Books – Auxiliary Memory

The Forsytes on TV

by James Wallace Harris, 6/13/26

Would anyone still be reading John Galsworthy if British television didn’t keep producing new versions of The Forsyte Saga? Galsworthy did win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1932, the year before he died, but that recognition seldom guarantees an enduring audience.

I must admit I wouldn’t be reading Galsworthy books today if I hadn’t been a fan of all three miniseries based on The Forsyte Saga. Technically, The Forsyte Saga is the title Galsworthy gave to the first trilogy of novels based on the Forsyte family. All nine novels are called The Forsyte Chronicles.

I know it sounds obsessive that I’m reading the books after watching 42 episodes of the three miniseries. However, the novels color in the main characters with greater detail. They also flesh out all the minor characters we see standing around the main characters on the screen.

The literary world has forgotten Galsworthy as a Victorian materialist who didn’t make the evolutionary step to modernism. Virginia Woolf was particularly hard on Galsworthy for failing to portray the inner lives of his characters. We don’t get deep, long stream-of-consciousness narratives, but I do feel Galsworthy describes the inner world of his characters, sometimes explicitly but often implied through dialogue and action.

Soames Foryste, who readers will hate as much as Irene Forsyte hates him, does get our sympathy. Soames is so well developed over six novels that he feels like one of the historical figures Lytton Strachey wrote about in Eminent Victorians.

Personally, I don’t know why Anthony Trollope and John Galsworthy aren’t as popular with readers as Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. They fill in a gap in English history for readers who study history through novels. Galsworthy is well-suited for those who love Downton Abbey, which explains why British television has produced it three times.

Amazon has the Forsyte Collection for 99 cents, which claims to contain everything in 3,355 pages. There are several audiobook editions, but I’m listening to the Naxos editions. Naxos packages the entire story of nine novels using their trilogy names: The Forsyte Saga, A Modern Comedy, and End of the Chapter.

Only the first six novels actually focus on the Forsytes; the last three deal with a distant cousin.

The Forsytes Saga (1967) miniseries has 26 parts, and covers the first six novels and interludes (short stories):

The Man of Property
In Chancery
To Let
The White Monkey
The Silver Spoon
Swan Song

The Forsyte Saga (2002) miniseries has 10 parts, and only covers the first three novels and interludes (short stories):

The Man of Property
In Chancery
To Let

The latest television version, The Forsytes (2025), had only six episodes in its first season and covered only part of The Man of Property. It had been renewed for seasons 2 and 3. For some reason, it changes the story from the books and the two other television series. I don’t recommend starting with this series, even though it has the most elaborate production.

I recommend watching the 1967 series, which is in black-and-white. The only place I could find it was on YouTube. Among the stars were two of my favorites, Kenneth More and Susan Hampshire.

As far as I can remember, only Soames, Irene, and Winifred appear in all six of the first novels that focus on the Forsyte family from the 1880s until 1926. It involves at least ten love stories and eight marriages. It begins in Victorian times, spans the Edwardian, through World War I, and into the Jazz Age.

The 26 episodes of The Forsyte Saga reminded me a great deal of the 26 episodes of The Pallisers, which is based on six novels by Anthony Trollope. It made me wonder if Galsworthy was a fan of Trollope. But it also reminded me of the 12-volume novel series, Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell, and the four-part TV series of the same name. These English writers like to span generations, combining character drama and British history.

Although there are plenty of reasons to hate Soames Forsyte, I found him a fascinating character. I was very sympathetic to Irene Forsyte, but I also wanted to condemn her. I both liked and disliked Jon and Fleur. In the 1967 version, Fleur was played by Susan Hampshire. It’s hard to judge the faults of a character played by such a beautiful actress.

I’ve already seen the 2002 version twice, and I’m looking forward to watching it again. According to WatchNow, it’s available on Netflix and PBS. Damian Lewis portrays Soames wonderfully. The character is so unlikable, yet over time, you develop great sympathy for the poor man.

Unfortunately, I haven’t taken to the new 2025 version, although I will give it another viewing. The actors all look too young and beautiful. The costumes, sets, and production are luscious. Visually, it reminds me of HBO’s The Gilded Age. The latest big historical dramas all seem to be revising the past, so everyone is young and beautiful. I really appreciated all the genuinely old-looking characters in the 1967 version.

The miniseries focuses on romantic relationships. The novels also explore many other kinds of relationships. Soames and his father. Soames and his uncles and aunts. Soames with his brothers and sisters. Soames is the patron of Philip the artist. But they are also romantic rivals for Irene. In the second trilogy, A Modern Comedy, the novels focus on Soames’ relationship with his daughter Fleur. In the second trilogy, we see Soames in several business and political relationships. And we see Soames’ relationship to art – he’s a collector of paintings.

And this is just the connections of Soames. There is an intense relationship between Old Jolyon, Young Jolyon, and his son Jolly. We encounter even more relationships with their wives and lovers. Young Jolyon is Soames’s first cousin, and the two families have several overlapping relationships.

The story focuses on marriage from Victorian times through the Jazz Age. To the first and second generations of Forystes, marriage was about improving the Forsyte holdings. Soames twice marries poor, beautiful women who come to despise him. Intense love fails other couples. In the first six novels, I can only recall one marriage where love succeeds.

I’ve read enough about Galsworthy to know that the complicated Forsytes were somewhat inspired by his own family. And Galsworthy stole his wife, Ada, from his cousin, and they lived unmarried for several years, hiding the scandal from his father. After his father died, his cousin divorced Ada, and Galsworthy married her. This is paralleled with Jolyon and Soames.

In other words, there is great depth in these novels that makes The Forsytes worth reproducing for television. And it should encourage fans to read the novels.

JWH

Separate Tables (1958) and Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont (1971)

By James Wallace Harris, 5/26/26

Last Thursday, Bookbub offered me a $1.99 deal on Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor. That deal is no longer available, and the Kindle edition is now $5.99. However, my edition is an NRRB edition, and the current one is from Virago. They each have a different introduction. That makes me wonder about Bookbub deals. Well, that’s neither here nor there. Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont is a wonderful novel.

I bought the book and started reading it right away because it was about an elderly Englishwoman moving into a hotel that catered to retirees. For some reason, I’ve always liked movies, TV shows, and books where people live in a rooming house or hotel.

But here’s the coincidence I wanted to mention. Thursday night, YouTube offered me Separate Tables, a film about people living at an English residential hotel. You have to wonder just how savvy these AI algorithms are at knowing what we like.

I’ve since discovered there’s a film version of Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, also available to watch for free on YouTube. It would have been even eerier if the algorithm had offered me this film last Thursday. And one reason I’m reviewing these two stories together is that the people in the Claremont also ate at separate tables. Both stories are about loneliness. Mrs. Palefrey focuses on older people, and Separate Tables covers everyone.

Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, the novel, is a gentle tale about unhappiness that makes you feel good. Laura Palfrey is a widow with one estranged daughter and one indifferent grandson.

Elizabeth Taylor describes her: “She was a tall woman with big bones and a noble face, dark eyebrows and a neatly folded jowl. She would have made a distinguished-looking man and, sometimes, wearing evening dress, looked as Lord Louis Mountbatten might in drag.”

The plot of this novel is rather simple. Mrs. Palfrey is embarrassed that her grandson doesn’t come to visit. She befriends a starving would-be writer, Ludo Myers, who actually likes her. So she tells the other hotel guests that Ludo is her grandson. Keeping up this lie leads to light, pleasant humor. Along the way, we get to know the other elderly guests at the Claremont.

Only one old man, Mr. Osmond, lives among the old women. I sometimes go places where I’m the only old guy among a roomful of old women. So I identified with Mr. Osmond.

Separate Tables is a far more dramatic, edgier tale, on the verge of melodrama. The film is based on two one-act plays, and the story is told through an ensemble cast. David Niven won a Best Actor Oscar, even though his time on screen was short. In all, the film was nominated for seven Oscars, including Best Picture, and won two. The other was for Wendy Hiller for Best Supporting Actress.

Sibyl Railton-Bell (Deborah Kerr) is a homely spinster dominated by her mother, Mrs. Maud Railton-Bell (Gladys Cooper). Sibyl is emotionally fragile and is afraid of sex, yet she is attracted to Major David Angus Pollock (David Niven). Pollock is a lonely old man who pretends to be a war hero and has several dark secrets. John Malcolm (Burt Lancaster) is an American hiding out from life at the hotel. He has a tortured soul, drinks, but attracts the hotel manager, Pat Cooper (Wendy Hiller). They talk of getting married. Then Anne Shankland (Rita Hayworth) shows up. She’s an actress who has gotten too old and can no longer dominate men or get parts.

All the actors play against their famous type.

Separate Tables is gorgeous to look at, filmed in widescreen black-and-white. The story flows from one character to the next, bringing all the guests together into a scene I particularly liked. It’s near the end when they are all seated at separate tables, but talking to each other between tables.

Both stories, Between Tables and Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, are about loneliness. I’ve known several people who have said they were loneliest at parties, when they were around people. The characters in these two stories are frequently together. The virtue of Elizabeth Taylor’s novel is that the reader hears what’s going on in people’s heads. In contrast to the film, viewers must read the actors’ minds through facial expressions and body language.

I have this odd feeling I’ve seen Separate Tables before, but I have no real memory of it, just a bit of déjà vu. Getting old is a trip. I know I’m trying not to talk about it because it depresses my friends, but I find the experience fascinating, even all the forgetting.

I’ve always assumed that if my wife dies first, I’ll move into some kind of retirement community or assisted living. Most people I know dread the thought of such a lifestyle. I like the idea of having my own room for solitude, but being able to go downstairs and find a community. And I know as I get older and weaker, I’ll be glad to give up working in the yard, taking care of the house, and driving. I think such laziness is why I’m drawn to stories about people living on hotels and rooming houses.

I’m guessing that many of my friends will find these two stories disturbing. My peers hate anything that makes them think about aging. I guess I’m some kind of existential Boy Scout, because I consider such stories to be preparing me for the future.

By the way, the introduction to Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont in the current edition is by Paul Bailey, who claims to have been Taylor’s inspiration for Ludo. You can read the sample at Amazon to read the introduction, but here’s the part I liked.

I have to begin this appreciation of Elizabeth Taylor’s penultimate novel on a personal note. I was working as an assistant in Harrods when my first book, At the Jerusalem, was published in 1967 – a fact which, for some reason, struck the diarist of The Times as being of interest to the paper’s readers. A year after publication, I met Elizabeth Taylor at a party. She told me how intrigued she had been that a man in his late twenties should have chosen a home for old women as the setting for a novel, and that she had gone to Harrods’ magazine department to see what such a curious creature looked like. She went on to say that she had watched me at work for about an hour, from the vantage of a chair in the adjoining lounge. She smiled as she made this revelation. She had not anticipated seeing someone with a youthful appearance: she had expected me to be just a trifle wizened.

When I read Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont in 1971, I remembered Elizabeth Taylor’s confession. Ludovic Myers, the young man who comes to Mrs Palfrey’s aid when she falls in the street and who subsequently befriends her, is a novelist manqué. Throughout the course of Mrs Palfrey, he is writing a study of old age which – altering a phrase uttered over a pre-dinner sherry by his new, elderly friend – he gives the title They Weren’t Allowed to Die There. He works at Harrods, in the sense that he takes his manuscript into the (now vanished) banking hall, where he scribbles away happily, surrounded by Honourables on their uppers and tired county ladies resting their feet before the train journey back to the shires. Ludo, like me, is an ex-actor, who has done his stint in a tatty repertory company and has no desire to repeat the experience. In other words, I am flattered to think that I gave Elizabeth Taylor a little bit of inspiration for what is undoubtedly one of her finest books.

Taylor, Elizabeth (2011). Mrs Palfrey At The Claremont: A Virago Modern Classic (Virago Modern Classics Book 83) . Little, Brown Book Group. Kindle Edition.

JWH

ABUNDANCE by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson

by James Wallace Harris, 4/17/26

When I bought Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, I assumed it would be about creating a post-scarcity society. Instead, it’s about the supply-side progressivism. A post-scarcity society was a concept created by futurists and embraced by science fiction writers. It’s based on the idea that technology could produce such a surplus of everything that it would invalidate capitalism. It turns out supply-side progressivism (or the abundance movement) is somewhat related, but a smaller subset of post-scarcity.

The book Abundance originated with an essay by Klein in The New York Times and an essay by Thompson in The Atlantic. Before buying the book, I suggest reading those two essays and the Wikipedia entry. If you still feel a need to deep dive into this subject, the book is where to go. 40% of my Kindle edition is references and index. Klein and Thompson have done a massive amount of research.

Basically, Klein and Thompson are liberals attacking the government for too much regulation, and telling liberals that some of those laws designed to help people for liberal reasons are now hurting people that liberals also want to help.

The two cases Klein and Thompson focus on are finding homes for the homeless and for people who can’t afford one, and making healthcare more affordable. They go into great detail about how zoning laws are keeping us from solving the housing problem. The second focus is on how the federal government is now stifling innovation.

I agree that zoning laws keep us from solving housing problems, but I don’t think undoing those laws is possible or the full solution. I thought San Francisco was the wrong city to analyze, and considered Houston an unfair counter-example. San Francisco’s growth is limited by geography, and Houston has endless sprawl, so zoning may not be the defining factor.

I believe wealth and greed control zoning laws, and that’s not going to change. The American tech oligarchs have no trouble quickly building giant data centers, even when they face significant protests. I don’t think asking average Americans who are NIMBYs to become YIMBYs is a fair request. Or one that will bring about change.

I found their story of Katalin Karikó far more fascinating. I especially recommend chapters 4 and 5 on Invent and Deploy.

Karikó spent years submitting research proposals to study mRNA, which were routinely rejected because those who decided who received research grants didn’t think mRNA was worth studying. Yet, years later, her research led governments and pharmaceutical companies to develop Covid vaccines within one year, even though it normally takes years to develop a new vaccine.

Klein and Thompson praise the quick development of the mRNA vaccine under the Trump administration and wonder why Trump never took credit for it. They guess that Trump didn’t want to promote a huge success for big government, and a success for vaccines to his anti-government, anti-vax followers. They do recommend the book Warp Speed: Inside the Operation That Beat COVID, the Critics, and the Odds by Paul Mango. It proves how successful governments can create abundance when the need arises.

Klein and Thompson show how the federal government wastes huge amounts of money on scientific research through its current procedures and often backs the wrong research. They give a history of how the federal government was successful in the past but is now confined by policies and regulations.

Modern liberal politics is made possible by invention. Almost every product or service that liberals seek to make universal today depends on technology that did not exist three lifetimes ago—or, in some cases, half a lifetime ago. Medicare and Medicaid guarantee the elderly and poor access to modern hospitals, where many essential technologies—such as plastic IV bags, MRI and CT scan machines, and pulse oximeters—are inventions of the last sixty years. It is tempting to say that, with these essentials already in existence, it is time for society to focus at last only on the fair distribution of existing resources rather than the creation of new ideas. But this would be worse than a failure of imagination; it would be a kind of generational theft. When we claim the world cannot improve, we are stealing from the future something invaluable, which is the possibility of progress. Without that possibility, progressive politics is dead. Politics itself becomes a mere smash-and-grab war over scarce goods, where one man’s win implies another man’s loss.

The world is filled with problems we cannot solve without more invention. In the fight against climate change, the clean energy revolution will require building out the renewable energy that we have already developed. But decarbonization will also require technology that doesn’t exist yet at scale: clean jet fuel, less carbon-intensive ways to manufacture cement, and machines to remove millions of tons of carbon from the atmosphere.

In health care, the last few centuries of invention have turned a death planet—where disease ran rampant and, before 1850, one in two babies perished before their sixteenth birthday—into a world where people can look forward to generation-over-generation increases in life expectancy. But there are still so many mysteries that require fresh breakthroughs. We’ve made disappointingly little progress with many cancers. Complex diseases like Alzheimer’s and schizophrenia elude treatment or even basic comprehension. The cellular process of aging is a deep mystery. We still don’t have effective vaccines for adult tuberculosis or hepatitis C, or vaccine platforms that we can immediately scale up in the event of a new pandemic. Decades from now, our children may gawk in horror that people with chronic pain or lingering illness in the early twenty-first century couldn’t take a simple all-purpose saliva or blood test to answer the basic question Why do I feel sick? If disease is a universe of mysteries, we have scarcely explored one minor solar system of its cosmos.

Inventions that may seem outlandish today may soon feel essential to our lives. Streets filled with electric self-driving cars that give us mobility without emissions and free us from the vast number of deaths caused by faulty human reflexes or judgment. Gigantic desalination facilities that transform our oceans into drinkable tap water. An economy with robots that build our houses and machines that take on our most dangerous and soul-draining work. Wearable devices to scan our bodies for diseases. Vaccines that we can rub on our skin rather than inject at the end of a needle. As unrealistic, or even ludicrous, as some of these ideas might seem, they are not much more ludicrous than a rejected, ignored, and unfunded mRNA theory that came out of nowhere to save millions of lives in a pandemic. To make these things possible and useful in our lifetime requires a political movement that takes invention more seriously.16

So, where is that movement? Invention rarely plays a central role in American politics. In health care, for example, Democrats have spent decades fighting for universal insurance, while Republicans have consistently fought its expansion. But while the dominant fight in Washington is typically about how we buy health care, we rarely talk about the health care that exists to be bought. After all, in the future, progressives don’t just want everyone to have an insurance card; they want that card to provide access to a world of treatments that liberates patients from unnecessary disease and debilitating pain. Technology expands the value of universalist policies.

If progressives underrate the centrality of invention in their politics, conservatives often underrate the necessity of government policy in invention. “The government has outlawed technology,” the investor and entrepreneur Peter Thiel said in a debate with Google CEO Eric Schmidt in 2014, echoing a popular view among techno-optimists and libertarians that government laws mostly block innovation. But many of Silicon Valley’s most important achievements have relied on government largesse. Elon Musk is now a vociferous critic of progressive policy. But he has also been a beneficiary of it. In 2010, when Tesla needed cash to launch its first family-friendly sedan, the Model S, the company received a $465 million loan from the Obama administration Department of Energy.17 His rocket-launching company, SpaceX, has received billions of dollars from NASA under Democratic and Republican administrations. Musk has become a lightning rod in debates over whether technological progress comes from public policy or private ingenuity. But he is a walking advertisement for what public will and private genius can unlock when they work together.

Beyond merely regulating technology, the state is often a key actor in its creation. An American who microwaves food for breakfast before using a smartphone to order a car to take them to the airport is engaging with a sequence of technologies and systems—the microwave, the smartphone, the highway, the modern jetliner—in which government policies played a starring role in their invention or development. Federal science spending is so fundamental to the overall economy that a 2023 study found that government-funded research and development have been responsible for 25 percent of productivity growth in the US since the end of World War II.18 “There is widespread agreement that scientific research and invention are the key driver of economic growth and improvements in human well-being,” the Dartmouth economist Heidi Williams said. “But I think researchers do a poor job of communicating its importance to lawmakers, and lawmakers do a poor job of making science policy a major focus.”19

The pandemic proved the necessity of invention yet again. The mRNA COVID vaccines saved millions of lives and spared the US more than $1 trillion in medical costs.20 But they might have never existed if it weren’t for Karikó’s force of will—and the cosmic luck of an extremely well-placed Xerox machine.

Klein, Ezra; Thompson, Derek. Abundance (pp. 134-137). Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.

Ultimately, Abundance brings little hope. I think the book showed too many examples of how we can’t create abundance and why. It thoroughly convinced me that our current political evolution is in the wrong direction.

Yes, Katalin Karikó and mRNA are shining examples of what’s possible, but one great example does not prove that change will happen. All the other examples Klein and Thompson used were from history, suggesting that Americans will step up to the plate when they face a great challenge, but not in ordinary times.

AI and data centers are a major challenge, and we aren’t stepping up. Please read “How the American Oligarchy Went Hyperscale” by Tim Murphy. Greed drives us. Klein and Thompson even use examples of how monetary prizes can be used to solve problems.

The Tech Bro Oligarchy promises a post-scarcity society with AI, which is the kind I was expecting the book Abundance to be about. But I don’t believe in that kind either. At 74, I doubt the pie-in-sky dreams science fiction promises. Just because we live in science-fictional times doesn’t mean they’ll lead to science-fictional futures.

AI-generated abundance will ruin us. Old-fashioned human-generated abundance is possible, but greed will always keep the wealthy from sharing it.

p.s.

This essay was not written with any help from AI. All the ideas are my own. But are they? My ideas come from reading books and magazines. I train my mind on information just like AIs are trained. I’ve cancelled my AI subscriptions. I’m putting that money into buying more books and magazines. Reading Abundance did me more good for my mind than reading what AI has to say about it. Gemini produced excellent summaries, but they didn’t stick in my mind.

Grinding through the book word by word will not help me remember everything, but I do think it helps me remember more than reading AI summaries. But in the long run, what’s important to remember is that we could live in a saner, more compassionate society.

JWH

Audible Has Granted Some of My 2018 Wishes

by James Wallace Harris, 4/13/26

When I joined Audible back in 2002, I wanted to reread (by listening) my favorite science fiction books I had read growing up. Audible did a fantastic job producing hundreds of science fiction novels first published in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. However, there were quite a few I kept waiting to hear. In 2018, I published a list of 67 science fiction books I hoped Audible would produce. I came across that list today. I thought I’d reprint it, annotating which wishes were granted.

Unfortunately, Audible has quietly dropped many old science fiction books from its catalog. On a discussion board today, one member described a visit to Barnes & Noble, where he looked to see how many old science fiction titles that Baby Boomers grew up reading were available for new readers to buy. I’m not sure he would find any of these books in B&N’s science fiction section. I do give Audible credit for keeping a great many mid-20th-century SF in print. Luckily, I bought hundreds of old science fiction books on Audible, and they’re still in my library, even if they are no longer for sale.

Here’s my wishlist from 2018. I link to Wikipedia for those titles that are now available at Audible. (It was the best way I could make them stand out.)

Per the comment below, I’ve looked for these books on YouTube, and marked those titles.)

A Voyage to Arcturus (1920) by David Lindsay (YouTube)
The World of Null-A (1948) by A. E. Van Vogt (YouTube)
The Voyage of the Space Beagle (1950) by A. E. Van Vogt (YouTube)
The Legion of Time (1952) by Jack Williamson
The Long Loud Silence (1952) by Wilson Tucker
Marooned on Mars (1952) by Lester del Rey
Bring the Jubilee (1953) by Ward Moore
Children of the Atom (1953) Wilma H. Shiras
A Mirror for Observers (1954) by Edgar Pangborn
Mission of Gravity (1954) by Hal Clement
Cities in Flight (1955) by James Blish
Citizen in Space (1955) by Robert Sheckley
Rocket to Limbo (1957) by Alan E. Nourse (YouTube)
Wasp (1957) by Eric Frank Russell
The Enemy Stars (1958) Poul Anderson
The Lincoln Hunters (1958) by Wilson Tucker
The Fourth “R” (1959) by George O. Smith (YouTube)
The High Crusade (1960) by Poul Anderson (YouTube)
Hothouse (1962) by Brian W. Aldiss
Second Ending (1962) by James White
Davy (1964) by Edgar Pangborn
Simulacron-3 (1964) by Daniel Galouye
Earthblood (1966) by Keith Laumer and Rosel George Brown
Empire Star (1966)
The Witches of Karres (1966) by James H. Schmitz
Lords of the Starship (1967) by Mark S. Geston
Camp Concentration (1968) by Thomas Disch
Of Men and Monsters (1968) by William Tenn (YouTube)
Omnivore (1968) by Piers Anthony
Past Master (1968) by R. A. Lafferty
Space Chanty (1968) by R. A. Lafferty
The Last Starship from Earth (1968) by John Boyd
The Still, Small Voice of Trumpets (1968) by Lloyd Biggle, Jr.
Behold the Man (1969) by Michael Moorcock
Bug Jack Barron (1969) by Norman Spinrad
Macroscope (1969) by Piers Anthony
And Chaos Died (1970) by Joanna Russ
The Year of the Quiet Sun (1970) by Wilson Tucker
The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth (1971) by Roger Zelazny
The Fifth Head of Cerberus (1972) by Gene Wolfe (YouTube)
The Listeners (1972) by James Gunn
The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe (The Unsleeping Eye) (1973) by D. G. Compton
The Centauri Device (1974) by M. John Harrison
Orbitsville (1975) by Bob Shaw
The Female Man (1975) by Joanna Russ
The Shockwave Rider (1975) by John Brunner
Trouble on Triton (1976) by Samuel R. Delany
On Wings of a Song (1979) by Thomas M. Disch
Ridley Walker (1980) by Russell Hoban (YouTube)
No Enemy But Time (1982) by Michael Bishop
Native Tongue (1984) by Suzette Haden Elgin
Ancient of Days (1985) by Michael Bishop
The Falling Woman (1986) by Pat Murphy
Mindplayers (1988) by Pat Cadigan
Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (1990) by James Tiptree, Jr.
A Woman of the Iron People (1991) by Eleanor Arnason
Sarah Canary (1991) – Karen Joy Fowler
Synners (1991) by Pat Cadigan
China Mountain Zhang (1992) by Maureen F. McHugh
Ammonite (1993) by Nicola Griffith
Galatea 2.2 (1995) by Richard Powers
Ingathering: The Complete People Stories of Zenna Henderson (1995)
Holy Fire (1996) by Bruce Sterling
The Book of the Long Sun (1993-96) by Gene Wolfe
Aye, and Gomorrah (2003) by Samuel R. Delany
Store of the Worlds (2012) by Robert Sheckley
The Future is Female (2018) edited by Lisa Yaszek

JWH

Ever Wonder Why Web Pages Keep Reloading on Your Phone? Or How Advertisers Know What You Are Thinking About Buying?

by James Wallace Harris, 3/20/26

I’ve practically stopped reading web pages on my phone because I can’t get to the end of an article without it reloading several times. That irritates the crap out of me. Yesterday, my friend Mike sent me a blog post that explains why web pages do this: “The 49MB Web Page.”

Shubham Bose realized while reading a page at the New York Times that it involved “422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data.” Bose is a software engineer and decided to deconstruct how and why. I highly recommend reading his explanation of what happens when you load a webpage. He also explains the hidden machinery that tracks our personal data.

My friend Anne and I joke that we can talk in person about something we’re interested in, and the next time we get on our computers, the algorithm is sending us information about what we talked about privately. Bose does not explain that apparent bit of mind-reading by our AI overload, but if we’re being observed in 422 ways each time we read a page, it can probably predict what we will think about soon.

Bose is an engineer interested in the user interface (UI) and user experience (UX), and recommends programming techniques that could make me like reading on my phone again.

Is that the real solution? Make our experience better so we don’t notice all the activity behind our reading?

Personally, I’m slowly returning to magazine reading. It’s hard to give up the convenience of the internet, but the UI and UX of print magazines are more enjoyable.

Magazines cost a lot of money and people naturally prefer free. But that’s another philosophical issue over technology. The internet provides endless free content, but is it really free? There’s a reason why free comes with 422 network calls and 49MB of spying programs.

My friend Linda and I are reading If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares. The book is about how we should worry that AI will wipe us out. The authors present many scenarios in which AIs could drive us to extinction. Most of them sound like science fiction, but there are mundane hints we should ponder.

This morning, I read “The Laid-off Scientists and Lawyers Training AI to Steal Their Careers” by Josh Dzieza about several companies that hire laid-off experts to train AIs to make fewer mistakes. Online systems entice desperate humans to work in digital sweatshops to train AIs to put other humans out of work. The same kind of monitoring used to sell us shit is used to track their work. The system traps them in a cycle of working for less and less money because they know these people are desperate to put food on the table and pay rent.

Is artificial intelligence doing this to us, or is it our own greed? At some point, we need to decide. There are many stories like this YouTube video, which suggest that AI can’t take our jobs.

It might be dangerous to get too comfortable with that idea. Because I also watched another video that shows how fast AIs are learning.

We have to decide, although our greed might not let us. One article and one video claim the solution is to develop a symbiotic relationship. But what happens when the AI gets smarter than us? If they don’t need us, will they want us around?

Many claim the internet brings out the worst in people, and it makes us overall dumber. There’s that old saying, “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.” Isn’t AI and the internet teaching us how not to fish?

JWH