Angela Ambroz
This was really the best? Somehow, this feels like an incomplete view of all the possible great spec fic that was out there in 2006. Few of the stories are really dazzling: Alastair Reynold's story is playful and full of cosmic wonder, a very old timey sci fi feel to it; as is Palwick's “The Fate of Mice”. “Finished” was touching. There were a few B-grade, OK stories - “Triceratops Summer”, “The Policeman's Daughter” - but there was quite a lot of unimaginative, unpolished stuff. I was surprised. Haldeman's short-short, for example, was flat and uninspiring. (I remember the drabbles of fanfic, where the whole point seemed to be leveraging sparse, stylish prose to make something mysterious and evocative; this short-short was just... short.)
Overall, I'm a bit baffled; the editor, Horton, mentions Strange Horizons magazine (a place where I've read a number of stronger stories), but it doesn't seem like he picked much from it. And what about Abyss & Apex? These magazines consistently have great pieces. This supposed “Best Of...” didn't feel very “best” at all.
Kinda between 3 and 4 stars. Because - Lordie, is there carnage. Expect carnage front to back, panel by panel. Not a single page goes by that blood and guts aren't spewing around. It also threatens to turn very dark, very fast - and I won't spoil the ending. Oh, and this is definitely my cat. I don't think I can look at my cat in the same way anymore. Put my cat in a suit of armor, and, yeah, I guess she'd murder us all.
Basic: three pets - a cat, a dog, a rabbit - are mutilated into Borg-type super-soldiers by those hyper-shady, hyper-cynical versions of the military we oft see in comix or sci-fi B movies. After the animals break loose, so does all hell. Including super secret supersoldier Animal Weapon 4 - I won't spoil what animal it is. But it's not a cow. And if there's one animal that - should we choose to Borgify it into a killing machine - would really rip us to shreds on a mighty path of vengeance, it'd be the cow. Or maybe a chicken or pig. Anyway. Please consider donating to Farm Sanctuary to avert this terrible revenge.
Anyway, this gets really gross, really fast, and stays gross. For this reason, and for the general animal rights despair, I've always had trouble getting past page 3 of this comix. I've had it for YEARS. Today I managed, and it's a fast, sharp, good read. The paneling is really elegant. So much is told visually; kudos to the authors and no wonder this always makes the “top 10 graphic novels” list. It's very well-done.
Just don't eat before you read this.
And don't expect to NOT feel weird around your (non-killing machine) pet after you read this.
Really solid, smart sf. A little ponderous, and I found Ted Chiang's “voice” to be a little homogenizing (basically all the characters sounded the same), but the range of his ideas was great - this short story collection spans a very imaginative set - and one of his stories is, imo, one of the best sf short stories ever written. Simply masterful!
Brief notes about some of the stories:
- Understand: This is basically Flowers for Algernon: a first-person account of a dude with brain damage who, through some hand-wavey magical medicine, becomes a super-intelligent mega-brain genius. The difference here being that, this time, the protagonist is basically an asshole (whereas Charlie was a sweetie). Fine.
- Division by Zero: Meh. An academia power couple has angst because the Mathematician Wife has stumbled upon a painful, foundational inconsistency in ALL DA MATHS. I would have been into this in grad school, when having deep, philosophical reactions to foundational mathematical principles was something I considered fun/cool instead of kinda tedious? It was fine. 1+1 = 1, omg.
- Seventy-Two Letters: This was a hoot. What an imaginative idea! A kinda steampunk story with a pleasantly creepy vibe. The world is weirdly skewed, and Chiang does a good job of slowly revealing how this world is different from our own: words - specifically, Hebrew letters arranged in various ways - (inexplicably?) give “life” to clay-based automata. Or sort of. It's 19th century London, and an industry rises up of automatons that can carry shit, clean shit, and do other mindless chores. Protagonist is a “nomenclator” - a scientist (?) who comes up with the Hebrew words that power these automata. He has lots of labor sensitivities (Industrial Revolution being what it is!) and wants to make a self-replicating automaton that can be cheaply distributed to all English households and thus de-industrialize the landscape. Yeah, I wasn't sure about his reasoning either, and neither are his factory worker buddies. Also there is some drama about “mega-foetuses”, and the inevitable Frankensteinean ambitions to make a true automata: an actual person! That can procreate other people! Definitely a hoot. One of my favorite stories in the collection.
- Story of Your Life: This is the short story that turned into the movie Arrival. I found Arrival overly intellectual and overly solemn - i.e. classic mid-2000s literary sf! - and so I wasn't super pumped about the story. But I found reading the story a “second” time to be oddly enlightening. While the movie seemed to be mostly about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (the theory that language “creates” our reality), the short story was much more free will vs. seeing the future. As is cliche for this sf issue, there is a dead child and lots of regret. The ultimate idea is that, even when you can see your sad, tragic future, you still choose it to still feel the feelings - the highs and lows. As I was sobbing at the (super sad) final section, I realized - omg - THAT'S WHAT I'M DOING RIGHT NOW. I knew the ending (of this story), but I still went through the motions of reading it and still felt the feelings afresh! If not more deeply! So that was an interesting meta moment.
- Liking What You See: A Documentary: A fun, fake oral history about a near future where, to combat “lookism” (the statistical likelihood that better-looking people get treated better by society), neurologists have developed a minimally invasive procedure that gives people mild face-blindness. A local college debates where to have everyone have this procedure done, to basically create a lookism-free campus. This was pretty fun, and obviously reminds the reader about all the various older people who variously critique the “special snowflake PC culture” of younger people at liberal arts colleges. Chiang makes a good argument for both the pro-procedure and anti-procedure groups, and it's a nice, dystopian, Black Mirror-ish moral fable.
- Hell is the Absence of God: AHHHH, THIS. THIS. I read this story back in 2008 and it has stayed with me since then, it is MASTERFUL. It's the story that put Ted Chiang on the map for me, and it's the story that inspired me to write The Good Deaths stories (yo, if anyone wants to buy Part I, plz let me knowwww). The idea is wonderful: Chiang envisions an alternative reality where evangelical Christianity is Literally True. The angels of God come blasting out the sky like natural disasters, dispensing with miracles (you! no more cancer!) and causing havoc in a pretty indiscriminate, random way. When people die, witnesses can see their literal souls flying up to Heaven or falling down to Hell. Hell can occasionally be glimpsed when the ground turns translucent: and Hell doesn't look so bad? It's just a place where the angels and God don't appear. The way that everyone deals with this seemingly amoral but inscrutable and all-powerful deity is wonderful. Protagonist is a recently-widowed dude whose wife dies during one of the angel visitations (she gets fatally injured by exploding Starbucks windows); her soul flew up to heaven, since she was a devoted, God-loving nice lady. Protagonist, however, has always been kinda meh about the whole destructive, amoral God business, and fine with going to hell, but now - wracked with grief over his dead wife! - needs to fall in love QUICK with God so he can earn his way into heaven. Baaahhh. IT'S SO GOOD. I think what I love about it is that, even in a world where “faith” is a moot point, the mysteriousness of our lives - the problem of evil, of randomness - would actually not at all be solved by the literal presence of an all-powerful deity. I ALSO admired Chiang's ability to wrap this essentially non-theistic argument in a story that FEELS strongly, especially in the end, like a moral fable. So many emotions in the end! It's like a Grimm Bros. tale, very wtf and very wonderful.
Spare, wry, meditative, a little longing and a little inspiring. 200 pages, and they go down a treat - read it in one sitting. Very light, but satisfying.
The android girlfriend trope has been done. Hooooo boy, has it been done. And Alex + Ada is, yes, basically an unabashed, unashamed android girlfriend story. And, sure, it touches on how we define humanity, souls, free will, consciousness, rights, blah blah. And, yep, it's once again contextualized in the awkward, patriarchal “do women - I mean, androids?! - have brains/souls?”: i.e. Blade Runner, Her, even Cloud Atlas - it's always a lady! Always a bot-lady! Are there no handsome boy-bots to be emancipated and liberated and given brains? Apparently not. Apparently the blank stares of handsome men do not inspire writers so much... hmm...
Anyway, despite this pretty severely disadvantaged premise, I found myself liking this comix quite a bit. Yes, it's a girlfriend-bot emancipation story. Yes, it's a dude, assisted by another dude, that has to emancipate the bot lady. But it's a reeeeally well-told story, with excellent pacing, smart dialogue, a charming and curious vision of the near future, and delicate art. So, OK, the genre is still a bit eye-rolly problematic for me, but - pretending the problems away for the moment - this is a fun, enjoyable read.
Ugh. Insipid. Read this in one sitting. Could have spent that time doing something else. Like staring into space, mentally organizing my taxes, maybe just counting numbers to see how high I could go.
Basic premise: Undead, semi-dead, alternatively-alive protagonists live in The Place, where they are Entertainers to Soldiers fighting in the great Change War. The Change War is a big cosmic time-space war, where the “Spiders” (good?) fight the “Snakes” (bad?) by constantly altering timelines. Dead people are recruited, upon death, into this fight.
All of this is very fuzzily explained, but it's basically about wibbly wobbly timey wimey... hand wavery.
It's also a bottle episode, as we never leave The Place, which is a brothel/bar. Also, let me be clear: not much happens. Well, except for long pontifications, some homophobia/sexism, flat caricatures and uninteresting characters, and our friendly, can't-have-sci-fi-without-it Good Ol' Boy life philosophizing.
Pass.
Everyone in the Star Wars fandom always says this is all that and a bag of chips. I disagree. One red-eyed supervillain does not a cool book make.
For a book with “peace” in the title, and its prominent theme, this book has some scenes of phenomenal violence. I'm talking splattering gore, “Did that really just happen? Holy God” violence. The final scenes definitely left me shaken.
But Haldeman's a badass, and he hits on so many smart ideas, that I'm willing to forgive the violence and even entertain the prospect that he's making some other, grander point with it. Anyway, it's near future Earth, and America is laying some harsh smack down on a Latin American (coughIraqi/Vietnamese/Koreancough) insurgency. America has also perfected the art of drone warfare, and now, not only does it use remote control bombs, but soldiers plug into shared consciousness machines that operate drone soldier robots down in sweaty, tropical “invented Latin American country”. (Wait, isn't this mech pilot thing a whole manga genre? Note to self: read more manga.)
Anyway, everyone says that staying plugged into the mech/hive brain thing is very, very, very dangerous, and will make your brain mush. Thoughtful Protagonist (whose name escapes me, but who Haldeman thank-God-fully makes non-white) inadvertently gets pulled into an adventure uncovering the potentially ugly truth about the hive mind tech. It involves serial killers. And Zen? Sort of. It's wonderful, seriously.
Anyway, this wasn't as exciting and emotional as the spiritual (if not literal) prequel, Forever War, but all those good ideas, coupled with Haldeman's typically punchy Hemingway-esque writing style, merits a solid 3 stars.
An important topic (the transcendental) covered by an important dude (Maslow's hierarchy of needs!) - but overall disappointing. It was disappointing for two reasons: first, Maslow first establishes this normative, value-laden definition of the transcendental experience (the “peak experience”) as something beyond the small minds of “positivists” (that is, empiricists, behavioralists, etc.). But then he tries to shoehorn that very same scientific method from that very same post-Enlightenment tradition onto his definition by providing us with anecdotes and “evidence” of what the peak experience is like. But how am I supposed to take data seriously when the survey questions were, “Please describe your most intense, holy, positive experience?” And the answers are inevitably: “Intense, holy, positive.” It just seems like he has some major data collection issues! So the data side was just silly and possibly misguided.
The second disappointment - and this was a MAJOR letdown - was his bizarre, completely patriarchal and retrograde screed about the primal roles of men and women (which - surprise! - correspond to that tired old tale of strong, powerful, breadwinning (cave)men and their meek, subservient, soft and plushy women friends). Oh, for the love of God. Given how incredibly misguided he is in this - and how he tries to dress up his misguided notions in attractive, seductive language - I ended up doubting the whole book entirely. Sorry, Abe! I'll go back to the Zen masters for my transcendental needs.
A very fun gimmicky idea, marred by poor execution. The gimmick is that this is a future history of the brief, tumultuous reign of King Charles III - i.e. Charles of the big ears, son of Elizabeth II, father of Princes Harry + William. It's also written in the style of a semi-modern Shakespeare: I think I detected iambic pentameter? I didn't actually count the syllables, so can't be sure.
Anyway, that sounds cool, doesn't it? But bah. It was just silly. I didn't find the main construct and tension believable (when King Charles III gets mad at the British PM for wanting to enact a law that diminishes freedom of the press). It felt immediately dated, given Prince Harry's wedding (I know, I know, not the play's fault). But the treatment of Harry was a bit caricature-ish. The poetickal dialogue was also terribly stilted; like Shakespeare fanfic that I might have written back in school. The pacing and plot felt rushed, and many of the characters (especially Harry and his manic pixie “prole” girlfriend, Jess) felt like paper-thin stand-ins for ideas and stereotypes.
A strange, semi-compelling near-ish future fantasy. This is one of those concept books where the worldbuilding is the main selling point, often at the expense of character and plot. Characters in this are fine, if a little one-dimensional, and - unfortunately - the plot is standard and extremely slow-moving. We don't even get to the good stuff until the very last couple chapters!
It's been about 500 years since the Something That Happened, and humans with tiny, tiny pupils are (1) unable to see the full spectrum of color, and (2) really, really British. Like old school, tweedy, uptight, 1950s Englishy British. Like, the sort of stuff Monty Python would regularly poke fun at. Like that one really excellent episode of Doctor Who (sorry, gratuitous Who reference, latest obsession). Anyway, because of facts (1) and (2), the entire society is an extremely classist hierarchy, where Purples reign supreme (heh), and no one wants to be a low-class worker Grey. Where you fall on the colo(u)r spectrum all depends on what you can naturally perceive on the color spectrum - Purples see only purple. And that depends on genetics - which basically means everyone's thinking about breeding, all the time.
Our hero is Edward Russett, a mid-level Red who is basically the Standard British Dystopian Drone. A tiny little bit of him questions the system, but mostly he's fussy about his small-scale ambitions and fastidious in following the Rules. Naturally, he'll need a Freeing Femme Fatale to, uh, free him from this - and that would be Jane, a Grey with a cute nose.
THE NOSE THING. Pause for the NOSE THING. Ugh, I found this so tedious and sexist and stupid. Especially because it's meant to be precious and twee and cute and British. But every character - EVERY CHARACTER - must, at some point, comment on Jane's cute nose. The only reason Jane even enters the story is because Edward notes, again and again, how cute her nose is and, gosh, how he'd like to talk to her more. Aaarghh, I really couldn't stand this.
Indeed, a tangent to my tangent. It's still so depressing that speculative fiction, especially when it considers itself imaginative (such as this), is capable of building elaborate future worlds with elaborate social structures, but still can't envision, say, a female protagonist. Or just a female character that does something beyond liberate the male character's heroic protagonistness, and isn't described primarily by her sexy allure. Suffice it to say, this book doesn't pass the Bechdel Test.
Back to the book. So it's fine and tries very hard to be funny in a precious way, and generally succeeds. But unfortunately no real plot happens until the last few chapters of the book; we're meant to then follow Eddie Russett's adventures into books 2 and 3. I'm not sure if I will. Cliffhanger endings are fine if sufficient urgency has been built up; then you're happy to swing from cliffhanger to cliffhanger like a monkey through the branches (I'm thinking of something like Battlestar Galactica, whose first season was basically a clifferhanger bonanza). Shades of Grey, instead, ends with a sort of, “Oh, okay - something fishy is going on here.” Not really enough to propel me forward, and - in a standard mystery - something that should happen much sooner in the book.
Delightful. Unexpectedly so! This struck a chord with me.
I hesitated reading this since this is Kipling, and I assumed it would be dated colonialist claptrap. But not so! Quite something else. Though I am VERY curious to hear about the responses from these three groups of readers:
(1) Readers who don't speak Hindi/have never been to India/don't know much about India.
(2) Readers who DO speak Hindi/have spent time there, but aren't ethnically Indian.
(3) Readers who are ethnically Indian.
Plz let me know.
This book is very much in camp (2). Kipling was clearly in camp (2) - he spoke Hindi (or Hindustani/Urdu, at any rate), was born and lived in India/Pakistan for many years (quick wikipedia), and clearly was in love. I am, for better or worse, also very much in camp (2) - hence why this book struck such a chord. Dude. I loooove India. I lived there for 1 year, and then returned for 2- or 3-month trips for the next several years. I speak Hindi conversationally (सच!) and have tramped around it on the glorious Indian railway system - these are some of my fondest memories.
Kim - the titular protagonist - is also very much in camp (2). The orphaned child of an Irish colonial officer and some random other Euro lady (never got clarity on this), we meet him as a tween street scamp living in Lahore (present-day Pakistan). He is an extroverted lover of life, full of bonhomie and panache and brio and other French words for that vibe. He is excellent at code switching; or rather, he's completely culturally South Asian. One day in Lahore, he meets a wandering Tibetan lama. He has never met such an interesting person (someone from Tibet! and a lama, no less!) and immediately ingratiates himself and busies himself with guiding/helping the elderly mendicant.
And thus begins adventure 1. Because this is an adventure book, and it follows two adventures that periodically diverge and rendezvous throughout the subcontinent. Adventure 1 is: Kim attaching himself to the lama's side as his “chela” (Buddhist disciple) and helping him in his quest to find a mythical river (SOMEWHERE in India). Since tween Kim ain't got anything better to do, he is totally game to go wandering around such a very large area indeed - see new sights! Meet new people!
Adventure 2 - which I found a lot less interesting but I suppose could not be avoided - is Kim being (a) discovered as a “Sahib” (white guy), (b) getting the whole “son of a Sahib is a Sahib” sermon, i.e. being made to get properly educated at a fancy school in northern India somewhere (Dehradun?), and (c) getting pulled into the Great Game - aka the late 19th century diplomatic/intelligence war between Russia and the UK over central Asia (specifically Afghanistan). Kim is a feisty mischief-lover, and is multi-lingual to boot, so being enlisted as a teen spy by similarly-fluidly-code-switching Britishers and South Asians is totally his most optimal career path. But I, dear reader, found it a little less enchanting than wandering around with the Tibetan lama listening to Buddhist sermons and meeting interesting people. (And I hasten to add that adventure 2 is not as corny as I'm making it sound; it felt legitimately believable and was mildly thrilling in its 19th century espionage intrigue.)
Kipling's portrayal of race and culture is: he clearly celebrates Kim. And he celebrates all the characters who can navigate multiple cultural worlds fluidly and passionately: the lama, Colonel Creighton (the chief British spymaster), Hurree Babu (the Bengali middle management spy), and - to an extent - Mahbub Ali (the Pashtun horse-trader spy). Kipling excoriates several clearly racist, ignorant characters: the idiotic British schoolboy that Kim loathes, the Russian spies, even the well-meaning-ish Anglican minister. Basically, anyone who is rigidly “apart”, who is mono-lingual and holds themselves “above”, is - in this story - absolutely destroyed. There's a cringing schadenfreude in watching these characters get, well, their just comeuppance. I'm thinking especially of the Russian spies, ignorantly wandering through Himachal Pradesh while a network of village gossip is tracking their every move and colluding with Kim and his team on whether and how to help them. Kipling is clearly a fan of the big melting pot. (Which is why his poem, “The White Man's Burden”, is so confusing: “East is east and west is west and never the twain shall meet” - this entire book is celebrating that meeting!?)
The stuff I found problematic was the perpetuation of those regional stereotypes - e.g. macho Pathans and effete, intellectual Bengalis - which I read somewhere (citation needed!) were largely an invention of the British anyway. At least, I loved Hurree Babu, and was like, “stop calling yourself a coward, you're awesome.” I also found the dated terms and confident generalizations - Kipling regularly refers to “Asiatic” and “Oriental traits” - jarring. Even if they were, for the most part, flattering: take it easy and be flexible, the “Eastern way”!?
Oh yes, and the pre-Sahibized travels with the lama, when Kim and the lama take the train from Lahore to Pathankot and wander around northern India for a while, to places I've been to, made my heart sing. It was so fascinating to see this window into quotidian 19th century India, and to see what's changed and what hasn't. And the long digressions on Buddhism was chef's kiss. Why are there not more adventure books set in India featuring kindly, quirky lamas!?
Angry, punk femrage. A decent read. This had been on my To Read shelf since forever, and I'm glad I finally picked it up. It's short, fast, and (somewhat) provocative. That is, Despentes's life is certainly interesting and it certainly challenges your assumptions: from a punk adolescence, to rape, to prostitution, to porn films, to directing the (infamous?) exploitation “rape/revenge” film, Baise-Moi, to - this book? That's the biography I understood - though this book isn't a straightforward autobiography or even memoir. It's more like an essay, a screed, with lots of personal anecdotes.
Rape, prostitution and porn are three very charged topics, and the latter two provoke some pretty intense debates in feminist circles. Is porn good or bad for women? Should we legalize prostitution? And so on. Despentes provides a unique, very sex-positive perspective (she's basically saying porn and prostitution can be good deals for the ladies), though she's not necessarily making an intellectual argument. And that's fine. It doesn't have to be.
Perhaps the most interesting intellectual nugget is the (not necessarily unique) idea that the patriarchy demeans both men and women (not even getting into what it does to transgender people), and that much of patriarchal power is a way of protecting (cis) male vulnerabilities. That the true beneficiaries of the patriarchy are a select (male) few; and the intersectionality (aaaghh, I just used that wordddd, it happenneddd) of patriarchy, capitalism, racism and so on is what really keeps this world turning.
A note on the French-to-English translation (as I don't know how Despentes's writerly voice sounds in her native French), but I found the tone almost childish in its aggressive “fuck you!”s. I'm all about a good “fuck you”, but here it just felt more like Teen Rebel, less like Feminist Call to Arms. So... meh. (That said, my least favorite part of the Vagina Monologues is the part where they just shout “Cunt! Cunt! Cunt!”, so maybe I'm just squeamish about harsh language.)
Also, despite Despentes's mixed references to Simone de Beauvoir, this book did make me excited to pick up The Second Sex, and maybe a few other foundational fem texts (Gender Trouble? Friedan? a bio of Emma Goldman?).
The thing I love about Osamu Tezuka's brutal Buddha series is:
- The brutality
- Especially the brutality as juxtaposed by the drawing styles: rich, deep, textured nature drawing versus cartoonish humans - and those cartoons doing awful, non-cartoon violence to each other.
- Especially the brutality as an illustration of Buddhism's First Noble Truth (“life is suffering”) - so much that happens to these cartoons is HORRIBLY UNFAIR and just plain horrible. Some of the horribleness is because of the Hindu caste structure (and Buddhism as a reaction to Hinduism is a very rich vein to mine indeed), but some of it is just cosmically, randomly horrible.
- The rich, deep, textured history lessons! I dunno about all yinz but I looooove - LOOAFFFFFF - 500BCE history, and especially ancient Indian history. So I love hearing about the kingdoms of Kapilavastu and King Suddhodana and all that.
Most of vol. 1 introduces this crazy, brutal world and the titular Buddha - Mr. Siddhartha, plz - is born in the latter half of the book and then but a tiny babe for the rest of it. But, oh, the other storylines are great - GREAT. Onto vol 2!
This takes exactly the same amount of time to read as listening to Sufjan Stevens's Carrie & Lowell. Fact.
Super gorgeous art. Fun/funky idea (basically the multiverse, except instead of that 1995 Sliders episode where Hillary is president, or that one universe in which I am a banana (ALL HAIL MU), there is a Nazi/Navajo galactic war going on in one ‘verse and a monkey kung fu kingdom in another). Poor execution.
Poor execution cuz the “hero” of the story is your classic Ego Man anti-hero that hates himself, that everyone hates, that is meant to be vile, yet that the author(s) clearly really really like. Sorry, but I just don't care about multiverse-traveling douchebags.
Points for the monkey kingdom.
A charming, speedy book about a bunch of archaeologists doing their thing. I may have LOLed here and there. I learned a bit, and admired archaeologists their craft (while also worrying about their financial stability!), and liked hearing about their projects. A nice survey (ho ho) of modern archaeology in all its various forms.
A quick read that's fun and informative, as usual with Cory Doctorow's non-fic work? I dunno. I find myself admiring his clarity of thought and general well-informedness. Dude is smart. Sometimes I get a bit worried when he gets into my territory (economics), cuz I always instinctively worry about non-econ people reading up to Econ 101 or Econ 201 and then thinking they've Figured It All Out (hallo, libertarians!). Thankfully, Cory doesn't really fall into this trap; most of his observations/prescriptions re: incentives, copyright, legality, Internettery, etc, are sharp and on-point.
Awwww, man. Come on, man.
So I really quite liked Part 1 of this Ancillary Trilogy business, though I didn't love it, and so I was only very mildly curious about the sequels. I decided to give this a shot, given its Nebula nom.
Buttttt... well, meh.
Shortly: Breq, former AI of a former big spaceship, now blown-up and reduced to being a single-bodied yet super-cool rogue commando person, is now a captain of her very own spaceship, in charge of her very own crew, and on her very own mission. That mission was... unclear to me for much of the book, but it mostly involves going to this one space station/solar system and... hanging around? Protecting the system? Hrm. Well, Ancillary Space is all in uproar from the blood-splattered fall-out of book 1, and so the “gates” (convenient wormholes, science fiction, hooray!) are kinda broken/kinda dangerous, and so Breq is kinda stranded, protecting this random system - should anyone decide to come through the gate and blow them all up.
Honestly, I spent the first 70% of this book waiting for it to start. When I realized that the “hanging around on this random system, talking to people” thing was the plot, I was like, “Oh. Okay?” Apparently I have missed the point? Of this book? Apparently the point is that it's, like, a social justice domestic drama thing? Because basically Breq finger-wags at the bigoted provincials of the space station (all snobby types; there is even some human trafficking! for shame), and there's some stuff about an intriguing diplomat from the weird aliens-we-never-meet, the Presger (love that name, btw), but mostly it's about Breq calling out people's abusive relationships and saying, “That is NOT okay!” Okay?
I dunno! Am I missing something here?! Seriously, I felt so confused.
All the cool/lovable stuff from book 1 is still present, specifically the
- sneaky way the space hegemony is described as a “dark-skinned”, multiple god-worshipping, tea-drinking, snobby types (hello, desi space raj!)
- considerable and nice social descriptions of a Hinduism-type socio-religious order (seriously, really takes me back - isn't India great? - vah vah kya baat hai)
- the cool/funky/weird AI stuff: the added wrinkle in this book being that now we meet humans who choose to act like cadavers-reanimated-by-a-spaceship-AI (rather than being actual cadavers, re-animated against their will). Because that makes sense? it didn't, but I loved it anyway for its sheer weirdness
- Breq as a protagonist: cool, athletic, lady robot person. Very inspiring for the gym!
So, in a way, this book was like meeting old, familiar friends. Nice.
Yet, I still found it so - bewildering! Like, why was there so much gossipy pants drama?! Aren't we supposed to be worried about the Lord of the Radch coming to blow us all up!? Aren't these people supposed to be military types?! Seriously, there was so much teenage-style romance stuff being practiced by what I had understood to be 30something military people. It even turned a little after-school special-esque: “How can I tell if I'm in an abusive relationship?”
Three stars for confusing me. Now I really don't know what to do with the third book: probably not read it?!
Okay, I feel silly that I spent 10 years wringing my hands about reading this, because I worried it would make me anxious about my own mortality. How silly.
This made me anxious about getting old! Ha HA, zing.
Anyway, two main sections:
Section 1 is about getting old. Lots of really interesting stuff about multi-generational housing (and how it is NOT (just) individualistic WEIRD (Western educated etc) societies that hate living with the very old and very young, but that most people - once they get some money - don't want to all live together as a family), about a post-multi-generational system to managing the very old (nursing homes, aging in place, assisted living, etc). How getting old is a biological FACT, despite our attempts to hide it or will it away (90 year olds running marathons indeed). I also found it very touching how many parallels there are between caring for the very young and the very old; I remember thinking that when visiting my beloved grandmother in the hospital. Everyone was very very old, very sick, and thus close to death. The nurses shuttled to and fro. It reminded me of a newborn ward!
Section 2 is about dying, or rather modern dying. Modern dying is unpleasant and highly medicalized. You spend most of your dying time in denial that you are, in fact, dying, and thus many people kinda stumble into death after trying some last-ditch surgery, intubated and unconscious. If you have lost any loved ones, you may be familiar with this type of death. It is, indeed, very distressing and NOT AT ALL the calm, serene, wise deaths many of us hope for ourselves and our loved ones. The author, Gawande, talks about how this type of “kicking and screaming” dying is the product of both our nuclear family/medicalized culture (death is hidden, most of us have not seen people die) and the normal incentives patients AND doctors have to “hope for the best” and just keep trying medical interventions. It does take a lot of wisdom and courage to “let go”. Tons of interesting stats on hospice care (and how good it is for you, ironically), how overly optimistic even oncologists are about survival chances (especially if they know their patient quite well - aka if they've bonded a bit), and all that.
A decent, workaday novella in the vein of old school sci-fi. Aliens come, informing us that they come in peace and, by the way, there's a giant space cloud full of spores carrying a Spanish Influenza/Ebola-type disaster on its way. Yo, should we share science or whatever? Scientists work round the clock in fancy alien-funded labs, collaborating with mysterious alien scientists who seem to do little work. Aliens are tall, skinny human types.
Protagonist is nice middle-aged scientist woman - in other words, a unicorn emerging from a rainbow. Obvs to be portrayed by Meryl Streep in my head. LUV YA, MERYL. Anyway, so Meryl-protagonist has three grown kids, who are all sorts of a mess. Insert family drama. Insert some family drama which begins to strain credulity, verging into soap opera towards the end. Youngest, misfit son is Noah, addicted to a very benign-seeming drug and generally just a sensitive, scrappy 20something with a heart o' gold. Meryltagonist has a gay science friend, Evan, who is gay, we are mysteriously reminded a few times (gay!).
Big let-down anticlimax with a kinda stuffy moral overtone, which is typical of these things, it seems (War of the Worlds, that one Arthur C. Clarke book also about high-minded aliens from afar, etc...).
I felt silly buying this long ago, and still feel silly owning it. It's basically a “cookbook” where every recipe for the first half is:
1. dice [vegetable/fruit]
2. steam for 10 minutes
3. puree
4. freeze
5. periodically thaw and feed to your baby
It graduates to a couple VERY simple, healthy toddler meals - smoothies, chia pancake stuff, things like that. Things that are very easy to cook indeed.
All that said - I needed/wanted (and still need/want!) someone to hold my hand sometimes when I'm like, “argh what do I cook again?!” So it's a bit indulgent. It's like paying whatever this book's price was for common sense. But, legitimately, I did learn about a lot of random vegetables I had never had (e.g. parsnips). I learned you can steam EVERYTHING. I learned a 6 month old can eat their weight in peach puree (wow).
And yes, the first solid is GUAC. HA.
Yo, exactly what it says on the tin: you laugh, you cry, and character actor Alan Cumming is pretty fabulous. This quick, light read follows Cumming as he shoots an episode of Who Do You Think You Are, a pretty damn charming UK TV show where they follow some British actor on a fun genealogy tour. They've done eps with David Tennant, Patrick Stewart, Stephen Fry. You get the idea.
Anyway, on this episode (which you can watch above) Cumming learns some pretty intense stuff about his maternal grandfather, Tommy Darling. Parallel to this, he receives some also intense news from his estranged, abusive dad. But it's written with optimism and good humor, and it all goes down a treat.
Dr. Groopman's main thesis is that doctors are mere mortals, subject to (potentially damaging) cognitive errors - and we, as educated patients, should be prepared to gently steer doctors away from these potential pitfalls. He also makes an interesting case against Big Pharma and economization of health care, particularly the profit-driven, efficiency-oriented, Bayesian-updating system of algorithm-spouting automatons (instead of real live doctors). Moral of the story: we should tolerate uncertainty - welcome it, even - instead of hiding it under the rug and forging ahead with (sometimes) misguided diagnoses.
At times harrowing, often moving, overall illuminating.
Picked this up at a comics expo after having it on my radar for a long time. I wasn't sure I'd be into a Cory Doctorow-written graphic novel. I love Cory's writing, and I love graphic novels, but it just struck me at the time it came out as - meh, it could wait. But, man! I should have read this sooner! A very charming, refreshing comix with gorgeous art by Jen Wang, and great storytelling by Cory. Very similar, thematically, to his YA book, For the Win, in that this also talks about economics and labor rights through the lens of gold farming and online RPGs.
We follow the story of Anda, a pretty awkward, pretty average young girl in Flagstaff, Arizona, who loves geeky things and is invited to play a cool new online game called Coarsegold. As in many of Cory's writings, the virtues of online gaming are sung to the high heavens: camaraderie! heroism! sacrifice! imagination! The art is lovely in expressing all this, since Anda's life in the game is immersive, finely-detailed, exotic and fun. Anda quickly teams up with Lucy/”Sarge”, a fellow gamer who's on a mission to slay “gold farmers”. They slay with relish, until Anda befriends one farmer, Raymond, and - using the power of Google Translate - they get chatting. Raymond is just a kid from China with no options and a love of online gaming.
I always kinda appreciate, kinda cringe when non-econ people start talking econ, but Cory mostly gets it right. And he's such a compelling speaker and pedant (and I say that with affection) that I appreciate his taking an interest in, say, development and globalization and what it means for everyone (say it, Gary!). So that's nice. I also appreciate the Good Values this comix exhibited: stuff about how nerds can be elitist and mean too (oh man, have I experienced that...), stuff about the barriers girls face in geekdom generally. I loved the homey realism of Anda's school and home scenes, and I loved - LOVED - the art in general, especially those splashes of watercolor and the wonderful, human expressiveness of them all. Very nice, and I definitely recommend.