Today’s stack is a bit shorter—I kept taking detours into other subjects so it’s taken me a while to finish the second book on this list. These two novels are both about changing reality, though in very different ways: one is about how information shapes our understanding of the world (and who controls that information), and the other is about literally changing the world with an unusual ability. Of course, being able to reshape reality to our liking is a terrifying power: we’ve probably all had times that we wish we could do it, but I don’t know that there’s anyone I actually would trust to wield that power responsibly, either. Here, then, are some stories of people wrestling with enormous power (and the responsibility that comes with it).
The Editors by Stephen Harrison
Where do you get your facts? How reliable is that source of information? I imagine most people—at the very least, most people who would be reading this website—probably get a lot of their information from some online source. It’s so common that “Google” is a verb for looking something up, though of course these days some might be just as quick to check social media or TikTok, or perhaps a favorite Reddit forum. And, of course, there’s Wikipedia: the online encyclopedia that anybody can edit. It’s fascinating how this site has become such a huge repository of human knowledge, and a lot of work goes into how the site is written, what information is included, and even what things are worthy of an entry at all.
The Editors is about a fictional version of Wikipedia, called Infopedium, with a similar timeline (but a different founder, Gerald Budd). The book focuses on some of the editors of Infopedium, particularly some of the high-level users who are very active on the site. They’ve enshrined Budd’s founding principles as law: “Aim for Neutrality. We Need Better Sources. Anonymity Is Fundamental. Keep Developing.” But many of them still have their own personal agendas or different understandings of what makes a source “better,” and the novel digs into the ways that they clash behind the scenes.
Morgan Wentworth is a freelance journalist (recently laid off), and is our entry point to this world. She’s looking for a story that she might be able to sell to the Manhattan Times (obviously a parallel for the New York Times), and decides to attend an Infopedium conference in late 2019, where she meets several of our primary characters. Alex is a neurodivergent high schooler who got into editing Infopedium because he loves trains and created entries for hundreds of train stations in Manhattan, but then got involved in stamping out misinformation on the site. DejaNu is a librarian with a mission to address the systemic bias on Infopedium, working to add more articles about women and ethnic minorities—much to the chagrin of Telos, a long-time editor who feels that he hasn’t ever gotten the credit he deserves for his own contributions. And then there’s Nevin, who has found a way to profit: he charges a fortune to “clean up” Infopedium entries using several sock puppet accounts, ensuring that the site portrays his clients and their businesses in a more favorable light.
The story is set in the months leading into the COVID-19 pandemic, and it shows how important it was to have a reliable source of information, but also how bad actors could manipulate that information. In the story, both the Chinese government and the Briggs Holdings Corporation (which includes pharmaceuticals) have their own reasons for controlling information about the virus. In the meantime, the antagonism between DejaNu and Telos, who are constantly undoing each other’s edits, eventually grows to threaten the site itself.
I found The Editors really fascinating. I’m somebody who does rely on Wikipedia quite a bit, but have never edited it myself. I’ve seen the way that people have used Wikipedia to make political statements, or the way that certain pages get heavily edited and re-edited when there’s controversy. One of the fun tips for Wikipedia is to click the “revision history” tab on an article to see how it has changed over time (and by whom). Although this is a fictional story, with a lot of suspense and some mystery to it, I also think it makes for a revealing peek behind the curtain: it’s a reminder that Wikipedia is indeed maintained by a lot of individuals, and although many of them are working hard to provide a reliable source of information, there are also a lot of other reasons that people could decide to edit pages as well.
The story is gripping, and while nobody wants to relive the days of lockdown and uncertainty of early 2020, I found that part of the story felt extremely relevant. It’s clear that the ability to control information on the internet is extremely powerful, and this book is a great example of why.
A House Like an Accordion by Audrey Burges
Keryth Miller had a strange childhood, and half the time she doesn’t even know how much of it was real. Her dad was able to draw things into reality, creating the houses they lived in, but the drawings had a cost: things he drew from life could be come trapped as drawings, vanishing from the real world. When Keryth—now an adult with two teenage daughters—discovers that she is starting to vanish, she guesses that her estranged father is drawing her, wherever he is, and she needs to find him.
Keryth and her husband, Max, have a successful company built around an AI assistant he created, based on hundreds of recordings of his own father’s voice. She puts some of their considerable wealth to use, trying to track down the many places that she lived, in the hopes that this will lead her to her father. Along the way, this starts to bring up ghosts of her past—things that she has never told her family and would prefer to remain buried.
The story jumps around in time between the present (well, 2016) and Keryth’s past—each time she finds one of her old houses, we get scenes from the time she lived there. The houses are strange, mashed together from different things that her father remembered seeing, and often located in whatever weird, isolated places he could find, so instead of addresses they have names like “The House in the Reeds” or “The House Without Walls,” which also serve as the chapter headings. (I found that, and the dates in the headings, a really helpful guide to keep me situated.) The end of each chapter includes other documents: newspaper articles and correspondence, often revealing other bits and pieces of Keryth’s history or that of her father.
I don’t want to say too much more because there are some surprises along the way. I liked the way that Keryth’s background gradually unfolds (like an accordion?): even as her body is gradually vanishing, you start to see her more and understand who she is and what she can do. A warning: it is also a book about loss, so it could be a painful read, too. Several of the characters in the book have lost loved ones, and the strained relationship between Keryth and Max feels like an ongoing loss throughout much of the book. But I felt the book was ultimately hopeful, and I really enjoyed it.
My Current Reads
This past week, of course, was the US election, and I have to admit that I’ve spent a lot more time doomscrolling than reading books, which is neither productive nor relaxing. I don’t know what I’m going to read next now that I’ve finished A House Like an Accordion, whether it’s something to help me get more informed or a bit of escapism. Probably a bit of both.
Disclosure: I received review copies of these two titles. Affiliate links to Bookshop.org help support my writing and independent booksellers instead of giving your money to billionaires.
