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I was only able to read this book because of the Internet Archive. No local libraries carry it, it's out of print and the cheapest secondhand copy is 50 bucks (and that's without factoring in the costs of shipping it across the ocean...). It's so obscure I couldn't even pirate it. And yet, it's also a cult classic by Jessica Amanda Salmonson, a great, but underappreciated author and editor of anthologies of SF/F stories by female authors (I got my profile pic from the cover of one of her anthologies!). It's a damn good 90s horror that I had wanted to read for ages.

I'm well aware that not being able to read a mostly forgotten horror novel isn't the end of the world, but I also know that there are many people in countries that don't have as solid a library system as mine does, who rely on the Internet Archive to access textbooks, academic works and all kinds of learning material. So many important, but niche books will become completely inaccessible to anyone but the people lucky enough to live close to a library carrying it. Which will mostly be people in the global North.

I wasn't very optimistic about IA's chances in court. I know they're going to appeal, but I'm not holding my breath. But if they're forced to stop lending books, they'll be sorely missed. Losing their treasure trove of knowledge will be a huge blow globally.

Tiger Eyes: a story of the future

Non-Dutch readers might know Tonke Dragt as the author of "The Letter for the King", a book which has recently been adapted into a Netflix series (...which I haven't watched.) This is probably also her most famous and beloved book over here. It even received a prize for being the best Dutch children's novel of the past fifty years. She also wrote science fiction for a slightly older audience - what we'd now call YA- and this book is one of those novels.

I'll just say a little bit about her life, because it's so interesting; She was born in what at the time was still the Dutch East Indies, and spend her early teens in an internment camp for Dutch women and children during the Japanese invasion of the country. It was during these years that she started writing, on bits of stolen toilet paper according to the bio in one of her books. You can imagine that stuck with me as a child.

Tiger Eyes is sequel to an older novel, which was published before scientists knew that the surface of Venus was a barren wasteland. Maybe it's therefore her youth in the tropics that led her to imagine the planet as home to a lush, gigantic rainforest "of towering heights and miles across". This in contrast to her vision of future Earth; a dense urban sprawl, dotted by the occasional nature reserve. We all have robotic domestic servants, and rain is scheduled to only fall at night. Tigers are extinct, and anything truly wild and dangerous has to be found off-planet.

Am I finally of that age where I can genuinely appreciate a work of "real literature" or is this book just really that good, like everyone who recommended it to me said it was? Considering its age, this book feels like a surprisingly modern with themes that, if anything, have only become more relevant. Language and culture shock, anxiety and parental pressures, dealing with the "what-ifs" of life. These are nice, easily identifiable themes. Which doesn't mean that Hermans' approach isn't nuanced, it just means that you feel very smart when you realize "Ah! Here he's talking about the struggle between Man and Nature!" Which is another strong theme. One of the book's best qualities are how Hermans' writing makes you feel the desolation and eerie, dangerous beauty of the Lapland landscape.

The only thing that makes it feel very of its time are the really... iffy comments towards black people. It's strange, since Hermans does brilliantly dissect the myth of the great European explorer, who conveniently forgets to mention all the locals who led the way and carried the provisions. And the way he contrasts how the indigenous Sami people thrive in this hostile landscape with the efforts of the educated scientist main characters to survive in the high north also doesn't seem very consistent with anti-blackness. You'd think that someone with enough sense to recognize colonialist attitudes and reject them, would not also perpetuate the condescending ideas about blackness in those passages.

Our first person narrator and protagonist is a bit of a dickhead though, so maybe that's why.