I finally reread Lawrence Miles' "This Town Will Never Let Us Go"
No book has ever made me feel so strongly like I was in a gas station at two in the morning. I actually did read parts of this book at a gas station the first time around, and the novel opens in a gas station, so there’s precedent. But the feeling persisted long past leaving the station; also, somebody on Tumblr made the same observation years back. It’s some memetic property inherent to the book itself, I think. If you handed this book to a caveman he would spontaneously comprehend the entire history of oil. So am I rereading this book in 2026 because I just wrote an essay about the parts of my life I spent hanging out in gas stations? No, ah… unfortunately this book is back in my head for more severe reasons. It was published in 2003, written as the horrors of 9/11 and the War on Terror unfolded. Lawrence Miles’ vision of a future War between a staid superpower and a faceless Enemy was, all of a sudden, not science fiction. Appropriately, he...