Reviews and Comments

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.

(Cross-posted from my website.)

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.)

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.

(Cross-posted from my website.)

Not so much a thematic collection as the three stories that have both entered into the public domain and already been transcribed at Project Gutenberg. Plot and characterization are just enough to explore, or at least express, the concept.

War No. 81-Q: Short, bird's eye view of a "war" fought entirely using remote controlled drones...on a designated battlefield with a time limit, like a tournament, with spectators. So you want to settle your international disputes with violence. Why harm actual people?

Scanners Live In Vain: Very much worth reading. The main character is a "scanner," a man who has had all his senses and emotional centers surgically cut off so that he can endure the "pain of space," a neurological effect that prevents normal people from traveling across deep space except in suspended animation. Between missions, they can use a wire to literally reconnect to their humanity for short periods of time. He's called up for an emergency meeting while "cranched," a meeting that calls the scanners' whole purpose into question. And he's the only one there who's in a state to understand how disastrously people would react to the course of action they choose.

The Game of Rat and Dragon: Not as serious a story as "Scanners..." but fun and still thought-provoking. There's something malevolent out in interstellar space preying on our starships. Something disrupted by bright flashes of light, but only detectable by telepaths -- and it's faster than human reflexes. Fortunately, not all telepaths are human. It starts off being very coy about the "Partners," but manages to avoid "tomato surprise" territory by making the big reveal in the middle of the story, at the point where exposition gives way to plot.

Cross-posted from my website.