Carolyn Tragasz's Reviews > Sewer, Gas and Electric: The Public Works Trilogy

Sewer, Gas and Electric by Matt Ruff
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it was amazing
bookshelves: sci-fi, funny, wild-soul-books

"Hope’s a choice, not a sum; you can have as much of it as you damn well feel like having, regardless of actual circumstances. I’m not sure any event has a meaning unless we humans decide to give it one. That’s why hope is optional rather than mandatory. I think we’re born with a need to explain all the things that happen to us, not just to scientifically explain them but to actually create an account for them, a sort of framing story to hang them on; and I think we have a wide variety of choices as to what our own framing story will be.

The first question you as yourself- the first question, even before “Will I live” is “Why. Why am I made to suffer like this?” One drawback to belonging to a race of storytellers is the tendency to forget that life isn’t a story, however great our own need to perceive it as one. And one of life’s greatest failings, from a storytelling perspective, is that life lacks closure, in the sense of narrative convergence, all the elements coming together, loose ends tying off neatly in a final climax. Real life is never that tidy and it doesn’t stop happening just b/c someone won a victory. Where the end paper would come in a novel, actual events follow, and more actual events…so even if women’s suffrage had led to paradise on earth- something still had to happen next. New conflicts take shape, another struggle of some kind. And never mind if you’ve got no energy or patience left after the last one. That’s why my sufferette was so apt to tears: the only ending antidote to struggle and the suffering that accompanies it is to somehow escape the future. And the only way to do that-the only real way that isn’t the wishful closure of a fable- is to die before the future gets here. What hope is, is deciding you’d rather be nonfiction than a corpse."


A clever book with Douglas Adams-esque situational humor (a green submarine with pink polka dots named the Yabba-Dabba-Do, and sharks in the sewers are significant plot points) that also manages to deliver biting social commentary and profound insights into being human (see above). The book also happens to be set in a dystopian future with Donald Trump as President, but was written back when that was just a ridiculously improbable idea and not reality.
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Reading Progress

Finished Reading
February 26, 2020 – Shelved
April 3, 2020 – Shelved as: sci-fi
April 3, 2020 – Shelved as: funny
April 11, 2020 – Shelved as: wild-soul-books

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