Reviews and Comments

Transhumanist social sci-fi: satisfyingly inventive in environmental and physiological adaptations, with stories interested in the philosophical and political implications of a solar-system-wide diaspora. More Dune than Expanse, these remain largely aristocratic, plausible and complicated and regularly tinged with misogyny.

Data-oriented with narrative recounting of the buildup to 20c civil war in Yugoslavia, Syria, N. Ireland, Myanmar, Indonesia. Anocracy - in a gray area between democracy and autocracy - and ethnic Factionalism, and less solidly the fuel of broadcast or social media, are the risk factors she's most worried about. The second half starts to talk about the current U.S. directly, but given the advice is to strengthen trust in democratic institutions and broaden the social safety net and prosecute domestic terrorists, well... she claims to be optimistic at the end.

Lovely cozy futurist feminist stories that all have bikes.

In taking a much larger scope than the Martian, repeating the same formula failed to entertain or engross me, instead the tricks and slick solutions to improbably back-tracked premises seemed to go a long way to nowhere.

I do not have anything like a useful understanding of the pantheon of characters in Mugabe's Zimbabwe to appreciate the biting satire going on here.

Pretty depressing right away!

A pandemic novel, a time travel novel, and a central character who is a beleaguered author who can't decide if they are writing a novel or a novella... phew, honestly the writing was pretty good for me to give it 3 stars.

I am back to reading this while camping along the coast - bring on more shipwrecks and whale facts!

Powerful, but I don't think I could read them again? Explicitly and inventively emphasizing the violence and disregard society expects and delivers against black kids, a surreal and angry collection.

You ought to know I have long loved Krista's radio conversations, and that this book beautifully captures the form and content of those conversations towards a larger project of understanding human capacities for social good and connection. An openness to unfinished dialogue, to finding larger more generous more loving language, to hope expressed as grief and as goodness, to humility as a readiness to see goodness and be surprised... these aren't answers, just directions.

Affirming stories, full of love and mystery, rebellion and reflection.

Engaging and humorous academic archaeological rant, nominally about whether Chaco Canyon is the center of a long and large class society in the southwest and connected to Mesoamerican culture as much as an odd Pueblo precursor, but fundamentally about widening archaeological discussion from local site parochial scientism to engage narrative prehistory, persuasive argument, and speculation.

An American mom who comes to realize our approach to parenting - from industrialized roots and consumerist separation of kid/parent worlds and work/play activities, to its narrow forms of control and praise and anger, to nuclear family isolation and overwhelming expectations - is just weird and counterproductive. She frames this in time spent with her toddler while reporting on contemporary indigenous families approaches, and in seeing practices embodied in community her answers in translation are applicable to adult relationships as well as the task of raising future adults with well-developed senses of belonging and capacity and confidence. Pay attention to the behaviors you model and encourage, and create autonomy not independence nor control.

A fragmented linear history, simultaneously text-heavy and disjointedly repetitive in its story, and then meandering to fit in a frame or poster making a tangential global connection; the art is consistent but mostly reduced to portraiture and caricature.