Reviews and Comments

TBH I've come to question the sense of rating an anthology. After all, if I loved every story, wouldn't that simply mean a perfect overlap between my taste and that of the editor? I read this because it contains a story by Andrew Joseph White, and that certainly didn't disappoint. Although a number of other stories didn't really do anything for me, I have discovered a number of new writers I'd like to read more by (Jose Pablo Iriarte, Tori Curtis, Kathryn DeFazio, and Kylie Ariel Bemis), plus the introduction listed a number of interesting other venues for stories.

Provides a remarkably readable history of communism, tracing its origins in the French Revolution and continuing to almost the present day. Very detailed consideration of the internal workings of pretty much any country with a significant communist presence in the last 150 years, only slightly marred by a lack of context -- but then maybe the book would have been even more of a monster than it already was.

Genuinely just blown away by this. Mixture of creepy and gory that slightly belies the YA designation, but I fell for the characters so hard.

In-depth examination of the increasing concentration of the Canadian media landscape (speaking here from a city where I have the 'choice' of five daily newspapers, four of which are owned by Postmedia...). Covers the process by which Postmedia has gradually bought up more and more newspapers, closing many of them, and shifting the increasingly-centralized editorial take to the right. Also covers the complicated financial structure of Postmedia and its ownership by various, mostly US-based, hedge funds and other opaque financial institutions. Because the book is so new, it's also able to cover the various forms of subsidy provided by the Liberal government, and how they've often ended up just propping up the debt payments of the hedge funds, while being inaccessible to smaller independent news outlets. Not a cheery read, but useful in understanding the way Canada's democracy is going...

Not quite as good as Network Effect, perhaps because ART is less involved this time. The first couple of chapters also confused me a bit -- I felt like I'd been dropped into the middle of a book and had missed the build-up -- but once I got past that it was a ton of fun.

The first half of the book consists of pretty much a chapter per century, starting with the original sources and then walking through Geoffrey of Monmouth, Chretien de Troyes, Malory, and so on. This part seemed consistently excellent, to me. The second half is much more patchy, consisting of chapters on different themes in Arthurian literature, such as the relationship between Christianity and magic or the attempt to map the Arthurian legend onto the real geography of Britain. Some chapters are really interesting and others... less so.

Such a fun read! Action-packed, almost breathlessly so, with much less of the exposition that I think slowed down the later novellas, still plenty of humour, but also deeper relationship-building. Murderbot (aka 'SecUnit', when it wants to be less, I don't know, murderey) remains easily the most relatable character in today's fiction.

TBH I'd be hard pushed to say I enjoyed this. It's the first time I've read anything in Middle English (though my understanding is that it's closer to Early Modern than, say, Chaucer) and it felt like a bit of a slog. Glad I've read it, but even more glad I've finished it!

Worth reading for the first chapter alone, which plots Starmer's move from a remarkably left-wing lawyer (I had no idea he was involved in the McLibel case, for example) to a marked authoritarian, starting with his involvement in Northern Ireland and ramping up during his time as DPP. How you feel about the second chapter probably depends a lot on how you feel about Lexit, though arguably there are patterns emerging here that remain through the rest of Starmer's career. The remainder of the book covers the period of Starmer's rise to leader of the party, and really continues the theme of moving towards greater authoritarianism and watering down any left-wing policies. Eagleton is obviously not a fan, and that rather mars much of the book, but the first chapter is pretty breathtaking as a character study.

Some fun stuff in here, but it felt too much like a random collection of just anything related to either Dracula or Transylvania.

Good on assessing/criticizing 'green growth', left-accelerationism, SDGs, and the like. Also good on discussing Japanese thinkers and whether Japan's lost decade(s) count as degrowth. Gets a bit bogged down in analyzing whether Marx was leaning away from productivism in his later years, based on reading his unpublished notebooks. Sketches out a pretty plausible model for what degrowth communism could look like, but then gets a bit wrapped up in Chenoweth's 3.5% as all we need to achieve our ends :(

Not sure why I was dissatisfied with this the first time around. There's perhaps a little more exposition than I'd like, but otherwise a fun story.

So I've apparently goofed on my library holds and got this before Network Effect and , while entering it into Bookwyrm, discovered that I read it only a year ago! Still hoping for a good experience...

I always thought "All Systems Red" was an absolute standout. Funny, and relatable, and thought-provoking in somewhat equal measure. The remaining three novellas felt somewhat flat after that, but this re-read has significantly changed my opinion. The first is still much funnier than the other three, but I now see their strength in developing the depths of Murderbot's character, becoming, if anything, even more relatable.

While the endpoint of the book is Brexit, it does such a good job of tracing the way the proletariat has been split, first through offering voting rights, but only to certain segments of the working class, and then during the twentieth century, by leaning on racism, xenophobia, and nationalism. Also good on the way Labour has generally acted as a diversion from anything more radical, and the way that the shift to the right under New Labour opened up space for nationalism. In Scotland this manifested as the SNP who occupied a position left of centre, but still to the right of Old Labour, but in England this led to the rise of first the BNP and then, when they imploded, UKIP.