Pluralistic: Charlie Jane Anders' "Lessons in Magic and Disaster." (19 Aug 2025)


Today's links


The Tor Books cover for Charlie Jane Anders' 'Lessons in Magic and Disaster.'

Charlie Jane Anders' "Lessons in Magic and Disaster." (permalink)

Charlie Jane Anders' Lessons in Magic and Disaster drops today: it's a novel about queer academia, the wonder of thinking very hard about very old books, and the terror and joy of ambiguous magic. It's my kind of novel!

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250867322/lessonsinmagicanddisaster/

There's a kind of magic I love to read about – the kind where it's not entirely clear whether the person purporting to do magic is acting entirely on instinct, and neither they nor we can be entirely sure whether anything magical has actually happened. This ambiguity just tickles something in me, the part of my brain that tries to bear down on traffic lights to make them turn green, or on board-game dice to get a good roll. It's the mode of Iain Banks's The Wasp Factory and Kelly Link's Book of Love. It's a mode that Anders does superbly, and has done since her 2016 debut novel, All the Birds in the Sky:

https://memex.craphound.com/2016/01/26/charlie-jane-anderss-all-the-birds-in-the-sky-smartass-soulful-novel/

That's the kind of magic at the heart of Magic and Disaster, which tells the story of Jamie, a doctoral candidate at a New England liberal arts college who is trying to hold it all together while she finishes her dissertation. For Jamie, holding it together is a tall order. Her relationship is on the rocks, her advisor is breathing down her neck, a smartass alt-right kid in her class keeps trolling her lectures, and to top it all off, her mother Sarina has withdrawn from society and is self-evidently preparing to lie down and die, out of grief and penance for the death of her wife, who died of cancer that everyone – her doctors and Sarina – downplayed until it was too late.

That would be an impossible lift, except for Jamie's gift for maybe-magic – magic that might or might not be real. Certain places ("liminal spaces") call to Jamie. These are abandoned, dirty, despoiled places, ruins and dumps and littered campsites. When Jamie finds one of these places, she can improvise a ritual, using the things in her pockets and school bag as talismans that might – or might not – conjure small bumps of luck and fortune into Jamie's path.

Jamie's never told anyone about the magic, but when she and Sarina have an especially bitter confrontation, it slips out. In desperation, Jamie gives her mother – a campaigning lawyer who has withdrawn from life and become a hermit – a demonstration of magic. Her mother approaches the demonstration with a lawyer's don't-bullshit-me skepticism, but something in her responds to the magic, and when Jamie leaves her, Sarina tries to bring back her dead wife, a forbidden conjuring that has disastrous consequences.

Jamie had hoped to give her mother something to live for, but catastrophic magical experimentation wasn't what she had in mind. Soon, Jamie is dragged into Sarina's life, to the detriment of her relationship with Ro, a fellow academic who is rightfully suspicious of Sarina and the effect she has on Jamie. When Ro finds out about the magic, the relationship breaks, and now Jamie has to face her problems alone.

Those problems keep mounting. Jamie is working on a dissertation about a 300 year old "ladies' novel" that promises to reveal some profound truth about the life of its author and her challenge to the role that she finds herself confined to as a woman, but it's slow going, and Jamie's advisor is at pains to remind her that there are dramatic changes in the offing to the university, and that Jamie had best get that thesis in soon. Meanwhile, the Men's Rights Activist bro in Jamie's class keeps upping the ante, mixing disruptive "just asking questions" behavior with thinly veiled transphobic digs (Jamie is trans, a fact that is woven around her relationship to her mother and to magic).

Anders tosses a lot of differently shaped objects into the air, and then juggles them, interspersing the main action with excerpts from imaginary 18th century novels (which themselves contain imaginary parables) that serve as both a prestige and a framing device. There's a lot of queer joy in here, a hell of a lot of media theory, and some very chewy ruminations on the far-right mediasphere. There's romance and heartbreak, danger and sacrifice, and most of all, there's that ambiguous magic, which gets realer and scarier as the action goes on.

This is a wonderful magic trick of a novel from a versatile author whose work includes YA space opera, hard sf adventure stories, and a wealth of brilliant short stories. It's a remarkably easy novel to read, given how much very difficult stuff Anders is doing in the writing, and it lingers long after you finish the last page.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago US CD/DVD bootlegging is not run by organized crime https://memex.craphound.com/2005/08/18/us-cd-dvd-bootlegging-is-not-run-by-organized-crime/

#20yrsago Lem’s tensor algebra poem, annotated https://web.archive.org/web/20051107014429/http://cheesedip.com/2005/08/18/lem_love__tensor_algebra.php

#20yrsago Hunter S Thompson’s ashes to be sent high on fireworks https://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/22/us/ashestofireworks-sendoff-for-an-outlaw-writer.html

#20yrsago Southern Baptist guide to non-gay Disney movies https://web.archive.org/web/20050917042544/http://www.bpnews.net/bpnews.asp?ID=21416

#20yrsago ItPlaysDoom: catalog of devices capable of running Doom https://web.archive.org/web/20070226184902/http://www.itplaysdoom.com/

#10yrsago Women of the Haunted Mansion cosplayers at SDCC https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJptS52CZIw

#10yrsago Gallery of deserted Chinese amusement parks https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2015/aug/14/china-deserted-amusement-parks-stefano-cerio

#10yrsago New pornoscanners are also useless, cost $160 million https://www.politico.com/story/2015/08/airport-security-price-for-tsa-failed-body-scanners-160-million-121385.html

#10yrsago Gender and sf awards: who wins and for what http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2015/08/data-books-and-bias.html

#10yrsago The End of the Internet Dream: the speech that won Black Hat (and Defcon) https://web.archive.org/web/20150818104913/https://medium.com/backchannel/the-end-of-the-internet-dream-ba060b17da61

#10yrsago Piracy vs the MPAA: yet another box-office record smashed https://www.techdirt.com/2015/08/18/hollywood-keeps-breaking-box-office-records-while-still-insisting-that-internet-is-killing-movies/

#10yrsago Stephen Hawking’s speech synthesizer now free/open software https://www.wired.com/2015/08/stephen-hawking-software-open-source/

#10yrsago Defector from Kremlin’s outsourced troll army wins 1 rouble in damages https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-33972122

#10yrsago Chuck Wendig’s Zeroes: a hacker technothriller in the War Games lineage https://memex.craphound.com/2015/08/18/chuck-wendigs-zeroes-a-hacker-technothriller-in-the-war-games-lineage/

#10yrsago Dismaland: Banksy’s (?) swipe at Disneyland https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/aug/18/banksy-weston-super-mare-dismaland

#10yrsago Giant dump of data purports to be from Ashleymadison.com https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/data-from-hack-of-ashley-madison-cheater-site-purportedly-dumped-online/

#10yrsago Iran arms deal prosecution falls apart because of warrantless laptop search https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/08/warrantless-airport-laptop-search-dooms-iran-arms-sales-prosecution/

#10yrsago The (real) hard problem of AI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mukaRhQTMP8

#10yrsago Airport security confiscates three year old’s fart gun https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/toddler-has-his-minions-fart-gun-confiscated-at-dublin-airport-for-posing-security-threat-10457743.html

#5yrsago South Africa's copyright and human rights https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/18/fifth-pig/#3-steps

#5yrsago Upbeat surveillance marketing https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/18/fifth-pig/#hikvision

#5yrsago Fed cops substitute dollars for warrants https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/18/fifth-pig/#ppp

#5yrsago Deindustrialization is a market failure https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/18/fifth-pig/#deindustrialization

#5yrsago Mr Cook, Tear Down That Wall https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/18/fifth-pig/#no-true-scotsman

#5yrsago "Fuck the algorithm" https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/18/fifth-pig/#a-levels

#5yrsago The Fifth Pig https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/18/fifth-pig/#5th-pig

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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Recent appearances (permalink)


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Latest books (permalink)


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Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025

  • "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
    https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. (1022 words yesterday, 36039 words total).

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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