#REVIEW: DOCILE, by K.M. Szpara

On April 10, 2020 By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews3 Comments

First things first:

CONTENT WARNING: While I don’t think the review itself is going to be a trigger risk, DOCILE’s back cover warns of “forthright depictions and discussions of rape and sexual abuse,” and I would add warnings for confinement and torture to that as well. Go NOWHERE NEAR THIS BOOK if that will be unhealthy for you.

As is my usual tradition, rather than beginning this by talking about the book I just read, I’ll talk about me a bit. First, I probably should have bought Docile at C2E2, as K.M. Szpara was there and I got two other autographs from authors who were literally sitting at the same table as him. In fact, I think S.L. Huang was sitting next to him. It ended up getting ordered a week or two after getting home instead, so it was a little cheaper but it’s not autographed.

Second: without getting too far into the details, my reaction to this book was probably somewhat informed by the fact that I’ve had to have a stern conversation or two with credit card companies since my mother passed away in January. The notion that at some point in the future debt might be made inheritable has a bit more salience with me right now than it might otherwise. (And, because I don’t want people reading into this too much, let me be clear that we aren’t talking about a huge amount of money here or anything– but the conversations still have to be had.)

This book is a hell of a thing, y’all. I described it on Twitter right after I finished it as the best book I’ve read this year, which, okay, it’s only April, but I’m in lockdown so I’m forty books in already– and a few hours later I kind of want to walk away from the word best but it is certainly the most interesting book I’ve read this year, and the most thought-provoking book I’ve read this year, and it’s the one I most want to find three or four other people who have read it and just sit around and talk about it for a couple of hours. “Best” doesn’t ever mean the same thing to any two people, and this book definitely has some … problematic aspects? Starting with that content warning up there, so there are already a lot of people I can’t recommend this to, and I was going to save the links for later in the piece but the book has nothing to say about race, which for a book set in future America that is effectively about slavery, is at the very least a pretty substantial omission.

This is, in other words, one of those books that some people are going to hate, and I’m not going to put myself in the position of arguing with those folks; that just wasn’t my experience of the book. Your mileage will vary, of course.

At any rate: let’s get to the premise, at least. Docile is set at some unclear amount of time in the future, somewhere outside of Baltimore. Income inequality has increased to the point where there are literal trillionaires out there walking about, but the majority of people are buried in debt, which has been made legally inheritable– so each generation is finding itself in a deeper hole than the one before it. One way out is by finding someone wealthy to buy you out of your debt, becoming what’s called a Docile. A contract is signed, and Dociles have certain rights (the book isn’t a hundred percent clear about how often these rights are honored, but they aren’t treated as a joke) but it is possible to sign for a lifetime of servitude if your debt is high enough, to clear the debt of the rest of your family. Most Dociles take a drug called Dociline, which effectively erases free will in the person taking it, making them a perfect servant. Some Dociles are used for labor, and others become personal servants and/or, effectively, sex slaves. The book’s main character, Elisha, signs a lifetime contract to become a Docile at the beginning of the book, selling three million dollars’ worth of debt and also snagging a thousand dollars a month in a stipend for his family.

His Patron is Alex Bishop III, the other POV character of the book, who is the scion of the family that invented Dociline. And Elisha, whose mother was also a Docile and who is suffering lingering effects from the drug, refuses to take Dociline, which he has a right to do. Which means that Alex, who has taken him on as a house servant and sex toy, has to train/brainwash him to become a proper Docile.

There’s a lot going on.

The front cover of the book contains the words THERE IS NO CONSENT UNDER CAPITALISM right front and center where you can’t miss it, and consent is one of the many themes of the book– others include income inequality, individual free will and autonomy, personhood, and the predatory nature of capitalism itself, and the book has an awful lot to say. I don’t want to spoil a lot of the details, especially since I was utterly wrong about a twist that I spent most of the book assuming was coming and never saw, but Szpara is a hell of a writer and I blew through this 500-page book in, basically, three big gulps.

Alex is, to put it very mildly, not very nice to Elisha at first, although the relationship between the two changes radically over the course of the book– and just how real the relationship is is one of the things that the book interrogates. After the first time they have sex Elisha openly wonders to himself if he’s been raped, and do not go near this book if the frequent explicit sex scenes are going to be a problem for you.

(This is another place where the reaction to the book is going to be all over the place– I would never, in a million years, have thought of this book as erotica, but apparently there are some folks out there who are treating it like it is? And you’re going to react very differently to this book if you’re reading it to get off or because you enjoy BDSM as opposed to, say, reading it because it’s a sci-fi dystopia and that’s a thing you like. Frankly I find the idea of people reading this for titillation to be a bit creepy, or at least the idea that you’d read it for that reason and be successful. You do you, I guess, but while there aren’t any sort of stereotypical Brutal Stranger Rape Scene type of things that tend to make me put books down, nearly all of the sex in this book is, let’s say, at least squicky about consent, and there’s at least a couple of scenes where the goal is absolutely Elisha’s sexual humiliation.)

So, yeah: Docile is problematic and messy and gross and I found it utterly fascinating and I have no idea what K.M. Szpara’s next book is going to be but he can have my money right now. If you read this and you’re still interested in the book, absolutely check it out, because I want people to talk to about it, but if you feel like it’s not for you I’d pay close attention to that feeling and take it seriously. I’m glad I read it, and it’s going to stick with me for a while, but it is definitely not for everyone.

12:31 PM, Friday, April 10: 473,073 confirmed cases, 17,036 American dead.

Bloggy navel-gazing

On April 9, 2020 By Luther M. SilerIn BlogwankingLeave a comment

If I make it until 8:00 PM before just deciding to post that I’m taking the day off, I should probably just not post, because I kinda already took the day off, didn’t I?

Ah well.

8:01 PM, Thursday, April 9: 461,437 confirmed cases, 16,478 American deaths.

Ain’t it the truth

On April 8, 2020April 8, 2020 By Luther M. SilerIn Politics1 Comment

Sat down at the computer 20 minutes or so ago all like OKAY WORDZ TIEM MOTHERFUCKERS and … yeah, apparently that’s at least slightly easier said than done? I dunno, maybe the seventeen hundred words I gave y’all on Nioh 2 yesterday was all I have in me at the moment.

So, politics, I guess.

I am having an interesting reaction to the news about the primary ending. I was not actually expecting rage to be among the emotions I felt once that happened, but as it turns out that one’s kind of leading the pack; it pisses me the hell off that we are two months away from anyone in Indiana getting to cast a ballot in a primary that started off with half a dozen candidates I’d have been perfectly happy to vote for and two I’d have been deliriously happy to get, and we’ve somehow ended with an eight thousand year old white man who I used to refer to as “the Senator from MBNA” winning the nomination before Indiana even got to vote. And I’m not happy about it. This motherfucker has been close to the bottom of my choices for the entire Goddamned primary, and while the math has been clear for quite a damn while that my choices are not everyone else’s choices– none of my candidates managed to get anywhere with black voters, which is critical to winning the Democratic nomination– the fact that I literally didn’t get to cast a ballot before the choice was made pisses me off anyway. I’d have been fine with voting for someone who lost. I’ve done that a whole bunch of times. I’m not fine with this.

The Democratic party’s primary structure is fucked, the way we choose presidential candidates is fucked, and I want this shit fixed. Now, God damn it.

(There is– and I will make this point more than once more before November– absolutely nothing short of the election being cancelled or my own death that will prevent me from voting for Biden this fall. Nothing.(*) But that doesn’t mean I have to be happy about it, and right now I choose not to be. A good VP choice would go a long ways toward restoring some enthusiasm, but I don’t need to be enthusiastic to vote. I’m grown. I’m gonna fucking vote like it’s my job, because it is.)

(*) Well, okay, Biden’s death would probably also cause me to not vote for him, but this election’s already going to be fucked up enough and I don’t want to even think about what the shit would occur if that happened.

(**) Since I actually know, image credit: @adequateashell

8:03 PM, Wednesday April 8th: 429,052 confirmed cases and 14,695 Americans dead.

Nioh 2 Yokai, Loosely Ranked by How Much I Hate Them

On April 7, 2020April 7, 2020 By Luther M. SilerIn video games1 Comment

SHUT UP I’M ON SPRING BREAK

I was loosely keeping track of how many times I said “God, I hate these things,” while I was playing Nioh 2 yesterday. It was … a lot. I love the game, but I have some serious enmity toward some of the monsters. Let’s do an absurdly detailed post about it!

PART ONE: YOKAI I DON’T ACTUALLY HATE ALL THAT MUCH:

DWELLERS: Most of this first category is yokai that frankly should never, ever kill you. Are they going to? Yes. Yes, they are. But dwellers, both of the smaller and larger size, are usually pretty harmless unless they’re throwing firebombs at you and you haven’t noticed them yet.

SKELETON WARRIORS: Again, either size, neither of them should be killing you. The ones with spears can be kind of dangerous because that spear usually hits harder than you’re expecting it to, but it’s easily dodged. No biggie.

SPIDERS: I mean, they’re spiders. Don’t attack them from in front, you’ll have a bad time. Other than that … eh.

ABERRANT SOLDIERS: Can be highly annoying at range, but they’re still cannon fodder and they’re generally pretty fair. Slightly more annoying than skeleton warriors and dwellers because they block.

KAPPA (NORMAL): Damn near harmless on their own, but they run away and chasing them down can lead you into other trouble.

SNOWCLOPS AND ONE-EYED ONI: They hit like a truck but their movesets are predictable and they can be blinded. These can be dangerous in smaller rooms, especially if the camera goes nuts on you, but they shouldn’t be a problem unless they’re surrounded by other enemies.

YOKI: Man, these were trouble early on in Nioh 1. Now only the kusarigama variant should even be hitting you, although the new four-swing move they’ve given the ones with the katanas can still catch you if you’re too close when they start attacking. They feel pretty defanged now, though.

ONI-BI AND BIWA BOKU–BOKU: Not dangerous, really, but the Biwa Boku-bokus are always hidden and an endless stream of Oni-bi can be trouble if you’re fighting something else. Plus, in Nioh 2, the fire ones explode after you kill them sometimes, which teleports both way higher on the I Hate You scale.

ENKI: Basically a Yoki but in the shape of a gorilla and with longer-range moves, the Enki are actually kind of fun to fight but their damn grab and stomp move is so fucking disrespectful that I kind of hate them but only a little.

YAMANBAS: Actually, these aren’t that bad. You don’t want to get caught by surprise by them but they’re usually not too much of a threat unless there are other monsters around.

PART TWO: THESE THINGS ARE ALL ASSHOLES:

FLYING BOLT: An enemy that was significantly scarier in Nioh 1, so I have left-over enmity from that, but they’re much rarer in Nioh 2 and I tend to have flame available most of the time so it’s not as big of a deal. Still hate ’em though. (Also, I can not get this image to cooperate, and I’ve used two different pictures of these damned things. I don’t know why it’s being weird.)

GAKI: Properly fought, a Gaki can be disposed of in a few seconds. Which is why there are usually several of them, and they’re hanging from the ceiling to drop down on you and eat your face, or they eat each other and become Super Gaki, or they’re high up on a ledge throwing shit at you. Fuck them.

MAGATSU WARRIORS: I probably should hate these more than I do, but they’re pretty rare, and while they’re tough every one I’ve fought so far has been in a position where I could bring everything I had to bear on them and in a one-on-one fight they’re not that bad. I think if they were around more often I’d hate them more.

MUJINA: Damn near harmless except for the fucking heart attack I have every time one of these bastards jumps out of a Goddamned treasure chest.

WAIRA: Not especially tough, especially considering their size, but their grab attack is bullshit and they can tunnel underground, and they’re much faster than they look.

NAMAHAGE: I hated these a lot more in Nioh 1, where they didn’t show up until the DLC, and I feel like they’ve been defanged a bit in this game, but they can throw shit at you now, and I never remember they can do that until there’s a hatchet protruding out of my Goddamned forehead. Plus I still have leftover Nioh 1 trauma from these things so I always forget they’re mostly easier to handle in this one.

ONYUDO: My single most-feared opponent in Nioh 1; Onyudo and their stupid tongues are pushovers in Nioh 2. Hang back, wait for burst attack, Brute counter, seeya. Still hate ’em a lot, though, but it’s maybe a bit less warranted in this game than it was in the previous one.

NURIKABE: Most of the time, fights with Nurikabe can be avoided since you can usually gesture your way past them. Nurikabe are high on my hate list because they usually have shit hidden behind them, and the last thing I do before finishing any main mission is spend a month looking for the one damn wall in the entire level that has Goddamned eyes on it. Plus, if you do have to fight them, they’re tougher than they ought to be.

UBUME: Ubume aren’t actually that dangerous or hard to kill, but the central conceit of the damned things is that they’re yokai that were formed from grieving mothers, and about half of them are carrying around a baby-shaped chunk of spirit stone that you have to shoot if you want to actually fight them. I’m all for the occasional dead baby joke but man this is bullshit.

LESSER UMI-BOZU and TOXIC SLIME: Sneak-attack ass motherfuckers, all of them, and I hate them, especially since I should be smart enough to look for the sonsabitches by now. Slightly lower on the list because pretty much any fire attack will kill them; they’re a huge pain in the ass if you happen to be out of fire, though.

ONE-EYED IMP: Awww, isn’t he cute? NO, he’s not fucking cute, he’s going to swat you with his goddamned tongue and then jump away toward fifteen other enemies and then while you’re dealing with those he’s going to turn into a goddamned One-Eyed Oni and mudboot-stomp your ass when you’re not looking. Fuck these things.

MITSUME YAZURA: Sure, he’s all heads and legs, and that’s fun, but I hate these things just because they look so much scarier than they actually are until you get complacent, which they have a magical power to make happen, and then they grab you with their feet-hands and hold you over their many heads and rip you in half, and fuck these things.

KARAKA: Not terribly hard to defeat, since their distance attacks can all be interrupted, but their habit of masquerading as fucking torches is really Goddamned annoying and they tend to pop up at the worst possible moment. These things raining fire on your ass while you’re trying to deal with something more immediately dangerous is hellaciously annoying.

PART THREE: FUCK EVERYTHING ELSE ON THIS LIST, THESE MOTHERFUCKERS ARE ALL ASSHOLES AND SERIOUSLY, FUCK THEM:

MOTHERFUCKING WHEELMONKS: I hated these motherfuckers in Nioh 1, and now they can jump. They move at the speed of light, they are the only enemy in the entire game who can hurt you just by touching you, and half the fucking time when I get killed by these bastards I hadn’t even seen the fucking thing yet and it just buzzsawed me into a corner and killed me dead before I knew it was there.

GODDAMNED ROKOROKUBI: I’m not even sure these assholes are supposed to be top-tier enemies, but something about them makes them impossible for me to fight, and a single rokorokubi can take me down under damn near any circumstances at all if I’m not either incredibly careful or using massive overkill. Their grapple attack sucks, occasionally mistaking one for human sucks, their range sucks, they suck. Fuck rokorokubi.

PIECE OF SHIT TESSOS: They fucking fart on you and then you can’t heal properly. Another fast-as-fuck enemy, they’ve also got this bullshit Sonic the Hedgehog spin around like a crackhead move that I hate, and they even have the fucking temerity to have a weak spot in their tails that I can somehow still never take advantage of. I think these are my most hated of the enemies new to Nioh 2.

PUNK-ASS FUCKING KARAKASA UMBRELLA MOTHERFUCKERS: Yes, that’s a fucking umbrella standing on a foot with an eye. These goddamned things have no excuse to be as annoying as they are because they’re tiny pieces of shit and oh also they’re umbrellas and if you don’t know how personally insulting it is to be killed in half a second by a fucking possessed demon umbrella then imagine how mad you get when it happens twice in a row.

GARBAGE MONSTER RED KAPPAS: Neither harmless or as useful as the regular kappas, no, these assholes jump on your back and break your spine when they aren’t Koopa-ing around on their goddamned shells faster than you can keep up with them. Dicks, all of them.

THESE FUCKING KARASU TENGU BASTARDS: I hate them. I hate them I hate them I hate them I hate them I hate them. I hated them in Nioh 1 and I hate the assholes now. This game is set up poorly to be able to manage monsters that can fly, and the fact that if they look at you crosseyed you lose 2/3 of your health does not help. Fuck fucking tengus. They’re assholes, all of them.

MOISTENED BINT NURI-ONNA: Wait, did I say tessos were my least favorite new enemy? No, fuck that, there are at least two that are worse: Goddamned Nuri-Onna, for starters; these assholes can hide on ceilings, under water, have long range, a grab attack, eat your face, and God help you if you miss a burst attack and get hit by their fucking paralysis vision. Fuck that. These can be handled if you know they’re there, and don’t tend to have a ton of stamina, but that just makes it more frustrating when they kill the shit out of you.

CHEAP, LYING, NO-GOOD, ROTTEN, FOUR-FLUSHING, LOW-LIFE, SNAKE-LICKING, DIRT-EATING, INBRED, OVERSTUFFED, IGNORANT, BLOOD-SUCKING, DOG-KISSING, BRAINLESS, DICKLESS, HOPELESS, HEARTLESS, FAT-ASS, BUG-EYED, STIFF-LEGGED, SPOTTY-LIPPED, WORM-HEADED SACK OF MONKEY SHIT IPPON DATARAS: Eh, maybe they’re not that bad.

6:53 PM, Tuesday April 7th: 387,547 confirmed infections, 12,291 Americans dead.

April 6, Status Report

On April 6, 2020April 6, 2020 By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized2 Comments

…because everything lengthy I might want to write fills me with horror, have a Random Bits post:

HEALTH UPDATE: I have not taken any medicine for the last several days and woke up this morning without having a coughing fit. I also made it through last night without getting up and having to blow my nose or wipe anything disgusting off of my face. I’m still coughing occasionally so I’m not 100% yet but my going-on-five-weeks-long Upper Respiratory Thing appears to be on the wane, finally.
So I’ll have COVID-19 by next week.
Speaking of: I left the house today for only the second time since March 16, to take some stuff to (and have lunch with) my dad and then to get some banking stuff done that could not be done over the phone or the Internet. The last time I left was also to see Dad. He’s only leaving the house once a week to go to the grocery, so we have lots to talk about.
That was sarcasm. I never have anything to talk about anymore. I play Nioh 2 and read books. That’s it.
SPRING BREEEEEAAAAAAAAKKKKKKK!!!!!
Gas was $1.23 a gallon. I’m going to put the boy in the car tomorrow and drive to Kokomo and back just for the sheer hell of it.
I was wearing this shirt the last time I posted a picture of myself to the blog. That was not intentional.
I never mentioned it here, but school is officially E-learning-only for the rest of the school year, so the next time I will be expected to “go” to a “job” will be in August. Which is insane. I am actually planning on spending some time over this week trying to figure out how to make my lessons more engaging for the kids who are still bothering to tune in.
Obligatory reminder: I am incredibly lucky in that between my job, which can be done from home, and my wife’s job, which is in the health care sector, we are reasonably well insulated from the utter carnage that the job market has turned into. I was planning on spending the summer at least casually looking around; that plan is no longer in effect. I will return to my current job this fall unless I am actively prevented from doing so, which given my seniority can be reasonably described as unlikely.
CURRENTLY LISTENING TO: Billie Eilish. Her *first* album, which tells you that I own her first album.
SPEAKING OF MUSIC: You may recall me being super happy about the new Pearl Jam album that came out … recently. How recently? I think it was in March, so somewhere between seven days and seventeen years. I haven’t mentioned it since. I won’t quite go so far as to say I was disappointed, but I was disappointed.
Wait.
Damn.
Gigaton is, so far, an intensely forgettable album, which is not a word I’ve used to describe many Pearl Jam albums. It deserves a couple more listens but I do most of my music listening in the car, notwithstanding the current playing of Billie Eilish, and I haven’t been driving much.
There is a song on the album called Comes Then Goes, which sounds so much like Parting Ways, released in 2000, that I’m actually weirdly angry about it.
I am listening to old Billie Eilish instead of new Pearl Jam, though, which probably should tell you something.
Related: I’m way behind on my podcasts, and I even found a couple of new ones to look into that I haven’t found time to listen to, because my “listening to things” time is disrupted.
VAGUEBOOKING: If you’re going to write speculative fiction, your world needs to have some rules to it, even if the characters don’t necessarily know what they are. You gotta spend some time on worldbuilding. Anything Can Happen At Any Time isn’t a plot, it’s a 12-year-old’s power fantasy.
UTTERLY UNRELATED: I have said good things about Daniel Ford’s Jack Dixon detective series, which I’ve read the first book from and am eagerly anticipating the release of the second. I recently finished the first book of his epic fantasy Paladin Trilogy, which is already interesting just because who the hell writes both detective novels and epic fantasy? and is also interesting because, well, it was interesting. I liked ORDINATION a lot and you should check it out.
The Billie Eilish album is over so now I’m listening to Pearl Jam. The back half, specifically, because why not.
I miss Bill Withers.
I keep almost writing a post about Tara Reade. If you know who Tara Reade is, you can probably guess why I haven’t written the post yet, because it’s going to be a damned tricky thing to write one way or another.
I would like to remind everyone that I wanted to vote for a woman.
Indiana still doesn’t vote until fucking June, which is still two months away. So my opinion about Tara Reade, regardless of where I land on it, may not be relevant anyway.
As of right now, 5:41 PM on Monday April 6: 356,942 confirmed cases of coronavirus in the United States, and 10,524 deaths.
AN HOUR AND TEN MINUTES LATER: I finished Gigaton and have been listening to Binaural. My god, what a fucking amazing album Binaural is. Also, an additional 257 people have been reported dead in America while I’ve been sitting here listening to music.
If you happen to have noticed the headline change, it’s because I popped over to Scalzi’s site and saw this, and feel like since I saw the article yesterday I accidentally stole the post title. So it’s different now.

A brief thought concerning corporal punishment

On April 4, 2020 By Luther M. SilerIn ParentingLeave a comment

I basically forgot to blog today. I’ve done an astonishingly good job avoiding the Internet across the board beyond what was necessary to get my last little bit of grading done before Spring Break– yeah, I’m on Spring Break, somehow– and other than the couple of hours it took to do that I’ve basically either had my nose in a book or been sitting in front of the PS4. Not a bad way to spend a Saturday where I can’t leave the house, mind you, but I seriously just had a sort of “internet? what?” moment a bit ago.

We have decided to watch the entire Fast and Furious series while I am home, by the way. Right now we’re about 20 minutes into the first one and literally every object on the screen looks like it was filmed separately on a greenscreen. I don’t understand why this movie looks so terrible. I may end up having to livetweet a few of these, we’ll see.

Anyway.

Something occurred to me tonight as we were putting the boy to bed, and this is going to be one of those lead-ins where the lead-in is longer than the actual point of the post– but I swat my kid on the ass as a joke all the time, right? I’ve never spanked him, literally never laid a finger on him in anger, and neither has my wife. But I swat the kid on the ass as a joke all the time, particularly as I’m putting him to bed. Most nights end with a hug and a swat on the ass. And tonight, for no particular reason, I swatted him a little harder than usual, to the point where I noticed it. Did he? No. Not at all. He squealed like he usually does– it’s part of the game, basically– but if he had any idea that I’d swatted him any harder than I usually do he didn’t react to it.

Now, again, I’ve never spanked him and never hit him with the intent to hurt him. Not once. And the thought that floated through my head and triggered this piece is that if I did decide I was going to spank my kid, with the intent of it being painful and in some way theoretically modifying and/or punishing his behavior, I would have to hit him harder than I have ever hit anyone before. Which, okay, isn’t saying a lot, as while I’ve broken up dozens of fights over the years I haven’t been in one since fourth grade– but …

Yeah. I’m not doing that to my son.

That’s all.

Mark Oshiro reads The Benevolence Archives!

On April 3, 2020 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing2 Comments

Through a series of shenanigans involving a mutual Patreon supporter (thank you, Hatstand4510!) Mark Oshiro of Mark Does Stuff has done a blind YouTube reading of the first two short stories in The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1. I was aware this was coming, and I was terrified to actually watch the video, but Mark is a really engaging reader and he is at least convincingly faking enjoying the story.

It’s really odd as an author to watch someone reacting to your work in real-time; people talk to me after they read things sometimes, and once in a while I see reviews, but this react-as-you-go approach to reading is really fascinating, and it was really cool to see some of my jokes and hints toward future stories hit the mark (no pun intended) as Mark was reading through them. The video is half an hour long, so it’s a bit of an investment, but we all have time on our hands now, right? Check it out, and follow Mark on YouTube and Patreon if you want to see more!