NiceonaTuesday

Great world building. Particularly like how Piercy develops the vernacular for different groups and how that reflects the underlying forces and most importantly principles that those groups shift around. Sometimes I feel points are repeated and whilst there has been a lot of work to flesh out this world, sometimes the pages are busy with description and dialogue rather than momentum. The presumably expected crescendo toward the end therefore doesn't land so loudly for me. Protagonist is great, love her passion and inner world, felt fresh to be placed alongside her in a sci fi context.

Left too much work for the reader. Sometimes I feel mystery is relied on to seem clever when sometimes it works in lieu of actually being bold enough to commit to stand for something. Kind of felt like the first of the new Dune films where it's setting up the story and the protein - except this doesn't have any follow up. There's so much possibility in ocean sci fi. Reading In Ascension by Martin Macinnes, which covers similar ground but gives so much imaginative yet believable detail.

Semi antiquated writing style using words like "lest" which made what felt like a modern protagonist hard to place and define. The research motive and subject to Lou staying in the house was just uninteresting and hard to follow - I'm not sure what overarching themes were meant to be connecting past to present if any.

I liked the protagonists honesty about desire and sex though. With the current buzz about women preferring to be alone in the woods with a bear than a man in real life, this er adds an alternative flavour to that argument. Still, for me, the most interesting dynamic was between Lou and Homer as we get a sense of Homer's character and voice whereas the Bear remains a voiceless object she cajoles and projects into her orbit. Maybe thats the point?

An uneasy dark dive into the impacts of dissociation. The protagonist is the last person to be aware of how the violence in the systems she inhabits has permeated her behaviour. Powerful.

I love her dry approach to surreality but the short stories didn't give me the depth or emotional weight like her long form ones