Reviews and Comments

I read this over a few months with an in-person book club, and it was a great choice for that because it has a lot to discuss. It opens with an incredibly harrowing description of the sort of heat wave disaster that the world hasn't seen yet but I think is plausible not far in the future. And from there it basically follows three interwoven threads: * The UN establishes a climate change super-org that gets dubbed the "Ministry for the Future" because its official name is far too unwieldy government-speak * India decides after the heatwave that it can't afford to wait for the world to get its shit together, and starts going it alone on geoengineering, to global consternation but also spurring some more serious action from other parties * The character from whose point of view we saw the disaster is very deeply scarred by the experience and devotes the rest of his life to climate action by any means necessary

In true KSR style, the book is very long on research and loving descriptions of places (mostly Switzerland this time; he's made me want to visit Zurich), and relatively short on three-dimensional characters. I think this one does a better job with the characters than Red Mars, because he picked a couple (Frank and Mary) to focus on and managed to bring those to life somewhat, while letting others just be functions in the story. But it's definitely still his weak point as a writer.

The book goes through a grim ride, in which there's a lot more loss, and it takes a huge amount of work and delay to get to meaningful global action. All of which seems sadly realistic to me. I think KSR's also right that in the end the levers will be social and financial system changes, not some amazing new technology. But his proposal for those changes feels weirdly credulous about Bitcoin, and thin on details about how it would actually achieve its social objectives - which would be fine for a straight work of fiction, but is jarring compared to how much deep research there clearly is in the climate system and technology parts of the story.

It eventually leads to a sort of optimistic conclusion, a somewhat believable scenario of humanity living within its means at last, and some aspects of that vision being genuinely appealing. But that end state has two glaring omissions which ultimately detracted a lot from the book for me.

One is that there's been a triumph of this "half Earth" movement about physically limiting human habitation to half of the land surface, to rewild the rest. But... everywhere habitable is someone's ancestral land. What happened to those people? Were they consulted, compensated, persuaded, or moved along yet again? And most of those ecosystems' stable pre-industrial states were ones of dynamic equilibrium actively maintained by humans - simply withdrawing wouldn't do what this book seems to assume it will.

The other is that there's this lovely vision of long haul travel being done by boat and airship, which in turn is practical because people get to work on their laptops. Which would be great for me! But what's a plumber supposed to do? I can only be so happy about a future in which migrants' ability to see our families is contingent on us having remote work compatible jobs. And the way that's not discussed left me feeling like KSR had only really thought about this future for himself.

I read this with #SFFBookClub, and probably wouldn't have done otherwise because IRL I find both election superfans and "too clever for elections" antis tiring, and their arguments tedious. I'm glad I was prompted to read it, because I enjoyed the majority of the book a lot, but in the end it felt sort of hollow.

The good: Older has the skill to make a thriller about an election actually... well... thrilling. I was very sucked in, at times finding it hard to put down. I think a key part of how is that she made me care about the characters much more than about the election itself. And the world itself is interesting - she ran with an idea that 20-30 years ago I would probably have considered a utopia, and has really chipped away at many ways in which it would not be. Plus the general background of different understandings of reality being what manifests social reality while also prone to being manipulated feels... prescient.

The bad: this book replicates a lot of aspects of Cyberpunk that I find a turn-off. The tone of the first couple of chapters almost made me give up, and there's this sort of simultaneous glamourisation of travel and flattening of difference that feels like a weird tic of the genre - even though this book at least modulates that a bit by travel still being clearly a hassle and a privilege. Ken's relationship with the various field offices didn't seem believable to me: how would he always know better than the locals, and why would any of them listen to him? And the last couple of chapters felt like a hurried wrap-up that just sort of forgot some of the potentially-interesting complications that were being introduced before them.

I found The Fall Of The House Of Usher intriguing but ultimately frustrating, and judging by the author's note at the end of this book, so did Ursula Vernon. Her reworking does a great job of keeping the atmosphere of the original while filling it out to be much more of a satisfying story, with clearer reasons behind what happens and much more compelling characters.

I love how the narrator has so much of their own story, and it's mostly made relevant to the core story of the book. And the mystery aspect is very well done, with that tantalising sense that we as readers are just slightly ahead of Easton & Denton in figuring out what's going on and what will have to happen. I also appreciated how Roderick gets to be more of an actor in this telling rather than a pure victim, and I'm intrigued by the ambiguity of whether Madeline also is one or whether we're purely hearing from the fungus towards the end of the book. It must be tempting when writing a story that fills in so many gaps from the original to fill in every gap, and I think stopping short of doing that was a very good move.

[this review is about the title story only] I was surprised by how short this story was. The way I hear it talked about kind of gives it the status of a novel in my mind, and it's really just a sketch, almost a single scene. Which is a format Poe absolutely excelled at--I think his best stories are so effective precisely because they're so tightly focussed and written--but somehow this one felt too skeletal to me. Which makes it a perfect choice for Ursula Vernon to have built books.theunseen.city/book/194634/s/what-moves-the-dead around, but not a story I found very satisfying in its original form.

It's not Wodehouse's fault that the Jeeves books have become such a cliche since he wrote them that they feel hackneyed now. But I do feel that the premise isn't quite enough to sustain a full length novel. However, the writing is just so well done and timed that it kept me enjoying the book. Every time I started to get too tired of the upper class twits, their inability to just talk to each other, and the pettiness of their gripes, I would reach a passage so perfectly written that it would draw me back in.

I think in future I'll stick to the short stories, but there is a lot that's really delightful in here.

I think I might like this sequel even better than the first in the series. As hinted at by the end of Jade City, Lee expands the world in book 2, bringing outside events to bear on Kekon and entangling the Kauls in things beyond its shores which they might prefer to ignore. But she has the good sense to do so mostly as a couple of tightly focussed subplots.

My favourite of them is Anden's time in Espenia. In Jade City I found it very entertaining how that place was clearly a stand in for the US, but it was totally flat seen through xenophobic Kekonese eyes. This was a fun inversion of the usual trope, but also would have been a bit much to continue, so instead we get to experience Espenia through Anden first being banished there and gradually making a bit of home in it. Port Massy feels very true to the NYC of the big wave of Jewish immigration in the early 20th Century, and his host family alternately remind me of the host family that put up my uncle when he first moved to Peoria, or of that uncle & aunt themselves in their early days in NYC living at the end of a subway line. All of it, the place, the community, the distance, and the pressures felt very real and well observed, and it provided a great chance to turn Anden into a fully realised character; one of my favourites now.

Wen also became much more of a whole character, and I enjoyed her arc in itself and for the ways her relationships with Shae and Anden developed. Shae remains the person I'm really cheering on through the book, and I found Hilo to be the one weakness: so much of the drama is driven by his actions, aptitudes, and mistakes, but he still feels more like an idea than a person.

I'm looking forward to getting my hands on Jade Legacy.

I love the basic premise of this book: telling a story about a tough, resourceful woman through the framing of an archivist going through objects in her house and getting context for them as flashbacks. It's beautifully written, and the Empress is a compelling character. But somehow the world didn't manage to draw me in. I'm honestly not sure if that's any fault of the book, or just that I'm a bit saturated with new fictional worlds having read a lot of fantasy this year.

First of all: I read this in draculadaily.substack.com/about form. I highly recommend this approach because the pacing in real time adds a lot of tension. But it does also mean that I didn't read it in exactly the order that the author put the text in.

In some ways this is a great book. There's a reason why Stoker's vision of the vampire has become so dominant in pop culture. And the format--a series of letters and journal entries--works very well, even if sometimes one has to suspend disbelief about how the characters found time to write thousands of words on the most action-packed days.

But it's also deeply flawed in ways that reflect very poorly on the author. It's super racist and very sexist--even by the low standards of the era it was written in--and Stoker insisted on writing various accents even though he was terrible at that, and apparently some of the best place-description passages were essentially plagiarised from travel guides. And at times I really struggled with how intensely the Dracula character maps on to antisemitic tropes of the time: the strange outsider from Somewhere East who drinks the blood of innocent Christians and must not only be defeated but hunted down wherever he flees to.

I am glad I read this, but I'll be happy to never read another page by Bram Stoker again.

I enjoyed almost every scene of this book. A horrible man who thinks he loves women but does so in thoroughly misogynistic ways (Murdoch was so good at writing this type) gets himself into ever more absurd self-inflicted trouble. His combination of self-absorbedness and refusing to ever really question himself make him insufferable, but his adventures are a good laugh.

But from chapter to chapter I kept asking myself why I was still reading. Somehow the whole of this book is less than the sum of its parts. Given that, the circularity of Jake ending in almost exactly the same way he started felt frustrating, when I think if the arc had felt more compelling along the way it would have been a satisfying end.

This is a powerful memoir which has a lot to say about how we (particularly Canada as a resource extraction colony, but also a broader "we") treat the people whose physical labour runs parts of the economy we'd rather not think about. The experience turned out predictably badly for Beaton, but in looking back she maintained empathy for the people involved, keeping a clear on focus on what the context of oil sands work camps does to people.

The letters that make up about half of this book are gorgeously written, and I love the story they tell. The basic idea of the time war is clever, and the descriptions of placetimes the characters find themselves in evocative, sometimes reminiscent of Calvino's Invisible Cities. I devoured this book in a few days.

And yet... something about it felt a little thin or hollow behind its fireworks. I think it was a good artistic choice to leave all technical details out, but I couldn't help but get hung up on the time paradoxes. Not that it's the authors' responsibility to necessarily avoid or solve them, but for me personally they intruded on the suspension of disbelief.

This is a collection of 80 short essays each by a different writer, each anchored to a consecutive 5-year span, starting with the first documented landing of enslaved Africans in the North American colonies.

The range of voices is a huge strength, with each writer not only having a different style but getting to make dramatically different choices in where to focus attention. Individually, many of the essays filled in gaps in my knowledge, but the whole is much more than the sum of those parts. It helps the book really live up to its "community history" billing - while of course even 80 authors can't speak for a whole community of millions, they can get a lot closer to that than any one alone could.

As should be expected given the subject matter, many of the pieces are very heavy and grim. Certainly some of the things I learned from reading it are further, deeper depravities than I'd already known of how white people dehumanised those they had enslaved. But there are also flashes of brilliance.

I never read more than one chapter in a day, to really let things sink in. That it took me so much longer than 80 days does reflect the heaviness: this is not a book to escape into after a hard day. But it's thoroughly worth the effort.

I love this book for being an alternate history that's not fixated on Hitler. I love it for how carefully it weaves its fantasy into the real history it's anchored in - enough so that as soon as I finished reading it I had to read up on the actual Red Turban rebellion and see how many of the characters were close adaptations. I love it for how much desperate, furious, and yes sometimes joyous life its main characters have. I love it for how viscerally it evokes some incredibly hard times (though be warned, it's a heavy read because of that). I love it for how utterly unsympathetic all the "big people" are.

Around the middle of the book the weight of Fate on both the plot and multiple characters' obsessions started to feel stifling, but the more the narrator complicated that idea the more this stopped being a problem.

I absolutely adored this book. I realise that part of this is that it was a perfect little escape while I was stuck at home with covid, but I do also think it's really wonderful.

It has some similar strengths to the first in the series, in that it's mostly about the relationships between a few outcast characters that become a chosen family and just happen to be in space. But if anything I think it's better written (I guess Chambers getting into her stride with book 2), and benefits from being a more focussed story of a smaller number of characters. And has some weightier things to say about embodiment, the tension between fitting in and freedom, and loyalty & reciprocity.

I am excited about the rest of the series.

I guess in two halves. This translation is 97% wonderful, with the other 3% being occasional grating patches. It is the most alive and readable version I've read, and I think the stylistic choices Headley made all make sense, from the repeated exhortations of "bro" to the ways she works to treat the women of the story--especially Grendel's mother, but not only her--better than other translations I've read. Using the techniques of heavy alliteration and kenning compounds with all modern language really brings home how driving they can be, and the originals must have been when their vocabulary was current. Sometimes "bro" and "daddy" felt over-repeated, and then started to grate, but that really is an occasional glitch in a wonderful translation (and I wonder if I'd even have felt that if I'd listened to the poem rather than reading it, or read it more slowly instead of in just 2 sittings).

But even in this best translation yet, the story frustrates me. However much Headley tries to open it up, and pushes back on this reading in the translator's introduction, it's still a story of macho men bragging and proving themselves with violence, in which womens' main role is to be prizes and servers. And Grendel's mother still gets short shrift. She's the character whose violence is the easiest to justify, but her role in the story is still to be an enemy whose defeat we cheer for.

It's amazing to be able to read this snapshot from so long ago, and this translation is now the one that I'd recommend to people. But I'm still so ambivalent about the actual content.