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CW for this book: a big piece of what it's about is stuck conflicts and deeply ingrained oppression, and the ways in which mutual fear / the fears of the people currently on top keep them stuck with horrifying consequences. Reading it right now I keep thinking about Palestine, which I think is partly intentional but there are also strong echoes of many other things. I'm about 2/3 of the way through and I think it's excellent, just also a very grim read.

To some extent this applies to City Of Brass too, but this volume paints a lot more of the history of the trilogy's world and goes a lot harder on the political themes.

@mouse@bookwyrm.social Yay! I'm a few chapters in to this right now, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I'm doing.

Chapter 3: I see now that characters from one story do show up in others, so the book overall will get to have character arcs not just a zoomed-out plot one. Makes me even more curious how much the stories have been reworked between individual publication and collecting into book form.

#SFFBookClub

Just sharing Enne's set of CWs for this book from weirder.earth/@picklish/111701657327009106 because hashtags still seem to only partially work between Mastodon and Bookwyrm:

"I wanted to pass on content warnings for: suicide, pandemic, climate change, death, euthanasia, animal experimentation, body horror, despair" #SFFBookClub

I just noticed that I've added a translation to bookwyrm even though I'm reading it in English. More importantly, in today's reading group we realised that there are at times quite large differences between the 1818 and 1831 texts, and decided we're going to stick to the 1831 one, which conveniently is what Standard Ebooks used.

I like how with the 1831 introduction this is a story within a story within a story: Frankenstein's story within Robert Walton's tale of how he found Victor Frankenstein, within Shelley's own frame story about being stuck in the Alps with Lord Byron in the notorious Year Without A Summer.

From the one chapter I've read so far I can tell this is going to be a lot heavier than the last couple of things I've read. Promising start, though. #SFFBookClub

I continue to love the Murderbot series. By this point, the action parts have lost impact because there's too much precedent for how they're going to turn out, so I think it's wise of Wells to play that part down a bit in this book, in favour of a story more about persuasion and trust building. And the ongoing saga of Murderbot learning about both its limits and capabilities continues to be one of the most relatable arcs in SF/F.

@Tak@reading.taks.garden Me neither! I've just read the first chapter so far, and been struck by just how vividly the research base is rendered.