Chelsea

Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones: 2/5

The Chaser: 4.5/5

Stag Dance: 3/5

The Masker: 3.5/5

A really mixed bag! "The Chaser" is amazing, but "Stag Dance" wears out its welcome well before it's over, and "Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones" and "The Masker" really needed a more thorough edit.

It's a little too thriller-y for me, and I think the premise worked better as a short story. I would have liked denser worldbuilding around how instancing works -- the book operates on Sliders logic, in the sense that this alternate universe only diverges from the real world in the circumscribed limits that are relevant to the narrative or can be used to make a point or allusion.

Like far too much contemporary literature, this book leans on the present tense to make the story feel more immediate. It also swaps between second-person and third-person to distinguish between two different kinds of POV, which I found annoying.

The themes are lovely, though, and richly explored! That just works better for me in a short story than a 350 page novel.

Useful methodology for many people including me, but the specific stories need some work and there are about half a dozen significant errors. Anki is invaluable for learning through this method btw.

I deserve some reward tape after finishing this behemoth. I'm going to take drugs and watch cat videos for a couple hours, then come back to write a review.

I didn't expect much from this because I bounced off the serialized version on the SCP wiki, but it improved a lot in the editing process!

I love that it just ran with the concept and let it get as crazy as possible. My favorite bit was the huge antimemetic leviathan skull that they turned into a meeting room with built-in idea containment.

The writing is basically fine. It's all written in the present tense which I always find a bit annoying. The use of black boxes as 'censorship' feels a bit overdone to me at this point, but that may be because I've spent too much time reading SCPs.

I thought using memetics as a lens to explore how fascism captures and corrupts people was a very fun angle, and a good way to tie all the interesting bits here into a cohesive novel.

I read this in the middle of Cyteen to understand some of the references to it in that book.

40,000 in Gehenna is basically fine if you like pulp sci-fi or are really into the alliance-union universe. It's not as packed with interesting ideas as some of Cherryh's other work. That's not to say there's nothing here -- you just have to dig through some not-very-interesting set building to get to it. I think Cyteen's references back to this book actually do more with the ideas than the book itself does.

This was a bit disappointing compared to the planetfall novels! Many of the stories feel like perfunctory writing exercises, elaborating on very minor characters (for example, the person running the grocery truck that Carl buys food from at the beginning of After Atlas) who don't have much of anything interesting going on.

However, I quite liked the first story and the author interview at the end! They were worth the price of admission for me.

"Tailor Made" -- a story about a man who designs adverts for clothing produced in sweatshops, who is forced to reckon with the choices he makes -- was also a fun read, simple but cathartic.

DNF. I picked this up after reading and loving Moonbound, but it wasn't for me. Feels very debut author and I'm just not that interested in the setting or romance-adjacent plot beats.

These all needed like 60 pages cut from them.

I don't usually like “cozy” books at all, and this doesn't feel like it should be an exception. There's virtually no plot and the prose is written like a therapist giving a canned speech about how neurodiversity can be a strength, but the setting and characters really won me over.


It probably wouldn't have landed for me if I didn't grow up watching TNG, though

DNF. Too slow

This feels like an overlong plot summary of a really good 800 page book. I love a lot of the ideas but it skips around so much and is so light on descriptive detail that the middle ~200 pages reads like a wookiepedia article. I'm so interested in the setting that I'm still going to try the next book though, lol. I loved Exordia so I'm hoping this book is just suffering from being a debut novel

The bits where the mc punches someone and then they immediately do what he asks are so intolerably dorky. Dnf

Solid start, anticlimactic finish. The AA stuff and learning about what Danny's been doing for the last 40 years is great and the psychic rv vampires are pretty fun, but the book's key plotlines don't gel together convincingly.

DNF. Didn't realize this was wish fulfillment YA rather than thoughtful YA. The world building is ludicrous. The homeric prose is kinda fun though.

I loved the lyrical prose but the setting felt a little underdeveloped – many scenes read like an unfinished sketch, so it was hard to imagine myself in the world. I think I might enjoy this a lot more as an audiobook, since the gorgeous, rhythmic writing is by far the best part.

I wish it had focused more on biography instead of linking Butler's work to the surrounding sociopolitical context – I thought that was clear from reading her books! There are a lot of great details here though, albeit stretched out in cases. I ended up skimming most of it

Note that this book is incomplete. Most of the content is on a website you have to go to on your browser instead of on the actual book.


What is in the book is primarily argument by metaphor. It's totally unconvincing.

I do agree with the premise,
‘if anyone builds artificial superintelligence using anything like current techniques, everyone on earth will die', by the principle of explosion.

It's like saying ‘if someone develops an ftl drive using anything like our current understanding of physics, puppies will inherit the earth'

The navel gazing counting scenes are arduous. I can't deal with the perfectly obvious philosophical conundrums presented ad nauseam. This book must hit crazy if you've never thought about consciousness before though

This is a difficult read, but worth it for the dense and introspective prose and world building. It's nearly plotless, though

There's a lot of fascinating ideas packed in here, and the thriller pacing makes it go down easy. My biggest problems with it are Elmira's totally pointless chapters and how often Nayler repeats important lines as if he's worried you'll miss them.

I think his prose has improved quite a bit from mountain and the sea, though! This is close to 4 stars for me

I really like quotation marks

The character writing is -awful-, but everything else is great. I'm excited about the movie adaptation – it's not like I'm reading Andy weir for the character's rich internal lives anyway

I'm so baffled by the praise this book has gotten. It's level 1 SF themes repeated at surface level over and over again, mixed with meandering lists of earths surface features

Good book other than the constant ‘as you know, Michelangelo, this new Pope is no great patron of the arts'.

I get that it's hard to fit all the exposition you want into an epistolary style, but just leaving it out or using footnotes would have been better IMO