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A frustratingly vague but often haunting epistolary short story. I wasn't anticipating it to hew so closely to videogame emails and SCP entries, but I'll give it credit for being thematically richer than most of the shockbait horror it structurally parallels.

Ideas about the bodies of dehumanized (in more ways than one) workers in a future capitalist state are woven in without the didactic brutality so much contemporary scifi relies on. Characters cannot see outside the demands of the company anymore than readers can materialize the absent interviewer. Both are invisible absolutes, acknowledged but dismissed because who has time when you're working 12 hour shifts (to say nothing or the cosmic horror leaking from this cargo...).

I felt rather listless by the end of this. Even with the introduction of an honest to god plot in the third act it retains the abstract, nonlinear structure (it was not surprising to …

Perhaps I took the title too literally, but it was disappointing to discover how little of this book is concerned with articulating actual tactics for violent climate resistance. It is predominantly an argument for the necessity of violence, a position I agree with having bought a book called "How To Blow Up A Pipeline," but which ends up feeling as late and ineffectual as the doomerism that spurred writing it.

The last chapter dedicated to rebuking climate defeatism is the most engaging (if shockingly bleak). It seems an altogether more difficult challenge to pull people back from the ledge of accepted annihilation, which Malm does a commendable (if brief) job of. I just can't help feeling like I am no closer to actualizing any of the goals that have been hazely waved before me. The anger and restlessness is already here, what's left is the difficult task of directing it.

Grotesque queer horror of the most beautiful and trashy variety. It is so rare to find something that so bluntly captures the trans experience, trans survival, love and gore wrapped in a scrapnel coated blanket. It is uncompromising, at times bordering on cruel, the accumulation of a thousand daily tragedies spilling out over a ceaseless apocalypse.

Within that pain are the pockets of hope that sustain us. The relationships and messy connections and bitter loyalty of communities continually rebuilding themselves because nobody else is going to save them. It is an uncertain future, but a future all the same.

Just wrapped it up. It's a very good detective novel though I think it's political allegory sort of falls apart by the end (or at least to the wayside). Lands in a disappointing ambiguity about the role of police and borders, seeing them as both fully artificial and hostile but also necessary because the alternative is total anarchy. I maybe expected something a bit more given Mielville's clear interest in leftist politics, but it was really closer to a Dan Brown novel but <spoiler>where the conspiracy is actually just a sad man with something to prove.</spoiler>

Like sledding down a hill on a piece of cardboard, hurtling towards a cliff, bailing too late and tumbling, limbs snapping like twigs as you become another piece of debris to careen over the edge. The chaos at the center of Stephen Florida is unrelenting, his drive to wrestle both pitifully insignificant and the only thing that has and will ever matter. To what degree any of what's happening is real or true is irrelevant to the kinetic energy that starts fully built on page one and refuses to decelerate until crashing headfirst into the acknowledgements.

The only comparison I can reach for are Johnny's chapters from House of Leaves, both painting images of isolated, angry men rapidly detaching themselves from reality until all that's left is their own paranoia. If you found Johnny's depraved ramblings hard to stomach I would recommend leaving Stephen Florida off your list (or at …

Took me a bit to come around to this. The early chapters are saddled with a lot of overcomplicated scifi world building and inexplicable pop-culture references, but once it shifts into being an earnest villains-to-lovers romance I was all in. I do not read enough violent and vulnerable love poetry so perhaps I am just starved for intimacy, but the way Red and Blue's brovado gets shelled as they realize they are falling for each other made me yearn for a similar connection the way all great romances do.

I am not particularly interested in picking apart the time travel for inconsistencies as the emotional impact works regardless of if I can make sense of the strands and ripples. The impression I get from talking with others is the stylistic moves and flowery ambiguity are fully love/hate, but I'm glad to fall in the former. Irrelevant in some ways, but …

The more I think about this book the more frustrated I am. It's my first Terry Pratchett so I wasn't sure what to expect, but the blend of British "incompetent masses" humor with the oppressively cynical, Liberal politics was agonizing. The book's arc is about how the world is fucked but it's at least better than the alternative because the people in power are composed tyrants rather than openly killing people; learning that it's actually super fulfilling and good to be a cop if you take it seriously, giving up training dragons to be a proper aristocrat, etc.

Just aggressively bleak "return to normal" resolution that combined with the "people are naturally ignorant sheep who will adjust to anything people in power demand" feels super cynical about the possibility or need for political change. Everyone is the same selfish, ignorant drunk who immediately rationalize horrible actions when they realize it's …

Found the way the book deified Jeff Mangum while describing Neutral Milk Hotel and The Aeroplane Over the Sea as almost supernatural happenings just the most tired Pitchfork-esq aggrandizement. Maybe I should have expected it for this particular album, but the constant "it was like he wasn't even writing lyrics but channeling a spiritual voice" embellishment feels so silly and precluded any actual criticism or analysis of the album beyond a short, haphazard section attempting to interpret the lyrics. Hollow criticism aside, comparing Mangum leaving the band to the death of Anne Frank (which happens multiple times!) is just a wildly gross extension of the already icky allusions to her made in the lyrics. Two stars for the legitimately very interesting section discussing how they achieved the analog fuzz sound on the album (it's as convoluted as you would expect). Would love to know if there are any good 33 …

Happy to have finally read something by Le Guin. I enjoyed the pseudo-epistolary structure and concept of a fully gender fluid civilization, but the book's age really shows through in the limits of how far this queerness can go (all relationships "become" heterosexual, for instance, because reproduction I guess).

I think I'm missing some important context for when this was written, as it has both a lot of vaguely anti-communist sentiment and also seems to be pulling from Catholic mission trips to East Asian countries, but I can't quite pinpoint a through line. A bubbling pot of challenging political ideas that are not so much unexplored as they are too large for a 300-page scifi novel. Very curious to check out some of Le Guin's later work, but this seems as good a place as any of, like me, you've been meaning to check her out.

There are some valuable historical and sociological observations in here, but Buck's political imagination is frustratingly narrow when it comes to a post-fossil fuel future. A significant amount of the book is devoted to outlining (but not doing) the planning work still needing to be done regarding forces of labor, capital, and government if we are to fully divest from the fossil fuel industry, which while all true is also plainly obvious to anyone already invested in addressing climate change (the audience for this book seems somewhere between center-left MSNBC libs and soft-leftists).

Ideas like degrowth and energy quotas are brought up and discarded in the span of a few paragraphs, while whole chapters are given to outlining accelerationist technologies like carbon capture and nuclear energy which hinge on somehow converting up-to-now destructive capitalist enterprises into public utilities (while also somehow preventing the government corruption that has allowed oil companies …