fiction

notes bookshop link there’s not a lot to say about this. it’s a fun, quick read and apparently the first installment on a much longer series. there’s all sorts of interesting stuff swirling around in here and stephenson is doing a great job of “world buliding”. the initial character, dawn/aurora, straddles two worlds between the wars and during the rise of soviet communism. there are historical figures (neils bohr makes a sidebar cameo), events (a world’s fair) interesting digressions (polo being played by cowboys/girls in montana, etc....

2034: a novel of the next world war – (ackerman, stavridis) the audible version of this got me across the better part of south dakota. i can only listen to fiction via audiobook and this did the trick. it’s a solid ride through the coarse concepts of potential american decline in military dominance. or put less jingoistically, an interesting conception of what the rise of china and india means in a multipolar world order....

notes bookshop link i’m glad i got this on kindle, because i slogged through this for far too long. this is an amusing sequel to the rise and fall of D.O.D.O. which was done with neal stephenson as the co-author. this builds on the whole time travel via witchcraft thing which is an amusing trope that i had fun reading. superficially, the premise is kind of neat; a rogue witch who’s engaged in the government’s time travel project decides that she’s going to make witchcraft supreme and stunt the emergence of “technology”....

notes bookshop link i always have to take the cory doctorow with a grain of salt. this was a DSA fever dream, and i say this as someone who leans heavily in that direction. the main character is a pretty flat charicature of a liberal kid that grew up in a MAGA household. gramps was a MAGA who died; leaving him the owner of a house that he opts to turn into a four-story walkup to house climate refugees....

notes bookshop link this was a tome, and it kept getting just a few pages at a time in terms of grinding through it. it wasn’t really a grind to read, it was simply so large that i couldn’t bring myself to travel with it over the past month or so. this is actually 3 books pulled together into a single volume. i think it’s call the “science in the capital” series and it’s kind of early KSR cli-fi....