Techie, software developer, hobbyist photographer, sci-fi/fantasy and comics fan in the Los Angeles area. He/him.
Mostly reading science fiction these days, mixing in some fantasy and some non-fiction (mostly tech and science), occasionally other stuff. As far as books go, anyway. (I read more random articles than I probably should.)
Reviews are cross-posted on my website and I have a blog dedicated to Les Misérables.
Fediverse Main: @kelson@notes.kvibber.com (GoToSocial) Websites: KVibber.com and Hyperborea.org
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Under a Metal Sky (2025, Granta Books)
Saw this on Dense Discovery, which describes it as:
A personal journey through the strange and powerful world of mining – from the raw beauty of minerals to the greed and destruction they fuel. It’s part travelogue, part reckoning with our deep reliance on what we pull from the ground.
Over two hundred years after the first colonists landed on Pax, a new set of explorers arrives from Earth on …
Content warning Twists and a bit of depth
Partway through, the story changes from one about people dealing with a massively weird but mostly harmless event to people dealing with imminent doom...but not yet, not until a few years from now, though it's not hard to calculate the exact date. And it became strikingly clear that the COVID lockdowns of 2020 strongly influenced the psychology and sociology of the story...as well as the epilogues where people try to explain it away as a hoax, eventually succeeding in replacing the real story with a "realistic" version that we, as readers, know didn't happen, because we got to follow along with the people who experienced it directly.
It's a whole new moooooon.
One day soon, suddenly and without explanation, the moon as …
A fast, enjoyable read with a few gut punches hidden throughout. Not so much about the moon turning into cheese as how lots of different people react to the moon turning into cheese.
Some of the vignettes are funny, some are touching, and some stand out more than others. Some people only show up once and others come back repeatedly. The feuding cheese shops that have gotten a lot more attention since the change. The pop-science author whose book on fantastic takes on the moon came out at exactly the right time. The astronauts whose mission is scrapped take it better than the billionaire rocket mogul whose company is building their rockets and spacecraft.
The most impactful stories, though, are a set of vignettes around the 3/4 mark involving a long-divorced couple staring down mortality, and an extended chapter on a writer who has spent her entire adult life trying …
A fast, enjoyable read with a few gut punches hidden throughout. Not so much about the moon turning into cheese as how lots of different people react to the moon turning into cheese.
Some of the vignettes are funny, some are touching, and some stand out more than others. Some people only show up once and others come back repeatedly. The feuding cheese shops that have gotten a lot more attention since the change. The pop-science author whose book on fantastic takes on the moon came out at exactly the right time. The astronauts whose mission is scrapped take it better than the billionaire rocket mogul whose company is building their rockets and spacecraft.
The most impactful stories, though, are a set of vignettes around the 3/4 mark involving a long-divorced couple staring down mortality, and an extended chapter on a writer who has spent her entire adult life trying to get her first novel just right before shopping it around.
OK, there's one with a more literal impact, but you know what I mean.
Ursula K. Le Guin’s timeless and revered A Wizard of Earthsea is reimagined in a richly expansive graphic novel by …
When the prince of Enlad declares the wizards have forgotten their spells, Ged sets out to test the ancient prophecies …
When young Tenar is chosen as high priestess to the ancient and nameless Powers of the Earth, everything is taken …
Ged, the greatest sorcerer in all Earthsea, was called Sparrowhawk in his reckless youth.
Hungry for power and knowledge, Sparrowhawk …
In 2025, with the world descending into madness and anarchy, one woman begins a fateful …
It's certainly not a fun book, but it's extremely engaging, despite the bleakness of the slow-apocalypse setting and story.
What makes this apocalypse so horrifying, and the story so engaging, is how matter-of-fact Lauren is in describing everything in her diary. It's the world she grew up in, so it's normal to her, though she can see clearly even at 14 that it's unsustainable. There's a sharp generational divide between those who remember what things were like before, but all that is just history to her.
Lauren's present is hopeless and brutal, but her diary doesn't linger on the ever-present brutality like a horror novel would. She acknowledges it, of course, but she's focused on how to survive it so she can build something better.
The setting resonates so well today in part because the societal fears of the 1980s that Butler was extrapolating from are the same fears that …
It's certainly not a fun book, but it's extremely engaging, despite the bleakness of the slow-apocalypse setting and story.
What makes this apocalypse so horrifying, and the story so engaging, is how matter-of-fact Lauren is in describing everything in her diary. It's the world she grew up in, so it's normal to her, though she can see clearly even at 14 that it's unsustainable. There's a sharp generational divide between those who remember what things were like before, but all that is just history to her.
Lauren's present is hopeless and brutal, but her diary doesn't linger on the ever-present brutality like a horror novel would. She acknowledges it, of course, but she's focused on how to survive it so she can build something better.
The setting resonates so well today in part because the societal fears of the 1980s that Butler was extrapolating from are the same fears that have been re-stoked to create our modern political moment, and the problems she focused on remain unsolved. (I go into a bit more literary analysis on my website if you're interested in that sort of thing.)
Soonish is a good overview of cutting-edge technologies, most of which are still in the near future, some of which have made dramatic progress in the last few years (as noted in my comment from earlier!) It's full of the authors' trademark irreverent humor, with cartoons scattered throughout, it's still very much worth reading even if, like me, you get to it late!
Another part that sticks in my head is that in the US, murder gets redefined as killing a citizen...and of course the people who want to murder non-citizens don't really care too much if someone actually is a citizen but just looks like the kind of person they think shouldn't be a citizen.
In 2025, with the world descending into madness and anarchy, one woman begins a fateful journey toward a better future. …
A set of loosely-connected stories set in the final years of a color-based enslaving society, the war for liberation, and the messy aftermath.
It’s brutal at times, but not as gut-wrenching as The Word for World is Forest, in large part because the viewpoint characters aren’t the ones carrying out the atrocities, and in some cases are relating them years later. The characters are also given space to exist beyond the immediate situation.
It’s not an exact analog of the United States before, during and after our civil war, but it’s clearly our own history and present that Le Guin is critiquing: plantations, color-based slavery (with corresponding prejudices), the struggle for women’s rights following the struggle for freedom, backlashes, and the ongoing struggle to really clean up the oppression and expand civil rights. All with the colors reversed to drive the point home for white readers.
A set of loosely-connected stories set in the final years of a color-based enslaving society, the war for liberation, and the messy aftermath.
It’s brutal at times, but not as gut-wrenching as The Word for World is Forest, in large part because the viewpoint characters aren’t the ones carrying out the atrocities, and in some cases are relating them years later. The characters are also given space to exist beyond the immediate situation.
It’s not an exact analog of the United States before, during and after our civil war, but it’s clearly our own history and present that Le Guin is critiquing: plantations, color-based slavery (with corresponding prejudices), the struggle for women’s rights following the struggle for freedom, backlashes, and the ongoing struggle to really clean up the oppression and expand civil rights. All with the colors reversed to drive the point home for white readers.
