Tootfinder

Just finished The Salt Grows Heavy by Cassandra Khaw. Per @… it's an excellent work of feminist horror, although it's really only a little more horrifying than the fairy tales it's grounded in. It's also a tale of love, just with a lot more entrails than your average romance novel, despite being only a novella. I'm not usually one for horror, but I enjoyed it a lot.
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Just finished "Snake-Eater" by T. Kingfisher (@…). I'd read and thoroughly enjoyed her "Digger" webcomic, and found this book to be quite enjoyable too. There's something indelibly heartwarming about an anxious character growing to feel more comfortable and self-assured, especially when escaping and unlearning emotional abuse, and I'm certainly a sucker for heartwarming characters. I like the way that Kingfisher has taken time to talk about and try to avoid cultural appropriation, in a way that I feel is reasonable, although of course I'm not an expert judge of the nuances and I'm biased by having liked the book, so I'm willing to be told things are complicated in that regard it others judge differently. I also really liked the window dressing of a vaguely solarpunk future society, in a book that's not at all about that society. I'd love to see Kingfisher write something focused on how that society could work (or maybe she already has?).
Probably going to look up some of Kingfisher's fantasy books soon.
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Studs Terkel on Work #amreading

Just finished "Take All of Us" by Natalie Leif. Far outside the genres/themes I usually enjoy but I enjoyed it nonetheless, in large part due to how thoroughly it delves into disability justice issues. Lots of great stuff about who deserves to take up space, performing perfect victomhood, etc.
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Have finished 'Stolen Man on Stolen Land - Being African American in Australia' by Tyree Barnette.
I do feel it's maybe a little *too* complimentary to Australia and maybe doesn't have quite as many insights as I was hoping for.
I was able to read between the lines about sociocultural meanings because i know Sydney/Australia well, but that would have been harder for someone from overseas. Perhaps I'm the wrong audience? #AmReading #Bookstodon

Just finished "Landing in Place" written by Sherine Hamdy and illustrated by Myra El Mir. A beautiful and emotional story that has a lot of great complicated perspective on wearing hijab, plus a lot of Egyptian historical and cultural details that I didn't know anything about. Some really interesting discussions about protest and revolution too.
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Just finished "Oksi" by Mari Ahokoivu. A wonderful example of a contemporary myth, and very beautifully drawn. Ahokoivu's ability to evoke feelings with abstract forms and mist-like flowing "panels" make this wonderfully unique, and her story captures all the whimsy and contradictions of an ancient creation myth perfectly.
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Back from a great #HayFestival with lots of food for thought and a new #tbr pile, featuring some old and new works
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Just finished "Forgive Me Not", a beautiful and touching fairy tale graphic novel by Mari Costa. Only thing I dislike about it is the royalty, which it honestly could have worked just as well without...
I actually liked the resolution of the climax a lot; many writers would have created a lesser scene for one or both characters.
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Just finished "Seven Little Sons of the Dragon" by Ryoko Kui. As expected from the author of "Delicious in Dungeon", an excellent collection of short stories that are whimsical, profound, hilarious, and beautiful. Kui's characters even in the short form always have a little extra twist beyond what you'd expect. I think my favorite of these was the story about mermaids, both for its ambiguous depth and for the hilarious "Lone Wolf and Cub" shout-out.
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Have finished 'Balcony Over Jerusalem' by John Lyons. It's showing its age (published 2017), but was on this list: #AmReading #Bookstodon

Just finished "The Terraformers" by Annalee Newitz (@…). It was recommended as a "solarpunk" book, and I'm currently on a quest to find more speculative fiction as good as Le Guin or Butler, so I was eager to dig in. Having tagged the author (hi) I'll try to be polite here, but I'll admit I was disappointed.
Newitz clearly has a powerful imagination and there's lots of great stuff in the book, but it's not at all pushing boundaries in terms of imagining future societies. I think the message and intent was good in a lot of places, but off or self-contradictory in others. I absolutely adore the relatively small point made at the end about revolutions being complicated and not boiling down to heroes and battles, but despite the book's attempt to avoid that, I think it still falls into that pattern. Without too many spoilers, the way that some big problems are resolved near the end leans too much on a legal framework without questioning how it's enforced, and that resolution then means that a few heroic acts are enough to tip the balance, which undermines the point about messy histories.
The biggest contradiction of the book to my mind though is with a central theme. The book really explores a world in which "anyone of any species can be a person, as long as we just bioengineer them to be intelligent enough," and it tries to make a point about how engineering limited intelligences is cruel. At several points characters comment about how personhood shouldn't depend on intelligence. There's even a brief quote about how maybe rivers could be people... But... the point could have been "anyone can be a person, regardless of intelligence." This would have made for much more interesting philosophical territory to explore IMO (how do we then bound personhood; how do we reconcile predator/prey relations between persons, etc.). These are also questions that the indigenous traditions Newitz draws on (and consulted about, as mentioned in the acknowledgements) has interesting answers for, but we don't get to explore them through Newitz' world, and because the question of personhood regresses to the question of intelligence, it feels like the moral philosophy of the ERT folks isn't any better than the "InAss" they disparage.
It's not a bad book overall, even if it doesn't engage with the questions I'm hungry to see others engage with. Newitz' efforts to sketch out a more vibrant and diverse future are still monumental and inspiring in a lot of ways. I'm just still looking for something more. Ultimately, I think it lives up to the "solar" but not very much to the "punk."
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Just finished Kameron Hurley's "The Light Brigade". At first, I didn't think it was really what I was looking for (positive examples of future post-capitalist societies) and it want quite that, but it was gripping, well-written, and inspiring in its own way.
Even though it doesn't necessarily have any hope to offer for the future, it has a nice and convincing portrait of the inescapable despair that capitalism leads to.
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Just finished "A Deepness in the Sky" by Vernor Vinge. A fascinating and epic science fiction novel with fascinating ideas about technology and also future societies. As I'm delving into a lot of sci fi looking for social imagination it's a good find in some ways but disappointing in others. The Qeng Ho culture is interesting, but their society is uninspiring; Vinge's rosy view of "trade" is not one I completely share, and their hierarchies and wealth accumulation are less compatible with their freedoms in my imagination than in Vinge's. That said, his perspective on the possibilities of galactic-scale civilization and the idea of the "age of failed dreams" are fascinating, especially right now, and his detailed ideas about programming, AI, automaton, and "Focus" are extremely relevant right now. Ultimately I didn't love some parts of the dénouement, and there's a lot of "great man theory of history" going on, including (only somewhat ameliorated) a focus on men over women. Vinge's damsels in distress have a lot more agency than usual for the role, but with the exception of Victory Sr. and Jr., the damsels are very much in distress, and Victory Sr. gets overshadowed a lot by Underhill.
It definitely helps one expand their imagination of what long-term and large-scale human existence could look like, which is great and no easy feat, and both the technologies that are written in and those written out are extremely convincing. The only thing I didn't find compelling was the transposition of capitalism onto such space and time scales. It's a very standard feature of sci fi from the last few decades, and I'm sure most readers don't question it, but I've become someone who can no longer imagine "capitalism across the stars" without questioning how realistic it is that its self-destructive tendencies could possibly last even a few more centuries, let alone succeed at interstellar travel.
One last extremely fascinating thing: how closely the strengths and weaknesses of Focus track with the strengths and weaknesses of modern generative AI. That, and the way that the "age of failed dreams" idea can help people imagine beyond generative AI in a positive way.
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Loved the Life and Times of the Extraterrestrial Potoo by K J Khan - Clarkesworld 238 : Lovely world and warm human-alien relationship
Clarkesworld Magazine - Science Fiction & Fantasy #sf #amreading

Just finished "Nell O'Dell Hates Quests" by Emily B. Martin. Quite a cozy fantasy story overall, with wonderful illustrations by the author herself.
I was worried to see a goblin on the cover and figured that even parodies of classic fantasy tropes usually end up being fairly racist in nature due to the standard fantasy races' racial alignments being thinly veiled eugenecist ideas, but I was pleasantly surprised to find Martin not just doing the "this is the one good goblin" trope but actually taking on racial alignments fairly thoroughly.
The flaws she gave her heroine were believable and well-grappled-with, and although the resolution was a bit too liberal for my tastes, the part about the internship was great. There was one facet of the ending that really bothered me, though. I was prepared to accept-but-not-like a "government is reformed somewhat" ending, but it ended up way more uncomfortable than that. I'll post a follow-up with spoilers about details.
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Just finished re-reading volume 1 of Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou by Hitoshi Ashinano in English official translation, checked out from one of my local libraries. It's really cool to see lots of the excellent Japanese stuff that I read through fan translations mostly online in the 2000s and 2010s not only come out as an official translation, but make their way onto library shelves for random people to discover without having to be deep into Japanese culture fandom.
YKK is of course a pretty legendary manga, and even though I'd read it before, it had been a while and the manga is so much more feelings-based than plot-based that it was at least as enjoyable the second time through. Ashinano's sweeping curves that capture the wide open landscapes of Minato are beautiful, and her characters also capture a particular feeling of freedom and kindness that's lovely to immerse oneself in. It's the kind of world where you understand immediately that the gun is just a memento and doesn't represent any kind of violence, foreshadowed or otherwise. Calm down, Chekhov, have a coffee, and get with the extremely relaxing times.
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Just finished "Rialto" by Kate Milford. A wonderful book with a *lot* of things to like but also a few I wish had been done differently.
Starting with the good stuff, an #OwnVoices portrayal of anxiety depression is always welcome, *especially* one that portrays positive coping strategies, including active therapy, and complex but ultimately supportive family dynamics. Dad & daughter each reminding each other to use calming strategies at different points in the book was lovely, and getting to see the complexities of the trying to be a supportive sibling was great! Larger than that aspect, portraying a YA adventure in which the parents are actively involved but don't spoil things is so great and must have been difficult to pull off. Most YA stuff quickly ushers the parents out of the picture, and this fails to provide any kind of positive or negative role model for parent/child interaction. This book had ample examples of the former, *and* let the kids have plenty of agency too. Excellent stuff that I absolutely want to see more of.
So what didn't I like?
First, as an anarchist, I always hate to see unapologetically positive (and thus drastically unrealistic) portrayals of the police. Without getting into spoilers, even the stuff about the Piepowder court bothered me. It's presented here as a cutesy alternate court tradition, but I can't help but speculate that these courts were likely not always fair in practice, and the whole "single person makes immediate judgments model" from this book is terrible in general. I just don't like positive portrayals of terrible systems that happen to be good because the people involved are good people, since they reinforce harmful positive mental models of "justice" that don't apply to the real world. This element wasn't enough to totally spoil the book for me (the plot could have mostly functioned without it) but it's a downside to me.
Second, the book is set in rural Missouri, and has plenty of Black characters. Yay for representation? Certainly better than the cast being all-white given the setting. But the book doesn't have any Black *culture* that I picked up on, and it chooses to try to completely sidestep the relevant history. Maybe I'm just not attuned to elements that were there; if anyone who read this did see them feel free to point them out. The history definitely isn't there though... for example, was the park segregated, or not? During the time it was active one imagines most parks would have been, and that if it hadn't been that would have been a very important difference, which would even have been relevant to the plot and themes of the book as written.
Now perhaps this critique is unfair because Black children and young adults *should* get to see themselves portrayed in cozy fantasies without things always having to be about racism... In a choice between erasing Black characters and erasing racism (and especially racist histories) maybe there's no right answer here and this is fine, actually. My instinct tells me that there are ways to do better, though, and that presenting a history with all the racism carefully elided isn't the greatest compromise to make here.
A while ago I read "Under the Heron's Light" by Randi Pink. It also has mythical animal guides, a Southern setting, helpful family members, a multi-generational mystery to solve, and a (slightly older) teen protagonist who is up to the task. In contrast, it is all about racist history, and takes us through multiple extremely harrowing scenes from the past.
In any case, this discomfort also wasn't a deal-breaker for me, in part because, as I said, I think it's probably good for Black children to see uncomplicatedly positive representations of people like them alongside the plenty of stuff out there that does get deep into the racism and history. I also don't have the best perspective to judge this stuff, although that doesn't mean I should default to "it's probably fine" (I'd be happy to hear from anyone who feels they have a better perspective on this, about this book or the trend in general...).
Overall, I enjoyed Rialto quite a lot. I don't think it quite makes it into my top tier of recommendations for my kids, but I think it does make the list somewhere.
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Just finished "Hammajang Luck" by Makana Yamamoto. It's lovely in a lot of ways and was quite fun to read, even if there were some aspects I disliked. It's an #OwnVoices queer romance heist set in a dystopian future space station with megacorporations and brain implants and all that jazz. I actually liked the tech aspects of it (despite a few physics warts) and the romance was both sweet and dramatic; even though it failed the consent test I was just talking about, it had some reasons to do so (not that that makes a perfect excuse). The heist plot was good to my mind (but I haven't read a lot of the genre). The biggest thing I didn't like was the treatment of prison as a redemptive force, and the police as a semi-neutral entity with real principles, rather than what we know them to be in real life.
More and more these days in science fiction I'm especially looking at whether and how appeals to law or governments (especially the nice "league of worlds" that steps in to save characters from a corrupt local government) function, and to the degree they are mechanisms of real justice, In disappointed. To be fair, even Le Guin does this to some extent... In any case, this isn't a totally fair criticism because that's not really what this story is about, just something that bothers me whenever I see it.
Overall, the book was great.
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Just finished reading "The Beast Player" by Nahoko Uehashi. I had already watched the anime, but it had been so king I didn't remember all the details. While the anime was great, the book is even better, and it's going to be high on my list of things to recommend to my children when they're old enough to read for fun.
The neurodivergent representation is cool, as is the deep central question of interspecies bonds and the political possibilities and dangers they entail. Uehashi handles the exploration of that question well in my judgment, including appropriate ambiguity without muddying moral clarity. Elin is a truly fantastic protagonist, not without flaws but nevertheless a excellent role model and a very sympathetic figure without being pitiful.
One thing I really love about Uehashi's writing is that she's not shy about using interior narration to tell the reader directly what a variety of characters are feeling, but when she does this she focuses on human contradictions, quirks, and weaknesses that make those characters feel much richer, and that remind the reader of all the ways our weird and sometimes contradictory or inexplicable quirks guide our actions just as much as both logical thought and predictable/expected feelings. None of the characters is an unerring source of wisdom, with every grand principle presented shown to have its weaknesses and biases, and even the wisest characters making mistakes and learning from them.
Overall, a wonderful book, and having also seen the "Seirei no Moribito" anime but not read the books, I'm excited to dig into more of Uehashi's extensive catalog.
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Just finished "Mage and the Endless Unknown" by SJ Miller. It's got a very cute cover for the amount of body horror it contains, but I really liked it overall. It's an almost-wordless story with a lot of conceptual depth, which is obviously a very difficult thing to pull off.
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Just finished "Salvage" by Renée Nault. I'm a sucker for romances in general and for characters like these, so I enjoyed it a lot, even though I wish works like this would actually address the structural issues they bring up more thoroughly. I tend to think about the messages of a work in terms of counterfactuals. For example, how would this story play out of Paolo hadn't been a good artist, or hadn't been so likeable, etc.
Also: how do the wealth differences play out in the end? Paolo & his family might escape poverty by association, but where I their community does these line get drawn and the rest get left behind? The natural true "good ending" for all these cross-class romances is an anarchist revolution, but so rarely do we get to see that... The alternative is to believe that only some of the lower class deserve being saved because of their virtues, which ends up being a toxic and regressive message.
To be fair, I think Nault pulls off an above-average landing for this trope, and her illustrations of the lower-class communities and their own richness are hopeful. I just always find myself wanting more.
All of that aside, Nault's art is truly wonderful, especially her use of color and the way she uses it consistently to emphasize thematic elements. It's a really beautiful graphic novel.
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Just finished "What Elephants Know" by Eric Dinerstein. Leaves me with very mixed feelings: it's a novel in many ways about Nepal, and I don't doubt that the author's experience living there gives him a not-insignificant window into the culture, plus there are multiple people mentioned in the acknowledgements as judging faithfulness to Nepali culture. I myself have no direct connection to the country, nor enough knowledge to see any clear inaccuracies in the writing, nor ways in which it directly disrespects the culture.
That said, my instincts say this is a portrayal of the culture and country that probably elides much about the downsides of foreign influence and the monarchy (something I naturally distrust as an anarchist). At minimum, the internal contradiction is clear between the police as an inept and dangerous institution when encountered directly, but as a clean and unproblematic way to resolve problems with criminals when the Maroons subplot needs wrapping up. This is typical of neoliberals who have begun to acknowledge the most obvious problems with police but who refuse to admit the necessity of police abolition. Furthermore, there's a strong thread of white saviorism thrown in, and a big piece of meritocracy to go along with it. This story presents only highly particular fictionalized solutions to the real structural problems facing the elephants and other animals it describes, and the solutions it imagines require reliance on institutions which are in the real world fundamentally untrustworthy.
I enjoyed learning about the ecology of the Nepali borderlands, and about the cultures surrounding elephants there, plus some of the diversity of religions and cultures that interact in the area, and the story was satisfyingly written in terms of the main character's trials and responses to them, if I disregard the issues mentioned above.
If anyone has recommendations for novels in English (including via translation) by actual Nepali authors, I'd love to hear them, as I'll be looking for that perspective to balance this one.
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So... I've started reading Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey, and 110 pages in I'm finding a lot to dislike, even though I've mostly heard nothing but good stuff about the series (and also the TV show). The fact that it became a popular TV show should probably have been a warning, but so far it's got standard-issue patriarchal & misogynist background radiation plus copaganda, with no real signs that there's going to be any reversal or repudiation of that stuff. There's also no indication I'll get any interesting thoughts about society or humanity out of this beyond bog standard space opera fare, in stark contrast to, say, A Deepness in the Sky which I also read recently and which has a similar heft. Does anyone who has read deeper into the series have opinions on whether it's worth my time?
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It's got some good stuff in there; keep going!
Your instincts aren't wrong; read something else.
Other

Just finished reading "There is no Antimemetics Division" by qntm. Not nearly the kind of aid-to-the-societal-imagination stuff I'm craving these days, but it does pleasantly stretch one's conceptual boundaries (assuming the horror aspects don't bother you). The core idea is truly clever and well-explored, even if I think it could have been even stronger by discarding classic horror tropes entirely (then again, I'm very much not the target audience in this regard).
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Recently finished "Noor" by Nnedi Okorafor. I'd enjoyed her book "Binti" but to me this was even better (it also has a different target audience). "Noor" has a lot of great things, like an interesting exploration of some of the conflicting ideas of physical transhumanism, a rich historical perspective on the interplay between a few different Nigerian cultures, and a brief glimpse at an alternative society of outcasts. It doesn't have the deep exploration of the outcast society I would have loved, but that would have been a very different story, and I don't begrudge Okorafor writing this one instead. I do think that the "corporate evils are finally exposed" ending elements ring hollow and have for some years now, but I can also understand how monumental an effort it is to write a truly compelling happy ending in our current age. Overall, a really good book, and yet more confirmation to me that the marginalized voices so long kept out of literature in general and science fiction in particular have a deep wealth of perspective to offer when they graciously choose to do so.
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Just finished "Amazona" by Canizales (indirect trigger warning: rape). An excellent fictional graphic novel about the displacement of indigenous people from the Amazon in Columbia. I especially liked the dedication: "Dedicated to those who have had to flee, leaving their lives behind. May the light in their hearts never fade. May it light new paths, so its brightness can blind the greedy. Early on the refugees, hosted in a city, comment that they now need money, when before if they had a need they could just take what they needed from the jungle. The book doesn't make this point, but communities like that have been living that way for tens of thousands of years, and I have hope that those ways of life will continue, at least where not yet destroyed, for tens of thousands more years, if not millions or billions of years. I am myself not a primitivist, despite being an anarchist, but I think there are nevertheless a plethora of important perspectives to be seen if one pays attention to indigenous groups around the world.
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Just fished "Coldwire" by Chloe Gong. An interesting and well-written cyberpunk thriller, even though it didn't have the social-imaginative elements I was looking for. I liked the reveal, and the overall construction, even if I felt that a lot of things were a bit off, and I'm not sure how I feel about an ultimately-optimistic-about-technical-possibilities view of the future right now, especially after reading Vinge's "A Deepness in the Sky" just recently which offers an idea of a future that's less optimistic (even if it dilutes that a bit towards the end).
Even if Gong's imagined future doesn't feel like it has anything interesting to say about either how to get to or sustain a more libratory society, it's a fun book and I'm definitely somewhat interested in the potential for a sequel.
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Just finished the manga "My Brain is Different" by Monzusu. It's a series of true stories of people with learning disabilities, talking about their childhoods and adult lives, plus some parents talking about their kids & parenting strategies (including parents who themselves have learning disabilities, of which the author is one). It's got some dark stuff in there, of course (indirect CW depression, suicide, bullying) but it was so nice to read the stories that were all #OwnVoices and which all showed his childhood difficulties (sometimes extreme) weren't defining of an entire life trajectory. Plenty of positive parenting examples too, mixed in with negative ones.
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Just finished "Healer of the Water Monster" by Brian Young. I'm reading a bunch of juvenile fiction right now in a quest to have some good recommendations for my kids to read in a few years when they're old enough, and this one definitely makes the cut, with deeply-integrated #OwnVoices Diné cultural elements, good (to my reading) handling of complex topics like divorce and depression, and cool magical elements. This is exactly the kind of new generation of kids' fiction I'm looking for that drops the regressive themes present in so much of what I read at that age. For example, I just before this I read Howl's Moving Castle and then The House of Many Ways by Dianna Wynne Jones, and while the first was pretty much great, the sequel has a whole benevolent monarchy thing that's central to the book in a way that weighs down the politics of the book a lot. Unsurprisingly, the indigenous perspective is a refreshing one.
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