Leadership, power and succession. Then what? The Library at Mount Char, by Scott Hawkins

 Suppose there is a very bad person in a position of power.  Abusive, manipulative, sadistic... what would you do?  Presuming you could do anything.  What would you do to take power?  And if you succeed, if you succeed in taking power, if you succeed, in that other meaning of the word, to the position of power, what next?  Read The Library at Mount Char, by Scott Hawkins.  Perhaps some of these questions and themes might strike you as relevant.

Here is the set-up, doled out rather effectively.  Reality is occasionally re-written as one great power succeeds a prior.  The current power is "Adam Black," which is as good a name as any for a very, very old entity.  He is tens of thousands of years old, and whether or not what he does counts as "magic" is something to be contested within the novel, but whatever.  He has been at it for a very long time, and he has been writing books about how he does what he does.  So many that, at this point, it constitutes its very own multidimensional library.  The titular library, of course.  A few years back, the US government tried to take out Adam Black.  They failed, of course.  In the process, they orphaned some kids in the small community where he had been living.  He "adopted" the kids, or took them in as students, or something.  He becomes "Father," and directs them to study one "catalog" of magic each, from his Library of Doom.  He fucks them up.  Why?  He's not a good person.

Enter our POV kid, all grown up and all fucked up-- Carolyn Sopaski.  Unassuming, easily ignored, and not the expected turncoat to murder and overthrow Father, seize control, and basically run all of reality, but basically, that's what she manages.  Her catalog is the study of language, which means that she can learn basically anything.  Including anything in that Library.  She's not supposed to study any other catalog, but shit happens, and she does, and basically, she's the one who is not only pushed too far by Father, but who can keep cool, form a plan, and carry it out.

So here's the thing.  I present this to you, as the concept for a book, and that's the book.  Right?  That's about the first 2/3 of the book.  Carolyn wins.  Remarkably anti-climactically.  Father was killed off-page, and the other big showdown was so low-key you barely notice it.  Then... what?  She's the new Father.  The new one in charge of reality.  Then... what?  Start playing a Who song?  Here's the problem.  Father was a fuckin' psycho, yeah.  But, once Carolyn finds herself runnin' the show, she doesn't know what to do.  Enemies at the gate, and all that.  The sun?  Well, that was actually an entity.  Gone now, bu-bye.  Complicated.

But it's gone now.  Um... kind of important, that!

What's Carolyn gonna do about it?

Hang on, I've got other enemies to deal with!  Don't bother me with this!

And that's the brilliance of this book.  She takes over, wins, and she has no clue what next, so everything goes to shit.

Politically, there's stuff about which I would like to nit-pick, and I'll do so, at least quickly.  'Cuz it's a thing I do.  First, the president cannot issue pardons for state crimes.  At one point, Carolyn is setting up her childhood friend to show up at the right place at the right time, but as part of this process, he gets arrested, then broken out of prison, and there's this whole, big thing, but he's a fugitive.  So Carolyn manages to have the President promise a pardon.  Presidents can issue pardons for federal crimes, not state crimes.  There's another bit, which is realistically just a joke, about the President and your fan-bait character, Erwin, arranging a poker game, and the President jokes that if he loses too much money, he can print more, and, um... no.  The supply of bills is tightly restricted, and not subject to unilateral executive order, and the Mint won't just print up more bills 'cuz the Prez says so, and the Fed has independence, and the relationship between the Federal Reserve, and the Mint, which is under the Department of Treasury is... OK, fine, yes, it was a joke, but it bugged me, particularly when the phrase, "money supply," is so frequently misunderstood.

But never mind.  It's a good book.  It deals with an issue that most books don't really address.  You won.  What next?  You defeated the Evil King/Tyrant/Dictator, hurrah/huzzah, ticker-tape parades and perhaps the philosophically inclined sidekick asks, "but at what cost?"  But that isn't even the interesting question.  The interesting question is, what do you do?  Because those costs are paid.  They're as sunk as the Maine, as sunk as a mundane, old rowboat in a tiny fishin' hole at the bottom of a nondescript lake, and as relevant to your decision as either one.  The glory of the former equal now to the glory of the latter, or if not the glory, the relevance.  What the fuck do you do?

Carolyn really wasn't ready for what was next.  Father was a shit, which was not to say that things didn't at least vaguely, kinda work, but he fucking sucked.  It takes no stretch of the imagination to understand why Carolyn wanted to usurp him.  Hawkins shows you.  Yet one of the important things that we learn is that reality has been reset and re-run many times.  Carolyn's adoptive "brother," David, was originally supposed to be Father's successor (Carolyn's usurpation was Father's plan, in this iteration of the timeline), but for that to work, Carolyn was set up as his adversary rather than the other way around.  Yet to make that happen, she became so monstrous.  And in the reality we observe, she's still pretty bad.  Upon her ascension, she doesn't really appear to give a fuck that life on Earth is basically all dying because of that sun-disappearing-thing.  She's concerned with consolidating her power.  Yeah, watch me not give a fuck about her supposed bigger concerns if all life goes away.  That's the point.

She had no plan, and was totally in over her head.

If a person actually does manage to get into a position of power and isn't ready, no matter if the predecessor sucked, it'll be bad.  We are led to believe that Father's predecessor really was worse.  And OK, sure, fine.  And this sets up the question for Carolyn.  What for her?  She has no plan.  Not even any concept of a need for a plan.  And Father's horribleness doesn't alleviate the need for one.

I wrote yesterday about the Omicron variant.  We are not vaccinating the world.  We are still not doing what needs to be done on climate change.  Yeah, Trump was shit.  OK, he's gone.  (Not gone gone, and we still need to deal with his lying fucking ass, but he is not in office now.)  Just an example, but what now?  What's the plan?  I'm sorry, but an infrastructure bill is not a fucking plan, and that first round of vaccinations could not possibly have been the end of the story.  Seriously, nobody saw this coming?  Seriously?

Big picture.  Yeah, get rid of the Big Bad.  Take over, put yourself in charge.  If you don't have real plans to deal with the big issues, though, so what?  I cannot draw a straight line from Biden to Carolyn Sopaski.  Biden is trying.  The point in Library at Mount Char was that Carolyn kinda wasn't.  Or, she was, a bit, but was so lost in the process of consolidating her own power that the idea of dealing with all life on Earth dying out just didn't get onto her radar.  But my points are as follows.  First, getting the Big Bad out of power is only the first step.  Processes are in motion, and you need plans to deal with them.  If you don't, it's all for naught.

Remember when they gave Barack Obama a Nobel Peace Prize for not being George W. Bush?  No matter how far left you may be, remember looking at Trump and thinking, oh, what I wouldn't give to have George W. Bush back?  Yeah, Biden doesn't get the Nobel for not being Trump.  The financial crisis dumped onto Obama's lap was not actually caused by George W. Bush, and TARP, while messy (a rushed job), at least created enough time to get pieces into position.  They moved rationally in response to a crisis they didn't create, and Obama then moved rationally.  Then the GOP went fuckin' nuts, and problems ensued, eventually giving us Trump, but the thing is, it was basically a big math problem.

Climate change was staring us down then.  We have 12 years of inaction, making things worse, and a pandemic doesn't work the same way.  From TARP to stimulus, it was a math problem aimed at getting the economy to move again, which is a thing that happens because capitalism just fucking works.  Communism doesn't, capitalism does, go away Donald, you fucking mercantilist moron, go away squad, you fucking commies, let capitalism work.

Pandemics?  They're made of these things called, "viruses."  Which really should be "viri," but let's skip that today.  Evolution is a thing.  Yeah, arm jabs.  First round.  Or two.  Not enough!  Why?  Evolution.  Like I wrote yesterday, we should have been gearing up to vaccinate the fucking planet.  First priority, particularly given the cost relative to the shit that's in these damned bills.

Otherwise, we're just going to keep getting more and more variants, until our vaccines can't keep up.  Why?  Evolution is better at this than we are.  Vir(i)us(es) mutate randomly, and intelligent design isn't a thing, but they get a fuckload of rolls of the dice, and evolution gets to save the good rolls, and toss the bad rolls.  Fuckin' cheater motherfucker...  Or I suppose, technically not, but that's the point.  Regardless, this was predictable, by a glorious thing called "science."

So what's the plan, Stan?  Where do we go, Joe?

Yeah, points for effort, and buying us some time.  You are not Carolyn Sopaski, so kudos for meeting that not-so-high bar.  But Trump wasn't Adam Black.  Adam Black was competent.  Also, he wrote his own books.  And Joe ain't Carolyn, who was motivated more by personal vendetta than civic-mindedness, and Biden is civic-minded.  It's just that without a long-term plan, the civic-ness of his minded-ness is as relevant as my occasional decisions to violate my grammatical persnicketiness.

You won.  We need a plan.  Not just a stopgap, but a long-term plan.  Always true, but never more so than when cleaning up the mess of the old boss, worse than the new boss, and any conceivable boss an iteration of reality might ever generate.  We still need a long-term plan beyond gettin' rid of the old boss and rockin' out to The Who.

And of course, music.  No, not The Who.  I actually do kind of like The Who.  John Entwistle was among the better bassists in rock history, and Townsend?  Points for an interesting and different guitar style.  Moon?  Um... thanks, but no thanks, and I think Daltrey is a bit sloppy too.  Still, the interaction between Townsend and Entwistle?  Yeah, good stuff.

Instead, here's James Blood Ulmer, "Boss Lady," from Live at the Bayerischer Hof.