Critiques et Commentaires

Promising noir murder mystery in a magic high school, I was kept guessing well but also meandered away from caring by the inconsistent stakes and gaps in attention.

Grim rural experience and pain, there's an arc from recent to more misty past and back again, and the strongest poem is in that middle distance, about a cow and a grandfather.

Jarring moving phrasing juxtapositions of popular culture and reflecting on recent immigrant experience of being unwanted, lost, and vulnerable.

Enjoyable zombie shift, a retrospective on plague through interviews it mostly trades the horror hordes for human stories of disbelief and displacement. War and military get a little too much focus for me, however. The audiobook is a good fit for the format, with a good cast.

Sweet, a simply staged play or radio drama, a very constrained time travel premise, seems it could have been edited to be a tighter novella, but the loose threads aren't too frayed.

Widely speculative collection, from mildly future to space to horror absurd. I most enjoyed The Pill (Meg Elison), Crawfather (Mel Kassel), Skipping Stones In the Dark (Amman Sabet), and Two Truths and a Lie (Sarah Pinsker).

Via Amitav Ghosh's "The Nutmeg's Curse"

An educator studies middle-grade kids exploration of and place-making in their neighborhood's hedges, woods, and interstitial empty lots as they begin to range away from home from age 8 to 11, and combining this small study with theory and his and others adult recollections of the role of secret, self-created, organized, and usually private dens and playspaces, centers this form of development in the preparation for a social self to emerge.

Inventive and disturbing with a deep range, uncomfortable violent male gaze in most of these stories while critical of the same, only the title story felt classic.

Captures this stretched moment of trauma and grief in a series of chained short stories along a future plague's long trajectory. While every one of these is raw and centers horrific loss, ending, and predictable yet abrupt disconnections in the family and social fabric, somehow they are also beautifully sweet, often funny, and all too recognizable without polemicizing any of our current specific polarizations.

Friends said this was among the first sci-fi they read as kids. I was expecting dated 50s space booster meets Hardy Boys, and not too far off, but also much more considered and expansive than that, with practical realism and moral and empathetic choices with consequential acts and a scope that somewhat plausibly keeps ratcheting this to a memorable quality sci-fi.

Bookclub default option.

Speculation from another era, these are all well-written, stylistically and structurally varied, and struggle to get past their prompt or conceit or timewarp. Oddly, "Spice Pogrom" was my fave.

At its best, sharp analysis of American conflation of morality and prosperity, less so as a Cold War text criticizing both US and USSR attempts to manage history while making soon-to-be-awkward claims about democracy's defenses against pursuing preventative war, factionalism, and ideological blind hubris.

War and military patriarchy turned upside down and poked full of satirical holes to fill with wit and wordplay, of course, enjoyable as always.