Goran Lowie
An absolutely mental effort. The scope of Lucas' research is ridiculous. You won't find a more detailed, more thoroughly researched biography on any other director. Bava's growth from cinematographer to director is a filmic story on its own. It's filled to the brim with information about his films (down to the changed scenes in specific versions, the movies he worked on but wasn't credited for, the changes in different regional versions of his movies, production issues...) it is exhaustive and it is endless.
The most interesting part were the various stories about and glimpses into Bava's life. What a tremendously interesting life he's had! While reading this book, I went through Bava's entire filmography. Although I can't say I'm a big fan of his movies, I think he was a very impressive person and the impact he had on cinema cannot be understated.
Came for the space archeology and Big Dumb Object, stayed for the musings on free will vs communal good and governmental systems.
Didn't completely keep me throughout, I'll admit. Usually I love these books where not super much happens and much of it is inner monologue (certainly the case here), but I found myself almost screaming “Get on with it!!” halfway through.
Interesting (if somewhat depressing) little book. Ripe with symbolism (of which I'm sure I missed half or so), a dreamlike feeling, stream-of-consciousness but not really.
“You have such a blatant stare, but I have watched you as closely as you have watched me. It's what mothers do. We watch our children. We know our gaze is powerful so we pretend not to look.”
Feels like a bit of a wasted opportunity, like a really long drawn-out setup for a book (series). I expected more of it. Still a fun read though.
Definitely the most awkward and undeveloped novel of Butler. Many themes and story beats in this book were later executed better in her later works (most clearly in the Lilith's Brood trilogy). Just like Wild Seed and Mind of my Mind, this book is very much about a broken, abusive relationship. In this specific case, it feels a little too problematic, which is probably why Butler ended up pulling the book out of print... But it's still a decent read, well worth reading for completionists.
2.5/5.
Disappointing follow-up. Feels like it's fairly different from the first volume & it's still mostly set-up. How long is this going to be? Been three years since this volume, at this rate it'll be a very long time before I'll find out.
Silverberg has done it again!
My thoughts immediately went to Octavia Butler with this book, since I have been devouring her bibliography this year, and her best series (in my opinion), Lilith's Brood, is a similarly nuanced take on colonialism.
They both deal with two sides of the same story, however; unlike Lilith's Brood this is not from the perspective of the oppressed, instead we see the story through the eyes of an imperialist returning to the country he once colonized. It's very clearly inspired by Heart of Darkness, but Silverberg has made his own, fascinating story here.
A sombre tone, a flawed protagonist who goes through an entire spiritual journey, aliens that feel properly alien, filled with imaginative ideas, horror and beauty.
Can you “go native” as a foreigner, as an oppressor? It's an interesting question, and after reading this book, it's still difficult to arrive at a meaningful answer.
Deeply unsettling with a very weird/unique writing style. If you like dystopian literature, a must-read.
The Man Who Spoke Snakish is a dying earth story.
It's the story of a world on the brisk of collapse, following the few who still inhabit it. Their world is being abandoned, replaced, usurped. It's the story of the last pagan Estonians, living as hunter-gatherers in the woods, as their populace is converted to Catholicism and adapts to the sedentary village life.
This is the story of the turning point of an era, both the end of the old and the beginning of the new, but mostly it focuses on the terrible sadness of knowing something is ending forever and you are the last to have witnessed it. There's a moment in this book where our protagonist, Leemet, meets an ancient whale-like creature who pops up for the last time in its life and tells them how lucky they are to be the last to meet this majestic creature. It sums up his experiences throughout the book quite well.
Leemet is often the last something, and this fact turns sourer throughout the book. There's no great pleasure in witnessing the end of what you know, the great inevitability of it all. Leemet fights, rages, loves, tries to escape it, but there's no escaping it.
Leemet dies, and the world dies with him.
Incredibly detailed and in-depth, providing insights into these subjects that I haven't really found anywhere else. Immensely fascinating!
A thrilling read. I read this book because it was recommended to me– I've always been a fan of Stephen King (ever since, when I was 10 years old, picking up “It” in a bookstore and being unable to put it down) but I hadn't even heard of this one. It was described to me like this:
“[...]one of Stephen King's lesser known books, is actually one of his best in my opinion[...]”
and I'm very much inclined to agree. I stayed up all night reading it– it's currently 7:24 in the morning. It's one of my favorite books I've ever read (by King), and I wholeheartedly recommend it to other fans of Stephen King, of books, or of life.
A weak effort by Shafak standards, sadly. It won me at the start with the compelling relationship between the boy and the elephant, but then it became a very plotless affair going from event to event, reading more like a collection of vignettes with a vague overreaching plot than a real novel.
There's some other silliness in here... The protagonist keeps confronting people who then monologue about their motivations, he keeps being miraculously saved by the same people along with other coincidences, and many of the relationships in this book feel very unbelievable.
Two stars for the prose, which is as great as Shafak has always been. But this was a very disappointing book.
Was forced to sit at a specific spot in a bookstore for an hour or so and this was one of the few books I could get my hands on.
Gender stereotypes: the book. Terrible. If the author is so fascinated with “how gender evolves in our society”, why is 3/4 of this book “men only think about sex and women love buying shoes haha”?
A decently written tale of xenobiology and the relationship between two different races. Had some big Xenogenesis vibes here. Classic “problematic” alien/sociological horror as were used to from Butler.
Hard to Be a God is a book with a pretty great premise and an execution that may not be the thing you immediately expect or want from that premise, but it's really good nonetheless. Much of the context is no longer obvious since it was written in the 1960s and was somewhat censored by the Soviets, but the Russian attitude feels very evident: strong opinions put forth with some grounded and slightly cynical thinking. It's a book of ideas.
Rumata and his cohorts were only to observe, as it was considered almost sacred to allow civilization to evolve on its own. This brought about most of the critical themes that this book explores. He does start interfering. This is all from an ethical standpoint based on the history of Earth itself. It's very much a commentary on the USSR back then.
It's about the fate of intelligentsia under totalitarianism. It examines an important question: if Marxism, which is called the “basis theory” in the novel, promised that the “capital mode of production” would be followed by communist paradise, how come the USSR ended up turning out the way it did?
There's more to it than that, but I'm not one for long reviews. It's a powerful story.
The book was adapted twice, once in 1989 by the German director Peter Fleischmann (starring famous filmmaker Werner Herzog) as a two hour movie, a largely forgotten work and fairly straightforward adaptation of the book. It was also adapted by the Russian director Aleksei German, his final film before his death. The film came out in 2013/2014/2015 (film festivals) and is notoriously one of the grossest, most uncomfortable and confusing movies in a long time.
It's black and white, it has an experimental narrative, it's more slice-of-life and doesn't really have a story. Most people who've seen it say that they didn't really get the story or that it was confusing, etc. I haven't seen either movies so I plan on watching them now that I've read the book. From what I've read, I think having read the book will definitely help watching the 2013 adaptation.
This collection is an excellent sampling of modern speculative poetry. I read a lot of it (but I often don't get around to reading the poems from these particular magazines) and was pleased to find many familiar names here—people who are well-established in the field and whom I enjoy. However, I pleasantly jotted down some new names I'm completely unfamiliar with to hopefully delve into some other time!
The best thing about this book is the sheer variety of poems within. Many different themes are explored in different styles. Will every poem in this collection be to your taste? Absolutely not, but that's the beauty of it. As the editor says in the foreword—these poems contain multitudes, braiding themes and ideas in a truly refreshing way.
If there's any nitpick I have, it's the somewhat limited selection. But this is of course a feature and deliberate limitation of the book—when you make a best-of of specific magazines you are of course limited to the poems from those magazines. I would love to see another modern poetry anthology from Interstellar Flight Press (probably the single best publisher in the field right now!) focusing on a bigger variety of voices, no repeated authors, across many different magazines, to truly showcase the state of modern speculative poetry.
Favorites:
- ARCHEOLOGISTS UNCOVER BONES, BIFOCALS, A TRICYLE by Steven Withrow
- BILLETS-DOUX by Brittany Hause
- ANSIBLES by Ursula Whitcher
- PACKING FOR THE AFTERLIFE by Mary Soon Lee
- MUSIC REMEMBERS by Ashok K. Banker
My sincerest thanks to Interstellar Flight Press for the ARC!
LEARNING TO HATE YOURSELF AS A SELF DEFENSE MECHANISM is a rare one-author short story anthology that isn't uneven. That is to say, most of the time when an author collects a bunch of their short stories it tends to contain a few great stories and a bunch of whatever. But reading this made for a very strong collection, only getting better as I kept reading.
There's a few themes in these stories that keep returning—cultural appropriation and exploitation, being (ab)used by others, modern and refreshing takes on social media and how they've changed the way we interact, AI, time travel and time loops. What I loved about these stories the most is that they never overstay their welcome. Most of them are flash fiction or slightly longer than that. Too many short story writers don't know when to stop, but Kriz does.
I think I'd read maybe one story by her before in Clarkesworld or something like that, so this was a pleasant introduction to the author. Feels like something AK Press might've published.
Thanks to the Interstellar Flight Press for another strong ARC.
I've always been a big sucker for post-apocalyptic books, so I've had this one on my list for a long, long time. It definitely didn't disappoint. The apocalyptic scenario itself wasn't particularly original or interesting– but that wasn't the focus of the story, and I'm glad that it wasn't, because at this point I've read so many post-apocalyptic books that the scenarios themselves don't interest me anymore.
What made this book so great, then? It's beautifully written. Instead of the usual adjectives I'd use to describe post-apocalyptic fiction (bleak, depressing, scary, fucked-up, horror-inducing, heartbreaking)– which, sure, all could be used for this book– I'd use different adjectives: optimistic. Uplifting. Hopeful. Survival is insufficient and the pursuit of beauty and art persist.
The character development was great and it also really made you appreciate our current life, and everything humanity has achieved.
After reading so many bleak and depressing and disturbing post-apocalyptic books, Station Eleven is very welcome indeed.
I've never heard of The Mountain Goats before (only discovered that the writer is a musician after reading this book) but absolutely loved Wolf in White Van. It's a pageturner in a way that Haruki Murakami books are pageturner. Very moving, loved it!