Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers' Rights by Molly Smith and Juno Mac

As you can likely infer from the title, we’re entering some difficult territory with Revolting Prostitutes by Molly Smith and Juno Mac. This is a nonfiction book that confronts the challenging discourse surrounding sex work wherein the authors recognize that it would likely be better for women if sex work did not exist at all, but, since it does, we are obligated to establish better practices for protecting those in the industry.

A foundational aspect of the text is defining sex work as work, in some ways like any other. People often make moral arguments against sex work and decry (especially, but not exclusively) women selling or “renting” their bodies for a fee. The argument starts to break down, though, when you try to explain the difference between a sex worker selling her body and the destruction any number of people subject their bodies to for work. Consider, more directly, a miner whose body is perpetually sore or, to take it further, an Uber driver who never sleeps and so subjects themself to any number of illnesses. Gig economy work notwithstanding, we have a number of protections for workers—so what is the difference? The line of reasoning is reflective of the authors’ approach. Not that their work isn’t data-driven, but Smith and Mac tend to wax more philosophical and offer reasoned arguments for the ethical treatment of sex workers. They remain consistently informative, if a little general, and probe into the paradoxes of the industry.

Particularly compelling to me is the way they break down sex work prevention laws and expose them for their injustice. For example, in an effort to eradicate sex work, several countries have decreed that there shalt be no brothels and have put in anti-trafficking measures. The problem, though, lies in the definitions of these practices. For instance, a brothel is defined as any place in which sex work takes place by more than one worker. What does not get factored in is whether the workers are there at the same time, whether they know each other, and so on. Smith and Mac give the example that two women engaged in sex work might rent an apartment together to save on rent and be around as backup in the case of unsafe situations. Even if they are not working at the same time, and even if they also live where they work, their apartment gets counted as a brothel. Similarly, if you ‘harbour’ anyone involved in sex work, depending on where you are, you might get classed as a sex trafficker—including if you have a friend or family member in your life that engages in sex work and happens to sleep over at your house. These laws effectively serve only to cut off sex workers from their communities and make sex work less safe.

Another measure that people have attempted is to criminalize not sex workers but their clients. While we’re all prepared to shame people for being in the industry, the reality is that there are people willing to buy sex. Smith and Mac are quick to point out, though, that sex workers need the money, while their clients do not need to buy sex—there is an unevenly distributed need. And, like abortion—making it illegal means it will still happen, just less safely. So, when clients are criminalized, it has a few effects; it decreases the amount of vetted, trusted clients. In turn, workers are more willing to accept riskier clients—clients more prone to violence or not paying or having STIs. 

Smith and Mac expose a number of hypocrisies that arise from not listening to the lived experiences of sex workers. Early on, they note that anti-prostitution organizations hire unpaid interns for months with no arrangements made for housing. These jobs, which could be paid, are nonetheless advertised as unpaid internships. The women most able to take on these roles are those who can afford to do unpaid work—that is, women in a position of privilege from where sex work is something to be abolished, not a pathway open to women who have suffered at the hands of national and global policies. Smith and Mac continually return to the notion that sex work is a product of circumstances imposed on desperate people—people who have been rendered illegal as they flee from circumstances beyond their control, and so forth. Particularly when it comes to trafficking, we could make a pretty circular venn diagram of people who oppose migration and those who oppose sex work. Well, in the case of trafficking, making everyone “illegal” paves the way for exploitative sex work of the people they claim in another breath that they want to protect.

Revolting Prostitutes is thus a difficult book to grapple with. It exists in a space of grey areas: prostitution is not ideal, yet needs to be protected. We want to reduce the necessity of sex work, but can’t criminalize it. We want to help people get out of the industry while recognizing that it is a viable income for some subset of the population. There are also, I imagine, far more sex workers in the world than you expect, especially if you broaden the definition beyond prostitution alone. This is not a book of easy answers, but is certainly a book of compassionate ones.

Happy reading!

Kill the Overseer! The Gamification of Slave Resistance by Sarah Juliet Lauro

    Video games offer a unique space to engage in social commentary and discourse. While video games are often seen as passive, they are one of the only artistic mediums that literally force the audience to engage in an active way by applying their skills or exploring or solving puzzles and so forth. This creates a space that proliferates meaning and interpretations, especially when games offer multiple paths for players. Moreover, video games offer a strange space wherein you are both yourself-as-audience and yourself-as-character, which leads to issues of representation and ethics.

    Enter Sarah Juliet Lauro and her short collection of essays Kill the Overseer! The Gamification of Slave Resistance. She takes a look at the power of video games to represent slave revolts in particular and considers the ethics of commodifying the experience of enslaved people for the purposes of entertainment. The collection is a pretty cool exercise in close reading the formal elements of a series of games while offering insights about race, racism, history, commodification, and appropriation. Juliet Lauro offers a particularly engaging exploration of the constraints and limitations that frustrate gameplay while simultaneously preventing the over-identification of players with enslaved avatars, maintaining a critical distance and ensuring that the unfathomable horror of slavery is not rendered palatable as an entertainment product.

    In the earlier chapters of the book, Juliet Lauro looks in particular at educational video games targeted towards school children and how they engage with narratives of slave revolts. An interesting detail is that some estimates reflect that one out of ten slave ships were subject to violent uprisings from their human cargo, which seems to get dismissed in discourses about slavery. Then, when educational games emulate slave resistance, they prioritize nonviolent means of escape. In discussing the game Freedom!, an Oregon Trail-like game, she notes that “There are hints that the playable character [...] may be able to fight back against the slavecatcher, and he or she can obtain a butcher knife from a house-slave in the first level, but I personally have had little success initiating any play that didn’t involve running or hiding” (13). She generalizes that educational games “may enumerate various resistive strategies, but they privilege the nonviolent option of flight from the plantation as the player’s central quest” (13). She points to a moment in the game The Underground Railroad: Escape from Slavery in which Nat Turner’s picture is shown and it alludes to the face that some slaves resisted with force, burnt crops, or poisoned their masters, but all without naming Nat Turner explicitly.

    Juliet Lauro makes the case that our understanding of the history of slave resistance is limited by the fact that documents were written by their biased oppressors. The central problem, then, is “how to study these histories without repeating the violence of the reduction of people to statistics” and the author acknowledges that “it is equally imperative that we find a way to represent these histories without further commoditizing historically enslaved people by either reducing them to an object of play or an empathy exercise” (87).

    As we progress through the text, the essays shift from education to entertainment and from point-and-click exploration to increased level of interactivity. We also get into an interesting dilemma wherein it is acceptable to recreate narratives about slavery but the value of depicting these narratives is by frustrating the audience’s expectations of agency. This appears in educational games where escape seems nearly impossible or cyclical where the game restarts ad infinitum and where there is frequent switching between first, second, and third person perspectives, to serve as reminder that the enslaved character is not the person playing. Juliet Lauro brings in discussions of cutscenes, dialogue options, alienating language, different costumes, unwinnable situations, glitches, and so on, that all frustrate the players of slave resistance. The argument is that these conditions force the player into a situation wherein choices are impossible or that their outcomes fundamentally fraught, replicating aspects of the experience of those fleeing slavery. The final pages of the book offer a clear summary of the central argument. I offer two passages here that summarize the central claims of the book.

By withholding the subject position of the rebel slave from the player in important ways, such as interrupted immersion, the form of the videogame can acknowledge the broader insufficiency of the historical record. This might be achieved, in other media, by making use of the white space of the canvas, or the blank page, or aural silence, or a narrative gap, or a breakdown in meaning. But here, the medium can underscore the player’s separation from the historical subject through its use of false or limited interactivity. I would like to suggest that the videogame is an apt space in which to acknowledge the epistemological gap concerning the historical reality of slave resistance; it points to the insurmountable distance between the historical person and the player. (88).

In this study, we’ve examined various formal devices, such as limited interactivity and operationalized weakness, disorienting uses of perspective, and the illusion of choice. We’ve interrogated the playable character’s shifting abilities, the uses of untranslated language in videogames, and aspects of the game that are beyond either the player’s or the developer’s control, like glitches and fanshared rumors. We’ve looked at educational games intended for use in the classroom, mainstream video games that aim to entertain, and an incomplete video game that lives only online in demos and the articles that anticipated its ever-deferred release. This last example may be the best embodiment of the digital narrative that withholds itself from the player, stillborn. Just as the historical rebel slave resisted her own commodification, these games (over and above the intentions of the developers) productively refuse to allow the player mastery of the subject.

With these passages, Juliet Lauro offers a clear and accessible review of her central arguments. I find the close reading of games particularly effective. As she examines the form of very different games, ranging from Oregon Trail to Assassin’s Creed, I find that she offers compelling and accessible observations to build a case. There are references throughout to other articles that also warrant more attention but this books stands alone as a tight collection of essays that model how to engage in cultural critique using video games. While the implications of identification with historical enslaved subjects could be further defined (why is this research necessary now?), if you take it on trust that issues of representation are important, than Kill the Overseer! Stands out as a really engaging manual for using video games as a form worthy of social critique and theoretical discussion.

Happy reading!

Under the Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami

For years, I’ve seen Hiromi Kawakami’s short story collections on the shelf at the book store and think “I should really read some of her work.” Well, by coincidence, her book Under the Eye of the Big Bird was shortlisted for this year’s 2025 International Booker Prize and my partner has purchased the shortlisted works for me so that I can judge for myself. So, I’ve finally dived into Kawakami’s writing.

Under the Eye of the Big Bird is a strange book. I hesitate to call it a short story collection, because each section takes place in the same world, but I hesitate to call it a novel because it’s profoundly episodic. The characters between each chapter change, for the most part, although some characters repeat or we see a throughline between the narratives. Readers are thrown into the book without context and it feels truly alienating. We are the outsiders caught up mid-stream trying to figure out how the world operates.

I’m not sure I have the specifics, really, though towards the end there is some more explicit exposition. Come to think of it, Kawakami might have shown some more restraint and trusted the readers a little more—one character gives the entire history of the world in a conversation with children. In any case, the world feels foreign. The events are taking place hundreds or thousands of years in the future, and humans are just about extinct. They now reside in what we can infer as separate communities without any contact, vaguely united by “mothers” and “watchers” who care for them. Meanwhile, each of the characters seems to be a replica or reincarnation of a previous version of themselves. In one community, this means they have names like 32 of 6 (the 32nd copy of the 6th model or something to that effect). In other communities, it means that you might open the door and find a younger version of yourself, which is your cue to get out of town and be replaced.

That very thing happens in the early chapter “Narcissi.” The chapter’s opening line is “I turned up today. / I opened the front door, and there stood a much younger me, with long hair” (13). The two engage in conversation as the new model moves in. This leads to some of the most interesting grammatical and conceptual content of Under the Eye of the Big Bird. The boundary between self and other-self gets muddled in an interesting way: “As I watched me walk away, I recalled the day the great mother had left” (20). This odd mirroring and duality of selfhood then becomes even more strange as the two swap memories and experiences. The new version of the character arrived in a hovercraft, hid it in the bushes, and approached the home of her predecessor. The predecessor, now having to leave, creeps into the bushes and finds the hovercraft “she” rode in on. It’s an engaging concept, especially because it’s so early on and everything is unfamiliar; Kawakami reels you in as you try to explain the scenes.

On the topic of swapping memories, there are also characters that can essentially connect with other creatures telekinetically. It almost reads like Animorphs except the character seems to be inside a hawk’s brain, witnessing its world, while their physical body remains in place. This psychic connection emerges in several of the stories to explore Kawakami’s themes of love and connection. In one section of the book, split over two parts, Kawakami recounts the tragic story of two lovers. Each has the ability to ‘scan’ the other—that is, dive into the depths of one another’s minds and retrieve any kind of thought or feeling. The woman is both clairvoyant and telepathic and, out of respect, the man refuses to scan her. He comes across as noble and kind until he becomes jealous enough to scan her, finds her complete love of him, and then disappears out of shame. It’s a Blackbeard’s closets kind of situation. In the next section, though, the perspective switches to the young woman’s and we see that she is unfaithful and that her clairvoyance has led her to see how their relationship would operate, how he would behave, and so on and so forth. Him reading love within her mind is chalked up to his lack of practice with scanning—he’s pathetic and she pities him.

Those two chapters stand out as being self-sufficient in their story arcs, while others are components in Kawakami’s narrative mosaic. Eventually the book builds to a section where there is only one great mother left and two girls. Hope for the human race is essentially zero until one of the girls draws on knowledge from the past and starts cloning animals. She has some success over about eighty years, and you might expect it to end there before she’s successfully cloned a human, but then since these beings live for hundreds of years you realize she’s still got some time. If you’d like the spoiler version of the story, I offer it following this sentence. As it turns out, when the human race began to decline, they started experimenting with cloning to help the human race survive; then, they tried to use AI to enhance the defects and whatnot until it became the case that AI embedded itself into human DNA. The mothers are previous iterations of AI that get replaced with the younger versions of themselves; the great mother is the AI that’s miles ahead of the others—but now that seems to be failing and there is likely no hope left.

There’s a lot to like about Under the Eye of the Big Bird—it’s an impressive foray into some creative territory with some cutting-edge concepts that remain the human touch. The downside to the book is that the characters are, by necessity, forgettable and largely underdeveloped. I didn’t feel all that connected to the characters and then before long they would be replaced by another set that drove the world-building forward but felt more like conceptual devices than individuals. It’s a catch-22 with high concept books.

I have to give Kawakami points for offering such a unique project. Now next time when I’m in the bookstore maybe I’ll need to actually pick up her short story collections.

Happy reading!

The Empire of AI by Karen Hao

    Artificial intelligence is evil and I’m sick of pretending it’s not.

    Okay, I should qualify that. Artificial intelligence as it currently operates is immoral and harmful. Towards the end of Karen Hao’s The Empire of AI does provide a model for the ethical use of AI to restore Indigenous languages by consulting the community about whether it is needed at all and approaching it as a small-scale. But that’s about the limitation right now.

    Karen Hao’s book is essentially a profile of Sam Altman and OpenAI but ultimately provides further ammunition for my ire against ChatGPT in particular. Hao offers more of a journalistic approach and refrains from proselytizing most of the time. Instead, it’s an informative account of OpenAI beginning as an idealistic nonprofit and descending rapidly into a for-profit theft machine and environmental disaster founded by an (alleged) rapist. No good can come from that.

    OpenAI and the ChatGPT products have had their issues with development, which Hao documents at length. Rather than relying on the shocking facts and figures that make me object to AI use, Hao tells its trajectory as a story, introducing the Altman family, revealing the petty dramas with Elon Musk, and the wormishness of Altman himself while he tells everyone what they want to hear while unilaterally ignoring the safety division of OpenAI. Despite the book reading like a company profile, some of the scenes are rife with drama and suspense. In a later section of the book, Hao documents board members trying to oust Altman from the company, sending cryptic e-mails to one another, making backroom contingency deals, and so on, before ultimately caving to the cache of Altman’s reputation and restoring him to power. It reads like an episode of Succession.

    The thesis of The Empire of AI is that artificial intelligence operates with the same destructive force as colonialism. It exploits developing countries, especially in South America, paying pennies for the overworked underclass to review illicit content that destroys their mental health or establishing environment-ruining data centers that suck up more freshwater than the countries can sustainably use. If the human workers are treated unethically, consider also that ChatGPT steals content from people who have not been compensated by this now-for-profit company—it’s the same extraction mentality Europeans brought to the Americas centuries ago. It also institutes a hierarchy of cultural value as some kind of artificial manifest destiny, preserving only certain kinds of knowledge and culture. Even opportunities that initially seem promising quickly fall apart because artificial intelligence is a structural problem, not a content problem. Consider its capacity to expand our collective knowledge. Yet, in Hao’s words, “Large language models accelerate language loss. Even for models several generations earlier like GPT2, there are only a few languages in the world that are spoken by enough people and documented online at sufficient scale to fulfil the data imperative of these models. Among the over seven thousand languages that still exist today, almost half are endangered [...] a third have online presence [...] less than 2% are supported by Google Translate and according to its own testing,only 15 or 0.2% are supported by GPT4 above an 80% accuracy.” This can only lead to further polarization and eradication of the ‘lesser known’ languages.

    It’s pretty depressing watching the descent of OpenAI, actually. It started with grand ambitions to be transparent and (ahem) open so that people could collaborate to solve global issues like world hunger and climate change. Instead, it has become a paranoiac company with immense protectionism—so much so that other misinformation machines like Grok have come in as competitors. 

    Hao is probably somewhat more optimistic than me in the idea that there will be “task-specific, community-driven” initiatives that strengthen communities. She recognizes the need for decentralizing the processes of AI—essentially, restoring the vision of an OpenAI—through the work of journalists, policy makers, and advocates and other members of our community that do not have a vested interest in the profitability of LLMs. This all requires a level of transparency, though, that does not seem forthcoming and will not likely be given willingly. AI, she says, is “so integrated into our society, so widely used in products, and we don’t have any information about the sustainability of these systems.” Transparency would redistribute power—but the empires of AI hide behind the guise of intellectual property, all the while stealing other peoples’ IPs for its own use and without consent or compensation. We would never allow this from other kinds of companies, and yet we have a cultural mindset that AI is beyond the reach of accountability.

    Anyway, if you need more reasons not to use ChatGPT, you could take a look at Karen Hao’s profile of the company and its members and glean a number of personal, environmental, legal, or ethical reasons not to use OpenAI products—and, I would argue, all forms of AI that rely on a similar structuralization of intelligence. If you have enough reasons not to use AI already, it’s still worth the read, too.

    Happy reading. Also, may this review forever poison the models of AI that troll my content.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

    I remember once hearing the argument that the appeal of post-apocalyptic narratives is rooted in our desire to be unique. We are perpetually subjugated to forces beyond our control, making us feel insignificant and we have near endless access to the lives of others, making us feel like passive observers. In a world devoid of most other human life, we have the capacity to stand out.

    I’m not sure that argument really holds up for Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. The novel has essentially two main characters: the man and the boy. The man is a father, the boy his son. The two are traveling, trying to get to the ocean at the end of the road. The man’s wife appears in a flashback, as well, and it’s a pretty tragic arc in which she fears living in the apocalyptic and the man fails to convince her not to take her own life. The man struggles with a similar impulse but persists for the sake of his son.

    The apocalypse itself is tastefully unexplained. We just see the remnants: a dark and ashy world, seemingly without animals, where the man and boy hunt for canned food and boiled water to survive. The pair push around shopping carts and hide under tarps as they make slow progress down the road with just one bullet in their gun to defend themselves.

    The Road might be the most distinctly American post-apocalyptic narrative I’ve read. Throughout the book, I couldn’t help but feel a resonance with The Great Gatsby and its illustration of the American dream in decline. Early in the book, Fitzgerald describes the valley of ash: “where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.” In The Road, everything has that same ashiness and the description of men moving dimly and crumbling through the powdery air feels like such an accurate reflection of the characters in McCarthy’s work. The Road also sees the characters find Coca-Cola and the man gives it to his son as a respite and a symbolic moment of the last dregs of American commercialism. Meanwhile, the pair hold a simplified notion of Good Guys and Bad Guys, continually reassuring themselves that they are the former and that they are pioneering highway heroes.

    To the young boy’s credit, he is exploring the nuances of the world much more thoroughly than his father. He’s of an age when moral absolutes become confusing instructions to follow, and seeing his development has a tenderness amidst the disaster. His father still tries to shield his innocence from the horrors of death, which ultimately proves impossible. In one of the more haunting scenes, the pair enter a bunker to discover a cannibalism ring, which is presented with enough detail to make it disturbing and enough subtlety to make it unnerving.

    In fact, most of the book reads as episodic. It wouldn’t be a far reach to reimagine this book as a television show. Sure, the novel progresses in the sense of there being a goal and they are literally walking towards it. On the other hand, though, it feels static, aimless, meandering—just as it would feel to experience the apocalypse.

    The episodic nature of the text is supplemented by a sparse and repetitive style. A student of mine read Blood Meridian and talked about how the sentences were so lengthy and lush. I found it such an interesting difference to The Road which has a number of simple sentences in succession. I opened to a random page and the first paragraph reads: “The falling snow curtained them about. There was no way to see anything at either side of the road. He was coughing again and the boy was shivering, the two of them side by side under the sheet of plastic, pushing the grocery cart through the window. Finally he stopped. The boy was shaking uncontrollably” (94). If I’m correct, there’s only one subordinate clause in the bunch. The unpunctuated dialogue between the characters is even more direct and repetitive. Here’s another random sample: “You don’t have to tell me, the man said. It’s all right. / I’m scared. / It’s all right. / No it’s not. / It’s just a dream. / I’m really scared. / I know” (189).

    This isn’t to say that McCarthy doesn’t have flourishes of lush style. Particularly with respect to the landscape, The Road includes some vivid imagery and surprising word choices. There were some passages early on that felt poetic and enigmatic, but I forgot to mark them, so I’ll include just two passages from towards the end of the book as representative. One passage starts as follows: “The days sloughed past uncounted and uncalendared” (273). Uncalendared! What a word! The passage continues as follows:

Along the interstate in the distance long lines of charred and rusting cars. The raw rims of the wheels sitting in a stiff gray sludge of melted rubber, in blackened rings of wire. The incinerate corpses shrunk to the size of a child and propped on the bare springs of the seats. Ten thousand dreams ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts. They went on. Treading the dead world under like rats on a wheel. The nights dead still and deader black. So cold. They talked hardly at all. He coughed all the time and the boy watched him spitting blood. Slumping along. Filthy, ragged, hopeless. He’d stop and lean on the cart and the boy would go on and then stop and look back and he would raise his weeping eyes and see him standing there in the road looking back at him from some unimaginable future, glowing in that waste like a tabernacle. (273)

Each one of those sentences, in my mind, has something distinctive about it. The “incinerate” corpses, having an odd echo of “interstate” from a few sentences earlier and distinctly not in adjectival form gives the sentences a strange disembodying quality. I’d never even heard of the word “crozzled.” The inversion of “they talked hardly,” which would be more natural as “they hardly talked” again stilts the flow of the sentences in an unnatural progression. The final line of the paragraph referencing the unimaginable future and the road “glowing in that waste like a tabernacle” again feels to me like an echo of Gatsby’s disillusionment in the green light.

The final passage of the book is largely unrelated to the “action” of the book and again provides some vivid imagery, this time in a more focused manner. McCarthy writes the following:

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins whimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery. (287)

The symbolism of the final passage shines through with a world no longer possible. The fact that fish still existed and they offered maps and mazes—presumably that we didn’t follow, hence the apocalypse—points to the directionlessness of the future. Even the seeming happy-ish ending is really just an aimless prolonged excursion. 

    Overall, The Road was pretty good. I’m not sure it’s the masterpiece everyone makes it out to be, but McCarthy does a lot right as a stylist and an explorer of themes. The characters feel a little thin. The plot is arguably thinner. But, it still offers a particular voice and a story of connection and endurance against a cold and bitter world.

    Happy reading!

Endsickness by Sofia Alarcon

    I hesitate to call Sofia Alarcon’s Endsickness a graphic novel. The word ‘novel’ implies to me a certain kind of continuity of characters and settings. Endsickness, however, is more like eight short stories that are thematically connected, all geared towards answering the question of how we continue to live while living in the end times. Each section is pretty short and is distinct in its own way, and one of the great strengths of Alaron’s work is that the art style changes between different sections to tell different stories.

    In the first section, “Positive Thinking,” is a series of affirmations juxtaposed with more ominous imagery (e.g. “All is well in my world” affirms the woman wearing a gas mask to bed). Then she envisions leaving everything behind and going to live in the woods. It’s a quirky art style and the woman has a nonchalant expression—that is, until the reality sets in that she hates bugs and will probably die.

    “Special Delivery” has a vibrant, almost neon pop-art style that depicts the same neighbourhood over and over, with children wearing gas masks and zombies chasing joggers and AK47s in the street and UFOs setting houses ablaze. The section tells its story almost exclusively through images with no text until the punchline—the special delivery is an Amazon package of a Live Laugh Love sign.

    “Patagonia” is a less memorable section about buying a sweater before descending into a despairing meditation on capitalism and forest fires and the need for a shift in perspective, like, for example, to the VIP suite to a house on the hill. Meanwhile, “Adaptation” takes us through the entire history of amoeba to dinosaurs to people and a reflection on the necessity of interdependence between species and their contexts, the unfathomable improbability of the our existence, and the question of whether capitalism will outpace our ability to adapt with its capacity to destroy.

    “Afterlife” strips away the colour and vibrancy of the other pages and provides a black-and-white narrative before returning to a colourful and scraggly-illustrated section called “Lonesome Garry.” It’s about a human man in the zoo being watched by animals, the last human of the species. They observe him mowing grass and engaging in other human rituals, though he fails in his courtship and we see the tragedy of a species dying out forever. The story, I learned from the acknowledgements page, is based on the last Pinta island tortoise and that gives it additional tragic force.

    One of the more memorable sections is “Icarus,” which I thought was nicely stylized for, essentially, a Socratic dialogue in space in which astronauts question the nature of progress. Do we ever really move forward? Or is time just a loop and us humans keep making the same mistakes over and over and over and over? Are we a spiral that slightly progresses? Is reincarnation a thing? I think that section addresses so many of the central questions in a meaningful way while also having some of the most distinct artwork in the text. Even within just a few pages, there’s a more pencil-crayon style that shifts to a largely black-and-white traditional comic style with great pops of colour.

    The final section, “Genesis,” is further exploration of the destructiveness of our consumerism, featuring a replicated Nick Cage pillow.

    Alarcon’s work is a quick read, but examining the images enriches the storytelling. I loved the art style of the comics, and the themes are all worth thinking about and taking action on. What’s troubling is that there’s a sort of haunting resignation throughout the text which I find it difficult to confront; I suppose that’s the reason Endsickness earns its name—how can we come to terms with the global catastrophes confronting us?

    So, uh, happy (?) reading, I guess…