asmodeus commented on Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty
"A space adventure set on a lone ship where the clones of a murdered crew …
Content warning minor character plot spoiler
kinda disappointed the only(?) Black character is the Bad Guy. Hm well. Well.
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asmodeus replied to jkb@books.theunseen.city's status
@jkb@books.theunseen.city Believe it or not, there kinda is a sequel? It's a short story in the anthology 'Escape Pod' edited by S B Divya and Mur Lafferty. I uh... I didn't like it. It felt like an extension of the story, but the ending was hilariously disappointing to me. Like it was trimmed off the end of this book and the author waffled on including it.
I don't want to spoil it but I finished and thought 'really author? that's the open ending you chose?' It's not that [other author] has the copyright on that book trope, but man, it's one very much placed in pop culture as generic YA plots.
asmodeus reviewed Ascension by Nicholas Binge
hapazard, incoherent, predictably white cishet male author
Content warning full plot spoilers, racism, white cishet male author syndrome
"NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2023 BY ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY, THE WASHINGTON POST AND GOODREADS"
Um. By whom? Other whites?
Ok but really. This book is generic white cishet scifi.
The love interest is a demure Japanese woman who ditches her career to become homemaker to their adopted son of color. She is the main source of man pain and man angst that impels the main character, a white man. She suffers and he watches and oh his sadness about having to see her like this is just The Worst! Weeping and wailing! Also yes she dies. Also YES, she has to be rescued! Her, a supposedly intelligent doctor, reduced to a pathetic easily confused mentally ill[???] person. Another character who went through the same situation was not at all similarly behaved. In fact he, a white man, was quite coherent and self sufficient to the point of orchestrating his own suicide by cop, so to speak. Funny how the one brown woman is uselss and pathetic and needing of rescue. Hm.
The son, a boy of color who was orphaned due to the Pinochet regime, is another source of man pain. In a predictable plot twist, the son boy is dead. The MC is the reason he died, btw. Which ok, I get, people and character never act rationally and logically and perfectly and etc, etc. But in conjunction with the entire plot, it's just not that cohesive.
The entire plot is rather haphazard, frankly.
Ok you got a super smart autistic extremely well off privledged white man headhunted into a mysterious expedition up a non existent mountain. There's other white smart people headhunted into this place. Mostly stereotypical trope character. Not necessarily a bad thing but the writing cannot support it beyond the bare minimum. Smart military woman. Military man. Misogynist mountain climber man who enjoys slapping around women. Forgetable 'red shirt' military soldiers meant to die for plot angst and to let you know Things Are Getting Serious. You have the token not white character, the Japanese wife-macguffin. Oh and the two dueling philosphy characters: Super Atheist and White American Christian. These two play off the MC who is a lapsed catholic and tries to be scientific yet open minded towards religion. Specifically catholic and christian. Other religions? Speaking of....
Religion. Like I said you got the Super Atheist and White American Christian, and the culturally catholic but lapsed due to generic child death angst MC. The only times other religions are mentions are in passing, as references. For better or for worse, really. I don't want a white british man author trying to deal with the themes of Hinduism, considering how shit the one Japanese character is. I wouldn't say it's bigotry, just the typical blindness that white people have of other cultures. It's not developed. It's not woven into the structure of the plot. It's lipservice at best.
You got semi generic monsters, tentacled and of mild body horror, with a hive mind to boot. They live in caves because of course they are Not-White Savages who cannot build civilized cities like normal white people. At least they are not described as having hook noses or ethnic features. <- said through gritted teeth in a tired tone.
Speaking of generic softcore colonization in white scifi genres.... The monster hivemind hates the MC / mountain climbing team because they don't deserve to be on the mountain. Or something like that. Basically they don't deserve to know the knowledge that the monster hivemind has. Hm ok. Heaven forbid a civilization protects itself against foreign explorers! No literally, the MC describes himself as having a 'hunger' to know more about the mountain and to some extent the people on it and wants to give in to fulfilling this hunger. Even to the detriment of everything else. That is some manifest destiny, buddy.
Anyways, the ending. Most of the characters die in a last stand esque fight when the hivemind attacks. Mind you the hivemind only attacked because the group kept ascending the mountain into the hivemind's land. They continued ascending even though they coulda woulda shoulda left back down the mountain. Anyways. The last characters left is the MC and the Misogynist mountain climber man. Who, btw, steps into the shoes left by the dead atheist philosopher by talking about determinism and destiny, and defying it or whatever. Ok sure.
So it turns out the mountain was a test by higher powers--alien or divine, it's neither except it's definitely technically aliens. There's nothing uspernatural happening here.
The point of the test was to see if humans were ready to 'elevate' to the next step of evolution.
[I don't think that's how evolution works, and frankly this sounds like eugenics.]
The alien god says he1 and the other aliens made a 'seed'2 which if ingested will cause the person who ate it to become. Like. 'Homo Superior'. No literally, the alien god said 'homo alterior' or whatever. So literally you become a eugenic aryan3 super-man. There's a brief discussion where alien god reveals the entire point of the mountain and what the two human men are supposed to do now with the 'seed'.
1 ofc it's a he and a cisgendered man, heaven forbid we try to have fictional aliens without human genders
2 isn't starseeds a hugely racist eugenic thing the nazis made up? Someone correct me or don't.
3 ok he didn't mention eye or hair color but come the fuck on. That eugenic Homo Superior shit goes hand in fucking hand here.
Anyways.
The Misogynist mountain climber says he should be the one to eat the 'seed' and the MC, still having no spine, flip flops until he gives up after a few pages or discussion. The Misogynist mountain climber eats the seed, becomes the super man, and immediately blows his brains out. Because determinism and defying destiny or whatever.
Somehow the alien god did not forsee this.
Lmao.
Alien god is disappointed because appparently cooking this 'seed' took miltiple millenia and there will never be another. He goes poof. Literally, he just fades out of existence. Thus humanity is.... damned?? It's implied that other species, such as the monster hivemind, were similar tests / attempts in creating life. Humans are also as test and this mountain was kind of the Final Exam of the university course.
The MC gets dumped like a christmas present puppy in february near the same lake his son drowned in [that's cold alien god] and he ends up in a psych institute until his brother discovers him, and that's how the book starts.
The thing that irritates and disappoints me is the lack of cohesion. The book really tries to make something of it but only pays minimal attention to the themes of destiny and multiple dimensions and exoterrestrial contact. I think it suffers from First Published Novel syndrome. It's got the skill and editing to have a decent book, but this concept could have been pulled off better by someone with the developed skills.
btw, if you want a scary creepy mountain climbing book, try Sarah Lotz's 'The White Road'. It's horror and some supernatural, not scifi genre. All the White Spaces by Ally Wilkes and Thin Air by Michelle Paver, and Dark Matter by Michelle Paver. Again, all horror genre but pretty excellent mountain climbing plots.
asmodeus reviewed Mushroom by Nicholas P. Money
sufficent, albeit with a penultimate ecofascist twist.
3 stars
Brief, succinct, to the point, decently readable for the layperson, and has enough shallow history that it's not overwhelming. If you want a place to dip your toes into fungal history and study, this is a decent book.
I don't entirely recommend it as the author is a tad ecofascist. The ecofascism I mention is the author's sentiment that self genocide of the human species is laudable and necessary to save the earth from bad things humans do. Which is incorrect because it's capitalism and so forth that's destroying the earth. Humans aren't bad because we're human. This is brought up in the last two chapters of the book.
asmodeus quoted Mushroom by Nicholas P. Money
Listing one among the many thousands of mushrooms as critically endangered may encourage the idea that fungi are doing fine at a time of extraordinary threats to the survival of the more eye-catching animal species. This is a mistake. Like everything else in nature, mushrooms would be much better off today without us.
🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄 wonderful ecofascism on the authors part. yes he goes into how humans are destroying the earth but the problem is capitalism et al not humans, which he refuses to acknowledge.
Humans are animals and belong on the earth just as much as bears, butterflies, and that annoying cockroach under your fridge. We do fucked up shit to the earth and each other but the solution is not worldwide genocide of ourselves. It's to dismantle capitalism and its associated practices.
I think if you advocate such a concept, you should put your money where your mouth is and kill yourself first.
asmodeus quoted Natural Beauty by Ling Ling Huang
Sly, surprising, and razor-sharp, Natural Beauty follows a young musician into an elite, beauty-obsessed world …
Content warning sexual content [minor], medical content, body horror [minor]
Weekly vernix facial wraps, a treatment that, besides looking and smelling awful, costs thousands of dollars per session. Monthly stoma vacuum sealing, which closes her pores. The ones that remain, she enlarges and embeds with diamonds so that, upon first glance, she looks to be freckled with the cosmos. She gets the same orthodontic procedure that Saje gets to maintain her Madonna tooth gap. She even gets a pubic hair transplant every few weeks, one of our most painful procedures, exchanging her natural coarse hairs for mink implants.
This is some fascinating, verging on barely there, body horror. Mink hair pussy. Wow.
asmodeus reviewed Last Heir to Blackwood Library by Hester Fox
Everything was just very ok.
Um. Not good.
the romance was ok. The plot was ok. Everything was just very ok.
It very distnctly reminded me, in a bad way, of those love triangled from dystopia YA novels. You know, the dark brooding bad boy brunette versus the shallowly nice blonde good boy. Both of whom are in 'like-like' with the MC who is a bashful yet strong, book nerd yet sporty enough to go outside and talk to strangers--just like you teenaged reader!!!!
The writing was passable. It won't be found in any book mock threads. There was decent plot twists.
Honestly if you like those 'cozy mystery' genre stories, you'd like this. Also it's excrutiatingly white. And cishet. It's a harlequin book tbh, don't expect much.
The supernatural bit was kind of interesting, I guess? It's not a haunting per se. It's a curse and the mechanics were interesting enough. But again, don't …
Um. Not good.
the romance was ok. The plot was ok. Everything was just very ok.
It very distnctly reminded me, in a bad way, of those love triangled from dystopia YA novels. You know, the dark brooding bad boy brunette versus the shallowly nice blonde good boy. Both of whom are in 'like-like' with the MC who is a bashful yet strong, book nerd yet sporty enough to go outside and talk to strangers--just like you teenaged reader!!!!
The writing was passable. It won't be found in any book mock threads. There was decent plot twists.
Honestly if you like those 'cozy mystery' genre stories, you'd like this. Also it's excrutiatingly white. And cishet. It's a harlequin book tbh, don't expect much.
The supernatural bit was kind of interesting, I guess? It's not a haunting per se. It's a curse and the mechanics were interesting enough. But again, don't expect much.
asmodeus reviewed The man who died by Antti Tuomainen
A successful entrepreneur in the mushroom industry, Jaakko Kaunismaa is a man in his prime. …
mediocre, shallow, passable.
kinda wish fulfillment. decent enough plot, didn't especially thrill me. It wasn't That Deep but it amused me. It took like an hour or so to read. Very distinctly white cishet male author. A book you read at the beach and then leave at a bus stop or bench because you can't be assed to bring it back home or donate it properly.
zero rep but honestly that's not what I, at all, expect in a book and author like this. Actually there are Japanese characters but they feel slightly like stereotypes. Generic Business Men. That's about it.
asmodeus finished reading Patient Zero by Lydia Kang
nearly a 4 hour read for me, whoa wow. I very much appreciated the perspective of color that Lydia Kang brought to the book. At least she mentioned outright the racism and antiblackness involved with medical abuse and history in general.
asmodeus quoted Patient Zero by Lydia Kang
In the case of plague bacteria, special dyes resulted in a characteristic purplish “bipolar staining,” meaning both ends of the sausage shape took up dye—which was why they resembled safety pins. The safety pins meant it could be plague bacilli. Which meant the next step was quarantine. Only this wouldn’t be the usual quarantine of a ship or a single house. On March 7, in a display of Sinophobia, San Francisco city officials quarantined the entire fifteen-square-block area of Chinatown, sectioning it off with ropes, and within them the roughly thirteen thousand Chinese residents living there as well—not a single one of whom was warned in advance. Beyond Wong, no further evidence of the plague had been confirmed. [...] White people were ordered out of the quarantined area because it was assumed—without evidence—that only Chinese people were responsible for and susceptible to the infection. All this for a single case of an unconfirmed disease. It was not simply an unprecedented and ignorant use of authority, but an ultimately useless one. After all, ropes aren’t particularly effective at stopping rats. And worse, scientists had known since 1897 that fleas and rats could spread the plague, but leaders in San Francisco nevertheless chose to believe that poor living conditions in Chinatown was reason enough to isolate its entire population after a single case of plague.
How refreshing to see this stated outright and actually mentioned at all. Hell the most about colonization or black slavery I see mentioned [specifically by white authors] in passing is very vague and rushed over. I know authors should edit clearly and stay on topic but come on. There's many examples to be made about x y z , you could at least make a token [lol] effort.
asmodeus finished reading Camp Zero by Michelle Min Sterling
This probs the first novel I read that treats sex workers alright. is that shameful? maybe probably.
It was an intriguing suspense mystery with dystopian scifi flavors. [climatopian?]
It did have some heavy handed bioessentialist shit about 'men made the world bad via colonization' and ok you are not wrong for the most part. But I assure you Ms Author of Color that women, esp white women, were very much hand in hand with men in colonizing and raping the world and its people. Do Not Think you can just 'cis women' your way out of the apocalypse. It is unfortunate and disappointing that trans women or trans people are not featured in this book. Though odd 'only [cis] men raped the world to this climate apocalypse and all of them by way of having a penis and power via capitalism are Bad!' makes me NOT want to see this …
This probs the first novel I read that treats sex workers alright. is that shameful? maybe probably.
It was an intriguing suspense mystery with dystopian scifi flavors. [climatopian?]
It did have some heavy handed bioessentialist shit about 'men made the world bad via colonization' and ok you are not wrong for the most part. But I assure you Ms Author of Color that women, esp white women, were very much hand in hand with men in colonizing and raping the world and its people. Do Not Think you can just 'cis women' your way out of the apocalypse. It is unfortunate and disappointing that trans women or trans people are not featured in this book. Though odd 'only [cis] men raped the world to this climate apocalypse and all of them by way of having a penis and power via capitalism are Bad!' makes me NOT want to see this done by the author.
I get that the author wants to push some odd feminist feel good story? But lacking such intersection makes it fall flat. But then again the author is a bit odd about race. Sure the main character, a korean american cis woman, talks a bit about culture disconnect and how people fetishize her ambiguous race. But that's about it. I think there's one Black character? But her race doesn't often come into play beyond single sentence mentions. Well.
Also by 'feminist feel good story' I mean the protagonists fall victim to the generic YA dystopia novels. The bad guys are humans who, once murdered and overthrown, will magically [off screen] restore the world into one of wholesome equals and restored lands. It's a nice thought but revolutions take more than one person* assassinating Mr Bad Guy.
*a girl or boy, just like you the teen reader!