025 by smellincoffee

WHAT have you finished reading recently? Cancelled: The Shape of Things to Come, Danny King.

Geri had been a naturalist for less than a year. Before that, she’d worn clothes like Sienna (and most other people) but then, last Solstice, she had fallen in with new friends, software writers like herself, who refused to conform to society and wrote their own rules, which meant in practice slavishly adopting whatever the latest trend was.

WHAT are you reading now? The Henchman’s Book Club, Danny King.

WHAT are you reading next? Who knows?

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Cancelled: The Shape of Things to Come

Posted on August 12, 2025 by smellincoffee

Sienna Clay has a secret: she’s an Auditor.  Her job is to investigate her fellow Britons who are accused of thoughtcrime, or whose ancestors may have committed horrors like eating meat.  New Britanna’s  status as an island of tolerance set apart from the authoritarian nightmare of the Federated States of Europe can only be maintained by zero tolerance of those who don’t toe the line.  The accused and convicted (no real difference) are “Cancelled”:    their property is seized, their relationships null, their accounts emptied.   Sienna is proud of the work she does, though, even if she has to hide it for fear of being beaten to death by those whose lives she or other Auditors have ruined.  When she takes a few chances to find information that will help in her current investigation, though, she runs afoul of the very system she’s perpetuating. Cancelled  is a darkly humorous satire of cancel culture, one that uses it and technology to create an all-too-believable dystopia. 

The world of New Britannia is a strange mix of 1984 and Brave New World, with  a population kept docile through both the carrot (legalized drugs,  which people use constantly) and the stick –  being Cancelled and reeducated.  The first half of the novel lets us experience this strange mix of license and tyranny through Sienna, as she struggles with overwork, a callous boss,  an increasingly distant girlfriend, and a home operating system that’s peevish and histrionic. Unlike the aforementioned dystopian novels,  Cancelled is overt in attacking contemporary  ‘progressive’ culture:    characters’ influence in society is partially dependent on their Diversity Rating,  for instance,   with higher scores being given based on skin color, sexual orientation, etc.   Straight white men would presumably be the lowest of the low, but claiming different statuses appears common: one person is suspected  of “changing” their gender purely to earn a higher DR and thus a better job, but if anyone dares to voice their suspicions they’ll risk being Cancelled.   Hyperbole is also mocked: “worse than Hitler” is a common expression, and one man hurls it against Sienna after she refuses to sign a consent form allowing him to consummate his relationship with his girlfriend. (All sexual encounters are strictly governed by contracts:  a woman cannot “give consent” unless three of her female friends sign off on the contract.)     There’s also a significant degree of outright ignorance: no one  knows who Hitler really was,  for instance, only that “he knew Churchhill”.

The story that develops from this is interesting, as we witness Sienna fall from a fairly privileged place in life to become the lowest of the low. She should be utterly unlikable at the start, considering she’s a high-tech inquisitor, destroying lives for absurd crimes, but  King manages to make her sympathetic. He accomplishes this by having her in two frustrating relationships – one with her girlfriend, who sponges off of her  – and one with her house. It has an integrated AI, designed by the girlfriend, that is incredibly peevish. When Sienna is late getting home, for instance, the AI is so annoyed that its prepared dinner for her has grown cold that it locks her out. The fact that it’s been programmed by Sienna’s girlfriend also sees it partially weaponized against her later on. When Sienna’s risks at work don’t pay out and Sienna finds herself cancelled,    she’s put through a lot of physical and emotional angst that largely redeem her character as she realized what a monster she had been — and what greater monster she served.

I devoured Cancelled, which should come as no surprise given my scorn for much of what it mocks –  identity politics, oikophobia,  etc. I also enjoyed the aspects of the dystopia that were not political, like the role of technology:   Sienna and company are always plugged in, using smart classes to keep them online,  and surveillance is a given, leading to a society where expression is chilled to the point of frigid. (Tellingly,  the arts appear to have vanished: all Sienna listens to is AI-generated music.)   King tells a good story, and he appears to have numerous titles on KU. Definitely planning on reading more of him, and soon.

Related:
The Choice, Claire Ward. A dystopian novel where Britain is run by a literal health Nazi. Probably the only SF novel with an award from Good Housekeeping.

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Top Ten Authors Whose Work I’ve Read the Most Of

Posted on August 12, 2025 by smellincoffee

The newspaper world was rough-and-tumble, to say the least. Editors lambasted each other and often came to blows. When in 1835 James Gordon Bennett, editor of the Herald, charged Benjamin Day of the Sun with being an infidel, Day replied that Bennett’s “only chance of dying an upright man will be that of hanging perpendicularly upon a rope.” In January 1836, another editor, James Watson Webb, thrashed Bennett for twenty minutes with a cowhide whip on Wall Street as crowds cheered. (Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson)

Carl Sagan, Wendell Berry, Isaac Asimov, and Anthony Esolen

Today’s TTT is “books to end a reading slump”, but my tastes are so different than other people’s that it would a pointless exercise. Instead, inspired by this post at the SF&F forum Chronicles, , I’m listing ten authors whose published works I’ve (mostly) read in full.

(1) Bernard Cornwell. The only books by him I’ve not read are the ones he published under a female pen-name.

(2) Isaac Asimov. I’ve read all of his fiction except for juveniles & The Ends of Eternity. I’ve also read a lot of his nonfiction, mostly science and some history with more miscellaneous works like his guide to the Bible and a volume of annotated classical poetry.

(3) Robert Harris. Fairly certain I’ve read everything he’s published: Harris is a prolific author of historical fiction whose settings are incredibly varied: most of his works are standalones, with the exception of a trilogy based on the life of Cicero

(4) Carl Sagan. While I can’t remember my first Sagan work, his Demon-Haunted World is the best contender and I’ve since read everything by him save his work on nuclear winter.

(5) John Grisham. This author of legal thrillers was the first author whose works I ever ‘completed’, though frankly I would have stopped reading him years ago were it not for the fact that one of my family members always gives me his latest at Christmas.

(6) Jeff Shaara. An author of American historical fiction, Shaara has covered everything from the American Revolution to the Korean war; I’ve read everything save the last novel in his second Civil War trilogy (I have no interest in reading about Sherman) and the Korean novel. The quality is inconsistent, but at this point reading him is a habit.

(7) Wendell Berry. I’ve read all of Berry’s Port William novels and short-story collections, and have read most of his nonfiction to boot: the exceptions being Life is a Miracle, The Hidden Wound, and his most recent release.

(8) Frances and Joseph Gies. I include these two together because while they wrote independently sometimes, their solo work stayed within the same subject (medieval social history) that they address in collaboration.

(9) and (10) Anthony Esolen and Brad Birzer. Including them together because they’re both Catholic men of letters who write on literature and culture, though Birzer has also delved into biographies like that of Russell Kirk. They’re both wonderful to listen to as lecturers; Esolen is outright melodic and Birzer is very….soothing.

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