Last First Snow

"Last First Snow is the fourth book in Max Gladstone’s Craft sequence, but each of the books are standalone. This one is the earliest in the story, chronologically, and it is basically a book about zoning , generational trauma, and protest movements – which could describe a book that isn’t science fiction or fantasy at all. In fact, I read a non-sci-fi version of that book, and it’s awfully good when it’s written in the real world too. But Max does my favourite trick in speculative fiction, which is to take a very nasty real-world problem – which here is gentrification, and the destruction of a culture by an industrialised, corporatised culture, and police brutality – and get up really close to it, but make all of those things about a world that isn’t our world. So it lets you get closer in still, and while you do think about the analogues in the world you live in, you don’t have to engage directly with any specific trauma. It’s a generalised trauma. This is a special trick – to take the interesting and horrific conflicts of the world we live in, and spin them sideways. I use it myself, and Max is an amazing practitioner of it. This particular book has an in-world equivalent of high finance, and it is able to steals souls directly. Some of the magic is the in-world equivalent of weapons of mass destruction – things that would violate the Geneva Conventions, if they were real. When those are deployed against what had previously been a peaceful protest, what happens? The book also addresses questions like: if you were a political dissident or revolutionary when you were young, and now you are older – you didn’t win, and you now have a family – what do you owe the people who you were in that movement with? And what do you owe the people who you’ve built a life with afterwards? Max does not answer that question, which I think is good, because I’m not sure it’s an answerable question. But he shows you one character asking the question and answering it for himself. Both! I don’t think that it’s necessary to have experienced a trauma directly to do a good job of writing about that trauma. But you have to do a lot of work, really serious work, and talk to people who have experienced that. But I’m mostly interested in the ability of the reader to not have a knee-jerk reaction; to not think that they already know what the story is going to say. No matter where you are politically or socially, or what part of the world you are from or live in, you have lots of those baked in present stories about conflicts and traumas that are currently extant or have existed in your lifetime or your generational memory. Moving the action to a fictional universe, but using the same concepts, triggers and horrors can shift a reader away from their own expectations, so that they can see a different or wider or stranger angle on a story. Yes, I read a lot of nonfiction about terrible things that have happened because of zoning codes. For people who want to read about that in the nonfiction space, I would recommend Lawrence T. Brown’s The Black Butterfly: The Harmful Politics of Race and Space in America . That’s about Baltimore and redlining."