tanyahp

A strange asteroid (or is it...?) called Hero is approaching the world. Though it's not projected to collide, a few weird cults have sprung up around it. But in London, the Minton family has other problems. Marcus (white), the dad, is a cop who was involved in a scandal, and possibly in reaction, has gotten obsessed with the end of the world and put a huge survival bunker in the back yard. Kim (black), the mom, just got a cancer diagnosis which she's keeping secret. They have four daughters. The oldest, Aaliyah, is about to get married but is cheatin' with the groom's brother. The middle, Briar, has secretly joined the asteroid cult at her high school. The two younger daughters are too young to have soap opera drama yet.

I struggled with the beginning of this book. It has a confusing and distracting narrative technique - it's multiple POV and we get the inner thoughts of the character each chapter is focused on, but their thoughts and so forth are told in first person by a different narrator. It took me forever to figure out that "I" was Briar. I guess everyone eventually told her exactly what they thought and did? It was a weird, confusing choice with no clear point or payoff. That aside, the lead-up to the alien invasion felt very slow and draggy. I didn't really care about anyone but Briar, and I mostly cared about her because I was interested in the cult.

The story picked up a lot once Hero arrived and some shit hit the fan. It was an interesting and unusual take on an apocalypse, or it would have been if it had been even remotely consistent with what was set up in the spectacular initial scene of it.

( Read more... )

This book has a very boring start, blah or unlikable characters, soap opera melodrama, and a complete lack of consistency in its central premise. Also, the survival bunker has surprisingly little importance in the story.

sabotabby

Just finished: The Hunger of Those Who Built It by Wendy Waring. I don't have a lot to add from last week. This was really good, and did something with eco-fiction that I hadn't seen before (examining the way in which green technologies can be manipulated to eco-fascist ends. You folks should check this out when it's released.

Currently reading: Old Boys: The Powerful Legacy of Upper Canada College by James Fitzgerald. Research for a hopefully fun project to be announced soon. UCC is the poshest of all Canadian private schools, a boarding school on the British model, established in the late 1800s to create a Canadian aristocracy. This is an oral history beginning with the class of 1922 and going into the 90s.

Most of the interviewees brag about their time there and are proud of their military discipline, sports prowess, and connections, but there are a surprising number of critical interviews who speak quite frankly about the rampant physical, sexual, and emotional abuse at the school, as well as the imperialist, misogynistic undertones. And, tbh, in most cases the lack of an actual education, as the purpose of the school was to turn the kids into aristocrats and build social connections, not to teach them to think for themselves.

It's, uh, pretty bleak stuff. It heartens me that a few of them did rebel and go on to do cool things, which suggests that even in the worst circumstances, people will still want to think for themselves.

sabotabby

Happy OMG911BBQ!!nevarforget!!! It astounds me that 25 years after a terrorist attack that had nothing to do with shoes or liquids on planes, we're still removing our shoes and getting our toothpaste confiscated, but 6 years into a pandemic that's still killing people, we're not making people wear masks in hospitals.

Anyway the one big legacy, of course, is that the Anglosphere decided once and for all which side it was going to fall on in the whole liberty vs security debate. It hasn't made anyone safer, of course (see: pandemic that killed 7.1 million people and counting), but it's certainly made most people more spiteful and mean, and foreclosed on a social vision of what is possible. We can only expect a greater burden of policing, greater state surveillance, greater corporate surveillance, more brutality. Until, I guess, people have had enough.

Of all things, the 1984-esque Flock cameras, along with data centres, seems to be the thing that's brought people to the breaking point. Even Republicans. Especially Republicans, because there are a whole bunch that are motivated by love of cars and anti-state sentiment. On Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, Margaret has a four-part series on "The Valiant War On Flock: How People Are Fighting Mass Surveillance" (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4), and it's very uplifting because in a lot of areas, they're winning. And we need a good news story.

sabotabby

Just finished: Nothing.

Currently reading: The Hunger of Those Who Built It by Wendy Waring. This is a really fascinating book on a number of levels. It involves a good amount of political intrigue, but that's not really the focus; it's almost backgrounded compared to the fraught family dynamics and the story of one woman's slow disillusionment. It's one of those "oh, only a very small press could do something like this," which is to say that it plops basically a literary fiction story inside almost hard SF with a fairly unconventional structure, and it works for me.

The literary fiction story: The bulk of the book is a flashback to Diane's early career as the engineer who built the GreenBelt (not to be confused with the Greenbelt that Doug Ford wanted to bulldoze for monster homes), a sustainable circle that divides the wealthy white enclave of downtown Paris from the starving masses outside. She starts out with the best of intentions, trying to use green technologies to create sustainable cities, but even as her bosses' plans become clearer, she deludes herself into thinking it's otherwise. Not to mention that while France mass-expelled its immigrant population and severely represses Muslims, America is much worse and she doesn't want to go back. Meanwhile, she tries to track down her estranged sister Helen after her father's death.

The hard SF story: The level of detail with the technology is impressive. I have no idea about these things, but it almost has a breathless sci-fi Golden Age feel, and it feels well-researched and technically possible.

Anyway, it's very good. I'm almost through.

sabotabby

There's a lot of good podcasts this week as usual, but one that I found particularly interesting was It Could Happen Here's "The Hunt For Jason Arday." This is Robert reading a report from Stephanie Lamy with her permission, which you can read here.

Until Arday's death by suicide/media pile-on, I had never heard of this guy, He was the youngest Black professor ever hired at Cambridge, and the target of a media witch hunt about "academic integrity" led by eugenicists, most notably Nathan Cofnas. His death follows the pattern of other Black academics being accused of plagiarism for political reasons, and Lamy does a great job breaking down the political forces behind what really ought to have been a nothingburger of a story outside of academic circles.

One thing that has occurred to me over and over with this story is the extent to which educators at both the K-12 level and in post-secondary are encouraged to plagiarize and assist our students with their plagiarism. Otherwise, we and they risk getting left behind, and we wouldn't want that. I haven't seen it brought up in the discussion but it really strikes me how the only difference between what Arday is accused of and what we are being told is going to transform our jobs whether we like it or not is the scale of the alleged plagiarism/fabrication (much less than we are ordered to do), the money of the players involved (even a Cambridge scholar earns less than the lowliest tech CEO), and the colour of his skin (much darker than most of us).

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Not With a Bang, by Temi Oh

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June 2010

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