User Profile

The Female Man, We Who Are About To, and On Strike Against God are all extremely great 5/5 stories that are completely different asides from sharing a type of narrator that is uniquely Joanna Russ.

And if you don't know who she is, she's the angry lesbian of the new wave of science fiction, and probably a pound for pound better writer than Ursula K. Le Guin (and Ursula's one of the best...).

After the first three novellas are the Alyx stories. So far, these are light, fun adventure stories that draw on Fritz Leiber's tales about Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser in terms of style and content. Fritz Leiber is disappointing in some respects but the fact that he was in open dialogue with Joanna Russ is a point in his favor. It is nice to read these stories after We Who Are About To, which is one of the best stories in scifi but also simultaneously the most mercilessly brutal, fully played out, takedown of golden age scifi and the new wave.

I really admire Joanna's range as a writer.

As a note, I am almost ready to take a break on the new wave. James Tiptree Jr., Kate Wilhelm, Samuel Delany, Thomas Disch, and Robert Silverberg are people whose work I need to spend more time with but the end is in sight for me in terms of re-evaluating the whole project.

The stuff about musician nonpayment/payola is interesting and well-documented here (including efforts to unionize/resist/subvert it by musicians). Getting paid for music isn't something i personally care about, but the book does a good job and tying it to broader problems that exist right now wrt labour and the gig work economy, which is very relevant to the types of work I do (and as a participant in all this). HOWEVER, as a punk the real brain-breaker was solidifying my understanding of the tech end of how big data analysis and playlist curation shape broad understandings of genre and shape how people make (and consume) music. The example explored in the book was hyperpop but I can see exactly how hardcore and punk slot in. All the evils of the regular ol music industry plus unhinged levels of digital surveillance and squeezing every possible drop of money and attention out of both consumers and artists (who, spoiler alert, are also considered as consumers). Evil genocide-mongering billionaires. Everything is bad about Spotify. I knew it was bad bad but actually learning how the sausage gets made is truly horrifying. I am so upset. Preemptive apologies to everyone I will punish about this topic in the near future. I hope people who use the platform (in both senses) will read this.