Category: Microposts
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As we settle in for the long night ahead, John O’Farrell’s piece from last weekend is worth a read: Are you suffering from symptoms of hope? Here’s how to cope with the prospect of a Labour victory.
📚 Books 2024, 10: Beyond the Light Horizon by Ken MacLeod
Ken finishes his wonderful Lightspeed Trilogy with a flourish. Not all the problems are solved or mysteries explained, but that’s life. All the main characters get good conclusions. And a yellow submarine in space is still an astonishingly cool idea.
I keep thinking I should write about the current state of what we are calling AI. Trouble is, I still can’t quite decide what I think about it. Or why it makes me feel the way it does. Or even what, exactly, that way is.
Currently reading: Beyond the Light Horizon by Ken MacLeod 📚
Not so much currently reading as nearly finished. The final volume in Ken’s excellent trilogy, and looking forward to seeing him at Worldcon in Glasgow in August.
📚 Books 2024, 9: Trust by Hernan Diaz
Forget I hadn’t posted about this. I finished it almost two weeks ago. The latest book-club book, and not the sort of thing I’d choose normally. It’s the story of a financier around the time of the Wall Street Crash in the 1920s, told from four different points of view. Which one do we trust? (See what he did with the title?)
It’s pretty good, but nowhere near as good as the praise heaped upon it by reviewers, as quoted all over the cover, would suggest.
Doctor Who discussions are going to get confusing. Seems Disney are calling the Christmas special episode 1, ‘Space Babies’ episode 2, and so on; while the BBC call ‘Space Babies’ episode 1.
1 & 2 have their moments, but it doesn’t really get going till 3, ‘Boom!’, when Moffat takes over.
📚 Books 2024, 8: Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh
Actually finished this a few weeks ago, and forgot to write about it. I don’t know why, because it’s absolutely fantastic. Space opera of the biggest scope, yet a tightly-focused character-driven story, and a bildungsroman.
The Earth has already been destroyed when we start reading. Our heroine, Valkyr, or Kyr for short, lives on humanity’s last outpost (or is it?), where they train for revenge.
But there’s so much more to it than that.
One of those times when someone is trending on Twitter and it is what you fear. Sad to hear about the death of Steve Albini.
📚 Books 2024, 7: My Brother by Jamaica Kincaid
The latest bookclub book. Kincaid’s brother died in 1996 of AIDS. Kincaid herself was estranged from her family for 20 years, so she saw her brother when he was three, and then again when he was 33, and dying.
Unsurprisingly this is more about her than about him. She looks at feelings towards her birth family: does she love her brother? Does she love her mother? ‘No’ is her conclusion for both. But she examines different kinds of love, different ways of loving.
Parts of it are kind of like cubist art in a way: examining the same place, person, or event, at different times, in the way the cubists would try to show a subject from different angles at the same time.
The writing flows very smoothly despite some impressively- if not excessively-long sentences.