Reviews and Comments

Well, this is officially one of my favourite things.

Found an unread copy of the first Canadian paperback run in a thrift shop. Figured I'd give it run.

I appreciate the message, but the delivery doesn't really work for me. Towards the end it really faltered in holding my attention.

The optimism, despite a heavy dose of pragmatic pessimism, continues to be the thing that keeps me from being all in on this book. Slowly winding out the book and, sadly, looking forward to being done.

It's so strange. If you were try and cram some of this stuff into a story and approaching it allegorically, it would be too silly. Like cartoonish, moustache twirling silly. But you dress it up in capitalism and never ending growth and it is banal to the point of being beneath mention.

"our futures are simultaneously dependent on the actions of others and defined by our personal daily choices."

Only a book written before covid could bank so heavily on the beneficence of others over the long term and consider it to be a reasonable outcome. We can't convince people to wear a piece of fabric over their faces for the benefit of those directly around them. Asking them to upend their entire approach to life, community, governance, and finance to (more immediately) help people they've never met, in places they've never been, at some unknown time in the future feels like a cruel joke with two and a half years of pandemic in the rear view window.

Taking this as my first attempt to dive into solarpunk content. Pulled this from the reading list off the Solarpunk group over on Goodreads.