User Profile

Kelson Reads

KelsonReads@bookwyrm.social

Joined 3 years, 4 months ago

Techie, software developer, hobbyist photographer, sci-fi/fantasy and comics fan in the Los Angeles area. He/him.

Mostly reading science fiction these days, mixing in some fantasy and some non-fiction (mostly tech and science), occasionally other stuff. As far as books go, anyway. (I read more random articles than I probably should.)

Reviews are cross-posted on my website and I have a blog dedicated to Les Misérables.

Fediverse Main: @kelson@notes.kvibber.com (GoToSocial) Websites: KVibber.com and Hyperborea.org

This link opens in a pop-up window

Content warning Twists and a bit of depth

John Scalzi: When the Moon hits your Eye (Hardcover, 2025, Tor Books)

It's a whole new moooooon.

One day soon, suddenly and without explanation, the moon as …

Cheesy, with some bite to it.

A fast, enjoyable read with a few gut punches hidden throughout. Not so much about the moon turning into cheese as how lots of different people react to the moon turning into cheese.

Some of the vignettes are funny, some are touching, and some stand out more than others. Some people only show up once and others come back repeatedly. The feuding cheese shops that have gotten a lot more attention since the change. The pop-science author whose book on fantastic takes on the moon came out at exactly the right time. The astronauts whose mission is scrapped take it better than the billionaire rocket mogul whose company is building their rockets and spacecraft.

The most impactful stories, though, are a set of vignettes around the 3/4 mark involving a long-divorced couple staring down mortality, and an extended chapter on a writer who has spent her entire adult life trying …

Octavia E. Butler: Parable of the Sower (Paperback, 2000, Warner Books)

In 2025, with the world descending into madness and anarchy, one woman begins a fateful …

Hard to put down. And hard to pick up again.

It's certainly not a fun book, but it's extremely engaging, despite the bleakness of the slow-apocalypse setting and story.

What makes this apocalypse so horrifying, and the story so engaging, is how matter-of-fact Lauren is in describing everything in her diary. It's the world she grew up in, so it's normal to her, though she can see clearly even at 14 that it's unsustainable. There's a sharp generational divide between those who remember what things were like before, but all that is just history to her.

Lauren's present is hopeless and brutal, but her diary doesn't linger on the ever-present brutality like a horror novel would. She acknowledges it, of course, but she's focused on how to survive it so she can build something better.

The setting resonates so well today in part because the societal fears of the 1980s that Butler was extrapolating from are the same fears that …

reviewed Soonish by Kelly Weinersmith

Kelly Weinersmith: Soonish (2017)

Fascinating, accessible, funny, and still relevant!

Soonish is a good overview of cutting-edge technologies, most of which are still in the near future, some of which have made dramatic progress in the last few years (as noted in my comment from earlier!) It's full of the authors' trademark irreverent humor, with cartoons scattered throughout, it's still very much worth reading even if, like me, you get to it late!

(Cross-posted from my website)