Reviews and Comments

I found this book a bit slow for the first 50–60 pages, which are spent mostly describing the World without much of any sort of Plot happening. It only really begins to pick up around Part 3, when the mystery inherent to the setting starts to unravel, all through the eyes of a narrator not so much unreliable as naïve and lacking in knowledge, which makes him unable to understand things which are clear to the reader. It's the sort of book where it's worth reading (or at least skimming) the first few parts again to see what you missed the first read through.

I'm conflicted about this one. On the one hand I did think it was well enough written, and was fairly engaging & entertaining (being short always helps with these; & I was listening to an audiobook of it, a somewhat novel experience for me, so that may factor in). The setting and characters were interesting and as fleshed out as they needed to be.

But it comes across as deeply reactionary. One of the characters is an actual Nazi, & while he's certainly portrayed as horrible in many respects, he also seems to be meant as at least somewhat sympathetic. Not to mention the pervasive misogyny. Frankly I'd like to see what the Snakes have going on, with their "Unholy Triple Alliance [...] between the Eastern Classical World, Mohammedanized Christianity, and Marxist Communism".

Erich (the nazi) seems to be saying that it's cool and good to make the nazis win wwii, because if they didn't, communism would ultimately defeat The West

I can't tell if this guy is supposed to be a sympathetic character or not. it was 1958

very early on in the book but the main characters boyfriend is apparently a nazi & implied to be physically abusive—but "I do love him"

listening to the librivox audiobook librivox.org/the-big-time-by-fritz-leiber/

gonna invent a time machine so i can go to the 19th century and spread the good news about paragraph breaks

i wrote a joke on mastodon about how people should write an Actual anarchist cookbook and people linked me to this

the murderbot is SNARKY. i don't have much else to say about this book other than go read it, it's good and only 150 pages long

i do have one intelligent thing to say about it which is it raises a lot of interesting ideas regarding robot ethics and i hope she goes into that more in the sequels

what I expected from this book was a lot of of explanations of online linguistic conventions, which honestly put me off from reading it for a long time, because I already know all that stuff.

now, there is a lot of that in this book, but the real reason I enjoyed it is because it draws connections between online language and the broader field of linguistics—connections which I'd made in some cases, but often hadn't. (for example there's a whole chapter about how emoticons and emoji are, essentially, gestures.)

basically it's just a fascinating (and, yeah, pretty fun) book to read if you're interested in language

this book promised to be a blow-by-blow account of the apollo 13 disaster, and that's exactly what it delivered. if reading about some astronauts stuck on a broken spacecraft for four days while the ground crew desperately tries to figure out how to get them back home sounds like a good time to you, I recommend this book. it's pretty rah-rah american, but that's kind of to be expected considering the subject matter.

becky chambers' books aren't particularly plot-driven, they're like 90% characters and world building. this is one of the things I like about them so much. this book is about a bunch of strangers who get stuck with each other for several days and learn a lot about each other and themselves in the process. it's very very heartwarming. i recommend it

I bought this book from a used bookstore because it was like $1 and because of the cover (can't upload it here, it's the Ace paperback edition and it's glorious). "RETIEF—THE GALACTIC MACHIAVELLI!"

so the main character, Retief, is this minor space bureaucrat, only instead of sticking to galactic protocol like some sort of beta cuck, he uses his big brain and manly, manly physique to navigate complex diplomatic situations, which often involves action-cool hand-to-hand combat and random women offering to sleep with him.

also in the last section of the book, "Palace Revolution", there's a "People's Anti-Fascist Freedom League", who, of course, turn out to Not Actually Represent the People.

yeah the politics of this book are frankly terrible, but it was over the top and goofy enough to be entertaining at least.