sunn_bleach's Reviews (249)

A perennial recommendation on this sub that I finally picked up for cheap at my local used bookstore. In a phrase, it lives up to the hype. I wanted a quick, fun read after Exquisite Corpse and to balance out a book on wildfire management I'm simultaneously reading. This was both more fun and more poignant than I expected it to be - it's like a rumination on growing up and the magic you see in the world fading with experience. And yet there's still a celebration of that mystery that lurks everywhere as opposed to the easier pathway of detached irony that hits so many people once they turn 24 and decide the world isn't good enough for them anymore.

A book like this shows you that irony is both easy and cowardly; true bravery in the world is thinking it's worth loving anyway. I love how much of a "fractured fairy tales" approach this book has in deconstructing myths and shocking people when they turn out to be true anyway, but without the coyness that "deconstruction" is often associated with nowadays. The ending felt a bit long, and I could've had more of the winsomeness of the beginning before things got dour (and slow) in the castle.

At 30 pages in, I knew the villain protagonist was a metaphor for AIDS as a serial killer - and that's exactly what the story ended up being about: how AIDS spares nobody at all. This was deeper than its gimmick initially suggested, kind of like an LGBT answer to *American Psycho*, albeit with a much greater focus on the gore and cannibalism. I'm not too surprised why its splatterpunk reputation precedes its caustic outlook on the homosexual male community dissolving from the inside-out; the gore and death is **very** upfront and described in ways that emphasize the sensuality of the kill equated with sex. But that eroticism really serves the metaphor in the sexual spread of AIDS among homosexual male communities in this era.

I've got some issues with its pacing (a character went from "my friends don't want to do my pirate radio station, therefore I should kill myself" in about 3 pages, it was jarring), but overall definitely glad to have experienced this and I'll have to wash out my brain a bit with something lighter.

I read "Exhalation" last year and loved it; I have some more mixed feelings here. The first three stories have the self-conscious author problem of being afraid the audience won't "get it". All of their endings explicate what you were supposed to intuit, which robbed them of their mystery. Many of these were written when Chiang was a younger author, so perhaps there's some first-timer's fear that they'll be misunderstood.

In fact I was very surprised to read that "Tower of Babylon" won a Hugo and a Nebula, as it feels pretty "standard" so far as magical realism goes - and also has Chiang's worst example of explication over intuiting. On the other hand, no surprises at all that "Story of Your Life" got him acclaim, even if I'm so tired of sci-fi authors using the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis to mean "language is magic powers".

The rest of the collection was written 8 or 10 years later than the earlier stories. It's cool to see an author progress so seamlessly and strongly into what makes them a "great". Everything from "Story of Your Life" onward was an absolute banger, with "Liking What You See: A Documentary" being like "The Lifecycle of Software Objects" in how it took a specific social issue, offered a technological solution, and then went with that idea as far as he possibly could. "Hell Is the Absence of God" is just as extraordinarily harrowing as one might imagine; it's a good pairing with Peck's "A Short Stay in Hell". And I loved the brief 3-page short story/fake Nature article. Metatextualism in scientific writing is an A+ trope for me.

 Middling feelings - I strongly enjoyed the whimsicality of the beginning two chapters, but it fell off fairly hard for me once Orlando returned to England and the plot either stalled out to little more than "and then decades passed and Orlando contemplated art" before getting married. The fantasy vs. reality confusion toward the end didn't hit very hard for me since it didn't feel like Orlando made many memories in many of these places; the "ageless person" conceit fell hard despite the book's 300+ length.

I hate to call a book "padded" because books rarely every are. And, I felt like Woolf's loquaciousness in Orlando got in its way far more than it ever served the text, especially with the tendency toward off-hand parentheticals. That being said, I'll absolutely read more Woolf, I just think this one wasn't quite what I wanted it to be.

Similar to Eloghosa Osunde's Vagabonds!, this is a collection of interrelated short stories that slowly coalesce as the book continues. Hajji Hotak is strongly concerned with the Afghani emigrant experience, following a group of immigrants and their traumas/experiences primarily from the Soviet occupation to the early 2020s. I've never read an Afghani author (much less a speculative fiction author), so I was excited!

However, the book starts off with by far its weakest stories, being almost clichély coy and litficky. We've got our strained father-son relationship. We've got our on-the-rocks marriage where their kid disappears and brings the couple back together (or does it?). We've got our fake-résumé being treated as a narrative for someone's life. We've got our stream-of-consciousness section to show somebody's overwhelmed with the banality of their life. It felt like first-timer writing class exercises, and I'd seen it all before, feeling like I was reading the wireframes of how to tell an emotional story. It's as if the author simply got better as the book went on, with later stories having subtle and heartrending explorations of the Afghani immigrant life that weren't there at the start, especially through parallels of the Soviet and American occupations.

Still, glad I read it, and what worked for me in the second half really worked. 

The titular story opens this collection with an extremely erotic (and biologically accurate!) description of two slugs having sex. And from there, it only propels further into the weird with a story about a nonbinary person's apartment being overtaken by the evergrowing hair of their ex, a video game-esque description of making your way through middle school, a choose your own adventure story of being confused with your twin, and the gender ramifications of having sex and giving birth to gods.

Punkish in the sense of the characters not being afraid to dive into their bodily functions and struggles with their anatomy in a way right company would eschew - I loved this collection and finished it in three days. Many of these stories are written from the perspective of trans and nonbinary women - a world I otherwise don't have much exposure to, and I'm really glad I picked this up at overstock following an event at my local store.

Strongly recommend to anyone interested in the stories or trans/nonbinary literature. 

Using a time machine as an allegory for fixing your mistakes is a tried and true conceit - but what about a time machine as one for your perception of time? Rather than the time machine take you from place to place to fix things, it instead shows you through "chronodiegetic space" that your decisions would have always been that way even if you have the perfect information you so desired.

Carried forward, your time machine is how you can escape for a time, waffling through your 20s and the first part of your 30s and insulating yourself from the actual time passing outside; the time machine goes both ways.

How to Life Safely is ultimately two different books: a meta-metaphor of narrative through refusing to engage with the narrative... and a surprisingly standard litfic examination of a strained relationship with your father. It's easy to see which one I prefer. 

This novella has made the rounds the last couple of years, and I see why: a man is sentenced to a temporary hell due to following the wrong religion. He'll get out eventually, but first he must find the book of his life in Borges's Library of Babel. For those unfamiliar, each book in this library has 410 pages, 40 lines, and 80 characters per line with random latinate letters, spaces, and punctuation. As an exercise in x-treem combinatorics, the number of books in this library is so large, it would engulf metropolitan Denver if typed at 12-point font. It is over one million orders of magnitude larger than the number of electronics in the observable universe. Luckily, you can eat whatever you want, all wounds are healed the next day (including "death" insofar as it exists in hell), and other people exist in the library who all speak your language. You'll just have to spend so long finding your book that "billions of years" would be like finishing as soon as you began to search.

Peck masterfully shows you just how long eternity really would be - and in comparison to forever, spending googols of years in the Library is indeed a "short stay". What got to me was that dropping down the central shaft so you can start your search from the bottom-up would take you over 1,200,000 light-years down given Borges's specifications - and our narrator does take that fall. It really brings to mind the horror of eternal life - and the horror of that realization is occasionally explored in the story.

My main complaint is that it was too short and the concept too big to be a novella; the story ends after three distinct time gaps following the protagonist's roughly one thousandth year in the library, which seemed arbitrary. It feels like it ends before it starts, and it doesn't just have to be an emphasis on eternity. Perhaps that's due to the more people-centric focus as opposed to the social movements and Big Picture that Borges's original story focused on.

One thing that made me laugh and then made me very scared: the demon who sends the protagonist to hell quips about how "this is a correct-you-a-little hell, not the hell of your Christian faith - do you have any idea how long eternity is?". Indeed.