@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialJust 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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@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialJust 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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@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialJust 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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@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialJust 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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@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialJust 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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@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialJust 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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@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialJust 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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@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialJust 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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@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialJust 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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@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialJust 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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@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialJust 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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@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialJust finished "My Perfectly Imperfect Body" by Debbie Tung, a graphic memoir about dealing with disordered eating as a teenage girl. Similar themes to Hungry Ghost, except without as much of a family factor, and it's more direct. We get to hear the author's perspective as an adult at the end, including some good body-positive messages and thought patterns, even as she acknowledges the struggle necessary to climb out of body despair.
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@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialJust 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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@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialJust 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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@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialJust finished "A Psalm for the Wild-Built" by Becky Chambers. Overall it's good but I also have some Thoughts.
First, it was very pleasant to finally read some non-trite utopian solarpunk after having read stuff like Octavia Butler recently. Both hope and despair can be poisonous on their own IMO, so getting some balance in is nice. It's definitely a very valuable thing to be able to lay out an actually desirable and in many ways imaginable future given our grim present. Chambers is no LeGuin though. I'll probably be reading more of her work and maybe she fleshes out these ideas elsewhere, but at least in this book there is no focus on either how the transition to a better society could happen nor on how the better society holds up in the face of adverse events and inclinations. Compare LeGuin's "The Dispossessed" or N. K. Jemisin's short story "The Ones Who Stay and Fight" and it feels like there's something important missing from Chambers' portrait of a future society. Of course, maybe the point is to make a cozy book, in which case fine, there's certainly a place for such things, and I can look for deeper inspiration elsewhere.
The second big thought I had was that Chambers' worldview seems not well-informed by certain indigenous perspectives, and this creates some contradictions. For example, (minor spoilers) when Dex enters the wilderness there's a whole bit about understanding humankind's place in nature and how human settlements are what we're used to but they're only a brief interruption of the vast untouched wilderness. Along the same lines, much of the world is intentionally left untouched by humans as a way to keep it pristine and natural. Later however, a character makes the point that humans *are* animals. The indigenous perspective that I appreciate would agree with that, and would further question the value in distinguishing between human influence on ecosystems and influences that others have. More sharply, one might observe that there's a bigger difference between how different kinds of humans relate to and influence their environments than between how less-disruptive humans and various animals do the same: the strip-mine-operator vs. migrant tribesperson impact difference is probably much greater than the migrant tribesperson vs. beaver gap, for example. Rather than talking about limiting human disruption, then, as if all human-environment interactions are disruptive and must be minimized, we could/should be talking about how to create human societies that have beneficial relationships with their environments and acknowledging that we actually have many positive examples of that, both historical and contemporary. Chambers' utopia is a "humans dominate nature but restrain themselves so that their disruptions are minimal and thus nature can thrive" vision, but what I'd even more like to see would be a "humans study old ways and make new ones so that they can interact positively with ecosystems again" vision, including some of "here are the places that sometimes breaks down but also the patterns and institutions that ensure repair of those breakdowns and thus long-term sustainability."
Final big thought: Chambers' utopia is too homogenous for my tastes. Of course it's hard enough and valuable work dreaming up and sharing any utopia and Chambers' transcends triteness in a number of ways, so this criticism is a bit rude. But the single shared religion, lack of mention of conflicts around shared decisions, especially historical society-defining ones, and nagging questions like "what about the people indigenous to the now-uninhabited lands?" and "what about the indigenous peoples who weren't part of the factory-building societies?" leave me wishing for more nuance in this direction.
All in all: a good book, and I'm criticizing out of a place of appreciation, not scorn. I've got there sequel out from the library as well and will probably detour to a few other books but get to it pretty soon.
Sadly I don't remember who, but I got this one because of a recommendation on here, so thanks if you're someone who recommended it!
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@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialJust finished "Fustuk" by Robert Mgrdich Apelian. Without exaggeration, it is a true masterpiece, an absolutely stunning graphic novel about food, family, and magical contracts that reminds me of both Witch Hat Atelier and Young Bride's Stories. The truly impressive part is that Apelian is every bit as good an illustrator and storyteller as both Kamome Shirahama and Kaoru Mori.
In the author's note, Apelian says "So I asked to make the story I always craved growing up: a tale of Middle Eastern joy and magic that speaks to diasporic culture and how those of us within it relate to our two worlds." He succeeded at that goal abundantly, as far as I can tell, and has produced a truly impressive work.
Images are rough pictures of a few example pages showing very cool panel construction, lots of detail, and both dynamic action and expressive faces. I'm not going to spoil anything, but the second image here is one of the most powerful pages I've read in a while and the way it uses gutters demonstrates a beautiful mastery of the comics medium.
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@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialJust 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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@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialJust 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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@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialSo... 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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@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialJust 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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@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialRecently 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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@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialJust 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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@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialJust 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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@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialJust 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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@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialJust 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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