Aerin > Recent Status Updates

Giving this one a second chance, reading it with my eyes this time. The audiobook narrator’s performance gave the sexual relationship between the human and the robot a deeply gross groomer/child vibe that I REALLY hope is not actually in the text. But I’m ready to nope the fuck out if I’m wrong.

(Sigh) I’m back to yelling at this book. The authors are now claiming that “true” SF isn’t metaphorical; if it has zombies those are real zombies, and any deeper readings are secondary and probably hallucinated by the reader.

And sure, that’s sometimes true. But—and call me a bad dumb SF reader I guess—if the zombies aren’t actually ABOUT something it’s probably not a very interesting book.

“Sightings at Twin Mounds” was fun. Wolfe’s take on an X-File.

I get so viscerally annoyed every time SF authors start whining about “mainstream” authors publishing SF novels through “mainstream” publishers, appealing to “mainstream” readers. Wahhh, they’re not part of our CLUB, they’re not part of our CONVERSATION, it’s not REAL science fiction! Yes it fucking is, and it appeals to wider audiences often because it’s GOOD. Die mad about it, I guess.

I dislike both Walton’s and Palmer’s SF, buuuut I am still hopeful they might have something worthwhile to add to the metaconversation? Maybe?

I stumbled on this book at the library and I’m so glad I picked it up—it’s full of wide-ranging, deeply researched, and thrillingly bizarre information on a topic that affects multiple aspects of daily life but that I’d somehow never thought much about.

”Sizzling Saturn, we’ve got a lunatic robot on our hands!”

They just don’t write SF like they used to.

One of those “this would be so good if it was good” books.

Cruising toward a 2 star rating at this point.

I have to reread the whole series every time a new installment comes out - because I enjoy them very much, yes, but also because I can never remember what the hell happens in any of them.

This one hits very close to home. Manguso conveys the slow-motion self-immolation of giving everything of yourself to trying to make a marriage - a family - work, while your partner is busy unveiling ever deeper layers of apathy, selfishness, entitlement, cruelty, and ultimately betrayal.

All the lies you tell yourself, because how. How could you let yourself get trapped in this situation?

The world would be a better place if more authors took an honest look at the premise they’ve cooked up for their next novel, and instead of stretching and padding and overwriting the thing in order to fill 400 pages, simply asked themselves: “would this work better as a short story?”

So many aspects of this book are ADJACENT to being good. It wouldn’t be such an aggravating reading experience if it wasn’t almost, ALMOST there. Maybe in the second half? It’ll get its shit together…?

100 pages in, and at least 90 of those pages should have been cut. The prose is repetitive and ugly, but the bigger problems are structural. I cannot STAND attempts to build tension based solely on: characters being stupid, the author being coy about revealing things the characters already know, and/or contrived plot delays that would never happen in real life. I am having PTSD flashbacks to reading Connie Willis.

Nothing makes me grumpier than an author who doesn’t trust her own readers. I picked up what you were putting down the first time, you do not need to keep restating it for me in increasingly simplistic terms.

Sebastian Flyte is the platonic ideal of a manic pixie dream boy.

”What do you suppose Lord Sebastian wanted? A hair brush for his teddy-bear; it had to have very stiff bristles, NOT, Lord Sebastian said, to brush him with, but to threaten him with a spanking when he was sulky. He bought a very nice one with an ivory back and he’s having ‘Aloysius’ engraved on it—that’s the bear’s name.”

In Europe, [psychoanalysis] tended to find its greatest support among intellectuals and elites, while in the United States it became a mass phenomenon, but one that lacked a critical dimension.

Not sure how this manages to move so quickly while having absolutely no momentum.

I’m trying to tell you that there are some people you will never see. They are too low in the hierarchy, they are the ones who are noticed last, or not at all. Ordinary people do not know how to see them. They are never noticed. They are naturally invisible… I am naturally invisible, Richard, and you only see me because you want to.

This book is so good! This book is so good! THIS BOOK IS SO GOOD!

Those who enjoy science fiction above all other kinds of writing must enjoy its vitalising bastardy, its immoral interdisciplinary habits, as it feathers its nest with scraps of knowledge seized from the limit of the expanding world.

Science fiction deliberately uses the terms and structures of scientific thought to create mythic patterns, and the belief that underlies these patterns is a belief not so much in supernatural beings as in the almost supernatural power of rationality itself.

Me, yesterday: I really want to read this one, it’s a classic and cited everywhere, but it’s wildly out of print, not sure how I’ll track it down.

Me today, browsing the library stacks: oh it’s right there.

This book: hey there, I’m a first edition from 1973, and I don’t look like I’ve ever been checked out. Been waiting for you all this time ^v^

God, I love libraries.

“Let’s go poke around in the Forbidden Zone” is one of my favorite SF subgenres.

The whole premise of this is that it’s 6 novellas that take place in the same creepy town. But there’s so little attention given to the setting that I legitimately can’t figure out what’s supposed to be creepy about this place. It rains a lot. Corpses are buried standing up. That’s pretty much all we’re ever told. Sure, some weirdos live there, but so what? There are weirdos everywhere.

Yikes, this writing is awful.

Impulse library grab. First time reading Malerman.

This is shocking, and horrifying, and heartbreaking, and SO stunningly well written.

This really paints the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics as less coherent science and more a cult of personality around Niels Bohr. Which, I mean, I’m not an expert, but Copenhagen makes no fucking sense, and Bohr’s acolytes tried to justify that by claiming truth is antithetical to clarity. The less sense it makes, the more truthful it must be! Obviously.

Halfway through and really struggling to determine what poor bridge design and geological anomalies have to do with anything. Also, not convinced that the book’s apparent main thesis - that serial killers were somehow created or shaped by industrial pollution - holds even the tiniest drop of water.

All that said, I am enthralled.

Three things to bear in mind when you’re drinking a lot: do not drink cheap wine; do not drink undiluted wine; do not eat snacks during a drinking session. When you’ve had enough to drink, do not go to bed without vomiting as much as you can. When you have vomited enough, have a quick bath and rest. [That’s five.]”

Wise(?) words from Mnesitheus.