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krrksch@kirja.casa

Joined 3 years, 5 months ago

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Kim Stanley Robinson: The Ministry for the Future (Paperback, 2021, Orbit)

Established in 2025, the purpose of the new organization was simple: To advocate for the …

Hieno visio siitä, miten ihmiskunta selätti ilmastonmuutoksen

Todella monen asian pitää muuttua, jos aiomme elää tällä planeetalla vielä tulevinakin vuosisatoina. Valtaosa kirjojen ja elokuvien tulevaisuusvisioista tuntuu kuitenkin olevan dystopioita, kuvauksia siitä millaista helvettiä elämä Maa-planeetalla on, kun kaikki on mennyt pieleen. Muutamalla seuraaville vuosikymmenille lähitulevaisuuteen sijoittuva Kim Stanley Robinsonin The Ministry for the Future kuitenkin esittää uskottavan, vaikkakin monelta osin silmiinpistävän optimistisen vision siitä, miten kaikenkattava ekokriisi on saatu Maa-planeetalla kuitenkin jonkinlaiseen hallintaan. Robinsonin visiosta kiinnostavan tekee se, että se ei ole vain kaunokirjallista kuvitelmaa, vaan perustuu ihan todellisiin haasteisiin ja ratkaisuihin, ja monet kirjan luvuista ovatkin luonteeltaan pikemminkin tieteellisiä esseitä kuin varsinaista kertomakirjallisuutta.

Kirjan tulevaisuuskuva ei kuitenkaan ole paratiisimainen utopia. Maa siinä vaiheessa, kun ilmakehän hiilidioksidimäärä on saatu laskuun, ei ole enää aivan sama planeetta kuin se oli vielä ennen ilmastokriisiä, ja työn planeetan hengissäpitämiseksi kuvataan jatkuvan vielä tulevillekin vuosisadoille vaikka hiilidioksidiongelma kirjassa on saatukin pois päällimmäisistä huolenaiheista.

Robinson ei pyri hahmottelemaan paluuta meneen ajan tasapainoon, …

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Kirk Johnson, Ray Troll: Cruisin' the Fossil Freeway (Hardcover, 2024, Chicago Review Press)

Two “paleonerds” embark on a roadtrip across the West in search of fossils.

The new …

When I quizzed artists as to why they were painting bare earth, they told me that paleobotanists had forbidden them from using grass because it didn't involve evolve until the dinosaurs had gone extinct. Remove the grass and you're left with bare earth. This prompts the question "What was the ground cover in the Cretaceous?"

Cruisin' the Fossil Freeway by ,

TIL that grass is younger than dinosaurs. Wikipedia tells me there is some overlap between dinosaurs and grass, but grass largely evolved later. Johnson goes on to describe plants like buttercups, nettles and hops.

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reviewed Rakesfall by Ray Nayler

Ray Nayler: Rakesfall (Hardcover, 2024, Doherty Associates, LLC, Tom)

Some stories take more than one lifetime to tell. There are wrongs that echo through …

Rakesfall

I've put off talking about this book for a bit because honestly I'm not sure where to start. The short of it was that this was one of the best things I've read this year.

It is nearly impossible to describe the plot, but this is not a plot-driven book. It's weirder and bolder and chewier than The Saint of Bright Doors. To describe it at all, this is a book about two (ish???) characters whose various lives intertwine with each other across the timeline(s???), told in a series of simultaneously deeply interconnected but also wildly different stories. There's constantly recurring thematic motifs and threads, and I feel like the reader is asked to do a lot of work to try to connect the myriad of interconnected bits and bobs and hints in its various depths. I finished it and immediately considered starting again with my extra knowledge to try …

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reviewed Cetaganda by Lois McMaster Bujold (Vorkosigan Saga (7))

Lois McMaster Bujold: Cetaganda (Paperback, 1996, Baen Books)

Cetaganda

One of the qualities that I love about the Vorkosigan series is that because it is so long, it allows Bujold to play with different genres between books. If The Vor Game is military SF, then Cetaganda is a mystery novel. Pedantically, this book is not really a mystery proper in the way that a reader could piece together the whodunit independently; however I think this is an example of "detective Miles" mode, and one that we'll see again in Memory and Komarr especially.

This book features Miles and Ivan on a diplomatic visit to Cetaganda for the funeral of the Cetagandan empress. Miles has to juggle investigating a plot that's trying to frame the Barrayarans (but why? and by whom?), hiding things from his superiors (by implying he's a higher level spy), trying to interface with the Cetaganda police about a murder investigation (while not giving things away to …

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quoted Shards of Honor by Lois McMaster Bujold (Vorkosigan Saga (1))

Lois McMaster Bujold: Shards of Honor (Hardcover, 2000, NESFA Press)

The really unforgivable acts are committed by calm men in beautiful green silk rooms, who deal death wholesale, by the shipload, without lust, or anger, or desire, or any redeemable emotion to excuse them but cold fear of some pretended future. But the crimes they hope to prevent in that future are imaginary. The ones they commit in the present--they are real.

Shards of Honor by  (Vorkosigan Saga (1))

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Ursula K. Le Guin: The Telling (2003, Ace)

Once a culturally rich world, the planet Aka has been utterly transformed by technology. Records …

Thoughtful tale of culture vs monoculture

The cover blurb makes it sound like a cautionary tale about our highly-tech-dependent world (even in the 1990s!), but it's not the technology that's the problem. It's the homogenization of culture, and the insistence that there be one perspective, and only one perspective, that really matters.

Think of how we travel and find the same chain stores, chain restaurants, the ISO standard Irish Pub with its bric-a-brac decor, and how our TV and movies are full of endless reboots, spinoffs and sequels.

We see it first in Sutty's memories of Earth, controlled largely by a theocracy until contact with alien civilizations kicks their support out from under them. And then in the world she's trying to understand, one that's undergone a complete transformation in the time it took her to travel there at relativistic speed. She knows there were flourishing cultures here before she left Earth. She studied the few …

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Frances White: Voyage of the Damned (2024, Michael Joseph)

For a thousand years, Concordia has maintained peace between its provinces. To mark this incredible …

My father always says: ‘You can’t run from your responsibilities,’ but he lacks imagination. Besides, I’m not running. I’m sidestepping. Crossing the road so me and my responsibilities don’t make eye contact and aren’t forced into awkward small talk both of us know isn’t going anywhere.

Voyage of the Damned by 

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Nghi Vo: City in Glass (2024, Doherty Associates, LLC, Tom)

A demon. An angel. A city.

The demon Vitrine—immortal, powerful, and capricious—loves the dazzling city …

The marshland beyond the city was gone, and Vitrine wondered with brief bitterness what share the frogs and snakes and turtles that lived among the wild cane had had in the angels' punishment. Then she put the bitterness away and got to work, because anger could start a thing, but it took endurance and forbearance and patience to finish it.

City in Glass by 

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Jonathan M. Metzl: Dying of Whiteness (Hardcover, 2019, Basic Books) No rating

Whiteness is politics of calculated harm, not ignorance of negative consequences

No rating

A difficult book to read, since it mostly talks about how people are harmed, and how society fails to protect & support them. The three main topics covered are gun ownership leading to (especially) suicide, opposition to government-provided healthcare leading to worse healthcare outcomes, and school funding cuts leading to many negative outcomes. Whiteness is a political doctrine which contains many jagged bits and pieces of ideology which don't necessarily fit together neatly. One of the things this book did for me was articulate that at least in the policy areas of guns and healthcare, white people aligned with the white political project are not ignorantly voting for harmful policies. The people interviewed know that widespread easy access to guns leads to more gun deaths, and they accept and acknowledge that as a reasonable cost of maintaining their rights. Likewise healthcare: there is no confusion about the fact that moving …

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Sonia Sulaiman: Thyme Travellers (2024, Fernwood Publishing Co., Ltd.)

Thyme Travellers collects fourteen of the Palestinian diaspora’s best voices in speculative fiction. Speculative fiction …

Beautiful anthology

It's not just that the title of this anthology is genius, these are stories of ghosts, encounters, lost lands, resistance and connexion, and they are heartbreaking in a million ways.

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Gerardo Sámano Córdova: Monstrilio (2023, Zando)

Monstrilio

Monstrilio is a hard novel for me to pin down. If I had to attach some labels to it I'd say literary fiction with a dash of horror.

It's a story rooted in loss: Magos and Joseph's son Santiago dies suddenly; Magos is enthralled by a tale about regrowing a child from its heart and so cuts out a piece of Santiago's lung from his body to do the same. As she feeds it and grows this lung, it becomes a monster that she treats as her son, and names Monstrilio. The book is divided into four parts from different perspectives: Magos, longtime friend Lena, Joseph, and finally Monstrilio.

But it's not just about grief, it's a story about family and relationships with the monstrous. Magos lives in denial and tries to believe her lung monster Monstrilio is her child Santiago again. Joseph speedruns acceptance and tries to forcibly conform …

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Rozsika Parker: The subversive stitch (1984, Women's Press)

A good book on how femininity was historically constructed but the stitches weren't very subversive

3 stars: enjoyed this book, you might like it too

This is kind of a weird review because I feel like it was a different book than what I expected.

What it ended up being was a history of how femininity was socially constructed, in the context of social class, in Britain over the last few hundred years, and how the construction of modern femininity (as distinct from medieval femininity) was very closely intertwined with the construction of social classes as the middle class emerged. It did this largely through the lens of embroidery. It felt surprisingly modern in how it talked about gender as something changing and socially constructed and existing in the context of other socially constructed concepts, but it did feel very narrowly focused on Britain and Britain-adjacent areas.

Except for at the end in the more modern area, I don't think it really demonstrated embroidery being …

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William Landay: All That Is Mine I Carry with Me (EBook, 2023, Bantam)

One afternoon in November 1975, ten-year-old Miranda Larkin comes home from school to find her …

I have absolutely loved Landay's three previous books. He does something interesting every time. Mind you, this is only his 4th book, and it's been a decade since his last. Landay puts care into his novels; there's no churning them out. Aware of the gap, the book starts out with this:

After I finished writing my last novel, I fell into a long silence. You might call it writer’s block, but most writers don’t use that term or even understand it. When a writer goes quiet, nothing is blocking and nothing is being blocked. He is just empty.

I had to look… is this a preface or an introduction? No. It's the story. Landay is already doing something to engage me.