Ducks
Arriving in Fort McMurray, Katie finds work in the lucrative camps owned and operated by the world's largest oil companies. As one of the few women among thousands of men, the culture shock is palpable. It does not hit home until she moves to a spartan, isolated worksite for higher pay. Katie encounters the harsh reality of life in the oil sands where trauma is an everyday occurrence yet never discussed. For young Katie, her wounds may never heal. Beaton's natural cartooning prowess is on full display as she draws colossal machinery and mammoth vehicles set against a sublime Albertan backdrop of wildlife, Northern Lights, and Rocky Mountains. Her first full length graphic narrative, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands is an untold story of Canada: a country that prides itself on its egalitarian ethos and natural beauty while simultaneously exploiting both the riches of its land and the humanity of its people.
Stats for nerds
4recommend
6mentions
6people
2021–2026years
67% recommend33% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I’d like to recommend Kate Beaton’s book Ducks to get a vivid feel for what these “man camps” are like. That book is about camps attached to oil fields in Alberta, but the “AI camps” described here sound very similar.
- quick shout-out to https://literal.club/ as a hopeful successor of GoodReads, which has been in a state of disrepair if not abandonware for several years now. Literal is a terrific product and I hope it gains traction.
as for my own entries…
- Lapvonia by Moshfegh and Hollow by Catling are both sort of magical-realism set in medieval European villages, which would normally be considered "fantasy" but I assure you are very much not fantasy novels as any normal reader would consider. They are rather stories about the medieval setting set from the perspective of how people a thousand years ago understood and perceived their real world.
- and also on that medieval-tales motif, The Mere Wife by Headley is a contemporary retelling of Beowulf (the hero is a cop named Ben Wolff), great fun and well-styled.
- Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Beaton is winning tons of awards and deservedly so.
- Termination Shock and Ministry for the Future are stabs at possible approaches for solving climate change by very prominent SF writers, which miss the mark for various reasons, but worth a look as they're the dominant themes for the next few years of science fiction.
- Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton [1]. A haunting and disturbing account powerfully told and rendered. Beaton is well known for Hark! A Vagrant, but this is her best work to date.
The Kalevala [2]. I am familiar with the Eddas, the Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid, and the Epic of Gilgamesh, but the Finnish national epos was beautiful and refreshingly different. While I'm sure the English translation pales next to the original, it was nevertheless quite lyrical.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59069071-ducks
[2] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/elias-lonnrot/the-kalevala...
- It's hard to read in this format, but I recommend Kate Beaton's comic, "Ducks". https://beatonna.tumblr.com/post/81993262830/here-is-a-sketc...
- This is a review of Kate Beaton's book Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands (2022).
- Kate Beaton must have a brilliant publicist. Over the past few weeks there’s been a “Ducks” blitz in the outlets I follow: email newsletters, websites, magazines. “Ducks” even made the front pages of Ars Technica and HN despite no obvious tech connection.
I’m sure it’s a quality work and I actually look forward to reading it. But I’d also like to read the companion piece by her agency:
“The Making of Ducks — how we got people who read about GPUs to care about a comic set in Alberta”
