projectgus started reading Black Water Sister by Zen Cho
Black Water Sister by Zen Cho
As Jessamyn packs for Malaysia, it’s not a good time to start hearing a bossy voice in her head. Broke, …
Experimenting with moving my "want to read" list here.
With luck, this might also encourage me to read more regularly, to balance the ambitious addition of books to said reading list against my recent reading habits...
I guess we'll see about that.
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As Jessamyn packs for Malaysia, it’s not a good time to start hearing a bossy voice in her head. Broke, …
I picked this collection up as I'm a fan of editor Zen Cho's other writing, but the premise also hooked me in. The Cyberpunk genre has borrowed superficially from East Asian imagery and stereotype, so I was keen to see what Malaysian writers would do with it.
Although all the stories are in English, they're (as you'd expect) largely written for a Malaysian readership. For the rest of us to keep up then we need to understand a little basic Malay and/or have a willingness to look up words at times. I think there were some more subtle geographical/cultural references that flew straight past me as well, as I've not spent much time in Malaysia.
There are interesting takes in these stories, but I didn't feel anything really stretched the boundaries of the genre. I did notice, but maybe shouldn't have been surprised, how many variations of techno-authoritarianism (both hard-line …
I picked this collection up as I'm a fan of editor Zen Cho's other writing, but the premise also hooked me in. The Cyberpunk genre has borrowed superficially from East Asian imagery and stereotype, so I was keen to see what Malaysian writers would do with it.
Although all the stories are in English, they're (as you'd expect) largely written for a Malaysian readership. For the rest of us to keep up then we need to understand a little basic Malay and/or have a willingness to look up words at times. I think there were some more subtle geographical/cultural references that flew straight past me as well, as I've not spent much time in Malaysia.
There are interesting takes in these stories, but I didn't feel anything really stretched the boundaries of the genre. I did notice, but maybe shouldn't have been surprised, how many variations of techno-authoritarianism (both hard-line religious and hard-line secular) crop up over and over.
My favourite story, Kakak, was quite soulful and sad: an account of a fugitive android waiting to be smuggled to relative freedom in Indonesia. That one also had some great world-building glimpses of a pan-Southeast-Asian near future. Migrant worker themes like this pop up in a few stories, with the workers in question variously imagined as artificially intelligent robots or traditionally intelligent humans.
Its tonal opposite, Attack of the Spambots by Terence Toh is a hilarious story that I reckon would make a fantastic animated short.
This collection is almost a decade old now, and I want to go and see who is writing this kind of stuff in Malaysia these days. It'd be interesting to see how the themes and tropes might be different - for example there's a lot of gadget-based direct technological control in these stories, and I wonder if those anxieties might have morphed into extrapolations of more traditional surveillance and disinformation in the intervening years.
A recommended read, if any of this sounds interesting.
Half a century after the Doomsday Battle, the uneasy balance of Dark Forest Deterrence keeps the Trisolaran invaders at bay. …
In The Dark Forest, Earth is reeling from the revelation of a coming alien invasion-in just four centuries' time. The …
This book has an emotional quality which is missing from a lot of critical tech writing. Really worthwhile collection, although the contents are quite varied I expect something here will appeal to anyone who enjoyed Close to the Machine.
The outsider-becomes-insider accounts of the tech world of 1990s San Francisco were probably the sections I enjoyed the most while reading them. The short section of essays on artificial life - including the role of the body in intelligence - are the ones that I'm still thinking about six months later.
In The Dark Forest, Earth is reeling from the revelation of a coming alien invasion-in just four centuries' time. The …
Within the context of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, a military project sends messages to alien worlds. A nearby alien society …
Added after listening to Gloria Mark interviewed on the Ezra Klein show: www.nytimes.com/2024/01/05/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-gloria-mark.html
The most interesting thing here (IMO) is that it sounds like author tries to get outside the simple "attention == productivity in work" equivalence that most people writing about this topic stick to. Not sure if that'll end up exactly being the case in the book, but piqued my interest...
An original telling of the story of Eadweard Muybridge, who in 1872 succeeded in capturing high-speed motion photographically, thus making …