I'm currently the coordinator of the #SFFBookClub so a lot of what I'm reading is suggestions from there.
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The Picture of Dorian Gray is a Gothic and philosophical novel by Oscar Wilde, first …
I recently inherited a beautiful edition of Wilde's complete works from my great-aunt--with her signature dated 1946 in the inside cover!--so it's time I finally read this story. ...and it just occurred to me that the physical book in my hands is older today than this story was when my great-aunt bought it.
There are creatures in the water of Con Dao. To the locals, they're monsters. To …
So much to love about this book, how it weaves together unanswerable questions about consciousness and computation, together with a much more didactic message about humans' consumptive relationships with, well, everything including each other, and enough of a mystery story to keep the plot moving along. Also some great evocations of places (ahhh, multiple key scenes on Istanbul ferries), and of the ways peoples' reputations misrepresent their selves.
It's not a strongly character driven book - every character that is fleshed out seems to be a variant of "loner who wishes for connection" and largely a vehicle for the author's ideas - but there's enough depth to the characters to keep me reading. My one real criticism is that the ending felt a bit rushed. Not in the sort of too convenient, story-undermining way, but not quite satisfying either. It doesn't feel like a set up for a sequel, but …
So much to love about this book, how it weaves together unanswerable questions about consciousness and computation, together with a much more didactic message about humans' consumptive relationships with, well, everything including each other, and enough of a mystery story to keep the plot moving along. Also some great evocations of places (ahhh, multiple key scenes on Istanbul ferries), and of the ways peoples' reputations misrepresent their selves.
It's not a strongly character driven book - every character that is fleshed out seems to be a variant of "loner who wishes for connection" and largely a vehicle for the author's ideas - but there's enough depth to the characters to keep me reading. My one real criticism is that the ending felt a bit rushed. Not in the sort of too convenient, story-undermining way, but not quite satisfying either. It doesn't feel like a set up for a sequel, but I kind of want Nayler to write a few short stories filling out the characters a bit more and picking up some of the loose ends - perhaps something like Sofia Samatar did with The Winged Histories.
There are creatures in the water of Con Dao. To the locals, they're monsters. To …
One little thing that's bugging me about this book, while I'm otherwise enjoying it very much, is that either author or publisher couldn't be bothered to typeset Vietnamese properly. We get the diacriticals for Mínervudóttir, but in rendering Côn Đảo as "Con Dao" not only are the diacriticals missing: "Đ" is a fully separate letter from "D". It's odd because Vietnam is the one place in the book that it's clear from the author's bio he did live in for a while.
"Rustem" also feels wrong to me (it should be Rüstem or maybe Rostam), but there I may be overapplying Turkish defaults which might not fit right for Tatar. I'm just going to keep reading it as "Rüstem" because that sounds right in my head.
There are creatures in the water of Con Dao. To the locals, they're monsters. To …
Content warning general theme spoiler
I appreciate how the book has been gradually introducing both the need for the protected area and the terrible human cost of its imposition, in parallel.
@picklish@books.theunseen.city Ooh! I had missed that this even existed. Will have to get hold of it for myself too.
There are creatures in the water of Con Dao. To the locals, they're monsters. To …
ah yes, Turkish “o” as the solution to pronoun troubles.
There are creatures in the water of Con Dao. To the locals, they're monsters. To …
Lent to me by a friend who loved it and whose recommendation is reason enough to read a book I know barely anything about. The cover certainly has my attention....
Deathless is an alternate history novel by Catherynne M. Valente, combining the Russian fairy tale …
I repeatedly almost put this book down, and each time I was brought back in by the sheer beauty of the writing. It's simultaneously a reworking of assorted Russian folk tales and a magical realist retelling of ~30 years of Russian history, from the October Revolution to the Siege of Leningrad. It's full of interesting ideas and engaging imagery, but much of the time also has this sense that nothing any character might choose changes anything.
I'm having trouble articulating my thoughts about this book, but I think I largely agree with this review: strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/reviews/deathless-by-catherynne-m-valente/
Ropa dropped out of school to become a ghostalker – and they sure do love …
A fun, light read, with a charming protagonist who's fiercely independent and very wily, but quite prone to underestimating others.
#SFFBookClub October 2023 pick
Content warning Major plot and worldbuilding spoilers
We read this for #SFFBookClub, and it started some very interesting discussions. I think I liked it, but don't even know how to give it a star rating.
I keep seeing it described as "hopepunk" or "optimistic", and that was not my reaction at all. The setting is a world in which some people have managed to reorient their lives into a watershed-based somewhat anarchist model of living within planetary resources. But... but... but...
First but: there's no sense that the damage has been restored. A pivotal moment in the story is a hurricane hitting the US East Coast at Passover - in other words climate destruction far worse than we've endured so far in the real world.
Second but: it's strongly implied that much of the world's population hasn't joined the revolution. Nation states are still important (the narrator denies this, but there seems to be a lot of implication that she's flattering her faction), corporations have been exiled to artificial islands in the high seas but remain the sole suppliers of a lot of technology.
Third and biggest but: a lot of what drives the tension of the story is the narrator's inability to see things from anyone else's perspective, to the point that the people in the other factions only really seem human when we catch glimpses from outside the narrator's eye.
Having said all that: all of these things felt very plausible to me! In the face of it, aliens show up. And the aliens are in some ways a very hopeful story: two radically different civilisations that have built some sort of hybrid culture, and now become ardent students of human culture, on a mission to save us from the destruction of our ecosystem. Fourth but: as the story unfolds, it becomes clear that it really wasn't an equal marriage between those two, and their attitude to humanity is extremely paternalistic.
Much of the drama is about the human factions jockeying for position as the aliens basically decide what they're going to do with us. I appreciated how much of the power struggle plays out by means of disrupting communication, but it drove me nuts how much humans and aliens alike treated this as a contest to come to a single decision for all of humanity. I felt the obvious solution of "those who want to go with the aliens, go, those who want to stay, stay" was staring me in the face for chapter after chapter and never even seemed to be acknowledged as a possibility.
In the end I think I did like this book, but it left me feeling really down. Not an optimistic tale at all, but a deeply, deeply pessimistic one about our collective failures to see each other, and how much harder that failure makes it to deal with the mess we've got ourselves into.
From the author of Gods of Jade and Shadow comes this reimagining of the classic …
This ended up being the third of 4 stories I read this year that were all variations on the Fall of the House of Usher (including the original), and I think it's my favourite. The slow pace with which the protagonist (and by extension us the readers) learn what exactly is up with the house felt realistic and made for great tension because there's such a long period in which it's clear that something is Very Wrong but not what it is. And along the way Moreno-Garcia gets in some choice digs about what colonisers are and do, including to themselves and each other. Deliciously gruesome.
#SFFBookClub May 2023
It's been centuries since the robots of Panga gained self-awareness and laid down their tools; …
What a joy this book was! It's a fairly light adventure, but with an emotional journey, some relatable characters, and a setting that feels like a relatively positive future with some unspecified dark times in its past.
This was the #SFFBookClub April pick
The rapidly changing city of Janloon is ruled by jade, the rare and ancient substance …
I really can't get enough of Janloon and Kekon, and thoroughly enjoyed this shorter return to it. It pulls of the wonderful trick of being a totally self-contained story with all new characters for the important roles, while tying in very well to the bigger arc of the Green Bone saga, giving major characters from that satisfying cameos, and reinforcing the human stakes of the events of the big saga.
The Kaul siblings battle rival clans for honor and jade in the epic conclusion of …
Wow. This really wraps up the series perfectly, with a lot of sadness and some hope. I continue to be in awe of Fonda Lee's ability to make me care about a bunch of violent gangsters - this really isn't a genre I usually go for but she hooked me in and kept me reading. And I continue to love the image of Janloon and wish I could visit it for real - the tourist guide appendix is a very nice touch.
