Reviews and Comments

Two-hour podcast interview with the author on Tin House' Between the Covers: tinhouse.com/podcast/omar-el-akkad-one-day-everyone-will-have-always-been-against-this/

Chance, sense of place in the mountain west, love, home front, racism, what can be washed away and what can be transplanted. Women-focused, twists around an expected plot, hard scenes of loss and violence, I'm not sure they add up to a great whole but has a fitting firmness and solidity.

Faced with genocide in Gaza (and a personal immigrant journey reporting on Afghanistan, Guantanamo, and more confrontations of us vs them), a sharp and painful breakup with the comfortable beliefs of liberal western democracy's morality that allow any of us to look away.

Hard, as jargon-heavy sci-fi, as violent eldritch horrors, as our unlikable unforgiving neurodiverse crew tears apart those around them, as a philosophical conclusion about consciousness, self-awareness, and artificial intelligence. It is surprising to me that I still deeply liked it on re-read.

A cozy military sci-fi. On the first hand this is a fun romp of geriatric boot camp with fun technological reveals. Fails in comparison to "The Forever War" for any confrontation with political and social impacts of the endless colonial war context. And introduces several maddeningly open-ended universal author escape hatches for the subsequent series.

Our interrelations with microbes as co-equal participants in health and evolution, from coral reefs to human microbiomes. Upturns simplifications of good and bad, of in and out, self and other, and finally made sense of metagenomics for me.

Contemplative pandemic novella, weaving in loss, racial disparity, resilience, sitting and walking with grief, and an undercurrent of hopeful action.

Entirely enjoyable imperial intrigue and whodunnit with outsider characters in a strange enough world, just not quite my cup of tea but could see revisiting for the world once the series is complete.

A response to authoritarian anti-gender movements, the first half rails a bit more than I need to relive current politics, the second half updates Butler's approach to co-constructed gender in society as anti-colonial anti-racist, and emphasizes the right's lie of gender ideology being a destructive force in society, distracting from dealing with real dangers of climate, economic precarity, and war.

Wry, uplifting, political, dark academia joy on a death-sentence planet.

RIch chorus of struggling and striving and femininity in black British lives loosely connected.

Solid near-future sci-fi on intelligence and environment. Moves easily between gripping techno-action-violence, challenging witness of human and ecological oppression, and a shimmering wonder at science, consciousness, and marine biology.

Beautiful and varied collection of essays, interviews, photography and poetry on African American agricultural experience - some generational, some newly engaged in community building through the land, some reengaging with interrupted family legacies.

On the violence in colonizing and decolonizing; on nationalist and authoritarian dangers in bourgeoisie decolonization that is not decentralized nor built on building power of the state from within the oppressed classes; on the psychological harms to all sides in fighting and repression. An understandable classic.

So good to return to these deeply considered illuminations of human problem space.