Reviews and Comments

first off I'd strongly advise against reading this (or any of Junji Ito's works, probably) if body horror is a big problem for you. that said, Uzumaki is really good! the art is amazingly done, and the slow escalation from relatively self-contained (and occasionally kind of silly) spiral-based phenomena to... the stuff that happens at the end... is just fantastic.

Becky Chamber's works are rare among science fiction stories because instead of action-adventure plots they're about people talking about what it means to be alive.

The first couple of chapters felt like the plot was jumping around a hell of a lot, because they're really just backstory/preamble for the actual story

It's good that there will be a sequel because I do want to know what both Mosscap and Dex will do next

it's a magical realist (?) romance in a science fiction Time War setting, an unusual choice, but one that works well, given how strange the consequences of warping causality would be. If you can get ahold of the audio book, it's pretty good, has different readers for Blue and Red.

it's a friendly, easily digested introduction to medieval history. It's only 176 pages long (& half of those pages are taken up by charming medieval-style cartoons) and covers approximately 1000 years of the history of a continent-sized area, so of course it's sparse on details. Gets away from the Victorian-era mythos that pop culture is rife with.

it's the journal of a biologist exploring an area where things are Wrong and Strange. if that sounds like an enjoyable read to you it probably will be

this book emphasizes (among other things) that the behavior of the US military is the same now as it's even been, beginning with their treatment of the Indigenous peoples of North America.

here's the audiobook, www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrOKOJY0UlE

and here's some quotes from it bookwyrm.social/user/agafnd/quotation/85055 bookwyrm.social/user/agafnd/quotation/85073 bookwyrm.social/user/agafnd/quotation/85525 bookwyrm.social/user/agafnd/quotation/87116 bookwyrm.social/user/agafnd/quotation/87120 bookwyrm.social/user/agafnd/quotation/88055 bookwyrm.social/user/agafnd/quotation/88056 bookwyrm.social/user/agafnd/quotation/88058 bookwyrm.social/user/agafnd/quotation/93172 bookwyrm.social/user/agafnd/quotation/93174 bookwyrm.social/user/agafnd/quotation/93175 bookwyrm.social/user/agafnd/quotation/99799 bookwyrm.social/user/agafnd/quotation/99800 bookwyrm.social/user/agafnd/quotation/99801 bookwyrm.social/user/agafnd/quotation/99802

The Oankali have strange and disturbing ideas about consent, which makes this an uncomfortable book to read. (This is, like, intentional, though.)

There's a disregard for singular 'they' as a genderless pronoun, instead 'it' is used to refer to the Ooloi; this doesn't feel as bad as it might because it's apparently the pronoun that the Ooloi chose to use for themselves in English

The biggest problem I have with it technically is that not all that much happens for much of the book? At least the first half is spent with Lilith just learning things about the Oankali. Which is interesting, but pretty slow

it's a fairly short and straightforward story about resistance to colonization, but embedded in it is a kind of complicated discussion about the legitimacy of violence. It seems like it was in part a commentary on the Vietnam War (which is even alluded to at one point).

Don Davidson is one of the more thoroughly unpleasant viewpoint characters I've read; fortunately he is meant to be villainous, & at any rate it's only from his point of view for about a third of the book. His motivation, worldview & actions are disturbing but accurate for a certain sort of man.

it's a strange, complicated tale, made more so by the nonlinear fashion in which it is told. it's about family, mothers in particular, but it's also about cars and changing media formats and the subtle horror that lurks beneath the surface of "ordinary" US life. Check out the audiobook if you can and want; John Darnielle is a good reader.

A reunion with the characters from the first book & a satisfying conclusion that is still left open for sequels (which indeed there are).

i read this, like many people did i suspect, because i like Janelle Shane's AI Weirdness blog. This book does rehash some of the material from the blog as you'd expect, but the focus is more on explaining AI in a non-technical, non-sensational, & friendly manner. Probably the people who would get the most out of it are those whose knowledge of AI begins & ends with how they're portrayed in the news & in fiction.

I found this book a bit slow for the first 50–60 pages, which are spent mostly describing the World without much of any sort of Plot happening. It only really begins to pick up around Part 3, when the mystery inherent to the setting starts to unravel, all through the eyes of a narrator not so much unreliable as naïve and lacking in knowledge, which makes him unable to understand things which are clear to the reader. It's the sort of book where it's worth reading (or at least skimming) the first few parts again to see what you missed the first read through.

I'm conflicted about this one. On the one hand I did think it was well enough written, and was fairly engaging & entertaining (being short always helps with these; & I was listening to an audiobook of it, a somewhat novel experience for me, so that may factor in). The setting and characters were interesting and as fleshed out as they needed to be.

But it comes across as deeply reactionary. One of the characters is an actual Nazi, & while he's certainly portrayed as horrible in many respects, he also seems to be meant as at least somewhat sympathetic. Not to mention the pervasive misogyny. Frankly I'd like to see what the Snakes have going on, with their "Unholy Triple Alliance [...] between the Eastern Classical World, Mohammedanized Christianity, and Marxist Communism".