3/5: I really enjoy some of the philosophical conundrums the characters struggle with, eg. The worth of one life during wartime, the culpabilities of indentured warriors v. The powers that govern them...

4/5: A very sharply curated selection of posts from the blog her fans made a shining success during her final years. It’s loose, unstructured, funny, personal, beautifully written, and intimidatingly ...

4/5: Here’s your war-torn Portland. (Well, earthquake-torn.) Emma Pattee’s debut is an unhappy relationship novel, its failures and contradictions energized and literalized by unimaginable catastrop...

3/5: Nobody would accuse Tchaikovsky of being a poet, but I ask too much of pure space opera genre fare. And, as goofy pew-pew nonsense loaded with aliens and spaceship battles and subspace fuckery, t...

Hamaguchi is fascinated by inertia, by the slowing of time and shedding of social baggage. I relate to his interests and enjoy his work, staid as it is; he can hit extraordinary emotional highs when h...

A floating illusion fooled every model I tried—and revealed something deeper about how AI perceives time and motion.

YouTube video by Danielle Moodie

5/5: This one apparently made Schwab a romantic fantasy front-liner, and for good reason. I hate the term “romantasy”; so much trite checklist slop clutters booksellers’ pages these days, and the trop...

4/5: When I was a kid novels hooked me early because I loved encountering articulations of ideas that I didn’t know I knew, that felt important but that I’d never paused to consider. These were often ...

3/5: An entertaining fantasy adventure with memorable characters, truly superb extended action sequences, and enough original ideas to elevate it well clear of today’s gaseous romantasy swamp. Its sto...

3/5: Fun afternoon listen while my eyes are hosed. It’s a tragic and compelling superhero origin story of sorts set in an alt-future Ghana—apparently in universe with Okorafor’s “Who Fears Death” book...

3/5: I read this at the wrong time. A sentimental alt-history that imagines a society self-correcting into a utopian, unified vision of the 2020s, written in the actual 2020s—well, it doesn’t land wel...

5/5: Phenomenal. It feels like a fable, but one of remarkable thematic complexity and narrative harmony. It is wholly original, and conceptually much too strange to qualify as “dystopian,” as baffled ...

YouTube video by Double Down News

10 track album

4/5: Given that it includes a number of bangers including the beloved masterpieces “Vaster Than Empires and More Slow” and “Those Who Walk Away from Omelas,” it feels weird to give this anything less ...

4/5: This book is very, very long. It’s fast paced and supremely entertaining, with mostly quite well-drawn characters and a fun mix of well-researched historical adventure and supernatural mystery. This is my first time reading a Simmons book and I’m impressed by his fine prose, attention to detail, and immense skill with riveting action and grueling survival horror. And monsters. But man, this book repeats itself ceaselessly and relies so heavily on convenient late-breaking exposition. I never felt like I was going to bail on it but I was frequently ready for trial separations. But whatever, i...

This movie NASTY. I’m a bad person for watching it, a worse person for watching it multiple times, and a criminal for liking it. It’s difficult to relate to the film’s core theme which is that breasts...