Critiques et Commentaires

Oy, kinda fated myself into picking this up by reading Moby Dick and Schismatrix simultaneously.

Walls beyond walls.

Re-read 2024: So much to sit with and contemplate on each reading, come to it with empty hands.

Re-read 2020: Upped to 5 stars. Still a bit of a slow start and interspersed philosophical explainers, but I appreciate the complexities of this "evolving utopia" more than before, the human and social and intergenerational tensions she walks through in making the case complicated.

A sweet and intense french love story, with a wonderful style moving easily in and out of the characters' minds and relationships. Lovingly translated with a long translator's note that captures a small sense of Hofstadter's "Le Ton Beau de Marot".

1. So thoroughly about whales and whaling and the pre-fossil-oil industry that trying to write a book about any of that without reference to this now feels impossible. Thankfully, I'm not writing a book of whale facts; its been done.
2. "Blood for Oil!" (p291) This story echoes Don Quixote's wandering and precarity, but connects more immediately to the modern world's thirst for exploitation. Seriously relevant.
3. Technical knowledge's belief it has overcome passions and the most inevitable, which gives justification for the huge bulk of whale and whaling facts, while also constantly and purposefully undercutting the worth of reading all that.

Transhumanist social sci-fi: satisfyingly inventive in environmental and physiological adaptations, with stories interested in the philosophical and political implications of a solar-system-wide diaspora. More Dune than Expanse, these remain largely aristocratic, plausible and complicated and regularly tinged with misogyny.

Data-oriented with narrative recounting of the buildup to 20c civil war in Yugoslavia, Syria, N. Ireland, Myanmar, Indonesia. Anocracy - in a gray area between democracy and autocracy - and ethnic Factionalism, and less solidly the fuel of broadcast or social media, are the risk factors she's most worried about. The second half starts to talk about the current U.S. directly, but given the advice is to strengthen trust in democratic institutions and broaden the social safety net and prosecute domestic terrorists, well... she claims to be optimistic at the end.

Lovely cozy futurist feminist stories that all have bikes.

In taking a much larger scope than the Martian, repeating the same formula failed to entertain or engross me, instead the tricks and slick solutions to improbably back-tracked premises seemed to go a long way to nowhere.

I do not have anything like a useful understanding of the pantheon of characters in Mugabe's Zimbabwe to appreciate the biting satire going on here.

Pretty depressing right away!

A pandemic novel, a time travel novel, and a central character who is a beleaguered author who can't decide if they are writing a novel or a novella... phew, honestly the writing was pretty good for me to give it 3 stars.

I am back to reading this while camping along the coast - bring on more shipwrecks and whale facts!

Powerful, but I don't think I could read them again? Explicitly and inventively emphasizing the violence and disregard society expects and delivers against black kids, a surreal and angry collection.

You ought to know I have long loved Krista's radio conversations, and that this book beautifully captures the form and content of those conversations towards a larger project of understanding human capacities for social good and connection. An openness to unfinished dialogue, to finding larger more generous more loving language, to hope expressed as grief and as goodness, to humility as a readiness to see goodness and be surprised... these aren't answers, just directions.