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Moderation (Elaine Castillo, 2025)
I had a moment recently where I thought to myself: if I don’t read something that’s not science fiction, no matter how good that science fiction is, my brain will start oozing out my ears. You just gotta switch things up. So I picked up Moderation, which was one of my books I’d pre-ordered this month.1
However, if you’re at all familiar with the VR tech that exists right now, or had the chance to stick one of those headsets on your face, it has to be said: Moderation, with its technology that achieves perfect one-to-one translation into VR of not only touch, but tastes and smells, is… not not science fiction. The big shock, though, was that despite that Ottessa Mosfegh–core cover, the novel’s Vegas setting, and its protagonist having one of the worst jobs that actually exists (online content moderation, i.e., filtering out child porn), it’s a love story about how it’s never too late to change.
Girlie, our heroine, spends her days looking at videos of (mentioned above) people dying and child pornography. Most content moderators burn out pretty quickly, as we’re told in the book’s theatrical opening paragraph:
Girlie was, by every conceivable metric, one of the very best. All the chaff, long ago burned up by unquenchable fire: the ones who had hourly panic attacks, the ones who took up drinking; the ones who fucked in the stairwells during break time, the ones who started bringing handguns to the office, the ones who started believing the Holocaust had never happened, or that 9/11 was an inside job, or that no one had ever been to the moon at all, or that every presidential candidate was picked by a cosmic society of devils who communicated across interplanetary channels; the ones who took the work home, the ones who never came back the same, or never came back at all. The floor was now averaging only three or four suicide attempts a year, down from one or two a month. The ones who remained, like her, were the wheat: the exemplars, tested paladins, the ones who didn’t throw up in the hallway and leave the vomit there. They’d been, to continue speaking of it biblically, separated.
But Girlie has remained for an unprecedented length of time—over ten years. She helps support her family this way. She pays the mortgage and buys her mom luxury goods. (Her own hobby is vintage watches.) Reeden, the company she’s a contractor for, however, wants her to move to moderating in VR. Because they’ve just acquired this company, Playground. And also, now Girlie will be working with one of Playground’s founders, a sensitive, wounded, and extremely handsome man named William Cheung. Also, if she takes the job, she will move from contract worker to salaried worker, receiving not only benefits but an and but gigantic salary. So she’s taking the job, even if the company is somewhat evil. Whether close proximity to William is a plus or a minus remains to be seen.…
Moderation felt almost like a challenge Castillo had set herself to win: if you start your story with somebody up to her neck in the absolute worst of humanity, can you work your way over to a happy ending? One that feels (emotionally) persuasive? I think the answer is yes. Moderation represents a big swing that aims for, and deserves to find, a big audience. It is funny, it is convincing, and it is ultimately idealistic about both technology and people in a way I didn’t expect a literary novel to be. That is, there are lots of reactions I expected to have to Moderation. None of them were “kicking my feet like I’m reading A Room With A View.” But I did.
Age of Innocence (Edith Wharton, 1921)
I read this one during my interminable traveling back from Oregon (the Denver airport did its best to get me again) because I’d been meaning to and I saw
had a post about it. Begler covers the substance of the novel quite well so I am going to direct you to that post if you want to read about that and I will spend the rest of my time here talking about something completely trivial:⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️ TRIVIALITY BELOW ⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️
has a series she calls “non-romance romance” and Age of Innocence sort of tempted me to imagine a series of “non–sf sf,” partly because has mentioned to me some writing that exists out there about the way Wharton uses myth imagery.2 But I sort of think that category might just be Age of Innocence. Wharton is very self-consciously describing a world that is alien3 to her readers and whose values she knows will seem, if not stupid, unintuitive. The opera house at which the opening of the story takes place would not even have existed for those readers anymore.So in Age of Innocence, she is always spelling things out to you: what things mean on the surface, what they mean in practice, what’s done, what’s not done, what it means to be an American, what it means to be a New Yorker:
When Newland Archer opened the door at the back of the club box the curtain had just gone up on the garden scene. There was no reason why the young man should not have come earlier, for he had dined at seven, alone with his mother and sister, and had lingered afterward over a cigar in the Gothic library with glazed black-walnut bookcases and finial-topped chairs which was the only room in the house where Mrs Archer allowed smoking. But, in the first place, New York was a metropolis, and perfectly aware that in metropolises it was ‘not the thing’ to arrive early at the opera; and what was or was not ‘the thing’ played a part as important in Newland Archer’s New York as the inscrutable totem terrors that had ruled the destinies of his forefathers thousands of years ago.
She explores this world partly through the device of somebody who is both “of” it and not of it, someone to whom things have to be explained, someone who will make mistakes that throw into relief what everybody assumes and doesn’t want to say. She4 is in her way a harbinger of the future, not because she is associated with technology but because the changes that are coming will make it harder to maintain such a rigid and unchanging society, and more people who are dislocated will show up with more and more frequency. The context of any action, and thus its meaning, will become harder to control.
So the transformative moment through which all these things will pass is technology like the telephone.5 Age of Innocence really is a kind of science fiction: it is about a lost world and how that world was undone through scientific progress whose existence and effects they could not anticipate. At one point, Newland Archer is looking at a copy of Middlemarch, another novel about the recent past which also involves the arrival of technology that may change everything. In Middlemarch, this technology is the train, but what the train does to Middlemarch is ultimately not as dramatic6 as what the telephone will do to old New York.
What’s the point of all this? Not much admittedly. If you tried to file off the serial numbers and publish a true science fiction version of Age of Innocence, the result would be terrible, I think, unless a lot of thought were put into it, at which point you’d really be writing a book “inspired by” and would have left serial numbers territory.7 It’s more that it’s interesting to see a specific set of techniques that would go on to be used heavily by science fiction writers in this book. Somebody has probably written about this.
Right now I buy a lot of new books without really knowing if I’ll ever read them, not because I think they’re unappealing but because I have so much stuff I have to read.
There’s also some material that gestures in this direction in the early pages of Hermione Lee’s Wharton biography, of which, to be clear, I have only read the first few pages.
as it were
“she”—the newcomer (I need to stop writing posts when I have scrambled eggs for brains)
When Archer receives a long distance call at the book’s close, it is presented in almost exactly the way something would be presented in a story in like… Astounding… in the 1940s: “Dallas seemed to be speaking in the room: the voice was as near by and natural as if he had been lounging in his favourite arm-chair by the fire. The fact would not ordinarily have surprised Archer, for long-distance telephoning had become as much a matter of course as electric lighting and five-day Atlantic voyages.”
At least as I remember it.
If the technology were faster-than-light something or another and the story involved time dilation, for instance. Now I sort of want to do this.
The point of Wharton explaining this mysterious society to her reviewers in an almost science fiction way is interesting. Jo Walton actually wrote a review of Middlemarch in which she argued that it is science fiction, for similar reasons to the ones you give. (Though maybe there was something about Lydgate's (unrealized) ambitions to be a doctor who discovers important new treatments, too.) (Which reminds me of Heinlein's claim that Arrowsmith was science fiction (or speculative fiction) because it's about a doctor doing advanced medical research And Sinclair Lewis did give the microbiologist who helped him research the book 25% of the royalties.)
I have long felt that historical fiction is similar to science fiction in that it plunges the reader into an alien society. (Though by the common definition of historical fiction -- fiction written about a period before the author's birth -- neither Middlemarch nor The Age of Innocence quite fit. But in their effect they do.) It's definitely true that the plot of The Age of Innocence does depend on the vanished rules of a vanished society, and that the book knows that and leans into it, and that makes the great final scene all the more poignant.
(And, yes, Henry's review is great.)
(A counter example of a sort -- science fiction that is NOT science fiction -- might be a once very popular book called Sorrell and Son, by Warwick Deeping, which I have seen claimed as science fiction because it opens pretty much exactly at the time of publication of the book, but then tells the story of some decades of the life of a man and his son. So it's set in the future. But the future doesn't show any changes at all! (It's about a doctor too!))
This makes me not only want to read Moderation but also Age Of Innocence and Middlemarch, not to mention Arrowsmith which I have had on my list for a while. I am very interested in speculative fiction, and wondering if something that is set in the future is automatically sci fi. (1984? Brave New World?) as a side note I was in a bookstore looking at The Stand and the date King uses to start the story (in his future) was exactly the date on which I was looking at the book!!