User Profile

Marek

wildenstern@bookwyrm.social

Joined 2 years, 3 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

12% complete! Marek has read 5 of 40 books.

Samantha Harvey, Samantha Harvey: Orbital (EBook, 2023, Penguin Random House) 4 stars

Life on our planet as you've never seen it before

A team of astronauts in …

Swept along by gorgeous prose.

4 stars

I picked this up having not seen it before, from the combination of the blurb and the reviews on the cover, promising a beautiful book about astronauts on the International Space Station.

It is precisely that. Delicious, evocative, and poetic prose in a sweeping flow that both captures the disorienting combination of the banal and extraordinary of life in space. Astronauts in (or "on") orbit are inevitably some of the most capable and amazing people alive, but their lives are finely regimented and filled with finicky, highly structured work and lots and lots of housekeeping. The juxtaposition of that caretaking work with the fact they are in space, looking down on the world beneath from a god's-eye view, is central to the narrative here. It is less a story, and more an exploration of the humanity in the extraordinariness of the astronauts, and the extraordinary in the ordinariness of the …

Joe Abercrombie: Last Argument of Kings (The First Law, #3) (2008) 4 stars

Grim, unrelenting, but good for all that.

4 stars

Content warning Spoiler-ridden thoughts

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 …