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Weird things plague this book and oddly but surely break any immersion: there are passages that are totally implausible, to the point where I shook my head (some read as clips from Upworthy almost, given the scant pride of a better narrative context). The most damning is the tonal discordance between sci-fi premise - first contact! - and a bizarrely limited group of human characters. Why all from one university?

Mid 2000s literary theory refracted through a lightly ecological lens, plus the occasional tired nod towards contemporary relevance. This feels like an extended graduate paper that someone really liked and thought: let's do it with more psychoanalytic theory.

If you observe a road from an airplane, of course you’ll miss the potholes. Maybe you’ll even mistake a stream for a road, or a cloud for a coliseum.

Frustratingly colloquial. Bratton writes, "The problem is not just a few crazies. The number of people who you know that will refuse or have refused to get vaccinated for utterly spurious reasons will surprise you, if not shock you." And then cites nothing. This is vapid and careless writing, and rests on nothing other than intuitions and chummy clique feelings. Ugh.

Essentially a number of short chapters that could be blog posts - and not the best kind of blog. Nothing is cited. Rarely does the analysis dip below the level of an informed Facebook user. Looked on the back - it would be a crime to pay 26$ CAD for this. Willing to be surprised, but so far... 🤷

Environmental melodrama: “She tells me that she illustrated her latest piece with a collection of photographs she and her husband took on a road trip ... . “Hold on. I’ll send it to you,” she says. When I hear “Hold on,” I think, with my eyes focused on the world out the window, “To what?” Just beyond the construction crane cantilevered over the base of what will soon be yet skyscraper.”

Unbearably precious, like a self-imposed, sugar-inspired headache: “These days all it takes is a little unusual warmth to make me feel nauseated. I call this new form of climate anxiety endsickness. Like motion sickness or sea sickness, endsickness is its own kind of vertigo—a physical response to living in a world that is moving in unusual ways, toward what I imagine as a kind of event horizon.” Ugh.

I’m tired and bored by writers who become fascinated by the environment because they have recently broken up with a romantic partner, and who sublimate to the environment their desires. Enough of this melancholic rose-petaling.

“Postmodernity just allows for a plurality of lifestyles, tastes and opinions to find an outlet among consumers with enough money.”

Do we need more expensive monographs that endlessly dodge the question by seeming to grasp it with both hands? No. The answer is no. So far, so unimpressed with a writer whose previous work was lapidary.

"It is so hard to claim our desires and so much more relaxing to mock them."

Brilliant.

Hugo: "the utopias of today are the tomorrow's reality."

So far I am deeply unimpressed. Airy observations unanchored in actual details give the impression that Metcalfe doesn't actually have much to say, other than that she really doesn't like local food movements - was this intended?

Slow and careful, with a focus on modelling communicative relations of which I, for one, am no fan, but good so far. That said, waiting until chapter three to talk about power is... limiting!

Overwritten, verbose, and with good ideas peppered across the text. Can't help but reflect that this would have made a killer 20 page paper if not for the need to publish volumes for legitimacy and visibility.

ALMOST

Getting there.

I got to the chapter on language. It is... deadly dull.

Slow going for two reasons: 1) dense, economical prose; and, 2) petrifying existential dread.

A bankrupt political imaginary cannot save this technocrat's dreams of implementation policy: mostly, this is vapid storytelling and managerial inspirationalism.

So far this book has absolutely (!) captivated me, and I am desperate to read more

More of a thematic compiliation than a narrative theory, but ok.

This is not a thriller, but it is good.

Had to stop reading - just not interested...

A good book to read a chapter or two at a time, I think, as it is quite dense. Many quotations are set up as staging horses for deep arguments and thoughtful remarks.

I've made it to Canada – Tallack on the Shetland Islands was a little disappointing, or at least sombre and thoughtful, but his take on Greenland was very interesting and I'm excited to read more.

Just finished the "Jargon of Resilience" chapter and --- so good! Very densely packed and much too NYC for me, but otherwise I'm still digging this.

A dream in waves of historical fantasies that ebb and flow the way the sea crashes and retreats from the store: the gorgeous juxtaposition between the dreamy, hidden boy and the violence of history is an able transitory device between the two.

Bruised and broken, muttering or brash and laughing, the persons of Galloway's life come into being as complex and dynamic forces in her memories of her life as a small child. Good so far!