Barry Bonds

This post is kind of a follow-up to my book review of The Four Pillars of Investing. In that post I was left mulling over the idea of getting a TIPS (Treasury Inflation-Protected Security) ladder for a Liability Matching Portfolio (LMP), replacing my current strategy of maintaining and spending down a diversified portfolio of stock and bond funds.

To briefly recap: the appeal of a TIPS ladder is that it completely eliminates the uncertainty in retirement planning. You are buying a rock-solid guarantee to receive certain payments, adjusted for inflation. Our goal in retirement planning isn't to die with the most money, it's to ensure that our needs are provided for. A phrase Bernstein has that I like is "When you've won the game, it's okay to stop playing." So over the course of our working life we can build up our nest egg by riding the volatile up-and-down of stocks. Once we reach a point where we can purchase that guaranteed real income for life, we can do it, and not worry about sequence of returns risk or runaway inflation or any of the many other concerns we might have.

I have a few hesitations. First is just changing my strategy at all; as Bernstein also says, sticking to a sub-optimal strategy often has better results than chasing superior strategies.

On a technical level, one issue I've been grappling with is where, exactly, I would hold my TIPS. I think Bernstein's assumption is that you would have it in a traditional IRA at a discount brokerage. In this setup you can purchase arbitrary holdings, including specific government-issued bonds, and don't need to worry about taxes until you withdraw the funds for spending.

That isn't really an option for me, though. The bulk of my tax-deferred retirement savings are in a 401(k); my particular plan has great options, but it isn't a brokerage, so I can't buy specific bonds in it. I do have a Roth IRA, but it isn't large enough to hold the ladder I want; also, I believe the conventional wisdom is that it's best to hold high-growth investments like stocks in a Roth since you won't be taxed on any appreciation. And I don't want to start contributing to a new traditional IRA, because that would make future Roth conversions a lot more painful.

One possibility would be to wait until I retire or leave my job (which may not be any time soon - more on that below!), roll my 401k into a traditional IRA, and proceed from there, and I suspect that's what most of Bernstein's clients would do. But who knows when that would be, and at that point I think I'd be effectively boxed out of any future contributions to a Roth. Not a bad thing if I'm actually retired, but I think it's more likely I'd pick up another job in the future, and I'd like to keep the Roth door open.

By default, that leaves purchasing the ladder in a taxable account. All of the early guidance I've read has strongly warned against that, for the simple reason that you have to pay regular income tax (not capital gains tax) on all the interest generated by your ladder. TIPS also have what is called "phantom income": the principal amount is adjusted for inflation each year, and you need to pay tax on that adjustment, even though you don't access the money until maturity.

While doing this research, though, I found that "I bonds" can make a lot more sense in a taxable account, so that became my first step. "I bonds" are more like a traditional EE savings bond: you buy them directly from the Treasury, not a brokerage, you can hold them until maturity or sell early, and redeem with the government. Like TIPS, though, Series I bonds are adjusted for inflation, so buying $1000 in I bonds today will give you back an inflation-adjusted equivalent to $1000 in 2054 dollars when they mature, in addition to the fixed rate of interest they generate.

This is a good time for buying I bonds. Like most products, they paid essentially 0% interest for the last decade-plus; now, there's some positive interest, in addition to the inflation adjustment. The main downside is that you have to buy them from the Treasury Direct website; I didn't find this quite as painful as its online reputation suggests, but it definitely feels like a circa-2003 website. The other downside is the limited purchase amount: each person can only buy $10,000 in I bonds each year. (Though people with trusts or access to other legal entities can legally purchase more.) They do seem great, though, and I'm happy to be on this train now. There's really no downside: total inflation protection, no volatility, and very flexible redemption terms: you can redeem after 1 year, have to forego 6 months' worth of interest if you redeem before 5 years, and otherwise can hold for as long as 30 years.

So I bonds look great, but by themselves can't build a ladder, since you can only buy so many in a given year. My current tentative thinking is that I'll use these to fund additional spending after I start collecting Social Security. I'll likely try to delay claiming until age 70 (assuming rules remain the same) to maximize my benefit. Some back-of-the-napkin math suggests that, if I don't have to pay for housing, my Social Security benefit should cover most of what I'd need, and I bonds should cover the rest. So I'll continue buying those in the coming years, so long as there's a fixed interest rate of above 0%. I should have some "extra" from this, which I could maintain as an emergency fund or redeem before 30 years to help fill a pre-age-70 retirement ladder rung.

Which brings us back to TIPS. After several more months of researching, hemming and hawing, I've come to the tentative conclusion that holding them in a taxable account isn't the worst thing. One big reason for me in particular is that I live in California, which has a relatively high state income tax rate, and TIPS like other federal government bonds are exempt from state (not federal) taxes. So I think I'd relatively benefit more from TIPS in taxable than someone who lived in a lower-tax state.

I'm also already holding bond mutual funds in my taxable account - that's kind of a separate post, I've been trying to shift that over to my 401(k) but it's complicated. But anyways, the taxes you pay on an individual bond are basically identical to what you pay for a bond fund, even something like "phantom income". Over the long run, I'll be counting my TIPS, I bonds and Total Bond Market funds in the same bond "bucket" (when tracking asset allocation and directing future investments), so the bond funds will be shrinking (at least as a percentage of my portfolio) while keeping overall bond exposure the same.

So, at a high level, over the next, I dunno, maybe 10 years or so I'm imagining shifting from bond mutual funds into individual bonds making up a ladder.

I originally pictured this process as pulling a huge trigger, selling a gut-clenching number of stocks and buying a heart-pounding number of TIPS. And it seems like quite a few people do that. My main hesitation for doing that is uncertainty. There's a really good chance I will work for another twenty years, maybe even longer, and with that kind of horizon there's really no reason to not be in stocks: even if we had another 1929, 1987 or 2008 I'd be better off riding the wave. And I'm not completely sure yet what my living situation will look like: I'll very likely be in California, hopefully in the Bay Area, but housing has been by far my biggest expense for most of my life, and will have a huge impact on how much money I have available to purchase a ladder as well as how much money I need to get from that ladder.

Even though I was originally planning to get to a binary Yes/No decision, I've ended up with more of a gradual glide path, which is a little surprising but honestly feels pretty good. My current plan is that, rather than buying a ladder on the secondary market, I'll start buying rungs directly from Treasury auctions, likely with new issues of 10-year TIPS. I can keep this up for several years as my financial picture solidifies. There's a decent chance that the early rungs will mature before I retire, and that's okay! It means that particular rung will be a rolling ladder instead of a consumption ladder.

There are two big risks to this approach. One is that interest rates are slashed again and real yields go back to 0%. The other is that there is a big stock market crash and I have fewer assets available to buy bonds. That's the big argument for plowing ahead now rather than slow-rolling it. Still, as noted above, my time horizon is long even if I don't yet know the precise number of years. Even if both of those things happen, eventually rates will come back up and eventually the market will recover, and by the time that happens I'll be closer to retirement and have a clearer picture of what I need.

So, those were two big firsts for me this year: my first time purchasing a Series I bond on treasurydirect.gov, and my first time buying a Treasury security at auction. There are plenty of online articles and guides walking through how to do both of those things, so I won't recap them here. I bought the 2034 TIPS reissue via my brokerage; I'll probably try to do original issues for future years but from what I've read it doesn't really matter much. I'll definitely stick with the brokerage for buying future TIPS though, from what I've read buying actual treasuries (not savings bonds) at Treasury Direct is a nightmare.

One thing I haven't done yet, but might in the future, is buy TIPS on the secondary market. That's how most ladder purchases go, buying previous issues at a discount or premium to fill all your rungs. It sounds like you can only do that during a trading day, making actual bids on the market, which sounds kind of exciting - I can see why people get hooked on day trading! I am kind of toying with the idea that, going forward, I'll buy a new 10-year TIPS at auction and a 20-year TIPS on the secondary: for example, in 2025 buying a new issue that matures in 2035 as well as a 30-year issue from 2015 that will mature in 2045. I do like the gradual approach that implies, but haven't committed to doing it yet.

If this is at all interesting to you, you may also like a recent video Rob Berger put out on TIPS ladders. I discovered his channel a few months ago and have been enjoying it - he has a pretty Boglehead outlook, a very calm and pleasant demeanor, and is good at talking about complex topics in a simple way. Many of his videos are about things I'm not interested in, which is fine, I just skip those; when other ones like this TIPS video appear, they're great for me to validate my understanding or learn something new. He does close with a good point that this doesn't have to be all-or-nothing, you could use a TIPS ladder to create a "spending floor" for, say, half of your expected expenditures, and plan to fund the rest from a 60/40 or 70/30 portfolio. My immediate response to that was "Meh" - the whole point of a TIPS ladder seems to be eliminating uncertainty, so why only half-commit? But I think that's good advice for people like me who may otherwise be frozen in inaction due to uncertainty.

Uh, I think that's it for now! This post is probably the best evidence to date that I am getting Old, I never would have thought I could get this excited about bonds.

Bohemian Rhapsody

Still feeling too raw to write about the election. I don't think I have any particular insight to share. I suspect I'll have something to say before the inauguration.

I've been coping/escaping by diving back into Europa Universalis IV. For much of the time I was playing Hearts of Iron IV I found myself wishing that I was playing EU4 instead, so now I am!

This is my long-anticipated game focused on playing within the Holy Roman Empire. The HRE is probably the singular distinctive feature of the EU series of games, with really specific mechanics and a ton of flavor rooted in late-medieval and early-modern history. In my grand Portugal game I mostly just observed it from afar, except for the insanely exciting World War Zero campaign which may have been the highlight of a very long and very fun game.

That Portugal run ended when, in a bizarre turn of luck, I was crowned the Emperor of the HRE despite being way the heck over in Iberia. In that game, I helped the Catholic League keep Catholicism as the official faith of the Empire; but the HRE was overwhelmingly Protestant, so no major princes were eligible to be Emperor. The crown passed through a series of weak and tiny one-province minors, who would invariably get stomped when called to defend territory. It turns out that, in a "There's no rule that says a dog can't play basketball!" turn, nothing requires the Emperor to actually be a member of the Empire, and so, as an extremely well-liked and very powerful Catholic country, I got tagged in at the end.

Back to the present: I spent just a little while deciding which country to play as. Unlike EU3, where playing as a one-province or two-province minor can be a fun challenge, in EU4 it's a major slog, and larger countries are way better. The obvious answer was to play as Austria, the initial Emperor in 1444, but for some reason I shied away from that; I think it seemed a bit too obvious. I was more attracted to Bohemia, very roughly the modern-day Czech Republic. They're an Elector, so they can influence who becomes Emperor (including themselves); they're fairly large, not quite as big as Austria but bigger than most states; they're a Kingdom as opposed to a Duchy and get various bonuses as a result; they're on the eastern edge of the HRE, so they have options both for expanding inside of it and expanding outside; and over the years they've gotten a fair amount of additional content, including unique Missions, events, and even a related religion.

The religion might be the thing that intrigued me the most. Part of the "Emperor" DLC that I had previously picked up included content related to the Hussites, a sort of proto-Protestant reform sect that had emerged in Bohemia some years earlier; by 1444 it had been repressed, which in-game is represented by the official religion being Catholic but several provinces within the country, including the capital Prague, being Hussite.

I fired up the game and, as I do, immediately started work on converting those provinces back to Catholic. Politically, Bohemia starts off without a ruler: they had previously been in a personal union with Hungary, but that king died before the start of the game, so you're under a regency council. After a year or two, a new king is chosen, with pretty good stats - I think like 5/3/4 or something.

Some time after that an event fires about resolving the legacy of the Hussites. You can choose to suppress the faith, which boosts your missionary effectiveness at the cost of increased unrest; or you can continue to tolerate it, which increases, well, Tolerance of Heretics, and kicks off another event chain. I chose the first option to speed up conversions. But at the game went on, I wondered: Why? My Portugal game had been very Catholic-heavy, and that was all well and good, but since I was playing a whole new game, why not try out a different religion for a change?

For me, one of the hallmarks of a Paradox game is restarting several times at the beginning of a new campaign. In Stellaris I'll usually lock into the species I want to play as and my overall goals, and will play a few decades for multiple games until I find a galaxy that looks like a good match for my game. In EU4, I'll flail through the opening scenarios, figure out what dangers to be scared of and what opportunities to work for, and likely restart a few times until I feel like I can get the game off on a good foot.

In addition to the religion, I also realized that the in-game Missions I was seeing didn't match up with what I saw on the wiki. After some searching, I realized that this is because the most recent DLC "Winds of Change" added new content for Bohemia, including another revamp of their mission tree. This is a relatively recent change, I think starting with "Lions of the North", where there are branching missions available. For Bohemia, for example, you can either follow a Catholic-themed path of religious missions or a Hussite-themed one. While traditionally the missions have been based on actual historical events or attempts, Paradox is increasingly playing with "What if?" scenarios that are fleshed out by the game (and not just by the player).

The community consensus seems to be that EU4 is probably nearing its end and EU5 can't be too far off. The game is over 11 years old now, the oldest in this portfolio. Every major and most minor nations have received DLC content, and, as some mildly annoyed commenters have commented, quite a few nations have received multiple rounds: Bohemia had already gotten a significant overhaul in Emperor, did it really "need" more updates?

As I eventually learned (once I was too far into my game to feel good about a restart) it's even worse than that. After getting further down the Hussite mission tree I unlocked a religious Aspect of Faith that costs 200 Church Power and lets you declare war on any neighboring heretic religion (like the "Deus Vult" casus belli from Religious Ideas). But it showed up with an "X" on my screen, and didn't seem to actually unlock the ability. After yet more research, I learned that this ability is actually locked behind the Domination DLC, one of the few that I don't actually own. Even if I were to buy it now, I couldn't continue this Ironman save and earn achievements. Most annoyingly, Bohemia isn't mentioned anywhere on the product page for Domination, so it isn't even like I failed in my research. I found myself missing the icons that Stellaris shows when you're starting a game that suggest DLC which would augment the specific species you're playing at; seeing something like that here before starting the Bohemia game would have been really helpful.

Going back to the campaign: in the one I ended up rolling with, I had my missionary just chill for a few years. After a couple of decisions, we officially converted to Hussite and I set about converting my provinces.

 

I do really like the mission tree in EU4, it gives some great medium-term goals to work towards. Some of mine were diplomatic: you start off with two vassals to the east, and have some missions that encourage integrating them. The bigger and more challenging ones have to do with enforcing Personal Unions over Poland and Hungary. I knew that I'd need big allies for this, so I cozied up to Muscovy and the Ottomans. This turned out to not be very helpful, as they were constantly deep in debt and unwilling to heed my call to arms.

While waiting for my backup to become available, I turned towards some more traditional expansion. In my Portugal game, one of the most important things was controlling Centers of Trade so you could dominate a trade node and get the income from it. Bohemia is mostly in the Saxony trade node. Prague itself is a big center of trade, and there were a few other ones within striking distance. I fought some wars against, hm, I think Brandenberg and Saxony and one other country to take some more. This made me: extremely unpopular! Besides the massive Aggressive Expansion, you also get huge relational maluses from holding "unlawful territory", which seems to happen basically any time you conquer from another state in the HRE. There are a few ways to avoid this but they aren't simple: disband the HRE, become the Emperor, or ally the Emperor. Despite only taking a grand total of maybe 4 provinces I was looking at like 70 years' worth of negative opinion! It sounds like the recommended/preferred way of expanding with the HRE is to instead vassalize your opponents and eventually integrate them, which I guess is more historically accurate. In my case, though, I specifically wanted those provinces now to juice my economy.

Dealing with Austria has been pretty fun. In my first attempt I allied with them, but in this game we started as mutual rivals, which works well for an early mission you have to Humiliate Austria. That was actually the first thing I did in my last couple of games: get some allies together, declare war on them, and get them to concede defeat. This is a great start to the Bohemia game as it gets your Power Projection way up early on and weakens a potentially dangerous neighbor, plus you don't need to take any provinces (at least for this mission) so you don't need to worry about any Aggressive Expansion or Unlawful Territory.

I'm not sure if it was a result of this, but Austria also lost the Emperorship in this game, which has been great; we've had a few Emperors since then and, despite Austria being by far the strongest Catholic country in the HRE, they haven't been invited back in. Austria isn't an Elector, but so far none of the other Emperors have been Electors either. I have at least some influence in this, as I'll back whichever non-Austrian candidate has the most support; but by this point nobody is backing Austria. I wonder if they just lost a ton of Prestige in that war or if some other mechanic is at play.

Back to the east: my plan had been to get Muscovy to help me take Poland/Lithuania and have the Ottomans help me with Hungary. I'd been currying favors for decades and had around 80 favors with each of them. Muscovy never did help, but the Ottomans ended up pitching in for both wars. The "Restoration of Union" casus belli has a fixed warscore requirement, so it's doable regardless of how large the target is; but it's a high warscore, so these are long and grinding wars.

 

They also make you very unpopular. I gulped when I saw the Aggressive Expansion warnings: basically everyone in central Europe would be furious at me. And, after taking Hungary, even furiouser.

My economy was doing pretty well by this point, with some decent trade supplementing my already-high production income, and I opted to become Defender of the Faith. I'd convinced my vassals and now my Personal Unions to follow the Hussite faith, so this came with some really nice bonuses like steady decreases to War Weariness even in wartime, increased missionary effectiveness, and extra prestige.

That aggressive expansion is no joke, though. In my Portugal game I'd done a good job at keeping it at bay: alternating conquests between different geographic areas and religions so it would decay before becoming too big of a problem, and by the point it did become a possibility, I had become so powerful that nobody dared attack me. I think the only time I saw coalitions form in that game was when I was occupied with war against massive opponents like the Ming Dynasty; as soon as the war ended, the coalition would dissolve.

 

In this game, though, I had been basically spitting in the face of European Catholicism for the last 50 years, and they were fed up with me. The coalition exploded in size, and I knew that (Ralph Wiggum voice) I'm in danger. The singular large powers like Castile, France and England were too far away to be affected, but the sheer number of princedoms with like 7k soldiers each was dwarfing even my Bohemian-Polish-Lithuanian-Hungarian family.

I knew from reading the wiki that I should declare on the coalition rather than wait for them to declare on me, since the Coalition Casus Belli has an additional -30 penalty to accepting peace. I also knew that I didn't have any realistic hope of winning this war. My goal was to fire it, make peace on the least painful terms, and use the long truce time to repair relations and prevent the coalition from re-forming.

I ended up declaring on the Teutonic Order, a coalition member that was sandwiched between me and Poland. Everyone I was worried about was on my western border, and by taking a Teutonic province early I could get ticking warscore to partially offset the many penalties I was looking at. This ended up working out okay, about as well as I expected: my fully-garrisoned forts were able to hold out for a while as we defeated the few coalition members in the heartland, won a few minor skirmishes around the periphery, and, after a year or two, came to the table.

Another benefit of having the Teutonic Order be the target was that it was mostly their concerns I had to worry about: a Germanic target would have wanted back Saxony or another important province of mine, but in this case, I could cede my partner Poland's land. I spent some time here, picking provinces that didn't have a lot of Trade Power and weren't coastal, and ended up filling in war score with some ducats. In EU4, unlike in say Civilization, losing a war usually isn't a big deal. In this case, Poland already had cores on all the provinces I was surrendering, so I knew that once our truce was up I would be able to win them back at a fraction of the cost.

So, that was exciting, and a bit of a relief. I definitely took it easy for a while after this, letting my aggressive expansion and unlawful territory tick down and my manpower and ducats tick up. One unexpected bummer, which I didn't realize for a couple of years, was that I had lost my "Defender of the Faith" title: apparently you lose this if you lose any war, not just a war where you're called in to defend your brothers in faith. So that was 500 ducats down the drain. Even when I had the money to get it back, I shied away from it: by now it was the late 1400s, the Reformation was probably coming up soon, and as I was planning to switch to Protestant it probably didn't make sense to be the Hussite Defender of Faith for only a few decades.

 

During this "down time", though, I achieved my biggest territorial expansion of the game to date. Earlier on, I had managed to win the Burgundian Inheritance, one of the most significant events of the early game. Despite being different faiths, I had befriended Duke Charles and allied with him, so once he passed, his daughter Marie entered into a personal union with us. The HRE demanded releasing the lowlands; by this time the Emperorship had passed to some podunk prince, and I happily said "No" and fought to keep all the territory. Eventually Marie passed as well and the Burgundian lands all became Bohemian.

 

This wasn't part of my initial plan for the game, and definitely complicates a lot of things. Burgundy is obviously not contiguous with Bohemia, so I can't move my troops between them without 4-5 military access agreements with minor Germanic states. The provinces are all Catholic and of different cultures. Still, it's a big net benefit. You get free full cores on all of these lands, so it's a huge boost to manpower, tax and overall income. I still need to figure out what to do about trade. They participate in the English Channel (one of three terminal trade nodes) and Bordeaux; I'm currently pushing trade upstream but I know that's very inefficient. Over the very long term it might make sense to collect trade in the English Channel, but I don't have nearly enough trade power there yet, and would need to push my main Saxony power through some intermediate nodes where I have zero power. If this wasn't Ironman I would experiment with using my merchants to collect from multiple nodes instead of steering to Saxony and see how it compares. Heck, maybe I'll just try that anyways, I guess I'd only need to compare a couple of months.

 

 

The current situation I'm dealing with is the Lowlands Revolt. In most games the Netherlands emerge around this time, and I'm fighting really hard to keep that from happening. It's a lot harder than normal rebel suppression: in addition to the mechanics of the +10 local unrest, you get periodic events that just straight-up spawn a large rebel army in a Low Countries province. So basically I'll need to babysit this area for the next 20 years, which in turn means that my Balkan ambitions will probably be on hold for a while.

But that's fine. The Reformation did fire. I knew that there would be an event to convert from Hussite to Protestant, but I wasn't sure if it would convert every province or not. It turns out that it does, yay: or at least every province in your border. I had enforced religion on a few other nations over the years and almost all of them converted as well, except for The Palatinate which has remained Hussite. So we've got a nice head start on the Reformation.

 

In this game, the Reformation started southwest of Denmark, and so far the Centers of Reformation have mostly been along the North Sea and Baltic coastlines. I'm killing time while babysitting rebellions by declaring wars on small states and forcing them to become Protestant. It's pretty fun! Helpful too - apparently switching religions drops Prestige by 100 (!!!), so I was deeply negative for a while, and these wars are helping it to come back up.

It's also been a nice way to mess with the Catholic majors - they've started taking Defender of the Faith, so I'll like to declare a war on a small country far away, occupy it to get to -99 war enthusiasm, force religion on them (plus war reparations, ducats, and whatever else I can prestigiously demand), and take away the title from the Catholic Defender. This has been especially funny against Portugal, as they have to walk all the way across Europe and can't even get there before the war is done. Once that war is over, the next one won't have a Catholic Defender, so I can pick a larger target or one with more allies and take my time separate-peacing all of them.

Let's see, I think those are the major developments so far! My current plan is to keep doing this while the Lowlands Revolt is in place, hopefully getting together a lot more friends and prestige. Then I might finally take the Mission to subjugate Brandenberg and Saxony, since my Aggressive Expansion is mostly gone. Hungary is a bit of a problem: my rivals England, France, Castile and Muscovy are all supporting rebels there, so I can't lower their Liberty Desire. I'm hoping to eventually inherit them, but need to read up on the mechanics for that, they may just be too large. In any case, I want to go further down that tree for the "defend against the Turk" missions to reclaim the Balkans. I've already lined up Venice and the Mamluks as allies; the Ottomans are big but haven't fully blobbed yet so I think this will be my best chance.

Oankali

I'm continuing to gradually poke my way through Octavia Butler's books. It's kind of funny, I've been vaguely aware of her for a while but hadn't realized she wrote science fiction until quite recently. I just finished "Dawn", which is (probably) set in a different timeline than her "Parable" books.

MINI SPOILERS

I really loved Dawn. It's very different from Parable of the Sower, but like that book it felt far ahead of its time to me. (Which one would expect with science fiction, but in my own readings authors are usually exploring contemporary concerns in a future setting, not future concerns in a contemporary setting.) It doesn't feel prescient about specific events and trends like Parable, but it fully engages with ideas that were not in common discourse back then and are everyday topics now.

Where Parable's background is a very slow-burn gradual decline and rot of society, Dawn's background seems more traditional: a catastrophic nuclear war between the USA and the USSR. I flipped back to the copyright page and saw that this was published back in 1987! Funny to think how ubiquitous this scenario used to be and how it has vanished.

Basically all life on earth is toast as a result. It doesn't happen in an instant, and we only learn small snatches of facts in passing. It sounds like the northern hemisphere was hit the worst. The southern hemisphere is doomed as well, in large part because of the freezing temperatures brought about by nuclear winter.

With human life on the brink of extinction, they are saved by a race of aliens called Oankali. Probably the first 2/3 or so of the book is mostly the protagonist Lilith getting to know the Oankali: how they work, what they're doing, and what their plans are both short-term and long-term. The Oankali are an ancient race engaged in something they call "the trade". They explore, find sentient species, study them, modify their own genes to incorporate desirable traits, uplift the species with traits of their own. The Oankali as a civilization spread in this way, with half remaining behind and the other half continuing their exploration.

The Oankali have "saved" some of the surviving people, bringing them from the lethal surface of Earth to a space ship, curing wounds, and putting them into suspended animation. Most Oankali tech is biological rather than mechanical: the space ship is alive, and humans are kept alive and in stasis by Venus flytrap-type plants. We learn that these plants used to be carnivorous, but the Oankali modified them to be helpful instead.

I'm not clear on exactly what the timeline of Oankali contact with Earth has been. Were they silently observing the Cold War for years as it lurched towards Armageddon? Were they coincidentally passing by at the time? Did the energy of the nuclear war get their attention? In any case, they have a pretty deep understanding of humanity (though not as deep as they think they have). Jdahya, the first Oankali who Lilith meets, says that humans have two fatal traits. One is that they (we) are hierarchical. The other is that we are intelligent. Either one alone would be fine, but the combination would always inevitably lead to destruction. Because of this, they deliberately do not rescue the most hierarchical humans, which are the generals and politicians hiding in fallout shelters in the northern hemisphere. Human society will need to change.

And, more creepily, human biology will change too. The Oankali won't act without consent, but they seem implacable in their determination to mix human genes with Oankali genes, which severely grosses out Lilith and all of the other humans as well. Humanity has been "rescued", but will they still be humans once they become hybrids?

Reading this book, I thought this problem was nicely ambiguous and compelling. It's a very strange thing, and a very strange situation; but clearly humanity on its own wasn't faring so hot, so it might be something to consider. Looking back over it, I'm now wondering if we're meant to consider this idea sympathetically, or with horror like Lilith does.

I've been writing a lot about humans, but more of the book is about Oankali, and they're pretty interesting too! Physically, they're vaguely humanoid, but their bodies are covered with many dozens of tentacles. The impression I get from reading is a little like a sea anemone or something: they tend to move in concert, are used for sensing, seem to mostly move unconsciously/automatically but can be controlled if desired. Their skin is gray, smooth and cool. They are alien and revolting to look at, and it takes quite a while for Lilith and eventually others to be able to stand interacting with them.

Besides their tentacular appearance, the most interesting aspect is probably that they have three sexes. The females seem to be the tallest. Males are closest in appearance to humans. The "ooloi" have no gender and are referred to as "it". Ooloi look physically different from males and females, with an additional pair of "sensory arms", particularly thick and sturdy tentacles. Ooloi seem to dominate, although I'm not sure if that's generally true or only for the situations humans are observing. Oankali biology requires all three genders to participate in order to reproduce, with an ooloi essentially mediating between a male and a female. Yes, there is alien sex in this book.

MEGA SPOILERS

Lilith has been chosen to help train a larger group of humans, with the goal of relocating back to Earth in the Amazonian jungle. Humans don't come off very well. Prior to Awakening her first group, she is nearly raped by a human male: the first human she has seen in the long time since her captivity. This is the first of what will become many examples of the Oankali in general and the Ooloi in particular not understanding people (individually and as a whole) as well as they think they do.

Unnverved by that experience, Lilith is very strategic in her Awakening, reading candidates' biographies to try and find likely allies. This has mixed results. People are being awakened from the stress of nuclear war into an alien environment surrounded by strangers, so it's not too surprising that people aren't at their best.

In some ways, this section feels a little like a zombie movie, in the sense that "the real monsters are the humans." That isn't generally the case, or even mostly the case, but the scariest and most disturbing stuff tends to come from people (usually men) violently imposing their hierarchical superiority.

END SPOILERS

I just checked to see if there's a sequel, and there is! I'll probably check it out at some point, there's definitely more story to go with this.

Dawn is a little like the Parable books in that it looks directly at the problems with humanity - our selfishness, violence, fear and hostility towards the unknown - while still fundamentally loving humanity as a whole. The protagonists need to navigate challenging and dangerous worlds, and we admire them for that. There's good in the world, and bad in the world, and the good need to stick together and act on their principles in order to secure a better future for themselves. No matter what form the apocalypse takes.