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Ethics: A Novella About Birds
The smaller of the songbird's two chicks fell from the nest and died only days after he hatched. The remaining chick was large and vigorous and ate enough for two, so that, without her mate to help her, the songbird had to spend all day searching for food, from the moment his screams of hunger dragged her from sleep before dawn to final ebbing out of daylight. Her one good eye did not fail to notice the corpse of the other chick, crumpled and battered at the base of the tree, although she had not been present to witness the larger chick trampling it, then driving it furiously over the edge of the nest to fall to its death. With her altered vision, she didn't notice that her one remaining chick bore less and less resemblance to either her or her mate with every passing day, any more than she noticed the minor fungal infection pearling the ruined socket of her right eye.
The infection develops, the fractured skull knits, burned flesh scars over, the cuckoo chick burgeons, the songbird exhausts herself to feed it while her dead chick melts into the ground, axioms form and branch in lemmas, channel postulates like rain –
The infection develops, the fractured skull knits, burned flesh scars over, the cuckoo chick burgeons, the songbird exhausts herself to feed it while her dead chick melts into the ground, axioms form and branch in lemmas, channel postulates like rain –
- GenresFiction
90 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2022
14 people are currently reading
123 people want to read
About the author
Michael Cisco
91 books487 followersMichael Cisco is an American weird fiction writer, Deleuzian academic and a teacher, currently living in New York City. He is best known for his first novel, The Divinity Student, winner of the International Horror Guild Award for Best First Novel of 1999.
He is interested in confusion.
He is interested in confusion.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
March 18, 2025
Kind of made me feel like I was going insane, but in a nice way.
August 31, 2022
This is another in the list of Michael Cisco books that I know I don't fully understand, that somehow still unsettle me in ways I can never quite explain, but that I still, by and large, enjoy. This is told through the POV of a bird. It's riveting and terrifying and often confusing. Sometimes the color of the text changes. I don't think it's meant to signify anything, seems to me like it's more some level of printing bug, but then again it's a Michael Cisco book and what I think is often not the case, so who knows. Not quite as enjoyable as, say, Animal Money or The Narrator, but still always glad to read some of his work!
October 8, 2022
Ethics opens in a similar way to Michael Cisco's book The Tyrant, with the first pages focused on our small, weak protagonist getting almost fatally injured by an uncaring world. The Tyrant goes on to tell a romance in a world suffused with the supernatural. Ethics goes on to ramble about bird philosophy. No one can accuse Cisco of being one-note or predictable, that's for sure.
Eventually the novella moves away from the bird philosophy to a more typical plot featuring the protagonist songbird, addled by her brush with a fiery death (or did her near-death experience open up new vistas of thought, did it break the facade of reality for her and allow her to glimpse something beyond? This was published by Lovecraft ezine press, after all) and her attempt to seek vengeance on a cuckoo. Of note is the bird-centric writing of Cisco, who paints the world through the eyes of his avian characters. Here is the description of a storm seen through that lens:
The writing, as always with Cisco, is quite strong and one of my favorite parts of the book. The writing that isn’t bird philosophy, that is. While the songbird’s quest for revenge ends the story portion of the novella, the volume continues on for thirty pages of appendices setting out “ETHICS (for birds)” with definitions, axioms, propositions, and postulates exploring the avian way of life.
These appendices are basically writing you would expect to find in an unmedicated schizophrenic ornithophile’s journal. For every piece that I found digestible, like ETHICS (for birds) Part 2 Axiom 4: “There are many way [sic] to fly to the horizon,” I found a much larger piece that was gobbledygook, like ETHICS (for birds) Part 2 Axiom 5: “The outcrier does not feel or perceive any individual things except what hatches from scintillation and recedes toward the horizon.” Is all this bird philosophy a parody of a specific real-world philosophy or philosopher, perhaps Deleuze? I have no idea, and no inclination to look into it, because no matter what I discover these thirty pages will remain a terrible read.
As I’ve said before in other reviews, I have the feeling that Cisco writes exactly the book he sets out to write, even when the final product is one that I find very strange and imperfect by my own standards. Ethics is the Cisco work that diverges the most from my taste of the ones that I’ve read so far, to the extent that I found about half of it to be borderline unreadable. There may be some genuine insights in the bird philosophy that Cisco has published herein, but I’m not going to be the person to find those pearls of wisdom if they exist. I give this one a 2.5/5, rounding up only because the work is so short, and most of the insane babble is quarantined in the easily-ignored appendices. Certainly not where I’d start with Cisco, instead for a first-time reader I’d recommend The Traitor or The Divinity Student.
Eventually the novella moves away from the bird philosophy to a more typical plot featuring the protagonist songbird, addled by her brush with a fiery death (or did her near-death experience open up new vistas of thought, did it break the facade of reality for her and allow her to glimpse something beyond? This was published by Lovecraft ezine press, after all) and her attempt to seek vengeance on a cuckoo. Of note is the bird-centric writing of Cisco, who paints the world through the eyes of his avian characters. Here is the description of a storm seen through that lens:
The sky was ablaze with livid seams interspersed with dark masses, huge, inaccessible cloud nests, full of sun eggs that fractured and spat out flashing bolts of white and gold with terrible smashes, bright bursts of the light of embryonic days hatching out too early and dying.
The writing, as always with Cisco, is quite strong and one of my favorite parts of the book. The writing that isn’t bird philosophy, that is. While the songbird’s quest for revenge ends the story portion of the novella, the volume continues on for thirty pages of appendices setting out “ETHICS (for birds)” with definitions, axioms, propositions, and postulates exploring the avian way of life.
These appendices are basically writing you would expect to find in an unmedicated schizophrenic ornithophile’s journal. For every piece that I found digestible, like ETHICS (for birds) Part 2 Axiom 4: “There are many way [sic] to fly to the horizon,” I found a much larger piece that was gobbledygook, like ETHICS (for birds) Part 2 Axiom 5: “The outcrier does not feel or perceive any individual things except what hatches from scintillation and recedes toward the horizon.” Is all this bird philosophy a parody of a specific real-world philosophy or philosopher, perhaps Deleuze? I have no idea, and no inclination to look into it, because no matter what I discover these thirty pages will remain a terrible read.
As I’ve said before in other reviews, I have the feeling that Cisco writes exactly the book he sets out to write, even when the final product is one that I find very strange and imperfect by my own standards. Ethics is the Cisco work that diverges the most from my taste of the ones that I’ve read so far, to the extent that I found about half of it to be borderline unreadable. There may be some genuine insights in the bird philosophy that Cisco has published herein, but I’m not going to be the person to find those pearls of wisdom if they exist. I give this one a 2.5/5, rounding up only because the work is so short, and most of the insane babble is quarantined in the easily-ignored appendices. Certainly not where I’d start with Cisco, instead for a first-time reader I’d recommend The Traitor or The Divinity Student.
December 2, 2025
Very thought-provoking and beautifully written. Likely will need at least one full reread to get the most out of it due to the complex format.
In half of the text, Cisco reimagines Spinoza's Ethics from a bird's-eye view (har). Rather than thinking about god and inner life, birds would focus on the areas most important to them (finding a mate with a song, hatching, brooding, etc.). It's a cool idea. This Spinoza approach necessarily entails a lengthy, dry series of definitions, axioms, etc. I loved the idea, but it is dense and challenging. I can imagine it was a fun exercise to create it, but it was not as fun to read through the final result.
In the other half of the text, Cisco writes a beautiful series of scenes narrating the inner lives of a few individual birds (most importantly a songbird and a cuckoo). The drama that plays out between the birds spans the full range of what we typically think of as human emotions (love, longing, loss, greed, anger, obliviousness, suffering, rebirth). It's very interesting to imagine these birds living lives as full as ours, with unique personalities and experiences. Some may even invent whole philosophies of life, though without the ability to write anything down to share with each other.
Well worth checking out and taking slowly so you can soak it all in!
In half of the text, Cisco reimagines Spinoza's Ethics from a bird's-eye view (har). Rather than thinking about god and inner life, birds would focus on the areas most important to them (finding a mate with a song, hatching, brooding, etc.). It's a cool idea. This Spinoza approach necessarily entails a lengthy, dry series of definitions, axioms, etc. I loved the idea, but it is dense and challenging. I can imagine it was a fun exercise to create it, but it was not as fun to read through the final result.
In the other half of the text, Cisco writes a beautiful series of scenes narrating the inner lives of a few individual birds (most importantly a songbird and a cuckoo). The drama that plays out between the birds spans the full range of what we typically think of as human emotions (love, longing, loss, greed, anger, obliviousness, suffering, rebirth). It's very interesting to imagine these birds living lives as full as ours, with unique personalities and experiences. Some may even invent whole philosophies of life, though without the ability to write anything down to share with each other.
Well worth checking out and taking slowly so you can soak it all in!
August 25, 2022
A literary/intellectual feat. A boring read.
Side note: my copy had two tones of text. One was black and the other lighter in tone. I, at first, thought that it was meant to distinguish things (like italics), but the further I read I found no rhyme or reason to it. My guess is that it was an error in the formatting/printing process. If it WAS meant to distinguish parts it went over my head.
Side note: my copy had two tones of text. One was black and the other lighter in tone. I, at first, thought that it was meant to distinguish things (like italics), but the further I read I found no rhyme or reason to it. My guess is that it was an error in the formatting/printing process. If it WAS meant to distinguish parts it went over my head.
June 28, 2022
It's been like six days and I still can't quite look at my birdfeeders the same way.
January 14, 2023
My new favorite Cisco book!
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews