Jason

First half of this book is unequivocally great and everyone should read it. Pages 349-412 should be skimmed - badly edited, too dense and repetitive. Also skip the audiobook, this needs to be read in color.

This book weaves sci-fi, history, adventure, and philosophy in a way that is at once intensely relevant, intellectually stimulating, and soothingly fanciful.

Highly recommended, I found it hard to put down.

Did not finish. I couldn't stand that the main plot point seemed to be around bad communication and dishonesty to your life partner.

I want to rate this book 4 stars for being something I really needed to hear, but 2 stars for being too drawn out and not altogether convincing on its recommendations.

This book is (let's hope) a decent kick in the pants towards more meaningful political organizing and away from “hobbyism” - reading endless national political news, shouting into the echo chamber on social media, putting up an “everyone is welcome here” sign in your expensive, single-family housing neighborhood.

The reminder that the KKK is amassing real political power by offering real, local support to people in need, is kinda all I needed to hear.

There was an interesting, though drawn-out, history lesson in the middle about how the Democratic party organization used to be powerful because of its strong, local organizing. The party was everything in the tight-knit community, and when it came to vote they literally gave you a slip of paper with your votes on it, and you put that straight in the ballot box. Eventually there was backlash to this for many reasons, among them the fact that they were essentially racist local oligarchies which clung to power and resisted change. The shift away from blue-collar strongman control of local party organizations, towards bourgeoisie intellectual influence, actually stripped the party organization of its clout - because it stopped essentially bribing locals to vote for a slate - and alienated blue collar workers - because it was now led by intellectuals without a focus on lending a hand directly to the little guy (instead theoretically supporting policies that would theoretically help the little guy). Hersh essentially wants to recapture some of that lost power through local organizing, offering things like local child care, food support, et cetera, but he doesn't explain how he hopes to avoid the pitfalls.

In any case, I found the book fairly repetitive, bashing on the idea of political hobbyism and lumping a wide range of activities into it - pretty much everything other than voting and getting to know your neighbors / building local support organizations. But maybe that's what I needed it to be. Do I feel a little attacked? yeah, and that's because Hersh has a point and I am the hobbyist he's targeting. But when it came to write this review I found myself wishing I had just read some of the reviews here - like Andrea McDowell's rather than the book. It could have been half as long with the same impact... I really need to get better at skimming.

Can I give it three and a half stars? This story has some striking ideas and some really cool scenes, but lots of the book felt underdeveloped.

For the first third of the book I was wondering “does this author know that they're writing a satire?” It was like reading Hitchhikers Guide if Douglas Adams hadn't realized how funny it was. Just kind of weird, to have half-baked characters, relationships and tropes mashed together with some pretty cool concepts and some pretty wild hijinks.

In the second third, Banks seemed aware of the silly-factor of the madness he was describing, but the last third was heavy-handly dramatic with hardly any payoff.