Reviews and Comments

good information on the various ways police in the US suck and have always sucked. doesn't have much of an internationalist perspective, which isn't exactly a flaw, it's just beyond the scope of the book.

it might be a good text to radicalize your liberal friends with (so to speak).

it's a fairly entertaining oldish novel about a woman who has been implanted in a spaceship.

Raises a lot of interesting moral questions: from what I understand, she and her peers were born immobile, and of course becoming a brainship gives them mobility—but still, the conditioning necessary for this takes place from birth, and so they obviously can't give consent. Also, they are essentially indentured serfs to the Central Worlds until they can "Pay-off"—which sometimes takes hundreds of years. I didn't feel that these ethical issues were quite well enough explored.

I will forever find Helva's declaration "Imagine calling red hair and freckles sweet!" bewildering

It's a "fix-up" novel (made up of several previously published short stories), which accounts for its episodic nature. I thought the second half was better than the first (it was also written later).

The Sculptor is the story of a man living in New York City who unexpectedly gains a superpower—a familiar premise, but this is not a superhero comic. In a way it's more of a return to early stories of this type, like the Invisible Man, in that the hero of the story doesn't act particularly heroic—he just acts like a normal person might.

There's a big discussion embedded in the story about what Art is and what the purpose of Art is, which from the little I've read seems to be a perennial topic of Scott McCloud's work.

Anyway, I thought it was pretty good.

reading this has made me want to read some of luxemburg's actual writings; which i suppose is largely the point of it.

the art is kind of unusual but works and is often dynamic & expressive

if you're going to read the endnotes (i recommend it; they are interesting) i think a good way would be, to read the notes for every section after you read one; they're a bit dense to read after every page, and of course you'll have to remind yourself of the context if you leave reading them to the end

it is very cool that there is a guy who is a skeleton, who throws fireballs & quips

there are some uncomfortable stereotypes which i felt were the result of lazy writing & uninterrogated biases

i probably would have like this a lot in my mid teens.

a few of his lines of argument are kind of dubious; but he never claims to be the last word on anything.

overall it's a good book about the form & history of comics; and it ties it to art in general as well.

loads of good information & history about resistance to colonialism & land back. well written.

it's essentially a long exploration of the drake equation. being from 1979, the science is a bit out of date—for example, there were no confirmed exoplanets at the time. it seems to mostly hold up, though (to me, someone who is Very Not an astrophysicist).

this series continues to be good. there's some great character developy / learning about the outside world moments for murderbot in this one

the world this book portrays seems....all too possible, really

content warning, if you want to read it, for just about every kind of violence possible

i had a good time reading it! wasn't sure how the various plot threads were going to link up most of the time, but they eventually did and it was amazing

this book never really explains the world it's set in too well. it's stated that live actors have been replaced with CG models of classic actors; and yet, there are dozens of hopeful Marilyn Monroe lookalikes everywhere. (side note: which moviegoers in 1995, much less a few decades later when the book is set, care that much about Marilyn Monroe, or James Dean, or Judy Garland?)

the plot relies on an extremely dubious understanding of encryption but that's kinda par for the course for science fiction about the Computer

the behavior of the main character is really pretty distasteful

all this said, the premise of "hollywood only makes CG remakes now" is probably one of the most realistic cyberpunk dystopias i've ever seen

this series is shaping up to be pretty episodic (appropriate i guess given its protagonist's love of serial fiction) and this volume feels like it's leading up to a more major plot point. still i don't have any complaints about it though, it is a very good episode 2

it's definitely soft SF that's From Its Time. kind of reminiscent of Phillip K. Dick's stuff, except the main character was actually likeable. Love how the continuum-shifts were treated narratively.

like most of miéville's work, it's not for the faint of heart—several of the stories, like "Säcken", are positively horrific. (most of them are merely bizarre and mindbending.)

some of my favorites: "Polynia"; "The Condition of New Death"; "The Dowager of Bees"; "The Buzzard's Egg"; "A Second Slice Manifesto".