Artemis > Recent Status Updates

The 3body sections are so COOL. both Lius know how to write a sci-fi set piece!

Ohhhh the chapter about Wang going to the 3body video game world (for the first time?)… breathtaking.

So starting with a scene of a university professor getting publicly beaten to death for teaching Wrong Ideas is. Bleakly topical.

It's solidly okay but there keep being things that just feel. Kind of arbitrary and contrived. In ways that feel bumpy and take me out of the story

This is already kind of bland and stupid. However, the amateur historian who ignored all the Gold Rush era local newspapers in an old attic for a Donner Party journal with a treasure map in it, taking it to an archaeologist who works on Chacoan and Pueblo archaeology, and declaring that she would be the perfect person to lead an expedition to find the Lost Donner Party Gold... Too Real how ppl talk to archaeologists

Rabbit deserves a better friend, Cleo deserves a better love interest, Sylvia deserves a better book, and Zack deserves a better writer. Deuce is just there

Some parts of this book are almost good (Zack and Eddie’s lingering trauma from being black-site POWs) but some of this book is so so bad (just had to read some more Romance Scenes. I’m just so relieved he faded to black for the sex.)

This book is basically “What if Firefly and The Expanse were lazier and more sexist”

Aw yeah we’re starting to get into the Analysis™ portion. Crown has gathered all the data you could possibly imagine and now we’re starting to talk about what it MEANS.

Chunky chunky chapter outlining all the visual motifs and their possible symbolic meanings alone and in combination. Some of them (like abstractions of snakes that are mostly just a triangle) we somewhat hard to see, but she made thorough arguments. Some arguments for meaning were so broad that I’m not sure how useful they are, but I guess that IS common in motif and color symbolism.

Had to return this to the library. Bad news: I didn't finish it yet. Good news" the waitlist means that people in my area really want to read it!

Marking this so I remember my spot when the waitlist comes back around to me.

Gamifying my comprehensive exams reading so I get a little external validation for reading this whole book. It's a good book! It has every single possible piece of data you could want about Salado Polychromes in minute detail. Super important and useful and written in a clear manner! Just. It's homework y'know.

But you have to have sex for the good of the ECONOMY! Won't someone think of the poor economy???

This book is doing a fantastic job laying out the social forces and arguments in clear, insightful, easy-to-follow ways.

I'm CRACKING UP this book is SO BAD AND STUPID. There is an AI here now and he is Evil because of course he is, turning Evil is what AIs do. So now... everyone is... trapped in VR and can't log out!!!!!!!!!!!!!

At least 130 pages in there's now a plot instead of Wade being the Most Specialest Rich Nerd Boy In The Whole World.

"I Am a Beautiful Bug!"
A bitter, satirical, spitefully proud story about transition and being a minimum wage cog in the machine, and going "fuck that actually." The author's notes say it was written in a bad mood in a waiting room and yeah I can see that.

"Everyone on the Moon is Essential Personnel"
The titular novella. Or novelette? It was structured like a long short story rather than a short novel, and ahhhHHH. The interwoven stories of Sebastian, Lara, and their mother Donna, their hopes and fears and resignation to the way the world is. Finding meaning in the places they can, in the night after they get off work and the bitter empty hope of the moon.

A fun premise and enjoyable characters/setting, but MAN this book badly needed a copyeditor. Aside form occasionally distracting prose, I’m only 24 pages in and there have already been 3 glaring typos.

"My Noise Will Keep the Record"
This is one I had to read twice (a few stories so far have been like that), and absolutely benefited from doing so. Sad, about sci-fi ableism and real ableism and people with extensive prosthetics that keep them alive and they need to pay off working for a company that sells luxury wearable tech for data harvesting. The Pavlov line smacked me in the face.

"Estranged Children of Storybook Houses"
You know the theory that the story of fairy changelings originally were about autistic people? This story takes that idea and runs with it really well. Could have been trite but absolutely was not.

"As Tender Feet of Cretan Girls Danced Once Around an Altar of Love"
Archaeology! Immortality! Loss, longing, and living. A Cretan snake woman watches her home fall to ruin and be excavated again, watching an archaeologist tell her people's story (wrong, sensationalized) and collects other people's stories of her lost love, Ariadne (also wrong, sensationalized). This made me Feel things but I'm not positive what.

"The Android That Designed Itself"
A three-part meditation - sermon, manifesto, theory - about creating yourself. Interesting to see the three-part structure in relation to the next story's specific call-out against binaries in favor of triplets. Also surprising and interesting to see a re-working of Jarboe's now-famous tweet as the opening lines.

"We Did Not Know We Were Giants"
A short, almost mythical story about giving yourself to an indifferent god, and then hunting and eating eat.
Not sure if it's empowering or chilling.

"The Seed and the Stone"
I read this story twice to feel like I understood it, and I'm still not sure I do, and that's fine. Mystical, quiet, and luminous.

“The Heavy Things”
Weird period horror!

“The Nothing Spots Where Nobody Wants to Stay”
Bitter and sad, evokes being a teen and wanting to scream and get away, living in a social space where nobody wants to see you or wants to be near you.

"Self Care"
The narrative voice of this one was at once absolutely wild and intimately familiar. I felt like I knew this person, but only on twitter. A transmasc loser punk in a New England town being swallowed up by rising sea levels, with nowhere to go but a Catholic shelter, intensely resisting anyone's attempts to "help" him without understanding him but wanting to belong somewhere... snarky, bouncy, angry, real.

“Here You Are, Near Me”
Eerie and sad and unsettling. A poorly timed joke on twitter ruins a woman’s life, earning her threats—and pictures of all the times she’s shown up in the background of photos in totally-not!Harvard Square. Is “i recognize you” solidarity or threat?

“Marks of Aegis”
A very short story of the type that’s mostly an extended, fantastical metaphor. A metaphor for self-fullifillment, or for being trans, or for being a writer. Probably elements of all of those. Melancholy and spitefully proud—definitely setting the tone for the collection.

The main character is an anthropologist! I'm loving this.

More books should have tacky overdramatic mass-market-style illustrated covers. For shame, modern book design sensibilities.