Becca
I liked the idea of a strong caste-system being enforced on a generation ship, which launched from a post-apocalyptic earth with no destination. Planets are, in some ways, just generation ships, but it feels more claustrophobic in a ship, and therefore less room for idealism. I liked Aster and the deuteragonist, Theo a lot as part of a complicated, diverse and neurodiverse cast. And I also liked that for once in a dystopian setting, Solomon really explores the psychological impact of trauma in a way that is unflinching but still leaves room for sympathy.
But while the first half of the book was fascinating and driven by a compelling mystery, the denouement of the central mystery around page 150 requiring a bunch of pseudoscientific babble broke the metafictional agreement of mysteries (i.e. that before they are solved the reader at least has heard of all of the core components necessary to solve them; no fictional toxic heavy metal elements at the last minute.) And following that, the pacing really lagged into a series of upsetting but ultimately irrelevant oppression scenes. And ultimately, I wasn't sure what Solomon was trying to say about American slavery by telling a very conventional slavery narrative in space. I wish they had used the setting to advance the narrative.
I love books about platonic friendship. A lot. I think we don't talk about the value of friendship enough, and I read this while staying in a house with my college best friends, having gathered at no amount of financial, emotional and time investment to see our core friend group. So, this book should have been up my alley. But while Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman attempt to review the academic literature on friendship, this is a very superficial portion of the book. Most of the book is specifically about Aminatou and Ann's friendship in particular. I like that they wrote about being friends through difficult times and how to handle to dissolution of friendship, as well as focusing on how to maintain friendships via facing conflict and finding ritual, all of which are part of my core friendship values. But I just ...didn't like them. I have the sense that I'd like Sow or Friedman individually (and I have when I've heard them on podcasts) but their friendship based on alcohol and girly TV and fashion and being “low drama mamas” (I've found people who declare themselves low drama are (a) almost always not and (b) toxically conflict-averse) was something that made me want to run for the hills.
I'm not really sure what to make of this last entry in the Terra Ignota quartet. Some parts were absolutely brilliant – the way that war spirals out into tiny fractal battles with the motivation behind each becoming increasingly personal and complex. I loved the way that Palmer as a historian thinks about not just technological changes but how government, family structure and social mores will change in 500 years. As she reminds us, the American Experiment is not yet 500 years old and there's no reason to believe that 500 years in the future people will continue to idealize democracy and free speech, as dear as that is to us today.
I loved the tension between: do we do everything we can to dream of a better world, or do we work incrementally on this one? I thought that ultimately, after The Will To Battle being overly sympathetic to the Masonic Empire, Palmer in this book shows more of the nuance between these sides and ultimately the arc for the original Saneer-Weeksbooth bash and for Carlyle Foster are pretty satisfying.
But there's just too much in this book. There are three pieces that just don't really fit and I feel bad because I think they're really Palmer's favorite parts: The Homeric references, JEDD Mason and Mycroft. Each is central, but ultimately distracting. Perhaps the least clear complaint is Mycroft – part of what made Terra Ignota stand out is a literally criminally insane, unreliable narrator, whose scandalous secret past is definitely scandalous. But by the third book, Mycroft's deification of JEDD Mason and commitment to the monarchy of the Masonic Empire was starting to really dilute the richness of the setting. Palmer's responded to this criticism by saying that it's just the lens of reading via Mycroft and that readers can read past him. But she had a rich opportunity to provide a foil for his narrative with 9A, and instead 9A too became a JEDD cultist. I think this is simply a theory of mind failure – as the reader, I cannot completely see past an unreliable narrator to pick up clues from a highly complex setting from only seeing first person narration from said highly unreliable narrator. Also, Mycroft's schtick is that he really is an unforgiveable person and I think Palmer got wrapped up in her own creation and ultimately found him sympathetic in a way that I did not find deserved.
So complex world-building + interesting philosophy + futuristic homeric retelling + morally complex unreliable narrator + exploration of novel divinity = too many things to fit into a quartet
I think I really summed it up when I explained: “it reads like assigned reading for an undergrad philosophy course. The really cool one, with the professor everyone adores, but still.”
Palmer has always been clearly been using her work as a vehicle for important cultural conversations, but that was paired with awe-inspiring world-building in Too Like the Lightning and a careful deconstruction of all of the holes in her world in Seven Surrenders. In The Will to Battle, nearly 300 or 350 pages are devoted entirely to dialogue, about half of which is between the narrator and either (a) the reader, (b) Hobbes or (c) other dead people as imagined by the narrator. It's important work about what it means to be a civilization, how to balance improving this world versus dreaming of bigger ones and what we as citizens in a global society owe each other. I think it may also be doing work holding up either end of the quartet in which it's placed (time will tell), but it's not really functional as a stand-alone novel.
This is one of those books I couldn't stop telling people about:
So there's these two prisoners of war, and they use slight of hand and cold-reading to convince their Turkish captors that they're psychics and then lean in to the Turk's xenophobia to further convince them that there is secret Armenian treasure
In Icepick surgeon Sam Kean looks for scientists who did bad things in the name of science. In doing so, he mostly tries to avoid the easy ways out: most of the chapters are about sincere scientists, who at least start out meaning well, not cartoon villains. And on the flip side, Kean makes clear that there is no justification for the sorts of harm inflicted by these scientists – he reminds us again and again that this is not how science advances.
Reading it, I was stunned at how many of the tales were tales about scientists who did bad things in the name of MONEY, not science: taking to piracy, slave-trading, even murder with the goal of raising enough money to continue doing science. I complain bitterly about the NIH and the silly hoops for grant-funding, but at least science is funded. So much of historical science was only for people who were already gentry and could self-fund.
This is a beautiful, quiet meditation on what the purpose of life is and finding one's best self. I liked the idea of a tea monk, I liked the idea of a book focused on a character's journey to find the purpose of their life and how to spend their time and I really liked the idea of a post-apocalyptic world that functions by letting the wild lands stay wild.
But exactly what a tea monk does is relatively unstructured, as is Sibling Dex's story in general. And while I found the conclusion beautiful, I also found it a little unconvincing since the philosophical denouement was dependent on the setting that Chambers developed, so ultimately it didn't really speak to the reader about: what is the purpose of me and my individuality and my life and my time?
The best speculative fiction exists in dialogue with the world as it is and I think Chambers slipped a little in that goal.
A Desolation Called Peace continues Arkady Martine's Teixcalaan series about: where do the boundaries of culture/community and individuality get drawn? What does it mean to be a member of a community. Those themes are much more deeply explored in a Desolation Called Peace with the addition of the ring aliens and a deeper focus on life on Lsel station.
However, it lacks the central focus of a Memory called Empire – Teixcalaan culture is just so richly developed. A Memory Called Empire was brilliant in part because the best parts of the world, the philosophical questions it raised and the most compelling central character was all bound up in a central mystery about Lysander. A desolation steps away from that singularity of focus, and also includes multiple substories and the book really suffers from this diffusion.
Nonetheless, Arkady Martine realizes alien cultures with a depth like no one else, and a Desolation is one of the best science fiction books I've ever read, it just pales in comparison to its predecessor.
I am a big fan of murderbot in general, and this is really a classical expression of the form Martha Wells has honed to an art: a compelling mystery that also reveals the inner thoughts of Murderbot to itself and to us and causes it to grow as a person, er, bot, while also developing the relationships among Murderbot and the people it's come to care about. It's fun, it's got some depth to it in terms of personal development and exploration of the universe.The “but” here is that, unlike most murderbot fans, my favorite book in the series was [b:Network Effect 52381770 Network Effect (The Murderbot Diaries, #5) Martha Wells https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1568667704l/52381770.SX50_SY75.jpg 63614271], the full length novel. I'm just not really a novella person and the return to novella format solidified that for me – it's a little shorter and a little shallower than my preference (and having it placed as a prequel to Network Effect also threw me).So Murderbot. It's great. More novels, please.
Take a basic adolescent novel about fitting in, friendship and crushes and then make all of that real: if you don't have any friends, you will literally be eaten by monsters. If the golden boy reciprocates his crush on you, it will literally save your life. That's the premise of Deadly Education and it's kind of a fascinating one.
I think Novik's characters were well-developed, especially to explore the way that adolescence can feel so life-or-death. Sometimes school fantasy can feel twee, but I felt like Novik's monsters felt real, serious threats and this was done well.
This is a very 2020 book – about what happens when an external temporary disaster stops your daily routine, sets back your to-do list and forces you to reflect about your priorities. This is also a very Becky Chambers book – each main character belongs to a separate alien species and one that was not well-fleshed out in the previous books – each species is intricately developed in physiology, cultural norms around gender, living style, values, etc. And each character is carefully developed within that species.
Like Chambers' other works there isn't much plot there. Instead, the book really focuses on character development. Most of the book is spent on each character's own reflective practice and their pairwise relationship developments. Beyond that, the book is largely an exploration about family and parenting - why and how each character does or doesn't engage in different types of family relationships. Chambers wrote in interviews that she was strongly influenced by Le Guin and it shows here – very strong world building and a lot of contemplation about how speculative fiction to open a window into the choices we make in the real world without considering them.
Also, basically Come From Away, but with aliens and no music.
A few adorable snippets: a child's rock collection is all dressed up as a natural history museum; an entire conversation about how dumb humans are for eating cheese (there are no humans in this book, which I found a great choice that really allowed for larger cultural exploration), zillions of baked goods and a bath house so epic it needed foreshadowing
I didn't read a non-fiction book in nearly a year. This was not the right book to re-exercise that muscle. The Fires of Vesuvius is dense. Dr. Beard is a highly respected academic classicist and although here she tries to write to a lay audience, it is certainly an academic book (exhibit 1: that graphics are sorted into illustrations, figures and plates. Illustrations and figures are set into the text and numbered consecutively, but independently from each other. There are two sections of pages dedicated to plates. Each of these images which is referenced and cross-referenced from various places inside the book. Overall, there are over 200. You will spend much time searching for the right image.)
But despite the density, I did find the book a very interesting exploration about what life was like in Pompeii. I had no pre-existing knowledge: I had never taken a classics class, never been to Pompeii (or Italy) and my only real understanding of this time-period is from reading the talmud. In that context, also, it was fascinating to compare Roman culture with Talmudic culture (freeing slaves on a regular basis: universal! Having a set, primarily written canon for a religion: super abnormal!) There was also a lot to explore here about how Roman elections work, what people did for fun, and a lot, a lot of epistemology. How much can we trust the veracity graffiti and murals? What about when that conflicts with what seems likely to us?
An extremely satisfying prequel to [b:The Haunting of Tram Car 015 36546128 The Haunting of Tram Car 015 (Fatma el-Sha'arawi, #2) P. Djèlí Clark https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1537226167l/36546128.SY75.jpg 58277622]. Clark continues to shine in his ability to build a rich and interesting setting. In this case, I found the steampunk angels that were controversially “angels” versus angels and were being of pure ethereal light encased in a steampunk chassis fascinating. I think the continued richness of magical, metropolitan Cairo that Clark develops is perhaps one of the strongest de facto arguments in favor of the importance of diverse authors in speculative fiction. Clark just really brings a unique voice to the field. I found Fatma a much richer character than those in Tram Car – I loved her opinionated stance, the idea of her exotifying Western culture and of course the gender nonconformity. The downsides here were similar to Tram Car: Clark doesn't seem to really know how to conclude a story and instead just abruptly ties all the loose ends in a bow and declares the story over. I found it just as jarring in this novelette as I did in Tram Car – these are rich, complex settings with so much nuance in the set up and then almost anticlimactically neatly wrapped up. I am interested in finding out if this will persist to the upcoming full-length novel in this setting. But, nonetheless, Clark is now on my must-read list.
There is nothing more refreshing than a book that is truly completely new. And this is: Clark imagines a Cairo in which the late industrial revolution was marked by the emergence of djinn and magic. And rather than handle this as a fantastical event, the world simply adapts to this as a newfangled technology: you know, kids run off to the continent to take “alchemical classes” and in my day, high-bred kids just took Latin. And by the way, the steampunk aerial trams are also powered by magic.
Mix this with a strong sense of place: Cairo here is presented as a melting pot of Western Asian, Middle East and African cultures. (Me: Is it Afrofuturism if it's set in Egypt? Jon: Is it about either Cairo or Alexandria being the best in Africa at something? Me: Cairo is the hub of the African dirigible system...so...yes). And then add in some bureaucratic procedural elements in the form of a pair of police officers whose job is to take in magical hijinks. Plus a heaping dose of suffragettes (the Egyptian feminist society in this alternate history gaining a much early right to vote) and the result is completely delightful.
This book is SHORT – most novella's feel short because there isn't enough space to develop an interesting set of characters/plot/setting, but Clark really excels here. Just to illustrate how quickly he sketches the scene for you, three pages in you know that the world has gone through a recent technical revolution, the main character is cynical because hauntings are too mundane and his partner is overly eager. Indeed, this novella feels short because there is so much developed and so many interesting questions like, should tram cars be emancipated? How are djinns similar and different from ethno-specific folklore beings? What rights do non-binary gendered beings have in this world? And while the story comes to a satisfying conclusion, these existential questions are unanswered. I hope Clark continues to write a lot in this setting.
I love Mary Roach. So much. And finding humor in the oddest places is absolutely the schtick that made her famous.
This is not it. This is finding humor in the most trite, pedestrian places. Like, stop me if you've heard this one: there isn't much knee room on airplanes! Phone trees are incomprehensible! Tech support isn't based in the USA and also doesn't like to help you! Women don't like their bodies as they age! Men are slobs who like sports!
Also, speaking of aging with indignity, many of these jokes didn't age well. About three essays in, when we got to TV channels, I double checked the publication date: 2013. Huh. OK. And then an Anna Nicole Smith sent me to double check...2013. Eight years didn't feel that long ago, but I was ready to buy it until the mysterious object called the “Roomba” was discussed with great pomp AND Roach expressed indignity about websites not having phone numbers to call, google sent me to the Reader's Digest archives, where I found that most of these essays date back to the Dubya era...the first term. (If I hadn't figured it out by then, an essay featuring receiving netflix in the mail and an iPod shuffle would have given it away.)
What else didn't age well? Two different jokes making fun of Native American languages. And an internalized misogyny thinly disguised as self-deprecating humor. But the timeline raises more questions than it answers: in My Planet, Roach presents herself as appalled by the extremes of her aging face and body, incapable of adapting to new technology and tottering towards senescence. This feels impossible to reconcile with a woman who in 2008 agrees to have sex in an MRI (wikipedia tells me I'm remembering it wrong and it's an ultrasound...) and then 8 years after that bullies her way into an Army base in Djibouti to investigate diarrhea. The answer is that Roach was an ancient 43 when she wrote this book, an age that feels way younger than these essays read. I wonder which Roach is the real one.
And this is the rub: I'm a Mary Roach fan because she makes my work in the weird biochemistry of the body feel seen and relevant. When I read her other books, part of the joy is imagining her coming to interview me and giggling like old friends about some hilarious joke I tell with the punchline involving an organic acid and the tandem mass spectrometer. When I read this book? And I imagine this woman obsessed with her body shape and gender essentialism and very, very well-trod punchlines...if this woman ever wanted to interview me at work, I'd pawn it off on the fellows. (Maybe she's both things – the adventurous, witty, dry humorous writer and the cliched wine mom type and it's my own internalized misogyny that won't let me reconcile them. Who knows?)
I'll be honest: I'm downright angry about this book. My anger started around page 38 and never abated. You see, Seanan McGuire values representation. She does not apparently value correctly representing people. When the protagonist complained that she had not developed breasts and was short, I assumed we were getting some Turner Syndrome representation – you know, a syndrome, that results in delayed puberty and short stature. When instead, McGuire declared her protagonist to have CAIS (complete androgen insensitivity) I was confused. It had been a while since I'd taken my general genetics boards but it took me only 30 seconds on google to confirm: girls with CAIS have normal breast development and normal height velocity with a normal age of maximum height velocity (growth spurt). I kept reading – maybe the protagonist had a secret gonadectomy to explain those features? Maybe the mother was confused? But no explanation was forthcoming and it dawned on me: I don't think McGuire actually ever spoke to anyone with CAIS. And the more I thought about that, the more it upset me: McGuire refers to Regan multiple times as being “intersex,” a term that many women in the CAIS community don't use to refer to themselves. I had originally felt okay with Regan reclaiming the term, but the more I thought about McGuire using it with apparently no community input the less good I felt about it. And I thought about how McGuire portrays herself as a champion of diversity and the harm caused by tokenism rather than true representation. This is not doing it right. Do better. Talk to people with disorders of sexual development and ask how they'd like to be portrayed. At the very least, do a five minute google search. (Failing all of that, I once again offer my services as a professional geneticist who will fact-check speculative fiction for the low cost of a free book.)
(I have other feelings about the book, but this really is the most important one.)
I really enjoyed Deborah Blum's [b:The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York 7054123 The Poisoner's Handbook Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York Deborah Blum https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1442933592l/7054123.SY75.jpg 7305202] about poison in the Jazz Age, and this prequel, so-to-speak, of the turn of the century push for food purity was fascinating. Many popular non-fiction books read like an afterthought of stitched together essays masquerading as a book, but Blum's journalism background really shines. The narrative flows nicely from one section to the next, painting a complete picture of an America held captive to corporate interests and party politics on one side and activists, suffragettes, socialists and scientists on the other. This may feel a little on the nose for modern politics, but Blum never lets a parallel slip out, instead sticking strictly to history. She does so largely by focusing on the story of Dr. Wiley, the titular “one chemist,” who forms the also titular, “poison squad” – a randomized controlled trial to determine the effects of preservatives on food.Perhaps my biggest complaints about the books are the flip side of its virtues. With a singular narrative focus, Blum loses the opportunities to draw parallels and also address how the FDA and food regulation has evolved since FDR. Wiley's campaign against preservatives like saccharin and benzoate is addressed with complete credulity analogously to his campaigns against formaldehyde and copper salts in food. Blum never even mentions that both are FDA-approved now (a tangent: as a professional biochemical geneticist, I use benzoate all the time as a nitrogen scavenger because it binds to the amino acid glycine to form hippuric acid, which is easily excreted in the urine. When I first started interpreting urine organic acid analyses, I turned to my mentor confused – why do so many samples have hippurate in them? I assumed that some hippuric acid might be naturally occurring. Instead, my mentor handed me a diet soda bottle, clearly labeled “contained potassium benzoate to preserve flavor.”). She also didn't address the modern “pure food” movement or how that may be different with a more robust FDA who does approve the chemical additives...
This is an adorable chosen family narrative. I found it a little saccharine at times – there's not really a central conflict, or even much of a point besides coming together as a set of misfits and fighting back against intolerance – but sometimes you need that in the world. I will say that at times it felt almost like issue-fic: the intolerance was a little on the nose and the solution was very pat (asking people nicely to not bully you; have the mayor on your side and the angry mob dissipating seems a quite simplistic to January of 2021). But it was incredibly cute: a wyvern who collects buttons! An edgy child Anti-Christ who just wants to be loved...and talk about philosophy! A queer, middle-aged romance! And they all become a family.
So, full disclosure, I am not audiobook people. I am a massive Scalzi fan and I'm pretty fond of Zachary Quinto, so I thought it was worth a try. It's not enough. There are just too many names and too many subplots for me to keep track of just by listening. I'm not sure why audiobooks don't go the direction of podcasts, or even radio plays, and try for more auditory interest? Even Quinto, an expert voice actor, comes off as monotone and some of the voices he uses for different characters are jarring or absurd.
The bones, I think, are decent: Scalzi explores what options the criminal element has to operate with in a world in which murder doesn't work. He brings back his Dispatcher protagonist, his cop sidekick Langdon and the morally grey crime boss from the Dispatcher and that continuity and further story development was nice. Hopefully I'll get a chance to read this at some point when it stops being an audible exclusive.
Overall, I enjoyed the Interdependency trilogy, but I think this was the weakest of the three: about 100 pages are devoted to recapping the first two books. It also feels like the conclusion is a bit too neat and a bit too fantasy fulfillment – the billionaire ruler who's just in it for herself is shown up, the climate change crisis, err, disruption of the flow is able to be mitigated so that everyone is saved and this actually is a nice salve to 2020, but it's not as deep and challenging reading as I wanted. Everything is wrapped up so neatly that it feels almost like fanfic, although it was satisfying and fun reading.
This is archetypal Connie Willis: light science fiction, adorable rom-com between people you want to root for, department stores, Christmas, historical fiction and miscommunications. Honestly, it reads a little like “we forced an artificial intelligence to read the entire oeuvre of Connie Willis and then it wrote this” – it bears a striking resemblance to parts of Time Out as well as Bellwether. But I'll still read everything Connie Willis writes: it's adorable, funny and wholesome.
By the way, yes, I was annoyed to pay $30 for a 115 page novella, but the book is a gorgeous slip of a thing with embossed inner covers and a color illustration on photo paper, so I'm pretty sure I'll get over it.