Reviews and Comments

Ben Harris-Roxas

ben_hr@outside.ofa.dog

Joined 11 months, 2 weeks ago

Health services researcher and educator living on Dharug Country in Western Sydney, Australia. You can usually find me in the forgotten parts of the web. I like fiction, the more speculative the better!

My ratings ★ Not recommended ★★ Not for me, but may be okay for you? ★★★ Good ★★★★ Very good, recommended ★★★★★ Exceptional, couldn't put it down

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Echopraxia (2014) 3 stars

A follow-up to the Hugo Award-nominated Blindsight, Echopraxia is set in a 22nd-century world transformed …

If you like ideas more than… writing… this may be for you!

2 stars

I continued on to this after reading Blindsight, because even though I didn't love it I had some enduring questions. An error on my part. There were more deliberate ambiguities than plot points in this book.

I won't provide a plot précis. This has some compelling concepts and big ideas, but was frankly a mess. Characters' motivations remain inexplicable even at the end of the book.

Amusingly this AMA with the author seems to boil down to "you're reading it wrong". Authors, please get over yourselves.

Blindsight (Firefall, #1) (2006) 3 stars

Blindsight is a hard science fiction novel by Canadian writer Peter Watts, published by Tor …

Big ideas but strangely hollow

3 stars

The ideas are compelling, and the inclusion of recreated vampires is a weird but interesting diversion. There's no emotional core though. In some ways that's by design - the primary narrative POV is of someone who's had significant, personality-destroying psychosurgery. I found myself asking why should I care about any of this throughout.

commented on Woody Guthrie by Nora Guthrie

Woody Guthrie (2021, Chronicle Books LLC) 4 stars

This is such a beautiful book, full of photos, handwritten notes, and ephemera from Woody's life that had been lovingly compiled by his daughter and Robert Santelli. It makes me sad that few of us will leave behind any remnants of our daily lives and work in this era. Fuck modernity, embrace tradition.