Reviews and Comments

A fun and cozy queer narrative set in the Dungeons & Dragons universe, but with a move into non-violence, solving problems through honesty/care, a love story, and so on. Takes place IN a cozy setting and leaves you feeling like you've curled up by the fire in winter. You quickly come to trust that, though there IS tension and danger, you, like the characters, will find ways through that don't toss you back into the violence of traditional D&D problem solving. A fun book, even if you aren't into D&D.

An incredible and deeply relevant book that involves time travel, making sense of changing timelines, and so on - lots of nerdery for any sci fi fan. But perhaps most key - a deeply touching reminder of the ways that small actions may have tremendous ripple effects as time passes.

Another brilliant book by Annalee Newitz

Phenomenal book. Winterson echoes the original in content, genre, and form, with twists that bring it to life in new ways for our time. Beautiful, sensuous, haunting and horrible. Monsters who are also human and humans who are in their own ways monstrous. Gender, AI, sexuality, power, violence, and the future are at stake.

Excellent! Inspiring, thorough, accessible, inclusive, and aesthetically engaging. This is the manifesto to inspire people to think differently about how collectivism, cooperatives, and distributed technology might build into each other. Not a prescription, but an opening.

Loved The Terraformers, so picked up Autonomous. I liked the former more, but it was such a high bar that Autonomous was still excellent. Different, though related themes. Terraformers is environmental where Autonomous is health care / pharmaceutical, but both tell deeply compelling future narratives about attempts to create survival and thriving in the face of terrible, dystopian, and yet believable futures. Appreciate wrestling with parallels between human freedoms and post-human freedoms, with both taking place in the context of capitalism that is recognizable today... On to Newitz's next work.

Fast, engaging, and information packed, this book sent me tracing down references with excitement, energized me to think about the cooperative movement even more, and perhaps most importantly, gave name to things I've been studying better than I have yet to do. If you are at all interested in the futures of work, in economics beyond capitalism, or in more democractic ways of coming together, I highly encourage this book. It would be a great place to start.

Finished the Terraformers. One of the best books I've read in a long time. A utopian Eco dream within a dystopian capitalist future. So many wild and wonderful images and ideas and one of my favorite and most robust post human world buildings I can remember. I loved every minute of it and cannot recommend it highly enough! The audiobook is even better - the reader's character voices, produced bits of noise and sound, and so on all brought the world to life.

Longer note on my blog: publicfragments.org/2023/06/20/imagining-possibility-from-within-corporate-hellscapes/

Started this book several times over the years and never actually read it cover to cover until now. It's a good book with a number of key concepts used over and over elsewhere, though I'm not sure it was necessary to read it in full.

Working on a formal review of this book. It's a good one, worth a read if you think about power, oppression, agency, and technology

A great companion to Sunvault, a short story collection, Almanac is an essay "compendium" of solarpunk futures. There are a number of excellent essays for building clarity, imagination, and the like about solarpunk as an aesthetic, literary, and activist movement.

Lovely little collection from 2017 that I finally got around to reading. Sci-fi comics that aimed to be inclusive and anti-empire building. Some nice reads.

A fun ride! And intro to forensic accounting, money laundering, crypto nonsense, etc.

Wow. Like the other books, a ton of world building through about 50%, which is a little bit of a slog for me. But then things go haywire and the last half was completely absorbing. Like the other books, I read too fast and miss important details. Wish Alecto the Ninth was out...

Lovely in every way.