Space Station Mir

Just Finished: FINALLY finished the audiobook. And...I'm still conflicted. There is so much here that's intellectually interesting. But also, the narrator and all the characters except maybe one are terrible people. I mean, straight up murderers and torturers terrible. And characters are usually what I care about most. Instead, what's compelling about this book is the worldbuilding, the politics, economics, religion (or lack thereof), professed gender neutrality, philosophy, and obsession with the 18th century. However, even though the central concept of their societies are being future versions of the 18th century Enlightenment, what stood out to me most were the clever similarities to Thomas More's Utopia , perhaps because I'm a student of the 16th century Renaissance. Anyway, still deciding if I want to read the next book or not. I finally read it! I have no excuses. It was just as good as everyone said.  Jemisin did some interesting experimenting with t...

Currently Reading: I've been listening to this audiobook for about three weeks, and I've still got 5 discs left of 17. It's a tome, to say the least. I've got complicated feelings about this Enlightenment-centered future heterotopia (a term I learned from my class on utopian sf in grad school that feels most appropriate; essentially future utopias and dystopias coexist). It feels ostentatiously performative yet satisfyingly intellectual. It's got, at current count: an "18th century" preface, an unreliable narrator, Latin, literal Utopians, Masons, living toys, economic and political intrigue, and shifting gender pronouns and racial/ideological markers. The gender pronouns are the most deliberately performative and distracting element, far more noticeable than the consistent "she's" in Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch books or the nonbinary pronouns ("xyr" "they") in Becky Chambers' Galactic Commons books. It doesn...