Sometimes you get what you wish for, and sometimes magical thinking fails to pay off. Today’s stack involves stories of wishes and dreams, some granted and some unfulfilled.
8 Billion Genies written by Charles Soule, illustrated by Ryan Browne
I mentioned this one briefly last week. This was from a couple years ago, but I just got around to reading it recently. I recognized Charles Soule’s name primarily for The Oracle Year, his first novel, which I read in 2021. I hadn’t known that he has written a lot more comics, including some titles from the big two like Superman, Green Lantern, and Daredevil.
The premise of 8 Billion Genies is simple at first: at the moment that the 8 billionth person on Earth is born, every person gets their own personal genie, who will grant them a single wish. Chaos ensues.
Our entry point to the story is in the Lampwick Bar and Grill in Michigan, where a small group is present: the bartender, a band setting up for the evening’s show, a kid trying to get his drunk dad to wake up, and a Chinese couple, expecting a baby, who have mistakenly wandered into the wrong bar. Almost immediately, the bartender, Will Williams, makes a wish: that no wishes made outside of the bar can affect the bar or anyone inside it. It proves to be a prescient wish, as the world outside is immediately changed: flying people, giant robots, dinosaurs, you name it.
The comic has an interesting pacing: shortly after the introduction, we get a full page image of the Earth labeled “The First Eight Seconds,” showing the human population and the genie population both at 8 billion. (As the genies grant wishes, they dissipate.) From there we move to the first eight minutes, then hours, then days, and so on—and both the human population and the genie population drop drastically. Eventually, the story covers the first eight centuries, and the way that Soule and Browne make that happen is pretty fascinating. The illustration style is mostly naturalistic, but with the genies themselves looking like little blue cartoony versions of each of the humans they’re paired with. It also contrasts with some of the results of wishes—you’ll see all sorts of ridiculous things in the background, as people have wished to life cartoons and videogames and whatever else they could think of. (One thing that feels weirdly inconsistent to the premise is that the Chinese couple has an extra genie hanging around for their unborn child, but the story is that the genies appeared the moment the human population hit 8 billion. Did other pregnant women also have genies in waiting? We don’t know, because we never see any.)
For much of the story, we see glimpses of the world from the perspective of the people we first met at the bar. The three band members eventually set off from the bar and start making their way out into this bizarre new world. The Chinese couple have some sort of important meeting they’re talking about, and remain at the bar for a while until after their daughter is born. We also get little vignettes from other parts of the world, and we see the way that the wishes totally reshape the world. People who wished for fame or fortune soon realize their wishes were wasted, because in a world where anyone can have anything (once), what is fame or fortune? The real power is in the wishes, and very soon people who haven’t used their wishes become very sought-after, for good or ill.
I really enjoyed 8 Billion Genies—it’s an interesting examination of human nature, what we desire and how we try to attain it. I definitely think I’d be one of the people who just couldn’t decide: if you only get one, how do you know whether it’s the right thing? There’s also a whole subplot about kids—because they all got wishes too!—and what happens when you let a bunch of kids have whatever they wish for, or how parents try to guard their kids against making poor decisions. Overall, it’s just a very fun thought experiment—but definitely written for adults, not kids.
Failure to Launch: A Tour of Ill-Fated Futures edited by Kel McDonald
This comics anthology is just what the title says: each of the stories (by different writers and artists) is about some vision of the future that didn’t pan out. From free energy to milk transfusions to bringing hippos to America, this book is filled with dreams that crashed and burned. Failure to Launch reminds me a little bit of another comic I read a while back, This Land Is My Land, which collected stories of micronations and self-made states, many of which failed or never even got past the idea stage. As is sometimes the case with anthologies, I found the quality of the writing and illustrating to be a little uneven—there were definitely several chapters that could have used a proofreader, with errors in the text that looked like typos that weren’t caught.
That said, overall it’s a great collection and I really enjoyed reading it. Some stories I’d heard before but perhaps with a different perspective, and some were totally new to me. They range from global news—the Y2K scare, for instance—to the personal—E. Altman tells the story of working at her father’s PC repair shop. Some take a fictional spin on real fizzles: “The World Turns” by Barbara Mazzi features a character who buys into every “the world is ending” story, over and over. Want to know how the world was sold on leaded gasoline? That’s here. How about whatever happened to Sony’s Aibo robot dog? That’s here, too.
The book concludes with a story written by Harry “Hbomberguy” Brewis and illustrated by Skutch about Luddites, and in particular the figure of Ned Ludd for whom they were named. I’ve heard different takes on this over the past few years, and the more I learn about the Luddites the more I realize how much is lost when we use the term dismissively.
Overall, if you like reading about big ideas and outsized dreams—and particularly if you enjoy a bit of schadenfreude—this one is worth checking out.
Brownstone written by Samuel Teer, illustrated by Mar Julia
Almudena never met her dad, who left her mom when she was still a baby. But now that she’s almost 15, her mom is off to chase an opportunity, so Almudena is going to spend the summer with her dad, Xavier. The problem? He’s Guatemalan and barely speaks English, but her mom (who is white) never taught her any Spanish. Not only that, when she arrives at the old brownstone he calls home, she finds that he’s in the middle of a renovation project—and he seems to expect her to help!
Although Almudena had often wished that she could get to know her dad better—and that maybe her mom and dad would get back together and they’d be the perfect family—this summer didn’t turn out exactly the way she imagined. For one, she quickly finds out that her dad has a pretty serious relationship with somebody else. She also has a lot of difficulty at first figuring out where she fits in: she really doesn’t know what it means to be Guatemalan, and she gets a lot of advice and comments from everyone in the neighborhood.
Brownstone was a really touching story about a girl figuring herself out, particularly as a kid from a mixed background. Almudena is caught between worlds: she doesn’t look like her mom, but then she finds that she doesn’t totally fit in with her dad either. Her relationship with her dad (and with his community) grows over the summer and they both start to understand each other better through the ups and downs.
The Deep Dark by Molly Knox Ostertag
Mags is a busy high school senior: she’s got a job at the local diner, she takes care of her sick grandmother, and—oh, yeah—she always has to get down to basement every night to feed the blood-hungry something that lives in the cage down there. Yeah, it’s complicated. Mags doesn’t dare dream about her future, because her secret keeps her tied to this house, this place, this life. Then Nessa comes back to town—Mags’ friend from childhood who moved away years ago, and seems interested in more than just catching up. But she’s also asking questions that get a little too close to Mags’ secret, questions spurred by the secrets they shared with each other as kids.
Like Ostertag’s previous comics (The Girl from the Sea, The Witch Boy trilogy), The Deep Dark is a story about queer teens figuring themselves out: Nessa is trans and we get a glimpse in a flashback of her talking about it, and when she arrives back in town she has made her transition and reintroduces herself. We discover that Mags regularly meets up with Ava to make out, even though Ava has a serious boyfriend, and that is also tangled up with how Mags feels about her own secret. Because of it, she pushes people away from her, and pushes herself too hard—but Nessa may be able to help her see things in a new way.
The Deep Dark is pretty intense, and is definitely written more for young adults than middle grade readers. It’s also a much bigger book, about twice as long as The Girl from the Sea, which gives the story more space to build up gradually and for Mags’ secret to be slowly revealed over the course of the book. It’s powerful, emotional, and—as Ostertag shares in a brief afterword—very personal story.
All This & More by Peng Shepherd
I’ve only just started this novel, which comes out next month, but it fits today’s theme so I’ll give a brief introduction, and will say more about it when I’ve finished. The book centers on a reality TV show called All This and More, which uses a quantum bubbling technology to allow the show’s lone “contestant” a chance to relive key moments of their past, making different decisions and leading to new outcomes—which can then be slotted into reality as a new life. Marsh—a nickname based on “marshmallow” because she’s so soft and sweet—is the new star of the show, and we get a recap of her life, the way that she went through life avoiding risks … but now finds herself in middle age, divorced from a cheating husband, fired from her job, and worried that she has just ruined her best chance at a new love. This show will give her the opportunity to try different choices: does she still marry Dylan, knowing what came later? Will she give up her law career to become a mother? Or maybe she will stick with her high school sweetheart instead of moving away?
The gimmick is that the book itself lets you help make those decisions: it’s choose-your-own-adventure style, where you get to follow the story to different places. Unlike the typical pick-a-path book, though, there are pretty big chunks of story before the choices rather than just a couple of pages. The first choice comes more than 50 pages in, and then after that you hop around between “episodes” of the show, each about 20 pages or so, as Marsh decides which new thread of her life to pursue for each episode.
I’m curious to see where this goes: on top of the usual “change your past” plotline, which I’ve seen in other books and movies before, there’s definitely something going on with the TV show itself. The opening of the book describes the wildly successful first season, and then an abruptly canceled second season, before Marsh is selected for this third season with a new network and crew. There are some hints that something weird happened along the way, and I’m eager to see how that subplot unfolds.
May Contain Lies by Alex Edmans
Finally, I’m about halfway through this nonfiction book. It may seem a little out of place on this list, but it ties in because of the wishful thinking. The subtitle of the book is “How stories, statistics, and studies exploit our biases—and what we can do about it,” and it digs into how we often believe statements that we want to be true, despite the fact that they are not supported by evidence.
The first part explains two major biases that often trap us—confirmation bias and black-and-white thinking—and then Edmans explores how those biases are often used to convince us of things that aren’t strongly based in reality. The book is structured around what he calls the Ladder of Misinference: a statement is not a fact, facts are not data, data is not evidence, and evidence is not proof—but we often climb this ladder, putting things higher than they actually belong. He explains each step of the ladder, describing what the differences are between the rungs, and shows us examples of reports or books or claims that take that extra step up the ladder.
I haven’t yet gotten to the “what we can do about it” section, though the biggest takeaway so far is just checking whether a statement is one that will play into confirmation bias and black-and-white thinking: that is, do I want the statement to be true, and does the statement paint things in black and white without nuance? If so, then I should be careful about accepting it as truth without more proof.
The book reminds me of Thinking 101 by Woo-Kyoung Ahn (which I wrote about in December), another book that dives into our biases and gives tips for overcoming them, though this time instead of the hows and whys of biases, the book is more focused on identifying what is and isn’t reliable information. In a time when it feels like we are surrounded by more and more sources of misinformation and disinformation (see also: A Firehose of Falsehood), this is certainly a welcome lesson. I’ve already used some of Edmans’ suggestions in the past week when reading an article I saw shared online, by checking to see if the referenced report actually stated what the article said.
My Current Stack
Aside from the two books mentioned above that I’m still reading, I also read the online comic Kinfire Chronicles: The First Expedition, set in the world of the various Kinfire board games that I’ve been enjoying. The story takes place before the events of the games I’ve played—it’s after the arrival of the Starless Nights and tells the story of the first team of Seekers sent out of the city of Din’Lux with kinfire lanterns and the various things they encountered. It’s a band-of-misfits sort of story, where they start off pretty distrustful of each other, but eventually learn to rely on each other and become a team. We also get glimpses of many of the city’s leaders, the ones who show up in the game Kinfire Council—and you see all of the conspiring and maneuvering that they do to stay in power. I enjoyed the story so far, though the Webtoon format makes for a lot of brief episodes so it gets broken up into short chunks instead of being able to just page through it like a book. The story is also not over, though it appears to be on hiatus at the moment.
Disclosure: I received review copies of these books. Affiliate links to Bookshop.org help support independent booksellers and my writing!
