We’ve covered a great deal in our Digital Humanities course over the last week or so, from Bethany Nowviskie’s discourse on the origins of hack and yack , to the Seasons Don’t Fear the Reader vibe of Robin Sloan’s Mr. Penumbra’s 24-hour Bookstore . Nowviskie’s piece delves into the inevitable polemics which develop in a 21 st -century discussion about anything. Turns out there’s nothing new, even in new things.
Sloan’s work is a fun and readable adventure story (I consumed all 300 pages in a single sitting with one meal in between) that brings together friends both old and new as facsimiles for technologies both old and new. It’s a techno-age bildungsroman for a character who desperately needs the journey. Without spoilers, I can say that the final point seems to be that the journey is all that matters. There is no such thing as an actual destination in a world where everything is so interconnected as to be not
The most powerful part of Penumbra is its feminist-positive message, via one of its main characters, Kat Potente. Again, no spoilers. Kat is a strong young woman without being a stereotype, who has a skill set, motivations, and desires; she gets involved with a man, but her relationship with him does not define her character. Self-definition is left to Kat and Kat alone. What defines her is her Kat-ness (no, no Everdenes). Whether or not you might choose the same direction she does from the same positi