Reviews and Comments

This horror-movie-themed action-adventure novel jumps from scene to chaotic scene with reckless abandon. Notionally focusing on the victims of cinematic violent crime, we see a blending of the hockey-mask-and-a-chainsaw æsthetic and the ideologies of serial killers & school shooters up against a dangerously genre-savvy protagonist whose agency whipsaws her from situation to terrifying situation as she strives always to be a good "final girl", staying safely ahead of horror-movie slashers who could be lurking in any shadow or behind any door.

Unfortunately, the pulpy cortisol stress-fest action and snappy protagonist inner monologue are held back by jittery jumps between different paranoiac visions of who the BBEG villain might be. I understand that the heroine has to be off-balance and always-guessing or else she'd use speed, surprise, and violence of action to rapidly resolve the story. But the quick flipping between suspects she knows with absolute certainty are behind everything makes character motivations hard to follow, and leaves the protagonist feeling like an unreliable narrator who might just be more of a danger to those around her than the real villain, whoever that may be. I was hoping for more of a fantasy of agency and capability, but this story left me constantly thinking that the protagonist might be overdoing things and jumping at shadows (which she was), and that (combined with the chaos & confusion) served to leave this much less satisfying than I'd hoped.

Unquestionably the most exciting and fun of the Spin novels, and also the least straightforward. I didn't understand this book the first time I read it, I didn't understand it on subsequent re-reads, and I don't understand it now. If you do, please let me know?

It's about… possibility? Chaos theory & fragmentation? unity & disunity of self & identity? who you are always rests on a knife's edge? love as both you and the person you love change? colonialism, industrial extraction, & empire? and also AI-assisted space pirates in a weird FTL rift-space. It's definitely also about scifi space pirates.

I feel like Moriarty is trying to say a lot of things in this book, and I wish I knew what they were? I feel like she's very shy about saying it, and sees the need to keep our attention with all the swashbuckling space piracy?

Excellent book, love reading it every time. Maybe one day I'll figure it out. Not today though.

If you know about Israel's fascist occupation of Palestine and the IDF's ongoing attempt to perpetrate genocide against the Palestinian people, this book is the "But wait, there's more!" of this shitty infomercial playing out in front of us.

Israel's economy is, in large part, based on exporting tools of violence and human control. Weapons, surveillance, assassination, espionage: Israel sells the tools of fascism to its perpetrators, a little ethnostate-with-concentration-camps starter kit for China's oppression of Uhigurs, or Narendra Modi's BJP crackdown on Muslim people. Beyond just "The cruelty is the point.", the cruelty is extremely valuable market research & product development for a state which sells a fascism starter kit for anyone who can pay, no questions asked.

Forget IBM's complicity in the Nazi genocides, and cast your eyes instead to the number one purveyor of genocide technology worldwide. These tools are not general-purpose technologies which are sometimes used by bad people. They are tailor made to enact total dictatorial control and pursue crimes against humanity. Sure, they can be used for more benign purposes like hunting down journalists to dismember, monitoring the Mediterranean for migrants without any ability and therefore obligation to rescue them from drowning, or blackmailing people into become spies against their communities.

This book makes me so angry. How did a people whose most important identity is that of the outsider and the oppressed emerge from an attempted genocide to construct a state which stands for the opposite of those values in every way?

Travis considers their nonbinary experience through the lens of various phrases which have stuck in their memory.

This was a difficult one for me, fam. Travis's experience is like mine and nothing like mine. They have suffered so much more of the UK's transphobia while I hid until I was in San Francisco. Most of the phrases in this book aren't ones that have been said to me, but I still hear them loud & clear — even if I have plenty of space to retreat from them.

The thing that hit me hardest was the concept of trans & queer identity only needing to be what it is because society imposes narrow restrictions. If society didn't attempt to control & constrain us in these ways, we wouldn't need to define our identities how we do. What would queerness be like in a society which did not impose a value judgement about the relative genders in relationships? What would queerness be like in a society which already centered gender on experience and choice? What would it mean to be nonbinary in a society which didn't hinge on binary gender and use that to empower and punish.

I'm primed to be skeptical of any claim which sounds like the core one in this book: that there's something pernicious about The New Communication Tool, and that it will erode our society and culture.

But. Postman published Amusing Ourselves to Death in 1985, and has been specifically correct about several… let us say… arcs? of transformation in culture & communication; in the way we value wisdom, knowledge, information, and data; and in our approach to disagreement, debate, and argument; among others. Postman clearly isn't exactly right in the particulars — the cultural role of television has changed substantially, and even newer new media has further adapted down this path. He didn't specifically anticipate Twitter or Facebook or TikTok, but his heart is in the right place by extrapolation from television.

Still. Is society worse, or just different? Are the ways societ has improved supported by new media, and how does that compare with its support for the ways society has degraded? Did television & social media cause misinformation & polarization, or did they just happen simultaneously? I'm not going to come down on Postman's side here. But I also have unusually-easy access to unenshittified media, and I might be more tempted if I had to live through the way normal people experience the Web all day.

Regardless of valence, I don't think these changes are reversible. We can't go back, we can just adjust our paths forward. "Old man yells at TV." is a trite tale. "Dysfunctional society no longer able to coordinate changes needed to survive the changes causing dysfunction." is probably more distressing. And the problem with all questions about how to improve society somewhat is that so many of the levers of change are locked out for various reasons, so "What should we do about this?" ends up always having deeply radical answers because nothing is superficial. Or perhaps that's just because almost all simple problems have been solved, and we keep being left with more and more challenging ones.

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