User Profile

Marek

wildenstern@bookwyrm.social

Joined 2 years, 2 months ago

A mix of academic (philosophy, cognitive science, some science and technology studies) and science fiction or fantasy. A bit of pop science for giggles.

Academic tastes: Enactive approach, embodied cognitive science, ecological psychology, phenomenology Fiction: Iain M. Banks, Ursula le Guin, William Gibson, Nnedi Okorafor, China Miéville, N.K. Jemisin, Ann Leckie

Love space opera but mostly disappointed by what I read there. Somehow didn't read Pratchett until recently, and now methodically working my through in sequence (I know sequence is not necessary, but ...).

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Marek's books

To Read (View all 5)

Science Fiction

2025 Reading Goal

5% complete! Marek has read 2 of 40 books.

Arkady Martine: Rose/House (EBook, Subterranean Press) 4 stars

Basit Deniau’s houses were haunted to begin with.

A house embedded with an artificial intelligence …

A technoir about the human and inhuman aspects of the world

4 stars

Cyberpunk in its way, this is a genre-resisting noir (the detectives are police, not private, the clients don't want to be clients).

It has Martine's characteristic poetic prose, and themes of people, places, and the messy complexity of their relationships. Enjoyed it, despite it being a little disorientingly inhuman at times.

reviewed A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine (Teixcalaan, #2)

Arkady Martine: A Desolation Called Peace (Hardcover, 2021, Tor) 4 stars

An alien armada lurks on the edges of Teixcalaanli space. No one can communicate with …

Not quite as engaging as the first, but a solid sequel

4 stars

Content warning Not really spoilers, but some discussion of important themes

avatar for wildenstern Marek boosted
Andrea Ritchie, adrienne maree brown, Alexis Pauline Gumbs: Practicing New Worlds (2023, AK Press) 5 stars

Practicing New Worlds explores how principles of emergence, adaptation, iteration, resilience, transformation, interdependence, decentralization and …

AK Press has made 6 e-books free to download for a limited period: www.akpress.org/featured-products/featured-topic-free-ebook.html

  • Practicing New Worlds - Abolition and Emergent Strategies
  • Street Rebellion - Resistance Beyond Violence and Nonviolence
  • No Pasarán! - Antifascist Dispatches from a World in Crisis
  • The Operating System - An Anarchist Theory of the Modern State
  • Joyful Militancy - Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times
  • Emergent Strategy - Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

chaos.social/@catileptic/113453646275291175

Monte Cook: The Threshold (Hardcover, Monte Cook Games) 4 stars

What lies beyond the Actuality? What lies beyond the pinnacle of a vislae’s power?

The …

Hard going at times, but surprisingly satisfying by the end. Narrative background for an RPG.

4 stars

For a variety of reasons I’ve spent most of the last several months reading books and other materials for Invisible Sun RPG. This a novella of material outlining some of the aspects of the story background, and providing some illustrative fiction for come of the core ideas for the setting. I have come to really love the setting and the game, and have been very impressed with some of the ideas and elements that have come out for it.

Unfortunately, Monte Cook’s writing is not quite as good as his setting and game design. This was a slog at times. It came together impressively at the end – bits that looked random and awkward in the early sections came to have a good role to play in the narrative, and there were some nice ideas in design and presentation too.

Overall, good, but harder work in places than it needed …

reviewed A Gathering of Shadows by V. E. Schwab (Shades of Magic, #2)

V. E. Schwab, V. E. Schwab, ve schwab: A Gathering of Shadows (2016, A Tom Doherty Associates Book) 4 stars

Four months have passed since the shadow stone fell into Kell's possession. Four months since …

A decent bit of light fantasy adventure.

3 stars

On a par with the first. A mostly fun romp. Drags a little in the middle, and is marred for me by the occasional use of very modern turns of phrase which I find very distracting (e.g. someone in a regency-ish era London claiming they're good at "multi-tasking").

China Miéville: Kraken (Paperback, 2010, Tor) 4 stars

Kraken is a fantasy novel by British author China Miéville. It is published in the …

Miéville's signature weird unleashed on his beloved London

4 stars

This it a re-read, I picked this up when it was first released.

In some ways, this is one of the more straightforward stories from China Miéville. It's a romp of a thriller in which esoteric religious beliefs ground an urban fantasy, as a museum curator, Billy Harrow, tumbles down the rabbit hole into a London of mystical cults, exotically arcane gangs, and clashing apocalypses.

Miéville's love for the crazy melting pot of London is on display, as he takes every bizarre sect at its word, and continues to twist the surreality dial over the course of the tale from "curiouser and curiouser" all the way to "gargling warthogs dancing the can can".

The writing is jarring mixture of his signature extended vocabulary at the service of a chopping London vernacular cadence that gets a little tough to read in places. That's just a sometimes thing, though, in what is …

reviewed A Darker Shade of Magic by V. E. Schwab (Shades of Magic, #1)

V. E. Schwab: A Darker Shade of Magic (Hardcover, 2015, Tor) 4 stars

STEP INTO A UNIVERSE OF DARING ADVENTURE, THRILLING POWER, AND MULTIPLE LONDONS.

Kell is one …

Some sharp magical fun

4 stars

Though V.E. Schwab has been on my radar for a while I haven't picked up anything by her before. I have now ordered the second two books in this series. This was an interesting, fun adventure, with lots of character.

This is a multiple-worlds story, in which dimensions with different forms or levels of magical power are connected through a shared sense of "London" (though the different Londons and the countries in which they exist are quite distinct from one another).

The primary protagonist, Kell, is a magic user who moves between the worlds. His relationship with his own world is "complicated", and things are made much moreso when he unexpectedly ends up smuggling something he doesn't intend.

There are some lovely ideas here, and the world-building is well-handled. The main characters are compelling and sympathetic, while still having some rough edges. Setting the stage across the different dimensions takes …