competencefantasy's Reviews (912)

Ursula K. Le Guin's prose is practically poetry already, so her poetry is some strong stuff.

This is well construction and fairly pleasant to read, but has a problem a lot of survey science textbooks have. Several years of surface science experience made the textbook much more understandable, and I found I liked the textbook much more as a reference when I was already experienced. However, I feel a survey textbook should be able to function as an introduction, and this one required a certain level of comfort with the jargon and ways of thinking unique to surface science in order to start feeling accessible.

That said, I have read some truly horrendous science textbooks in my day. So, bear in mind that I mean this critique mildly. It wasn't incomprehensible, but it didn't do what I'd hoped in terms of pedagogy either.

It's amazing how much world, character, and theme is here in so few words.

This is a small bit of worldbuilding in a subset of the Imperial Radch universe. The references to the Aztec ball game (or at least our modern perception of it) were very clear and fleshed out nicely with detail from the in-universe personal nomenclature. I do think I like Leckie best at the novel or series length, however, as it gives me more time to become unreasonably attached to her characters and all of their interpersonal and political drama.

This text spent most of its time detailing arguments between archaeologists about the dating of different things that might indicate people had certain types of plows, cranks etc. If I was getting ready to make an academic argument in the archaeology of stuff I never knew was this important, I would find this book ridiculously valuable. However, I was kind of trying to read this for fun, and I wish the argument had been more centered on the ways technology and social change were connected, rather than retroactively trying to assign winners to an arms race about stirrups.

Also this book has convinced me that if my advisor lived in the middle ages, she would have built automatons... and been even more miserable than she is now.

My issues with this book are the same as my problems with the standard canonical pedagogy of the first Thanksgiving, which this book replicates word for word.