The Green Knight's Quest

This is a piece of July reading, but I'm pulling it out from the usual booklog (which will come in August) both because I have more than usual to say about it, and because in this case, there's good reason to mention it before next month.

What this book is: a very cogent discussion by a neuroscientist specializing in the study of attention -- and, as knock-on effects from that, memory, emotional regulation, connection with other people, and so forth. She talks about how we focus (and what disrupts that), how we stay aware of our environment (physical, emotional, etc.), how this relates to working/short-term memory and what goes into long-term memory, why we get disrupted by negative memories or worries about the future, how to keep from being hijacked by emotional responses, how to really be present for our interactions with people around us . . . and how basically all of these things can be improved through mindfulness practice.

Which is kind of a buzzword these days, but not without reason. Jha is very explicit that mindfulness is not about "thinking happy thoughts" (that's actually counter-productive a lot of the time, as it burns the mental resources you need for actual coping), nor is it something whose purpose is to make you feel better. In fact, the early road there often sucks! Instead, she treats it as mental training, the way you might undertake physical training for your body. The aim is to have better control of your focus -- not so you can be focused all the time, but so you can switch as needed between that and broader contextual awareness -- and a meta-awareness of what your own mind is doing, which gives you the chance to intervene when what it's doing is uhhhh not so great.

(As a sidebar, this book is also the first time I've encountered the word "hypertasking." It refers to tetrising your time so that you're always focused on something and never give yourself downtime between tasks, and, uh. Hi. Yeah. That's me. Turns out that whole "I don't know how to turn off" thing is also part of this same cluster of concepts, and while it has its benefits, in the long run it's not really good for your brain.)

A few caveats: first, a good chunk of the research Jha has done, and therefore presumably a chunk of her funding, involves the U.S. military. I found that I was not as bothered by that as I expected, because frankly, her work is ultimately about helping them not do the kind of thing I want them to not do. For example, she talks about how we need to be aware of our own mental narratives so that we can see how they're influencing our attention and know when to let go of them: for example, if you have the mental narrative of "anybody around me could be a terrorist," then you are automatically going to notice things that fit your narrative and literally not see the ones that signal "actually, this is a harmless civilian." (If you've ever heard of the basketball/gorilla experiment, it's very much in line with that.) I'm honestly in favor of anybody working against the "assume anybody could be an enemy and react accordingly" mindset.

Second, though she touches briefly on ADHD, she is not specifically a researcher in that field. So, for example, she comments that using mindfulness training to build awareness of mind-wandering abates the "costs" of mind-wandering in people with ADHD, but she doesn't address the challenges in undertaking that training in the first place. That's the kind of thing that would probably benefit from reading a different book, one written by someone specialized in the relevant sub-field -- or, of course, direct therapeutic guidance. (She is very very clear that while mindfulness plays a key role in certain treatments for a variety of conditions, including both ADHD and PTSD, reading her book is 1000% not a substitute for actual therapy, and please do not use it as such.)

Those caveats laid aside, I found this lucid, well-argued, and convincing. I've gone through spates of doing mindfulness meditation before, and they were fine, but I never found them life-changing. Turns out that might be because I was almost always doing only five or ten minutes, and so far, the research suggests that -- for whatever reason -- twelve minutes is the minimum effective "dose." (More is better, but since telling people to meditate for thirty minutes tends to result in them doing it for zero, she is very pragmatically aiming at the minimum line.) Twelve minutes a day, at least five days a week, for at least four weeks, to produce measurable changes in people's performance in various cognitive tests . . . though of course it's not like you do that and then stop, any more than you get swole at the gym and then quit on the assumption those muscles will stay with you forever. But theoretically, after four weeks of following this regimen, you've done enough mental lifting to notice a change.

And that's why I'm posting this now. As of it going live, I have successfully meditated for eight days straight, twelve minutes each time. By saying that publicly, I'm giving myself a bit more accountability -- because my hope is that I'll be able to keep this up, and in August I'll come back to report on how it's going. Will I feel less scattershot? Better able to remember things? More skilled, not only at focusing on what's in front of me, but knowing how to stop focusing and just &#$! chill for a bit?

Only one way to find out!

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://www.swantower.com/2026/07/12/amishi-p-jhas-peak-mind/)

Climate change is on everyone's mind's lately, to the point where "climate fiction" is now a recognized subgenre -- both within speculative fiction and without. Given my focus in this Patreon, however, I'm not going to attempt to spin scenarios about what our world might realistically look like in fifty or a hundred years, or how we're going to respond to it; other people have already done that in far greater depth, with far greater knowledge of the subject, than I could hope to do.

Instead, we're going to take a look at the climate changes humanity has already experienced, and what we've done about them.

Broadly speaking, we can lump these into two major categories: changes in precipitation, and changes in temperature. Furthermore, we can specify that, for it to count as "climate change" in a meaningful sense, it has to be a lasting alteration, not a brief one. Short-term change is weather; long-term trends are climate. And only the latter drives significant adaptations from society.

Of those two categories -- please forgive the incoming pun -- temperature tends to sneak under the radar. As we're in the process of finding out, you can get significant alterations in weather patterns from global shifts of only a degree or two; in the days when no one had reliable thermometers marked with a systematic scale, that kind of shift was impossible to measure. And a gradual, large-scale drift like the one that produced the eras we term the Medieval Warm Period or the Little Ice Age happens on a timeline so slow, people are apt to notice it only across the generations: maybe your grandfather tells stories about how frost never used to strike after the spring equinox, or conversely, the ground had always thawed by then.

These changes are still significant! Agriculture depends on people knowing when it's safe to put crops in the ground, and having enough time for them to mature before autumn storms or winter freezes kill them. As the average temperatures drift from what they used to be, harvests get poorer, because local customs are adapted to the weather patterns everyone expects. But as those patterns break, people will gradually change their customs to match, growing crops better suited to the conditions that now prevail.

Changes in precipitation can be a lot more calamitous. In this historical record, we most often hear about this as an issue of drought, when a persistent lack of rainfall across multiple years results in famine. It's also possible, however, for the problem to go the other way; too much rainfall leads to flooding and crops drowning in the field. Or, in a worst case scenario, you get both: current theories hold that the decline of the Khmer Empire owed a lot to unpredictable shifts between not enough rain and far too much, which wrecked the stability of a society that depended upon sophisticated hydroengineering.

People can also adapt to changes in rainfall, of course, but it's more difficult because the effects are more sudden. While unusual heat or frost can kill crops, a slow upward or downward drift in average temperatures gives you time to change from wheat to barley or vice versa, as you plant something hardier for the conditions. Droughts and flooding arrive more abruptly, and in between instances, you get good years where it seems like everything is back to normal. It's only when you look back on the pattern that you can see where things started going downhill -- and by then, quite a lot of people may have starved.

Attempts to engineer our way out of trouble are not a new phenomenon. The aforementioned hydraulic works, discussed in more detail last year, are all about trying to buffer against the vagaries of water being over- or under-supplied. Farmers can also insulate their fields with straw or attempt to shade them with taller plants, to mitigate the effects of heat and cold and reduce evaporation. But mostly, the response to this has had to take the form of changing our own behavior: planting something more tolerant of the conditions at hand, so that at the end of the day -- or the season -- we have something to eat.

I've been speaking of this primarily in terms of crops because that has been the overwhelming consideration -- and also the only part even vaguely in human control. If climate shifts produce more hurricanes or tornadoes or blizzards . . . well, historically speaking, there is bugger-all people have been able to do about it. Even now, we can only do so much to fortify our houses and cities against those kinds of storms. And while it's true that climate change can also introduce novel diseases, neither the people of the time nor historians looking back now can generally tell where exactly those epidemics came from. All people could do was hunker down and hope to survive, or migrate somewhere they hoped would be safer.

Because climate has historically been every bit as much out of our control as weather. While it's true that human action can affect the globe, as we're seeing right now, it tends to require a scale of influence we really only hit with the Industrial Revolution. Before that, our population was too small, our output of climate-changing factors too restricted. We have changed local climates through actions like deforestation, which can lead to desertification, but the biggest alterations have mostly come about through natural forces: volcanic eruptions, changes in ocean circulation, and the like.

I should note in passing a particular subset of (thus far fictional) climate change, which is the process of terraforming. Science fiction has long played with the idea that humans could deliberately alter the climate of a whole planet specifically to make it hospitable -- and not just the climate, but the entire composition of the atmosphere and the biomes of the land and sea. Most novels have handwaved their effects into existence, caring more about it as a background device to allow for human settlement on other planets; only a few have really devoted attention to the mechanisms by which this might be achieved. If you're interested in that end of things, I am definitely not qualified to help you! But it's an intriguing question to explore -- not least because the precursors to such ideas are being explored right now on our own planet.

Back to the home front: bear in mind that, more than any given set of conditions, the problem tends to be change. Some conditions are, admittedly, more favorable than others; mild temperatures and moderate rain -- however those are defined for the region -- are going to produce better results than the alternative. But humans are very good at adapting to the situation at hand, and thriving as much as possible under those circumstances.

It's when the rug gets pulled out from under us that havoc truly results. Then the behaviors and patterns that protected us before suddenly become maladaptive. Even if the new situation is entirely survivable, we may not be acting in the best fashion to get through it. But figuring that out, and making the necessary changes, is easier said than done . . . and no, that isn't simply a not-very-coded slam against all the inertia getting in the way of responding to our current climate crisis. People cannot easily abandon cities threatened by rising sea levels or the depletion of the local aquifer, or pivot their economy toward resources that better suit the new reality. That's especially true of everyone at the bottom of the socioeconomic scale, for whom the immediate concern has to be their ability to get by today.

As I said above, these changes are mostly going to play out on a timescale that means we only see a snapshot of one moment along the line -- or, perhaps, look back upon it in retrospect. (A few authors will have their story elapse over generations or centuries, but that's not common.) Still, knowing that context can help set the stage for a plot . . . one with far too much relevance for us today.



(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://www.swantower.com/2026/07/10/new-worlds-climate-change/)

The Tricky Business of Faerie Bargains, Reena McCarty. Something about the marketing of this one -- the cover art, the cover copy, and so forth -- made me think it's a cozy novel. It absolutely is not. Which isn't to say it's grimdark, because it isn't that, either; just that the stakes here are higher than cozy reaches for, and the trials the characters go through have sharper edges.

Which for me was a good thing, because I was extremely uncertain if I was going to like a cozy book about the fae. (That tips over into twee with shocking ease.) So I was very pleased to instead get a novel in a world where fae have always been known to exist, but Europe has largely -- and deliberately -- destroyed its own Otherworld, while the U.S. has set up strict laws governing how people are and are not permitted to make deals with the fae. The faerie courts are not the familiar Seelie and Unseelie, but they absolutely have their own politics, which unsurprisingly turn out to underlie the small-scale disaster the protagonist is trying to set right.

The fae themselves are pleasingly alien (even if I find the human-sounding ones like "Sloan" rather distracting). There's just enough echo of dysfunctional human patterns like narcissism to keep their weirdness from feeling random, and McCarty does a good job of selling the idea that the fae simply do not have the same priorities and mentalities as mortals do. The ending was particularly effective in that regard!

Below the Root, Zilpha Keatley Snyder. Discussed elsewhere.

The Murderer’s Tale, Margaret Frazer. I continue to gravitate toward shorter books at the moment, which is probably contributing to how many mysteries I've been reading lately.

By this point in the series, it is well established that the first scene will be from the viewpoint of the title character. So when you name your book The Murderer's Tale . . . yeah, Frazer is not faking you out. From the start, you know who the killer will be, and you can very rapidly guess who the victim will be, too. The killer is an unpleasant piece of work, thoroughly convinced of his own superior significance and misreading the motivations of everybody around him, who of course are lesser. Though I thought it was a deft touch when you see him being judgmental toward certain characters, and then soon after that you're in Frevisse's perspective and seeing her be judgmental toward them, too. Class distinctions are very real to these people. But this one really does read like a tragedy, because you see what's coming, it shouldn't happen, and of course you can't stop it.

A Case of Mice and Murder, Sally Smith. A newer mystery, set in 1901 London, about a barrister of the Inner Temple very comfortably settled into his routine, who gets piked out of it because the Lord Chief Justice has been murdered -- within the Temple! -- and the guy in charge of the place is extremely motivated to get the case solved as discreetly as possible. I very much like the central conceit here, which hinges on the fact that the Inner Temple's governance means the City of London police can only intervene there if asked; since the Temple is very much an elite bastion of the sort that thinks scandal is the kind of thing that should only happen to other people, having an insider investigate is exactly how such men would handle even a murder.

And Gabriel Ward is a congenial detective, very nerdy and obsessed not only with the law but with a whole array of historical tidbits. I like how Smith handles his very obvious OCD: another book might have made more emotional hay out of the stress and pressure of the condition, but Gabriel has long since arranged his life in ways that accommodate it. He does, over time, become more aware of the restrictions it places on him, but since he's a well-off gentleman cushioned by his residence in the Temple, it is not really a source of angst. It's just how his life works.

I enjoyed this one enough that I started out listening to it in audiobook and then transferred to ebook, not because the narrator was bad -- I liked him, despite fluctuating volume levels that sometimes made the quiet bits difficult to hear -- but because I have approximately 1-2 hours of audiobook listening time in a given week, and I didn't want to wait that long to get the whole story!

Cinder House, Freya Marske. This is the point at which I pivoted to reading the Hugo-nominated short fiction categories. I also read the short stories and novelettes this month, but since those weren't published under separate cover, they don't get tracked here.

It takes a fair bit of effort to make a Cinderella retelling feel original, but Marske manages it well -- starting with the fact that the protagonist gets murdered at the start of the novella and spends the rest of it as a ghost haunting the house now held by her stepmother and stepsisters. Marske also adds in a fresh layer by giving the prince his own story, with a curse that belongs nowhere in the original while fitting well into the general shape of fairy tale tropes. Be warned that there's some fairly heinous abuse here, quite apart from the murder; it turns out there are ways to torture a ghost who is more or less coterminous with the house she haunts, and one of the stepsisters eagerly explores those. The ending, however, finds a lovely and unusual resolution for the core problems.

Murder by Memory, Olivia Waite. SFnal murder mystery in space, aboard a vessel that's not so much a generation ship as a reincarnational one: people regularly save their memories to data "books" and upload the contents to their new body after their old one dies. The crux here is that someone has been murdered at the same time that several books were destroyed, with many complications ensuing.

I do tend to engage less with SF titles, but given the mystery kick I'm on right now, this one fit right in with my current mood. I enjoyed it a lot, even if I'm not sure it stands out in a way that would make me say it's award-worthy. There's another one out in the series and a third one on the way; I may well hunt them out.

Automatic Noodle, Annalee Newitz. Also SF, this time firmly in the cozy corner. In the aftermath of a war that saw California win independence from the United States, robots have their freedom . . . sort of. They're still discriminated against in a number of ways, many of which pose problems for a group of bots who want to open a restaurant.

I am extremely hit or miss with cozy books, because sometimes the warm fuzziness winds up making the perils feel a bit too toothless for my taste. Here, Staybehind lists at the outset several things that could go badly wrong, and then almost none of them happen. I suspect that actually dealing with those would have required this to be a novel, not a novella, and also it would have been markedly less cozy.

The River Has Roots, Amal El-Mohtar. This, on the other hand, is so firmly up my alley that I might as well have painted a target on myself. Folkloric-mood novella based on a murder ballad, with a central motif that plays off the connections between language and magic? YES PLEASE. And the writing is a lyrical (without being overwrought) as usual. If Amal wants to write another six of these, all riffing on different ballads, I will be first in line for them.

And All Between, Zilpha Keatley Snyder. Discussed elsewhere.

The Summer War, Naomi Novik. Last of the novellas, and I'm a little puzzled: in the Hugo packet it gets labeled as a "sample," and there's a link to request the whole thing on Netgalley. I wasn't minded to create an account just to do that, so I figured I would read what's here . . . and it feels like it's all but maybe the last two pages? Anybody who's read the full thing, I'd love to know how much the sample cuts off.

Anyway, I was feeling jaundiced because of that whole "sample" business, but this won me over. There's a tenuous peace between Faerie and the mortal world, but given the way faerie memory works, that means almost nothing: the events that set off the original war are as fresh today as the day they happened. The main character winds up in the thick of that, of course, and has to figure out how to protag from within very constrained circumstances.

The pacing of this one did feel a little odd to me, in that it spends a lot of time on setting the stage before we get to the main act. In ways I understand -- without that setup, much of the resolution would be less satisfying -- but it took me a bit longer to get into it as a result.

Until the Celebration, Zilpha Keatley Snyder. Discussed elsewhere.

A Case of Life and Limb, Sally Smith. Second of the Gabriel Ward mysteries, and the last for now, though there's a third coming next year. While eventually you get a murder here, much of the novel concerns someone sending packages with desiccated body parts to an assortment of men in the Inner Temple. (There's an entertaining discussion about whether this is even a crime, under the laws of the era.) Gabriel is once again tasked to investigate lest -- oh, the horror -- the journalists of Fleet Street find out and splash it all over their papers.

I should note that each book also involves some trial Gabriel is involved in, with the investigation taking away from the precious time he needs to prepare for that. I like that his trials are not murder trials; the first concerns a very tangled question of intellectual property rights around a beloved children's book, and this one concerns a defamation case brought by a popular stage entertainer. Topsy Tillotson is a delightful character, and I like how getting involved in her situation causes the rather mousy Gabriel to grow some unexpected teeth. (In my head he is played by Eddie Marsan, specifically channeling Mr. Norrell, sans that character's less admirable qualities.)

One other note I want to make, though, I'll put behind rot-13 -- not because it's directly spoilery, but because it might prejudice a reader's thoughts in spoilery directions: Gur jnl gung Tnoevry'f pheerag pnfr unf gb or gvrq va fbzrubj jvgu gur pevzr jvaqf hc aneebjvat gur svryq bs aneengvir cbffvovyvgvrf snveyl funecyl. Bs pbhefr vg jbhyq srry n yvggyr enaqbz vs vg jrera'g pbaarpgrq, ohg abarguryrff, gur aneebjvat fyvtugyl qvfncbvagf zr.

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://www.swantower.com/2026/07/09/books-read-june-2026/)