Murderbot just has near infinite potential as a character. It's multiprocessing nature makes the stories complex but so rich, I feel like starting the whole series again now to pick up the bits I missed.
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Reading for sanity, solace, meaning, meandering.
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outofrange reviewed System Collapse by Martha Wells
outofrange reviewed Adrift by Lisa Brideau
Climate migrants and sailing with amnesia
4 stars
Starts out as an amnesia plot thriller, which can be interesting but won't hold my interest without adding something else. It then gets into the characters and climate theme which it does well and thoughtfully. There's a little sci-fi woven in but it doesn't overreach, and works to provoke thoughts about what climate migration may look like.
The dance of plant and human desires
4 stars
The conceit - are plants using us more effectively than we use them? - still works over 20 years later. The stories still feel relevant even if they have since taken some unexpected turns. An interesting contrast to Camille Dungy's "Soil", but as a non-gardener they both have my admiration.
outofrange reviewed The Cloud Roads by Martha Wells
outofrange reviewed A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin
Entertaining and interesting in historical context
4 stars
I enjoyed this story for young adults while also appreciating how Le Guin weaves some deeper themes into something that appears a little formulaic at first. Savoring how one by one the mainstream expectations are broken, especially considering what those expectations would have been in 1968, made it an appealing read.
outofrange reviewed Camp Zero by Michelle Min Sterling
Interesting climate fiction
3 stars
This was better than I expected from a random impulse read. It's a pretty good mix of characters in a climate-themed story that is consistent, makes some cultural commentary, and tries some unconventional narrative devices that work pretty well. There are scientist characters, but it's not a particularly science-driven story.
outofrange reviewed The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff
Meditative historical fiction
4 stars
A simple story of survival in the early colonial American wilderness gracefully deepens into poetic meditations on nature, geography, guilt, death, history, and culture.
outofrange reviewed The Dog Stars by Peter Heller
outofrange reviewed Arcadia by Lauren Groff
Is any way of living sane when you look closely?
4 stars
I love that this story which begins on a hippy commune really wrestles with the fact that people do attempt to create lifestyles that reject some of the insanities of our mainstream culture, and probably always have, but it rarely becomes the dreamed-of utopia. And for a publish date of 2012 there is an eerily familiar pandemic event that gives even more gravitas to a very convincing story.
A successful challenge to the nature writing genre
5 stars
An impassioned argument for the honest inclusion of the day-to-day realities of the naturalist in nature writing, and for some long-absent diversity in this. And plenty of nature, too.
outofrange reviewed We, the Drowned by Carsten Jensen
A charmingly strange tour of seafaring history
4 stars
For me this was an introduction to Danish history via the island town of Marstal. Though I have some seafaring ancestry in the Dutch branch of my family, that was just enough keep my curiosity perked in these stories where the sea is always present. The human characters were foreign enough to keep me guessing, and they grew to inhabit a realistic historical world. Not sure how I came across this book, but glad I did.
outofrange reviewed The solace of open spaces by Gretel Ehrlich
outofrange reviewed Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton
outofrange reviewed The Code Breaker by Walter Isaacson
A view into the work and lives of gene editing researchers
4 stars
This is an area of research with huge potential impacts that I had little understanding of. The basic explanations are pretty good, though I still have plenty of questions. Why are CRISPR RNA sequences palindromic? Etc. Mostly this is the stories of the people, though. Somehow I hadn't heard that there are genetically modified humans walking the earth, and how that happened is pretty interesting. Also these researchers managed to agree on some guard rails to safeguard our species, which has parallels with what is happening with artificial intelligence now.