So it used to be that I cared what words people used to describe their gender. Not a lot, but some. Enough to roll my eyes about this or that gender description that I suspected the youths had gotten from spending too much time on Tumblr. At some point, though, I stopped caring, and I have to tell you that it is a much, much better way of life. Society wants you to care a lot about gender, and my path as I have gotten older and older is to care about gender closer and closer to zero. Are women…
5 CommentsCategory: 4 Stars
Between Neil Gaiman and Nalo Hopkinson and now Drew Hayden Taylor, I may need to reconsider my stated position that I am not a fan of short story collections. The emended version of this position — triggered by my reading of Drew Hayden Taylor’s collection Take Us to Your Chief — is that I am not a fan of short story collections unless they are SFF. Take Us to Your Chief is a wonderfully charming, clever, melancholy collection of what Taylor describes as Native sci-fi. The author is an Ojibway from the Curve Lake First Nations, and indigenous traditions and…
5 CommentsWhat a genuinely great, fun book. Six Wakes was one of my most anticipated books for spring, and with good reason! In this future, humans have perfected cloning: with regular backups (called mindmaps) and a fresh computer, a clone can die as many times as it likes and wake up again in a brand new body. If you haven’t backed up your mind lately with a new mindmap, and you die, your clone will be missing some time. Space janitor and chef Maria Elena wakes up in a new clone body to find that her last body is dead. The…
14 CommentsMy concerns going into The Watchmaker of Filigree Street were, one, that it would be too twee, and two, that I didn’t care much about solving a mysterious bombing at Victorian Scotland Yard by Irish freedom fighters. Happily for my peace of mind, though it starts off seeming like a rather twee mystery about a bombing at Victorian Scotland yard by Irish freedom fighters, that really isn’t what the book is at all. Our hero, Thaniel Steepleton, comes home from a difficult day at the telegraph office (bomb threat, something something) to find that his flat has been broken into,…
14 CommentsIt’s time for another romance novels round-up! I have read some pretty m.f. great ones in the last month, and I bring them all to you for your delectation and delight. I frequently recommend Alyssa Cole’s Off the Grid series to romance newbies, particularly ones who are coming to romance from SFF. Her latest book, An Extraordinary Union, maintains everything I love about her earlier work, but this time with spies! Elle Burns is a former slave, former staple of the abolitionist circuit, and current spy for the Union. Her eidetic memory makes her a unique asset, and she’s posing…
14 CommentsAs I think I have said in my reviews of Ausma Zehanat Khan’s previous books, I don’t read a lot of mysteries. When I do get hooked on a mystery series, I don’t tend to review each one, but I’m making an exception (as you can see!) for Among the Ruins, the third in Ausma Zehanat Khan’s Esa Khattak / Rachel Getty series. I was initially drawn into Khan’s work because of my general desire to support POC authors working in genre fiction. But I’ve stayed with the series because each book has done such a beautiful job of incorporating…
10 Comments
23 Things They Don’t Tell You about Capitalism, Ha-Joon Chang
Okay, so y’all know how I am on a quest to one day know everything? What I have discovered on this quest is that it is possible to become interested in just about anything. Most things (maybe all things? I have not fully tested the hypothesis) are only boring until you know enough about them to get past the 101-level stuff, and then they quickly become very very interesting indeed. It’s like that thing where you’re never more than one really good story arc away from loving a certain superhero in comics? Seems weird now, but a few short years…
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