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
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In 2025, with the world descending into madness and anarchy, one woman begins a fateful journey toward a better future. …
A set of loosely-connected stories set in the final years of a color-based enslaving society, the war for liberation, and the messy aftermath.
It’s brutal at times, but not as gut-wrenching as The Word for World is Forest, in large part because the viewpoint characters aren’t the ones carrying out the atrocities, and in some cases are relating them years later. The characters are also given space to exist beyond the immediate situation.
It’s not an exact analog of the United States before, during and after our civil war, but it’s clearly our own history and present that Le Guin is critiquing: plantations, color-based slavery (with corresponding prejudices), the struggle for women’s rights following the struggle for freedom, backlashes, and the ongoing struggle to really clean up the oppression and expand civil rights. All with the colors reversed to drive the point home for white readers.
A set of loosely-connected stories set in the final years of a color-based enslaving society, the war for liberation, and the messy aftermath.
It’s brutal at times, but not as gut-wrenching as The Word for World is Forest, in large part because the viewpoint characters aren’t the ones carrying out the atrocities, and in some cases are relating them years later. The characters are also given space to exist beyond the immediate situation.
It’s not an exact analog of the United States before, during and after our civil war, but it’s clearly our own history and present that Le Guin is critiquing: plantations, color-based slavery (with corresponding prejudices), the struggle for women’s rights following the struggle for freedom, backlashes, and the ongoing struggle to really clean up the oppression and expand civil rights. All with the colors reversed to drive the point home for white readers.
Here there be dragons...and th denizens of Ankh-Morpork wish one huge firebreather would return from whence it came. Long believed …
Here there be dragons...and th denizens of Ankh-Morpork wish one huge firebreather would return from whence it came. Long believed …
Lighter than most Le Guin I’ve read, Changing Planes is a Gulliver’s Travels for the present era, the social satire made possible through interdimensional travel. (When you’re stuck in a dismal airport between planes, well, you’re already between planes, right?)
Some chapters are told first person as the narrator explores a new reality (sometimes sticking to the tourist spots, sometimes going off the beaten path). Others read more like magazine articles or encyclopedia entries. Still others mix first- and second-hand accounts with the narrator’s reactions to them.
There’s a lot of whimsy, humor and sarcasm. It’s not particularly deep (especially compared to her major works), but it does give you a lot to think about.
Sarah Wynn-Williams, a young diplomat from New Zealand, pitched for her dream job. She saw …
Figured this would also be a good chance to try out Bookshop.com's ebook store and their app on my Boox e-reader.
In 2025, with the world descending into madness and anarchy, one woman begins a fateful journey toward a better future. …
Renowned author Peter S. Beagle returns to the world of The Last Unicorn in this resonant and moving two-novella collection, …
The high percentage of psychopaths, the sabre rattling against Canada, and people pondering whether their country still means anything hit even harder now.
But what he saw as important was the fact that, just as the Corporations had, he controlled the net. The news, the information programs, the puppets of the neareals, all danced to his strings. Against that, what harm could a lot of teachers do? Parents who had no schooling had children who entered the net to hear and see and feel what the Chief wanted them to know: that freedom is obedience to leaders, that virtue is violence, that manhood is domination. Against the enactment of such truths in daily life and in the heightened sensational experience of the neareals, what good were words?
Depressingly familiar, but then Le Guin was very well-versed in history and anthropology, and authoritarians often work from a common playbook.
(It's not stated explicitly, but I've gathered that "nereals" (near+real) are virtual reality experiences.)
Originally published as Four Ways to Forgiveness, but then she wrote a fifth story.
I'm finally reading this. It's been interesting to look at the chapters on space colonization, asteroid mining, robot swarms, fusion and so on where things are either still just as far away or have otherwise turned out to be more complicated (see: A City on Mars)....
...and then I got to the chapter on Augmented Reality, which they had to revise hastily just before print to account for the arrival of Pokemon Go....
...and the chapter on this cool new genetic modification technique called CRISPR...which has been making headlines with treatments that have been approved and gone into practice this past year.
Some things have been moving faster than others!
