the wrong end of the telescope

And so just the story itself is compelling. But for Norman Maclean's writing of it, like, I don't know if you know the book, but Norman McLean was sort of, the fire was an area of specialty for him, for, you know, it was one of his little private obsessions. And he always meant to write a book about it. And he started to write the book, but he died before it was finished. And the book was then sort of completed by his editors and also by his son.

So you not only get the story of the fire and incredible amount of detail about how the smoke jumpers fit into the National Forest Service, how they were created as a unit, but also stuff about the mathematics of how fire spreads in various circumstances. But you also get this sense of MacLean being a writer who is running out of time to tell the story that he really wants to tell because he knows he's dying. He's in a great deal of pain, I think, when he's writing the book. And all that comes through this, this impatient, irascible old man, this voice actually comes through in the book. And then I felt like, yeah, you know, I really need to write a song about this.

Finally, someone I’m sure none of you have ever heard of, because she’s a new Canadian author published by the tiny Bumblepuppy Press, and by the time you read this, her books will be prohibitively expensive due to tariffs. Rachel Rosen, whose ongoing Sleep of Reason trilogy (the second book has only just been released) depicts a future climate-ravaged world in which demons stalk the Rockies and so-called “MAIs” (Magic-Affected Individuals) are used by Canadian politicians to plan their campaigns. Canada falls into dictatorship in the first book; the Resistance hangs on by its fingernails in the second. There are Earthquakes and opera singers and prison camps for human experimentation. There’s a sapient tech-bro submarine. I don’t know how many non-Canadians these books might resonate with, but I’ll bet that number is increasing daily, down below the 49th at least. I would not have believed that a fantasy novel could be so depressingly relevant.