Reviews and Comments

A mix of frontier knife fights and sci-fi encounters with reality-bending concept pieces, a strong collection of not very likeable or comfortable stories.

A clear history of opium trade's encouragement, enforcement, and implications, mostly India to China under British imperial control but with heavy threads of American exploitation and wealth laundering up to our current opioid crisis. Entangled slightly with more-than-human agency and literary overlap with Ghosh's Ibis Trilogy historical events, I found this straighter history and less mentally rearranging than I expected.

Re-read after a long while for a bookclub.

Lighter and more liberally uplifting than I expected, though not all strong, the late chapters on the shifts in society as we ceased to treat schizophrenia, epilepsy, etc as personal moral failings stand out. From mostly neuroscience cases and psych experiments lens pushes at any gaps for spontaneous decision making separable from our histories of a second, an hour, a year, a millennium. Then moves into implications for society, primarily our societal morality and justice system's injustices built on individual responsibility.

Mixed feelings: the premised analogies for losing people and people losing themselves are well othered, and there a few sub-stories, on theater and mothers, that are heartfelt. Irked me as far from a coherent book, however.

Maintains the high bar of the first book for gripping sci-fi for a mid-grade audience, adds in several new complications without going awry.

The rising seas setting and class divisions among our characters thrown together in emergency are richly thought out for this novella, but the plot turns could have used more room and reflection.

Readable tour through infrastructure's reflections of our collective cultures, in its histories, dependence on social pasts and futures, and the agency it gives us individually and en masse to reduce labor and lessen daily focus on basic needs. Maintenance and the shifting baselines of climate bring our attention now to the need and opportunity to redesign infrastructure to address a larger collective future.

A writer joins a research ship to Antarctica and entangles the story of climate change and polar exploration with that of pregnancy and bringing life into our future, with glaciers collapsing, with the crew and scientists lives and hopes and wonder. Beautiful.

Hard to recommend, hard to finish, hard to put down. Focused on the grief and guilt of surviving, with the background of the surviving and oblivious world left to imply healing and reconciliation and accommodation.

Often rambling, ranting, and rigorous in odd measure, still a strong critique of computers-substituted-for-intelligence-AI. Computers ought not do some things we will come to believe they are capable of: through the instrumentalist and reductionist narrowing of rationality (and history) to what is computable and recordable; mistaking analogies and models of humans as information processors; and compulsive, addictive, and imperialist closing off of multiple and incommensurate perspectives.

Dark visceral history and encouraging strength through a long view of civil rights. A good collection of responses and reflections.

The early 2000s, fractured implied narrative in short scenes set in Nevada's bleakness, in global trade's corners, in conceptual micronationality, in the simultaneous confidence in and impermanence of technology.

Engaging tangent sequel on borders, racial justice, and love in a violent world. Plot details and world shifts aside, characterization pulls the weight well here.

Stunning, a climate apocalypse grounded in our current reality, that powerfully conveys a violent experience of living through a lifetime's decline in an intensely personal and local story - no boom-post-apocalypse, yet so many sharp inflections of loss and choosing between things you thought wouldn't matter til after you were gone away. It would be bizarre to call this a hopeful novel, but the undercurrent grows towards acceptance and dependence in the face of uncertainty, and it is beautifully done.