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psocopteraI'm falling behind on books. (Well, and, perpetually, almost everything else too... but right now I am addressing the topic of books...)
Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, Robin Sloane. I knew almost nothing about this except that it had been recommended by a friend, and that was a great way to read it, but I'm going to give y'all a little more detail so you know how it fits into the spectrum of things I recommend. So, a) this is a *nice* book, a book with a warm and rosy glow, I would not hesitate to recommend this book to anyone. b) It reminded me a little bit of Ready Player One except more universal and w/fewer annoying bits. c) Google is involved and I would love to hear from anyone who's worked at or with Google what they thought of the portrayal of Google in the book. And a couple of spoilers: One of the things I really liked about it was the way Everything Was Good? Like, paper, digital, audio, we can love and benefit from it all? I was really scared in the first digitization scene that the machine was going to start chopping up the book to scan it - like in Rainbow's End when they're shredding the entire Geisel Library. But in fact, no, this is a beautiful world where different technologies work in harmony and complement each other and we can embrace all of it at once! Also I literally thought halfway through "it's going to turn out to be the friends they made along the way" and IT SO LITERALLY WAS and that was awesome. The only one tiny thing that really annoyed me in all this warm fuzziness was when he has to explain Dungeons and Dragons to a woman who works at Google, like, excuse me?? Yes, obviously anyone can have any particular gap in their otherwise-hardcore nerdery, it's very easy to have not watched some particular movie or played some particular game, but, I don't know, maybe I am biased by being personally familiar with the RPG-playing history of many of the people I know at Google, but, no, this is not some boy mystery that girls would need explained to them, this is a common piece of geek culture that geeks of all genders who grew up in the US will have a basic familiarity with even if they didn't personally play, yeesh.
vN, Madeline Ashby. Apparently first of a trilogy of which the third book does not exist yet, but if I hadn't read that I wouldn't have known, it read like a standalone. Posthuman rogue robot hijinks! I am so psyched to have read this book because I finally have a woman author to list with Greg Egan and Peter Watts when I'm talking about people doing hardcore non-sentimental post-human futurism. Good stuff here about identity and robot-human relations and what it means to be a child and what it means to be an adult and consent and family. Ashby is exploring some similar territory to Stross in Saturn's Children but I'm so much more interested in thoughts about what it means to be a sex class/created as sex object from a woman? Sorry, but, like, similarly, I will be much more interested in what it means to be created as laborers/as bodies to suffer danger/pain from a writer who comes from a background of having their ancestors' bodies imported as commodities for those purposes. Not that I think I've actually read that book yet but if it's out there someone should recommend it to me immediately. It's like how Butler has much smarter stuff to say about race/species relations than anyone else, there's a real example. One interesting note, there's a murder of a human child pretty early on that for whatever reason *didn't* bother me, I mean, I'm not saying I was cheering, but it didn't set off the typical waterworks of child death, it would probably be interesting if I could put my finger on why not, but I can't, just didn't?
The Fifth Season, NK Jemisin. And on the topic of child death (there's a great transition), Josh read this and enjoyed it so I gave it a second go in preparation for reading the sequel when we get it. Turns out I really had already found all of the child death/torture in my first attempt, so no new awfulness, and I got to read some nifty stuff I hadn't found before, so that was nice. Iiiii don't know, I still don't feel like I would recommend these to anyone but I guess I'll have to see what she does in the second book? There is some genuinely *really cool* stuff here in and around the world too brutal to stand. (And then I read Facebook and it's like three new horrific shootings/beatings to death by cops, so, to be clear, I am not blaming Jemisin for writing about a world too brutal to stand, we may also be living in one.)
Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, Robin Sloane. I knew almost nothing about this except that it had been recommended by a friend, and that was a great way to read it, but I'm going to give y'all a little more detail so you know how it fits into the spectrum of things I recommend. So, a) this is a *nice* book, a book with a warm and rosy glow, I would not hesitate to recommend this book to anyone. b) It reminded me a little bit of Ready Player One except more universal and w/fewer annoying bits. c) Google is involved and I would love to hear from anyone who's worked at or with Google what they thought of the portrayal of Google in the book. And a couple of spoilers: One of the things I really liked about it was the way Everything Was Good? Like, paper, digital, audio, we can love and benefit from it all? I was really scared in the first digitization scene that the machine was going to start chopping up the book to scan it - like in Rainbow's End when they're shredding the entire Geisel Library. But in fact, no, this is a beautiful world where different technologies work in harmony and complement each other and we can embrace all of it at once! Also I literally thought halfway through "it's going to turn out to be the friends they made along the way" and IT SO LITERALLY WAS and that was awesome. The only one tiny thing that really annoyed me in all this warm fuzziness was when he has to explain Dungeons and Dragons to a woman who works at Google, like, excuse me?? Yes, obviously anyone can have any particular gap in their otherwise-hardcore nerdery, it's very easy to have not watched some particular movie or played some particular game, but, I don't know, maybe I am biased by being personally familiar with the RPG-playing history of many of the people I know at Google, but, no, this is not some boy mystery that girls would need explained to them, this is a common piece of geek culture that geeks of all genders who grew up in the US will have a basic familiarity with even if they didn't personally play, yeesh.
vN, Madeline Ashby. Apparently first of a trilogy of which the third book does not exist yet, but if I hadn't read that I wouldn't have known, it read like a standalone. Posthuman rogue robot hijinks! I am so psyched to have read this book because I finally have a woman author to list with Greg Egan and Peter Watts when I'm talking about people doing hardcore non-sentimental post-human futurism. Good stuff here about identity and robot-human relations and what it means to be a child and what it means to be an adult and consent and family. Ashby is exploring some similar territory to Stross in Saturn's Children but I'm so much more interested in thoughts about what it means to be a sex class/created as sex object from a woman? Sorry, but, like, similarly, I will be much more interested in what it means to be created as laborers/as bodies to suffer danger/pain from a writer who comes from a background of having their ancestors' bodies imported as commodities for those purposes. Not that I think I've actually read that book yet but if it's out there someone should recommend it to me immediately. It's like how Butler has much smarter stuff to say about race/species relations than anyone else, there's a real example. One interesting note, there's a murder of a human child pretty early on that for whatever reason *didn't* bother me, I mean, I'm not saying I was cheering, but it didn't set off the typical waterworks of child death, it would probably be interesting if I could put my finger on why not, but I can't, just didn't?
The Fifth Season, NK Jemisin. And on the topic of child death (there's a great transition), Josh read this and enjoyed it so I gave it a second go in preparation for reading the sequel when we get it. Turns out I really had already found all of the child death/torture in my first attempt, so no new awfulness, and I got to read some nifty stuff I hadn't found before, so that was nice. Iiiii don't know, I still don't feel like I would recommend these to anyone but I guess I'll have to see what she does in the second book? There is some genuinely *really cool* stuff here in and around the world too brutal to stand. (And then I read Facebook and it's like three new horrific shootings/beatings to death by cops, so, to be clear, I am not blaming Jemisin for writing about a world too brutal to stand, we may also be living in one.)
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Date: 2016-09-25 07:21 pm (UTC)