Reviews and Comments

A quirky alien / manhattan mystery, all of the sets and dimly futuristic premises sat well with an amiable lead, but my mystery satisfaction bar wasn't met by the ratcheting plot.

A wild collection of short stories rubbing shoulders with each other and The Goon Squad (which I barely remember, but enjoyed) in a near sci-fi future. Tightrope between failing to cohere, falling from believability or originality, and engrossing oddities of character after character, I liked too many of these to complain.

Great whale facts, wild how little we know about most whales. What we do know about the social behavior of humpbacks, bowheads, sperm whales, killer whales, and coastal dolphins (the authors study sperm whales, apropos, but build their argument across all these evenly) makes it clear to likely that social learning that is not environmentally or genetically determined is widespread in many aspects of their lives, and which make the case for preservation of broad populations of whales to maintain cultural diversity.

Impressive set of lectures on the societal implications of technology - broadly, from ancient metalworking to sewing machines to electrification to military industrial arms - from a feminist pacifist horizontalist perspective. Franklin highlights ways in which technical choices obscure moving from holistically artisan to hierarchical control, from biological growth and uncertainty to manufacturing's obliviousness to context, and the false claims of liberation or ease from the introduction of new tech which turns to exploitation and makes us dependent on industrial supply and control.

moving and growing and flinging us back out from the first's tensions.

Wonderfully sharp and lucid climate critique of fiction and global capitalism. Through modern literature's failure to face or grapple with climate change, he weaves the blindspots of the western novel's individual moral narrative, the role of empire in partitioning the world's industrialization growth and infeasibility of replicating western economic exploitation for the colonized masses, and the compartmentalizing of politics to no longer allow any sense of collective or commonweal.

Multiply recommended and interested, most recently from my partner. Maybe you'll get to it before me too?

Beautiful poetic interpretation, just enough word choice footnotes to remind you of the underlying ambiguity throughout.

Cultural analysis and context around Sun Ra's Chicago years in particular, and the development of his futuristic positivity in community, music, and poetry, but meandering between general history and textual minutiae.

Smart intricate blend of personal and family memoir, current anthropology/sociology about farmers and corporations and pumped aquifer irrigation in SW Kansas, and history of depletion and extinction for water, first peoples, and bison.

Painterly realism in capturing quirky 80s southwest and dry surprising wit with the wide cast's conversations about family and migration, a hilarious feminist hopeful version of Grapes of Wrath.

Prompted by my feed, I wondered how this holds up today. Strangely, my notes say I read this in 2016 and I would have guessed much earlier, and yet... with that uncertainty, I won't post this as a review unless I re-read...

5⭐ "Deeply disturbing and emotional, mixed with an excellent tech primer on privacy and a gripping story. I tore through this on the plane, one 4-hour sitting, could not put it down or sleep. Highly recommended."

You know.

Simultaneously holds up as a totalitarian dystopia (better than Brave New World, a fitting comparison in some cringe ways), and so entrenched in our cultural understanding that it falls flat today. In line with Orwell's other writing, the focus is on the pressure on people in the upper class to revise their own memory and to brazenly rewrite history as a matter of policy.

An entertaining YA sci-fi setting for the importance of storytelling and memory.