Reviews and Comments

The small town nuclear family setting made me feel so claustrophobic and a few hundred pages in, right when I was starting to wonder why I was still reading this weird family book, all the characters and the story started blowing open. Really well crafted, nothing revolutionary but a solid book to get wrapped into for a few weeks.

Really simple prose and a kind of overdone premise made me feel like I knew what I was getting into, but the story sucked me in really quickly and I ended up finishing it in one sitting. Really appreciated the steady, almost omnicient presence of the narrator through lots of turmoil in the lives of the women around her.

Comfort reread :)

Chip's propensity for unreliable/unlikeable narrators makes his books a bit of a slog sometimes, but he's still one of my favourites cause there's always layers of intent going on under the writing and he's so fucking smart and funny. Love imagining an occupied solar system with queer cooperative living and on-demand informed consent gender- and sexuality-affirming health tech, but! Theres a lot of dodging and ducking in and around the question of utopia here and the almost-campy idealized aspects of the society and tech play into these explorations. Loved it.

I found this interview/seminar with Chip from 1986 which shed a lot of light on his ideas around this book, specifically around the question of utopia/heterotopia and SciFi and how this book is in dialogue with LeGuin's The Disposessed. www.depauw.edu/sfs/interviews/delany52interview.htm

Finished this series during a multi-day power outage, and being in resource-management mode def made the cozy solarpunk world these books built feel closer at hand. It was kinda impressively fleshed out for being only 2 short novellas, but i think any more than that and the utopic vibes woulda been totally saccharine. I don't particularly care about solarpunk but I am a total sucker for robot-human friendship exploration stories so definitely enjoyed that aspect.

Unfortunately I think I fizzled out on this one even though I had been enjoying it.

MURDERBOT MARCH

I'm really trying to finish this book this weekend (after starting last winter, fizzling out, and restarting around Christmas). My project last month of mostly reading dozens of zines and being overworked has subsided; my ability to focus is high and I have a lot more time, so I feel dedicated to this task. After crushing about 100 pages this morning I needed a little push so I was digging around for meta analysis and found this article by Olga Tokarczuk about her process and motivation for writing the book, i really enjoyed it and she is such a freak. www.calvertjournal.com/articles/show/13404/olga-tokarczuk-how-i-wrote-the-books-of-jacob

This was really quite good, although super strange and disorienting, enhanced by reading it at bedtime and falling asleep in the middle of chapters most nights. Innumerable sentences and paragraphs highlighted just because of good arrangement of words. Definitely gave my whole life a melancholy tinge these last few weeks. I think I'd like to reread it when I'm older or if death feels more imminent.

(The pages go backwards, but still, this means I'm like 1/3 done)

This was super fun. I thought the oral history format was a really clever format choice, like looking into a giant construction site through little windows cut in the scaffolding and only kind of being able to grasp the depth of the pit. I kept thinking about KSR's New York 2140 and how it couldve been the same world almost, but with more grittiness and trauma and explanations about how we get from here to fully automated gay luxury space communism. I'm pretty sure I have big political differences with the authors, but I seriously enjoyed it nonetheless. I'd really appreciate seeing more of this kind of fantastic dreaming from those who want a drastically different world.