Reviews and Comments

Library sent me what appears to be an original 1943 printing.

This was nice, visually engaging, girl-led, empowering, power of truth and justice in collective struggle.

Small town teenage summer before the internet, feeling like an outsider in a place that is the same as everywhere else and always a half-beat in the past, making something weird and making something out of nothing, and holding on to that for feeling alive. At half-way I wondered, and the story pulled on ahead where it needed to go.

Takes three pervasive infrastructures and in a simple graphic treatment breaks them down in systematic detail, in historical and social context, and prompts questioning inequities and future reconsiderations of these built systems and their relationships to our global ecological society.

Witty low stakes riff, not so noir - the vibe is more 5th Element romp given the cruise ship setting, and the mystery bends to suit - but true to the original in prominent stiff drinks, and comfortably egalitarian in gender roles.

Remarkable survey of mycology by a curious scientist, emphasizing the paradigm shift from individualistic biology to ecological symbiosis, and the challenges fungi have thrown at drawing any firm boundaries within ecosystems and between ourselves.

Speculation from another era, these are all well-written, stylistically and structurally varied, and struggle to get past their prompt or conceit or timewarp. Oddly, "Spice Pogrom" was my fave.

At its best, sharp analysis of American conflation of morality and prosperity, less so as a Cold War text criticizing both US and USSR attempts to manage history while making soon-to-be-awkward claims about democracy's defenses against pursuing preventative war, factionalism, and ideological blind hubris.

War and military patriarchy turned upside down and poked full of satirical holes to fill with wit and wordplay, of course, enjoyable as always.

Modern dark magic and action richly set in a Malaysian context of spirits, gods, mothers and daughters, family status, face, identity, and revenge.

Deeply satisfyingly layered and interwoven, imagined Mayan/Belizean past and future solarpunk Earths, central struggles with violence and disagreement and revolt without compromising voluntary consent, paced like a jaguar moving through ruins.

A man's hard life in Idaho panhandle, briefly carried from one near death to another.

Indicting colonial capitalism's responsibility for our modern environmental and poverty dilemma. Quick and smoothly focuses our attention on small acts, then global repercussions, offbeat books, then deep mysticism, to come back to the long-fought war of ideas and omnicidal violence we accept for the modern era's consumption and wealth.

A morality question of harm volleyed between players in broadly medieval conflict from the personal to all out war. Reads as homage to LeGuin than most Banks: while there's only one late line to connect this explicitly to the Culture universe (give or take), it's most clearly asking the same questions.