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...
Life, Books, and SFF