Reviews and Comments

Mind boggling in historical scope, with some challenging aspects, I'm intrigued but will need to borrow again to finish. The style changes a little after the first "life", but I guess death and rebirth can mess with a narrator.

I'm endlessly impressed with Octavia Butler. Fantasy enticements heavily balanced with terrifying entailments, laden with keen observations of psychology, biology, sex, culture, and ethics. In a story that doesn't quit. Wow.

Guessing how the stories connect to their predecessors is part of the appreciation, and the new elements are no less incisive. Impressive.

More dead-on 80's nostalgia packaged in an entertaining story that pays homage by name to darker predecessors like Strange Days and Brainstorm.

Butler's way of introducing a superhuman premise up front in a matter-of-fact way then getting right to the implications for human characters and works well. You can feel strong undercurrents while engaging with a good story. Looking forward to continuing the series.

True to its title, a compendium of desert weirdness and beauty for the merely curious and irretrievably lost alike.

A beautiful expression of the definitive feeling of our time for me.

Framing a memoir as a series of metaphorical relations to various living organisms is an unusual approach. My interest in the natural world probably made me extra receptive to it. I learned good things about the included species, but would have been receptive to more of her personal experiences as a child of immigrants in the US.

I like the approach of getting the magic out of the way up front and then going to work on excellent characters and the complex contrasts between time periods. Maybe it's easier for historical fiction, but I can't help noting how flawlessly this story written in the 1970's holds up.

It's a little jarring to read aging science fiction where some of the speculations are now obviously off, but like most PKD stories there's a central question that is incisive and intriguing.

I happened to also be reading a Yuval Harari book where he observes that robots and AI in fiction are often just stand-ins for human characters, and that is definitely the case here. Klara's being "artificial" serves to point out ways that people may or may not be artificial, and allows some fresh perspectives on other human characters. It works if you can accept the starting point.

I guess I might as well join the fan club, I can't get enough. Just the nudge from panic to bewilderment is a lesson I've used daily since reading it.

I was spellbound by the news when 'Oumuamua came through the neighborhood, and this provided all the details I wanted and a good contextual framework also.

Reading this at the same time as Homo Deus by Yuval Harari puts an odd spin on the story, like binary stars in an eccentric orbit. Is it a techno-liberal fantasy, or a dataist rebellion? Maybe just let it provoke its own ideas and enjoy a ride with some different flavors of light and darkness. For someone who has walked away once or twice, it has a special appeal.

My brain was churning in place, but this book made me feel like the churn might go somewhere. Frameworks, definitions, speculations, and ideas are presented in a way that they can be used and considered without demanding to be the final word. A launch pad that invites you to aim for your own landing.