Finished reading Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler. This was a harrowing book, written in the early ’90s, about a teenager growing up as the United States is collapsing in 2024. It ended on a slightly hopeful note, and the book’s society is more collapsed than ours, so I guess there’s that.
Content warning: nothing on-screen, but there are plenty of references to rape.
Finished reading You Deserve a Tech Union by Ethan Marcotte. I’ve needed to pace myself with this, because I keep getting mad about my job and the industry as a whole. Even though the point of the book is to inspire and mobilize unionizing, I’ve ended up disheartened. (This will pass.)
Finished reading Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford, a noir set in the city of Cahokia in an alternate 1922. The story ends up being a bit like one of Le Guin’s (explicitly so), ending up asking whether a utopia is worth the price; in the meantime, it explores cultural identity, racism, and economics, with all the elements of noir (a corrupt establishment, dirty police, a femme fatale, etc.). I loved this, another candidate for book of the year.
Finished reading The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler. This was a wild ride — I couldn’t put it down — about labor and sentience and connection. Very briefly: a woman and the only possibly-sentient android explore the possibility of an octopus civilization, while a man is enslaved on a fishing trawler run by an AI and a savant tries to hack into a more sophisticated AI. This will be sticking with me for a while, a candidate for book of the year.
Rhymes with Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Ruin and, unexpectedly, Pink Floyd’s “Echoes” which I’ve already been listening to quite a bit lately.
Finished reading Witch King by Martha Wells, whose protagonist is the demon a bunch of fools tried to bind in the first chapter. Turns out he’s mostly a nice guy, or at least trying, as he tries to (in one arc of the story) overthrow an evil empire and (in the other) prevent a new empire from taking its place. Quite good.