User Profile

Sally Strange

SallyStrange@bookwyrm.social

Joined 2 years ago

Interests: climate, science, sci-fi, fantasy, LGBTQIA+, history, anarchism, anti-racism, labor politics

This link opens in a pop-up window

Sally Strange's books

Currently Reading (View all 5)

avatar for SallyStrange Sally Strange boosted

reviewed The Future of Work: Compulsory by Martha Wells (The Murderbot Diaries #0.5)

Martha Wells: The Future of Work: Compulsory (EBook, 2018, Wired Magazine)

The Future of Work: Compulsory

I didn't realize this (very) short Murderbot story existed until very recently. It's a prequel to All Systems Red and can be read online in WIRED. It reads a bit like a microcosm of the entire series, a journey from apathy to protecting humans to musing about being protected itself, but in 1000 words rather than a handful of novellas and a novel.

It’s not like I haven’t thought about killing the humans since I hacked my governor module. But then I started exploring the company servers and discovered hundreds of hours of downloadable entertainment media, and I figured, what’s the hurry? I can always kill the humans after the next series ends.

I don't want to talk about the tv show too much, but it's hard not to think about what the books are doing differently. It's really interesting to me how much the opening line of this …

avatar for SallyStrange Sally Strange boosted
Earl Swift: The Big Roads (2011, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

A man-made wonder, a connective network, an economic force, a bringer of blight and sprawl …

An interesting coincidence: on July 7, while listening to this book, I learned that Lt. Col. Dwight D. Eisenhower, then aged 28, set out with the Army Motor Transport Corps Convoy on a cross-continental trip from Washington D.C. to San Francisco CA on the historic Lincoln highway. On July 7, 1919.

Much of this "highway" was unpaved, so the convoy averaged less than 6 miles per hour all told. They had constant breakdowns and traveled with a blacksmithing and machining capacities in order to repair broken vehicles. They also crushed, and then rebuilt, dozens of wooden bridges.

They arrived in Oakland on Sept. 4 and took the ferry to San Fran the next day.

avatar for SallyStrange Sally Strange boosted
Taylor Keen: Rediscovering Turtle Island (Paperback, 2024, Bear & Company)

While Western accounts of North American history traditionally start with European colonization, Indigenous histories of …

Not enjoyable as an audiobook

This book covered a lot of things I've never heard of before, which is exactly what I was hoping for. Unfortunately, I think this book really relies on the images that are included and I listened to it.

The author references a supplementary PDF, and maybe that exists in my file somewhere, but I listen to audiobooks while I commute, which means that I definitely can't be looking at dozens of pictures as I listen to the author explain things that I have no knowledge about. The fact that there is a supplementary PDF is good, but I didn't have access to it, so that sucked for me.

I must admit that I also wasn't that partial to the way the book was structured anyway. So even though there were a lot of small tidbits that I was really interested to learn about, I couldn't really focus or keep up …

avatar for SallyStrange Sally Strange boosted
Vajra Chandrasekera: Saint of Bright Doors (EBook, 2023, Doherty Associates, LLC, Tom)

The Saint of Bright Doors

This book features some fascinating world-building and a captivating story, tied together with good writing and pacing. It manages to stay engaging throughout, revealing more of the setting, and advancing the plot, not necessarily through suspense, but by progressively peeling back more layers that make sense, but were perhaps not entirely expected. It's complex, but also entertaining, and just enjoyable to read.

avatar for SallyStrange Sally Strange boosted
Bonnie Ruberg: Video Games Have Always Been Queer (Paperback, 2019, New York University Press)

While popular discussions about queerness in video games often focus on big-name, mainstream games that …

Video Games Have Always Been Queer

1) Video games have always been queer. Even games that appear to have no LGBTQ content can be played queerly, and all games can be interpreted through queer lenses. This is because queerness in video games means more than the representation of LGBTQ characters or same-sex romance. Queerness and video games share a common ethos: the longing to imagine alternative ways of being and to make space within structures of power for resistance through play. From the origins of the medium, to the present day, and reaching into the future, video-game worlds have offered players the opportunity to explore queer experience, queer embodiment, queer affect, and queer desire-even when the non-heteronormative and counterhegemonic implications of these games have been far from obvious. Through new critical perspectives, queerness can be discovered in video games, but it can also be brought to games through queer play and queer players, whose choices to …

Tlotlo Tsamaase: Womb City (2024, Kensington Publishing Corporation)

This genre-bending Africanfuturist horror novel blends The Handmaid’s Tale with Get Out in an adrenaline-packed, …

Every page brings a new and disturbing meditation on bodily autonomy, personhood, memory, colonization, gender politics, or something else along those lines. It's a fucking lot. Like, we haven't even gotten to the event that changes the course of things for the main character, and we just had a reveal that her love interest (who's not her husband) has a nephew who is actually, secretly, his great-grandfather decanted into a new body with memories intact. Since the word on the street is that people lose their memories when they "body-hop," the MC suspects that this is a convenient fiction that makes the less privileged easier to control. And don't even get me started on this book's imagined politics of body-hopping across borders.

avatar for SallyStrange Sally Strange boosted
Fríða Ísberg: The Mark

Empathy or freedom?

An attempt to enforce empathic behaviour creates stark divisions at all levels of society. Very effectively conveys the ambiguous ethics and the entrenched positions taken by opposing sides. Strong parallels with toxic masculinity and vaccination.

avatar for SallyStrange Sally Strange boosted
Guy Gavriel Kay: Tigana (1991, Roc)

Tigana

When times are tough, sometimes you need a comfort reread of fantasy books from 1990. This book still resonates well for me, but it's hard for me to know how much of that is nostalgia having read it so many times. I suspect I am biased for this one and for GGK in general.

Tonally, this book can sometimes feel overwrought and full of told-not-shown sentimentality. That said, it's also a book about grief and memory and tyrants, and I think its style is not out of place for what it's trying to achieve. There's a few lines that jar me as a reader thirty years later, but on the whole I think it stands up better than I would have expected.

I quite enjoy its fantasy politics and scheming, but I also really appreciate the fact that the clash between Alessan and Brandin is specifically about two very similar …