Coleman

holyyyyyyy shit. 5 stars is not enuff.

"so good i want to scream" is a really good quote, rare to have a novel simultaneously so thought-provoking and (at times) hard to put down.

so the opposite of what i usually read, making me question things. all plot and ideas and witticism. not very much in the way of evocative descriptions of scenes or beautiful prose. internal, yes, but in a Big Ideas way. I think a big key is they're big ideas which are queer and female, rather than being more cis straight guy big ideas. so much potent gender thoughts.

I really thought this was gonna be 5*!!

I started reading this through a short story club, in which we read the last real story “Main Character”. I loved that story, so figured I’d read the whole thing.

The first two stories really got under my skin. The writing is funny, smart, and has all the qualities of a nightmare where things just get deliciously worse and worse. Legit gave me a fright, as silly as it was. Especially Allison, she haunted me.

The middle two stories were a bit of a letdown given the other three (not aided by my odd order of reading) I must admit. They felt broader than the first two stories—while all the stories are satirical, I found these two stories strained credulity to the point that I didn’t feel as much pathos or pain of identification reading them. And I didn’t love that the story about a gay man devolves into laughing abt divergent sexualities (even though I have to admit it was kinda funny). It also just really felt like a story a gay man wouldn’t write, and falling into that demo myself that kinda took me out of it.

“Main character” is still a tour-de-force, definitely the strongest story. And I really like how the short, unconventional two final chapters contribute to the overall themes of the book—while “16 metaphors” is a bit uneven, it explores some interesting territory. I like the way the rejection letter finishes off the book. Altogether, a profound look at the feeling of being spurned and how we react to it.

read this after meeting Hagen and enjoying talking to him!

This book has a pretty ambitious thesis to defend—the notion that AI doomerism/AI will-kill-us-all fears primarily reflect structural issues with capitalism, and that AI is imagined as the will of capital made manifest. Like most ambitious theses, I think it’s an oversimplification, but the authors make a pretty compelling case. I think the points around inevitability, control, deskilling, mystification, and the parallels to the steam engine were all quite compelling, and I learned a fair bit. I was less convinced around the arguments of why intelligence is threatening to capitalists (which I found a bit reductive/to lack an analysis of power) and the role of the transistor.

Overall, a nice entry into the debates around AI that is holding up well to the latest developments.

Lots of really interesting ideas. Very difficult and confronting writing of the male characters which I found very emotionally affecting. I am glad nevertheless that it actually doesn’t seem to be totally essentialist radfem content, that there’s maybe space for men to be good raised in a different society.

Never read sci-fi with this much linguistics, and as a linguist it holds up fairly well.

The prose was serviceable. I don’t really see the point of the minor plot threads (perhaps this becomes more clear in the sequels?), which also led the book to end on a note I found a bit random and campy after a strong second-to-last chapter. I did really enjoy Michaela, though I thought she was going to have more elaborate politics than she ended up having. Relatedly, sometimes it feels like the character’s motivations or actions don’t make *that* much sense, but rather need to happen for the plot. A weak point was the way Nazareth acted when she arrived at barren house—I thought this should’ve been a really climactic moment but it felt like it came out of nowhere and was almost Mary Sue (despite the complexities of Nazareth’s character in other contexts). Like they kind of dropped the whole thread of why it was important for her to come?

Stepping back though, a lot of interesting and original ideas you couldn’t see anywhere else, packaged up in a surprising narrative that kept me wondering where it would go.