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I listened to the book first, then read each chapter followed by the corresponding episode of Octavia's Parables podcast. The total experience was great. First, the reading by Robin Miles was impeccable, just like her reading of N.K. Jemisin work. The book itself was so thrilling, terrifying, and full of historical inversions and fascinating and flawed characters. The podcast is skillfully hosted by Toshi Reagon and adrienne maree brown. Their podcast "summarizes the storyline, places it in a strategic context for those intending to change the world, and provides questions to help bring Butler's ideas to life." I also read this after reading Ursula K. Le Guin's The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction which gave me a few other "thinking" tools while reading this.

A short essay that gave me a few more nails to put in the Joseph Campbell coffin. Sometimes you just gotta kill your early heroes. Sometimes you gotta replace the ultimately selfish "follow your bliss" crap with something closer to following your usefulness, like a bag. This essay also clarifies Le Guin's understanding of her own craft. After all, her craft is "full of beginnings without ends, of initiations, of losses, of transformations and translations, and far more tricks than conflicts, far fewer triumphs than snares and delusions; full of space ships that get stuck, missions that fail, and people who don’t understand. I said it was hard to make a gripping tale of how we wrested the wild oats from their husks, I didn’t say it was impossible."

It's online. I found it at the anarchist library. Just search the title.

This is the story of how to intentionally expand the fissures in capitalism's skin so it bleeds out and eventually dies. It's not utopian. It's about as violent as I imagine it will need to be. Its concerns are a whole planet affair and not centered on the west. It definitely doesn't skimp on the economics. The solutions are thrilling to entertain and on the whole it's a pretty hopeful story. It doesn't lean in only one direction either-containing everything from collective living, science, banking, industry, activism, violence, murder, and blimps (errr, sorry, I mean airships).

While this book deals with many of the subjects I thoroughly enjoyed in the Broken Earth trilogy I just didn't enjoy it nearly as much. Some of the characters were compelling along with some of their relationships, but I didn't care for them and their stories nearly as much as I did in Broken Earth. I might even go so far as to say I would reread the Broken Earth trilogy for a third time before I finish this trilogy. All that said, I did enjoy the book and it's not terrible by any measure, even compared to Broken Earth.

Revisiting books you read as a teenager is a dangerous business, mostly because of that whole being an idiot back then thing. But, this one gives me hope that my teenage self wasn't totally useless. I probably like this more now than then. It's the end of time, and the few people left can basically do whatever the hell they want, morals to be damned. This book has aliens, many miscommunications, a sad slow-moving emo giant named Lord Mongrove, and time travel. This book is quite subversive and absurd and enjoyable reading.

I enjoyed the story, the perspective and voice, the subtlety, and even the restraint from becoming clever with a plot twist, but I just didn’t enjoy it as much as Never Let Me Go. My original strong desire to sit down with it faded around the halfway mark. Still, I did finish it quicker than some novels. It’s definitely going to sit with me and I’m sure ideas from it will come up.

Easily my favorite space opera series and the first book hooked this Earther. The detail and world building are outstanding and the characters and their adventures are addictive.

I'm going to skim the first six books so I can re-read Persepolis Rising and then finally read Tiamat's Wrath to prep for the last book coming out at the end of this year.