Much thanks to NetGalley and Angry Robot for the eARC.

 Rig is a Nightbird, a rebel who does odd jobs—like rescuing refugees—to eke out a living beyond the control of the three factions fighting over the control of the galaxy. She is also Kashrini, a species whose homeworld and culture have been nearly annihilated by her former faction—Pyrite—and now Rig does all she can to preserve any Kashrini artifacts she can get her hands on. Alas, Pyrite Intelligence has decided it needs to retrieve the schematics for nanotech weapons that Rig designed for them once upon a time. And they are not the only ones who would be interested in that power.

 The first thing you’re going to notice about Bluebird is the frequency of action sequences. Seriously, this book is jam-packed with them. We go barely a scene before someone picks a fight. That might be annoying in less-deft hands, but Pierlot makes it work. I’m not huge on action sequences because I don’t visualize as I read, yet I still enjoyed the majority of this novel simply because Pierlot is very good at describing what’s happening and why we should care. For that same reason, if you do visualize cinematic sequences, you are in luck.

This novel reminds me of that genre of plucky science fiction I might associate with something like Titan A.E.. Rig just does not care about interstellar politics. She wants to do good, make some money, and be left alone to her own devices—and of course, spend time with the love of her life. You can almost feel her rolling her eyes at all the people who are trying to convince her of the importance of the faction conflict.

Although Pierlot provides us with a general backstory for the origins of the factions, there is no continuity with our human history, aside from certain idioms that seem to have survived into this far future. The legends seem to imply that humans came to this galaxy from another (the Milky Way?), but their method of arrival resulted in their fracture into the three factions that have since messed it up for everyone else. Typical humanity, amirite? Again, some people might feel disappointed that this mythos is unexplained—and again, I say, it works well here. It’s the point, actually, because as Rig tries to explain to Ginka, no faction has the full story—not even the Nightbirds. It’s pointless to fight about something you can’t be certain about because you weren’t there.

The third element that I really enjoyed was the relationship between Rig and June. I liked that there is clearly a lot of love and respect between them, but there is also some unresolved tension as a result of the vast differences in their lifestyles. There is an important conversation between June and Ginka early in the book, followed by a recapitulation between Rig and Ginka, that finally manifests as a tearful, heartfelt resolution between Rig and June. It feels organic, healthy, and it’s generally the type of lovely romance my aromantic self can really enjoy.

If Bluebird has any flaws, it’s that some of the characters feel larger than life and a little cartoonish in their villainery. This is the case with Lord Umbra—I mean, the whole “Lord” thing is just the start of the problem, and let’s not even talk about how he wields a sword. The whole throwback imperial vibe of Ossuary didn’t work for me, but then again, neither did the nihilistic technophilia of Pyrite. Indeed, for all that I loved the protagonists and deuteragonists of this book, there isn’t really a formidable or compelling antagonist. As a result, Bluebird’s overarching plot suffers and sputters its way into its final act.

Would I read another book in this universe? Yes, absolutely. Pierlot’s writing blends action seamlessly with careful character development, and the result is a type of compassionate science fiction I want more of in my library.

But do you really want to know what I’d like to see? A Bluebird video game. I would love to be able to play as Rig, fly the Bluebird, chat with June and Ginka, and generally be cool while inadvertently saving the galaxy. This is a universe I would play in, because even when the stakes are high, what really matters is the human connection.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

This book crossed my radar and I was ambivalent. On one hand, the description didn’t do a lot for me: it read like your fairly standard fantasy novel with the twist that the society is matriarchal rather than the mostly patriarchal ones we see. On the other hand, I was feeling some epic fantasy, and I wanted to see if Scorpica might pleasantly surprise me. You might say I am an optimist. Well, G.R. Macallister’s story has some intriguing parts to it, and her characters definitely very dynamic. Overall, though, the writing, characterization, and a lot of the worldbuilding choices just didn’t work for me.

Thanks to Saga Press and NetGalley for the eARC.

There are five queendoms: Paxim, Bastion, Sestia, Arca, and the eponymous Scorpica. Each queendom is known for certain traits and jobs; the Scorpicans are warriors. Each queendom is also matriarchal: there are matriclans, each one is ruled by a queen, and men in general have a lower standing in all five societies—for example, in Scorpica, only women can be warriors, and indeed, the nation actually sells their boy children to other kingdoms for a profit. Ok….

I’m rather torn by Macallister’s depiction of a matriarchy here. Look, I get that it is important to show that women in positions of power can be just as awful as men—and that’s what’s on display here. The gender swap in this story is basically, “what if women were in charge and were just as awful and oppressive as men are in our world?” That doesn’t interest me, though—the whole deal with patriarchy is that it is a form of structural oppression that exists beyond any individual person; if you gender swap it into an oppressive matriarchy, you’re not making any specific comment on our society beyond maybe that power corrupts. I am far more interested in depictions of matriarchy that push the boundaries of our understanding of power, etc. And we have those in fantasy already—fantasy has arguably long had traditions of strong female characters, warriors or otherwise, breaking the mould of what it means to be a hero. Scorpica feels very disconnected from those traditions, however, very much like it thinks it is different and edgy and cool when in reality it’s a couple of decades too late.

Similarly, the whole idea of nations that are so incredibly specialized just feels tapped out. We’ve done this before, over and over, and sometimes it leads down interesting avenues but it doesn’t seem to in this case. Even the title of the book is questionable given that a great deal of the action takes place in Paxim and Arca, and four or five of the main POV characters are Arcans. Beyond that, however, lies the main problem with this world: it’s boring.

The cookiecutter nations are actually a symptom of a larger problem, which is a lack of depth to the entire world. This is evident in the way that Macallister has structured the story: every five years, the queens meet to perform ritual child sacrifices to the gods. In between, we get precious few details about what these queens do or indeed what’s going on in any of these nations. When we are with Jehenit and Eminel and the Rovers, we’re told they are travelling bandits in the otherwise generic land of Paxim. Tamura and her warriors train and fight and hunt and fuck, I guess. We’re told Arca is a nation of magic, that pretty much every woman has some kind of categorized gift—but we never really see what this means, never really understand what kind of culture this has created among the Arcans, aside from the small glimpse we get into Mirriam’s bloodthirsty games of palace intrigue.

And then we come to the main plot: the Drought of Girls. The book starts with the last girl being born in a long time. Over a decade passes, and various nations start to get desperate, Scorpica most of all. I will give Macallister this: it’s a great setup to sow conflict among five peaceful countries, to be sure. Deprive them of a valuable resource, set them at each other’s throats. It’s not a bad plan by the Big Bad (and she would have gotten away with it too if it weren’t for those kids…). Again, though, despite the vast number of perspectives and the epic timescale of the novel, we see precious few examples of how the Drought affects day-to-day life in the queendoms aside from the existential worries it creates for some of the queens.

Plus, of course, as a trans woman, this kind of gender-essentialist plotting and worldbuilding always makes me uncomfortable. To be fair, Macallister does explicitly signal the existence of genderqueer people in this world—there is an agender priest who uses they/them pronouns, and at one point the book acknowledges that some people are “neither man nor woman.” Nevertheless, that is pretty much “the bar is on the floor” kind of territory these days; acknowledgement doesn’t do much to fix the larger issue, which is that for the purposes of the story you’ve created, it’s just more convenient if we largely ignore and erase trans, non-binary, and genderqueer people. I can’t get behind that. If your story relies on us existing only in the margins, you are actively marginalizing us, and you should find a better story.

My final critique is just that the writing itself didn’t work for me. This book is so heavily weighted towards tell over show. The omniscient narrator spends a lot of time explaining this world to us, instead of stepping back and letting the characters do so through dialogue and action. I suspect that’s what makes my observation earlier about the shallowness of the worldbuilding all the more poignant for me: it didn’t have to be that way. The writing style practically begs for a much deeper world to explain to the reader. Instead, it remains all surface-level stuff, and the dialogue between characters is … lacklustre at best.

Now if you have read up until this point, you might think I hated Scorpica. Understandable. Truthfully, though, all these complaints aside … I still kind of liked it? There’s charm to it and a strange kind of appeal to the journeys of some of these characters. Macallister has some kind of interesting story here; it’s just never fully realized. Queen Mirriam of Arca, for example, has a fantastic journey that sees her verging into straight villain territory—yet it is squandered in a confrontation with the main antagonist, who herself feels defeated too easily at the climax of the book.

I guess my verdict, then, is that Scorpica is kind of a hot mess of epic fantasy—but I respect that, because as I have said in the past, I prefer big swings and misses over books that don’t swing at all. I think there are a lot of problematic elements here, from the uncritical replication of oppressive power structures in a gender-swapped world to the erasure of trans people to the casual way children are sacrificed and sexualized (there’s a scene late in the novel where a girl who is maybe sixteen or seventeen years old has sex with a woman in her twenties—the timelines and ages of people are a little hard to follow, but it’s the kind of thing where if you start to think about it too much you’re like … oh). For these reasons, I find it difficult to recommend this book. At the same time, I can see what others might see in it. It was a pleasant diversion for a couple of days—but it didn’t get me excited, and in some ways, it left me cold.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

To say that I windmill-slammed the request button on NetGalley for this book is an understatement. Treasured: How Tutankhamun Shaped a Century promised something very tantalizing: a look into a cultural phenomenon that took the world by storm a hundred years ago. Christina Riggs does not exaggerate when she talks about the “Tut-mania” that swept the world over and over throughout the twentieth century, literally inspiring so many people like her to become Egyptologists. Though it had no such enduring impact on me, I remember the requisite ancient Egypt unit in elementary school, the making of a papier-mâché mummy entombed in a shoebox sarcophagus painted like Tutankhamun’s famous funerary mask. So when I saw Public Affairs offering eARCs, yeah, it touched something deep within my psyche. “Let’s dive into this,” I thought, “and see what more I can learn.”

Riggs weaves her own personal backstory throughout the book as she examines the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb, the subsequent analyses of his tomb and body, and the way the objects of his tomb became an important part of Egypt’s export of its culture on tour for political and economic benefits. Much to my satisfaction, Riggs explicitly calls out the colonialist and imperialist forces that shaped everything about Tutankhamun’s treatment, from his discovery up to the present day. That was my main concern going in—that the book would be a little shallow and not engage with the colonial elephant in the room—and Riggs allayed it immediately.

These are the science history books I truly appreciate: the ones that grapple with the darkness at the root of Western science’s often harmful history. We like to hold up science as a neutral process, but that is true only in the most abstract sense of the scientific method. The truth is that for the vast majority of the history of science, the scientists, the people involved, have often resorted to callous, careless, cruel experiments and methodology to get answers. In the case of Tutankhamun, the subject is millennia dead—but I don’t really see that making much of a difference. At the end of the day, this is the story of British archaeologists digging up the dead bodies of an ancient culture because they wanted to and had the power to make it happen. It’s gross.

Riggs highlights this while also, quite appropriately I think, stressing that her discipline of Egyptology is not all mummies all the time. Indeed, while Tutankhamun might have been an inciting incident in her childhood that nudged her on this path, she recounts that it was a long time into her studies before she came face-to-face with an actual mummy. This is a good reminder that it is possible to study history in a less invasive way.

So the chapters (which come later in the book) that focus on the physical examinations of Tutankhamun and the two fetal mummies found in his tomb were difficult but necessary to read. What of the earlier and later chapters, focusing on the tomb’s discovery and then Tutankhamun’s legacy for modern Egypt?

The discovery chapters are fun to read because Riggs is helpful at unravelling the sensationalism and mythology that has built up over the years. She digs into the personalities of Howard Carter and Lord Carnavon, talking about Carter’s early life, his career in Egypt, and how he wasn’t quite the dashing archaeologist that his hometown back in England might like to portray him as being. It’s worth remembering, Riggs tells us, that archaeology in the early twentieth century was still very much crystallizing as a science, and many people saw it as much as a business opportunity as a scientific one. Again, the blatant, wholesale extraction of objects from Egyptian tombs to Britain, the United States, and other destinations feels so wrong—but as Riggs pointed out, it was seen as perfectly normal back then, a kind of salvage right built into the contracts between those digging and the fledgling antiquities ministry in Egypt.

The legacy chapters, similarly, point to a complicated history of political tension between newly independent Egypt, its former colonizer, and the rest of the world. Tutankhamun at times becomes an olive branch and a rallying cry. He is Egypt; Egypt is him. (I really liked Riggs talking a little smack, carefully but ever so critically, of Zahi Hawass—if you have ever watched an ancient Egypt special on Discovery Channel, you know this guy. I don’t know much about him and have no skin in this game, but his absolute ubiquity as the go-to expert for all these shows made me skeptical, and it seems with good reason.) The detail that Riggs goes into helps us understand the monumental scale of undertaking an international tour of these artifacts.

In a similar way, I appreciated how much time Riggs spends discussing the photography and archiving of photographs of Tutankhamun’s tomb and artifacts. She lingers on this to a point where some people might be critical of it, but I think it’s important. So much of what we see as young people is visual—is not Tutankhamun’s mask one of the most recognizable visual icons in our culture today? That is so because of the decades of photography that happened, from the discovery of the tomb all the way through its tours. Riggs explains how this was achieved with the technology of the time, as well as how two very determined women mounted an effort to catalogue and preserve the original negatives in a way that would prove useful for future generations. Science is not just the dramatic discovery: it is also the decades of hard work that follow by people, often who do not have fancy degrees, who spend their days organizing, administrating, and believing in the importance of what they do.

Treasured is an intense, lively, and interesting read about this young king, the discovery of his tomb, and the sensation he sparked off a hundred years ago. It was satisfying, critical in the way I wanted but also inspiring. Would read more from Christina Riggs, and very well might.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

Not so sure about the brief part of this title. Aside from that, A Brief History of Timekeeping: The Science of Marking Time, from Stonehenge to Atomic Clocks indeed covers quite the range of timekeeping science and history—and you all know how much I love science books, and how much I love history books, so in case it isn’t clear, science history books are absolutely some of my favourite non-fiction. Applying to read this eARC from NetGalley and BenBella books was a no-brainer for me.

Chad Orzel, physicist and science writer, leads us through the progressive history of timekeeping technology and the accompanying social constructions of time. This is the thesis of the book, namely that our socially constructed temporal needs drove the search for increasingly precise timekeeping, which in turn influenced our conception of time. This feedback loop led us from Neolithic tracking of the changing seasons to marine chronometers, quartz watches, and atomic clocks that keep time down to the picosecond. Orzel both explicates the physical qualities of timekeeping methods and explores the people and processes involved in inventing or discovering these methods.

Some of the scientific explanations here can get quite intense. The book tries to separate the most intense and detailed parts of these explanations into sidebars (not that sidebars really … work … in an ebook). Nevertheless, even in the main part of the text, Orzel is assuming a fair amount of high school physics knowledge. I don’t think this is a downside, and even if, like me, a lot of that knowledge has atrophied for you, you will still be able to understand the gist of what Orzel is saying. Nevertheless, his explanations overall have reminded me of the sheer brilliance of the scientific method. The world we inhabit today exists not from the brilliance of individuals making profound leaps but rather from the persistence of experimenters, of craftspeople, of engineers and designers. The history of timekeeping is an iterative history, and when you think of it, so much of our technology is like that.

As far as the history goes, I think there’s something in here that will be new for almost everyone. You might be familiar with a couple of the events Orzel mentions—for example, he covers John Harrison’s efforts to win the Admiralty Board’s Longitude Prize (and comes for my girl Dava Sobel’s version of the story in the process!), and this was something I’ve read about before. But I really liked his exploration of the intricate mathematical efforts of first-millennium CE monks to line up and fix the calendars. Again, I keep thinking about our modern society’s dependence on computers for speedy, complex calculations. In actuality, up until recently, any kind of complex calculation would take someone hours or even days, let alone the time needed for double-checking.

This is part of the charm and power of A Brief History of Timekeeping. Like many a good science history, it helps me marvel in the wondrous nature of human innovation and inquiry. We went from hunting and gathering to agricultural revolutions all the way up to harnessing the power of the atom in order to measure our ever-changing definition of time … that’s just … wow. Yeah, this is a bit of a long read for something brief, but Orzel tells it well and in a way that makes every page worth it.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

Duo M.A. Carrick’s The Mask of Mirrors was far-and-away one of my favourite books of 2021. It was such an original, interesting fantasy novel! So I pre-ordered The Liar’s Knot with much anticipation, though as usual I didn’t actually get to reading it until now! That delay did not dampen my excitement, nor did Carrick disappoint me. There is no second book syndrome here, folx.

The Liar’s Knot picks up shortly after the end of the first book. Even so, the book provides a “the story so far” synopsis, and can I say that I want to see this more in fantasy series?? Bradley P. Beaulieu’s A Song of Shattered Sands series had a similar feature in its later books, and it is so helpful for forgetful readers like myself.

Spoilers for the first book but not this one.

We return to the cosmopolitan city of Nadežra. Ren, aka Renata, aka a couple of other aliases because she is a scammer (shock, gasp), has officially been adopted into House Traementis. Her nobility secured, Ren’s original plan to swindle the House has been sidetracked by inconvenient things like feelings and that whole “accidentally saving the city from devastation” that happened in the first book. At odds with recently-elevated noble and longtime crook Derossi Vargo, Ren finds herself growing uncomfortable close—in multiple personae—to Captain Grey Serrado. As much as she would like to reveal her true self to him and take comfort in another ethnically Vraszenian struggling to walk the line between loyalty to his people and preserving the peace of the city, Ren has other needs. For instance, she needs to understand why Azeraïs has apparently granted her the identity of the Black Rose in the form of the mask that she emerged with from Azeraïs’s Dream. She also knows that the enemies of House Traementis are still out there: a sickness suffuses Nadežra, and some will stop at nothing to seize power.

So much of my praise for The Mask of Mirrors stands for this book as well. The characters are so rich, diverse in their identities and attitudes but also so well developed. I love how much change the main characters undergo in this book. In particular, Ren has to walk a fine line in how she presents her various personae to people like Grey, who himself has his own secrets. Carrick makes a very smart choice in this book by choosing to reveal some of Ren’s secrets sooner rather than later (but I won’t say to whom or how!). I say this is smart because I think the easier but less interesting choice would be to try to have Ren walk that tightrope far too long, at which point the reveal becomes anticlimactic. The way that Ren’s relationships with Vargo, Grey, Giuna, and Tanaquis evolve as events unfold is so dynamic. Carrick keeps the reader guessing but also delivers the drama we want and deserve.

Likewise, the plot thickens. The Mask of Mirrors felt very much like a political fantasy novel. While The Liar’s Knot has elements of that, this story is more about personal connections to magic and to the city and its history. Unimportant events and remarks from the first book are revealed to be careful foreshadowing for the payoff in this book, once more confirming Carrick’s consummate skill. I also enjoy how all of the protagonists of the book ultimately want similar things, but their motivations are of course very different, and their methods are often at odds. This creates an excellent amount of conflict (and no small amount of humour as well) without throwing Ren into direct opposition with an antagonist too often.

If I had to make any criticism—and I am loath to do so, I loved this book so much—it would be that the antagonists are ill-defined and vague for most of the book. Oh, their motives are clear enough, albeit a little pedestrian. The magical nature of the mystery is a lot of fun, but the desire for power and political gain isn’t much of a surprise. In the end, the bad guys are not what makes this book.

Where The Liar’s Knot truly comes into its own, however, is the nature of Ren’s split identities. We see this through her own chapters but also through commentary from Grey, Vargo, and even Tess. Ren is no longer the street thief she grew up as. She has inhabited the persona of Renata so thoroughly that this is her life now—and unlike the first book, where that felt tenuous and short term, neither she nor Tess sees an endgame now. Is she going to be a noblewoman of House Traementis for the rest of her life, wearing imbued makeups to disguise her ethnicity, talking with an assumed accent, her sister forever her maid? Truly it’s a moving and moral dilemma that consumes Ren as much as the magical mystery of the plot consumes her, and it’s what kept me turning the page.

The end of my edition contains a tantalizing sample from the next book. I usually don’t bother, but I snuck a peek and wow can I not wait!

Kara love. Kara love a lot.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

The multiverse is a weird and wonderful concept. It’s actually several concepts stacked on top of one another wearing a trenchcoat. In One Verse Multi, Sander Santiago plays with some of those concepts to create a universe-hopping mystery involving polyamorous love interests, evil corporate aspirations, and dramatic confrontations. I wasn’t sure what to expect when I started this book, and I don’t think I could have predicted what I got. I wish I had loved this book more, because it has so much to recommend it!

Thanks to NetGalley and Bold Strokes Books for the eARC!

Martin Logan King works for the Multi-verse Protection Corporation (MVP). Formerly a rift-closure tech, Martin has now joined a new research team formed by MVP to investigate a unique event. The team discovers in the course of their investigation that not all is as it seems at MVP, that the founders are up to some shady shit, and Martin in particular takes it upon himself to investigate further and take action. The fate of the entire multiverse hangs in the balance, but can Martin save it without sacrificing the two men he loves?

Let’s talk about representation! One reason I wanted to love this book more than I did is because of how cleverly Santiago works in diverse representation. Santiago himself is a queer, trans BIPOC writer, and so he writes Martin’s character with a very authentic voice: Martin is a Black, gay trans man, and a significant part of the book is his self-discovery of polyamorous attraction as well. To be clear, I’m not praising One Verse Multi for the way it checks a lot of boxes—that’s not what matters to me when it comes to representation. It’s the quality that matters here, but I also wanted to remark upon the quantity of identities in play because intersections matter too. It matters that Martin is Black and trans, that he’s gay and polyamorous, etc. We can’t separate any one of these identities from the others.

In general, I really liked Martin. I liked his straightforward attitude and bravery. He’s heroic but not in a bombastic sense; occasionally he overreaches (and regrets it), but in general he has a combination of charisma and cunning that gets him through. I like that he took the fight to the enemy, for reasons I will discuss below. This, combined with all his identities, is why we need more protagonists like this!

In addition to Martin, there’s a non-binary characters and several other queer characters of various ethnicities. But perhaps even better than that is the supportive nature of the worldbuilding. Martin’s colleagues (aside from the bad guys) are endlessly supportive. Even when they disagree with him and argue, they always give him a chance to explain. Even the bad guys respect his identities; his queerness is never a source of jokes, slurs, insults, etc. It’s never up for comment. In this respect, One Verse Multi feels a lot like Star Trek: The Next Generation: the team is just vibing, and they don’t always see eye-to-eye, but they will trust each other’s judgment and listen.

It’s so fucking wholesome and I love it.

As you might know, I’m not a huge fan of romance, so I tend not to enjoy or comment on those subplots. For what it’s worth, I didn’t mind the romantic subplot here. I liked that it was polyamorous instead of a love triangle, and that it develops in a slow-burn-to-sudden-simmer kind of way. Santiago carefully hangs a lampshade on the stalker-like nature of Martin’s initial observations of Titus. Honestly, Titus and Lucas both seem like great guys, and I wish everyone all the best.

So the characters in this books are fantastic and a lot of fun. Unfortunately, I can’t say the same for the plot. This was where One Verse Multi nearly lost me: it drags. A lot. I kept looking at the percentage read in my Kindle, wondering why the story was advancing so slowly. There is no sense of urgency to the pacing for the first part of the book. Once we get a better sense of who the antagonists are, that does change—and to be fair, there are certainly some dramatic and tense moments. Once Santiago gets to the action, he’s great at writing it. It just takes forever to get there!

Similarly, the actual nature of the mystery was ho-hum to me. It boils down to predictable corporate greed, just enhanced with access to a multiverse. I don’t require that a mystery be totally unpredictable to me, but I do like to be a little surprised by the outcomes, and I didn’t get that here.

So my overall verdict? One Verse Multi is one of the most wholesome and satisfying books I have read in a long time when it comes to the characters and romance. On this strength alone I would recommend it if that is what you are after. On the other hand, if you’re coming to this for an intense mystery, I’m less certain you’ll be satisfied.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

Hair is so personal to ourselves, yet in many ways it is also political. Hairstyles can signal status—gender, affluence, class, or cultures. As Emma Dabiri explores in Don’t Touch My Hair, this is particularly true for Black women. This book goes far deeper than I expected given its length; Dabiri fuses her personal experience growing up Black in Ireland and the United States with meticulous research. The latter takes us from enslaved people in the Americas to Yoruban culture and mathematics to the sprawling, technologically sophisticated cities of African empires. This book is about far more than hair; it is a story of culture and history as it is written on people’s bodies.

As a white person who grew up in a city with a very small number of Black people, Black hair has never been something I have had much familiarity with or call to think about. Somewhere along the way, I learned about the controversial idea of Black people rocking “natural hair” instead of relaxed or straightened hair—but again, my racialization and upbringing meant that I really didn’t understand the internal politics of such decisions. Dabiri is really doing white people a favour when she discusses the history and weight of Black hairstyles, for she helps us understand how colonialism extended its control over Black bodies long past the formal end of slavery. In so doing, we go far beyond the simple eponymous admonishment and actually get to the root (pun intended) of our society’s misogynoir attitude towards Black women’s natural hair.

Dabiri’s grounds her connections between colonialism and hairstyling in her Yoruba heritage, but I suspect similar stories exist from other African cultures. She relates what she has discovered about the role that hairstyling played in Yoruban life, from the status of travelling hairstylists to the way that one’s hairstyle could signal one’s social position, such as a messenger. Dabiri admits that taking care of natural Black hair is time-consuming, then goes on to say:

 

Truly in this paragraph Dabiri demonstrates why it is so necessary for white people like myself to continue, always, to read books about racism by Black people. It isn’t enough to stop at “ok, don’t touch Black people’s hair without asking, and don’t ask to touch a Black person’s hair.” That’s merely being not racist. If one wants to be antiracist, one needs to go deeper than mere behaviours and actually understand the connection between Black hair and the forces that maintain racist oppression. That’s what Dabiri does in the above paragraph and throughout this book, and it is why no white person will ever be an expert on anti-Black racism no matter how many of these books we read.

But one of the benefits of reading to learn more about being antiracist is that it also encourages me to think about how white supremacy, while not oppressing me, also forces me into certain patterns of behaviour. Reading this book inspired me to reflect on how my relationship with my own hair has changed over the past few years, mostly as a result of my transition. Since that isn’t relevant to my thoughts on this book, I turned that reflection into a companion blog post that you can read if you are interested in my thoughts.

Beyond the antiracist education made available in Don’t Touch My Hair, there is just a wealth of cultural and personal knowledge that Dabiri shares. I was not expecting the final chapter to be all about mathematics! It was with such delight that I read Dabiri’s account of research done by white ethnomathematician Ron Eglash. In this way she summarizes how, historically, Yoruban and other African cultures have used hair as a way to describe mathematical knowledge, such as fractals, long before these concepts were laid out in writing by European mathematicians. We often give a tip of our hat in mathematics to the contributions of “Islamic mathematicians” while forgetting that a large portion of Muslims were, indeed, Black Africans. This erasure is, in and of itself, a form of racist revisionist history wherein even as we re-admit Islamic contributions into science and mathematics, we whitewash Islamic scientists and mathematicians just enough that they become palatable to Eurocentric stories of these disciplines.

Dabiri’s point? African people have always participated in scientific and mathematical discovery and innovation long before Europeans showed up in Africa, looked around, and promised to deliver “civilization” by railway at gunpoint. Moreover, African people did this through complex, three-dimensional ways of storytelling, from the construction of their cities and weaving of their clothes to the styling of their hair.

Highly recommend this book to a wide audience, particularly for white people like myself. It isn’t too long, it is rigorously cited, and it is packed full of important ideas and information. Dabiri’s writing challenges you, pushes you to consider your own complicity in these systems, and exposes wide without recourse the ways in which white supremacy continue to oppress Black bodies despite supposedly centuries of freedom. It’s time to change that.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

What would you do if you could edit your memories—or more precisely, if others could edit your memories? This is one of the fundamental questions of Glasshouse, one of the earlier novels by Charles Stross. Still firmly within the posthuman stage of his oeuvre, this book is less about the implications of the existence of strong AI and more about the implications of mind uploading and an ability to alter physiology and neurology at an atomic level.

Robin has just undergone a radical neurosurgery that has excised most of his memories. Thanks to a letter from his past self, he has a vague sense of who he is, but no detailed memories of his family, profession, or anything from his past. He lives in a galaxy of loosely organized human polities fractured after a vicious “censorship war,” a post-scarcity world where you can be backed up by molecular (dis)assemblers, create duplicates of yourself in a bewildering variety of forms, and gate between star systems thanks to wormhole technology. In short: sufficiently advanced society, indistinguishable from magic.

Robin agrees to enter an immersive experiment designed to replicate a society lost to time—that is, ours. He finds himself in a female body, at the mercy of the experimenters who, of course, do not actually have his best interests at heart. It turns out Robin’s past self might have ulterior motives that he can only speculate at. Now assigned the identity of Reeve, she needs to get to the bottom of this experiment—without alerting the experimenters—and also hopefully locate the person she met prior to going into the experiment and with whom she might have been falling in love.

This is a strange novel, albeit perhaps not for the reasons one might think after reading my summary. Stross does a kind of bait and switch wherein he first leads the reader to believe that the threat to Robin/Reeve comes from without the experiment; in reality, and without spoiling it, the threat is as much from Reeve’s own uncertain mental state as anything else. In this way, Stross can explore several interesting ideas.

First is the extent to which embodiment affects identity. This has always been one of my favourite philosophical questions. Realizing I’m trans went a long way towards explaining my ambivalence towards embodiment in general (it was a lowkey manifestation of gender incongruence). We see a few examples of this in Glasshouse. Although Reeve is not opposed to being a female body, she is appalled by the primitiveness of an unaltered human body of any gender, the way she menstruates, is fertile, needs to work out in order to build muscle. Sam, on the other hand, is extremely uncomfortable with the male form because of negative associations from his past. And in general, all of them are uncomfortable with living in this ersatz representation of our contemporary society, simply because we lack the freedom to be whoever we want to be.

Second, and related, is the nature of autonomy and liberty. Reeve’s enemies want to unilaterally impose a new structure on society that is modelled after our own, with these enemies in charge. Now of course this sounds like a bad idea. But as Reeve points out at one point, the ability to edit memories introduces a wrinkle. If someone can edit your memory so that you remember having consented, even though you didn’t, does it matter that you didn’t consent? (Because as far as you remember, you did.) I know this is mind-bending stuff, but the end result is similar to the thesis of Dollhouse—namely, the ability to edit memory might be more dangerous than wielding physical weapons of mass destruction.

On a side note, I feel like if this novel were ten years younger Stross would have worked in connections to social media. While we aren’t quite capable of editing our memories yet, we are living in a golden age of misinformation thanks to social networks. With deepfake video, it’s possible to mislead even the most careful person these days. Two people can “remember” an event differenty thanks to exposure to misinformation, which can have very real consequences on our actions.

While the ideas are, as usual, high quality, I admit to some disappointment regarding the ending. After a lengthy build-up, the ending feels very rushed. The actual action is related in a confusing way, with a lot of things withheld from the reader (though easy to predict). I think I understand what Stross was trying to get at with the ending, as Robin and Kay attempt to build a new life together that allows them to escape the horrors of their past at war. Nevertheless, the execution left me wanting more than we are given.

So like a lot of posthuman science fiction, high marks for the big ideas but needs work on the implementation!

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

The conclusion to the duology began with to make monsters out of girls, to drink coffee with a ghost follows amanda lovelace’s processing of her grief over the death of her mother. This includes poems that focus on her mother’s nurturing qualities as well as her mother’s toxic or abusive qualities. Later, the focus of the poetry shifts to moving on, finding love and solace in a partner, and realizing that is possible to forgive without forgetting.

As always, lovelace’s writing is beautiful. Like so much poetry, theirs is deceptively simple yet full of layers of meaning. Even though I have yet to lose a parent, it’s possible to relate to lovelace’s feelings because they express them so damn well. And as the collection continues, I really enjoyed how its scope broadens to consider the role that our ghosts play in our lives, our decisions.

lovelace touches on the idea of found family, something that really resonates for me. The poem “they’re your real family” really stuck out for me, reading it as I did on my ride or die’s birthday and thinking about all that both of us have been through in recent years:

 

This is how I feel about my two best friends. This is what I love about lovelace’s poetry—even when the majority of the topics are not things I have direct experience with, there are always a few poems that hit me right in the heart. to drink coffee with a ghost is no exception in this regard.

I guess what I have learned, then, from the last few years of reading lovelace’s poems is the kind of poetry that works for me. As I often reflect upon in these reviews, poetry in general doesn’t appeal. But maybe for me a poem needs a few things: deceptive simplicity, emotional connection, and topics that deal with matters of the human heart—but not just romance. I think I am finally starting to understand why poetry can help someone heal.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

This book was recommended to me by my French friend Emeline! I definitely need to read more books about disability. Sitting Pretty is part memoir, part educational polemic about the need for our society to shift how we view and act upon disability. It is heartfelt, humorous, but also really affecting. Rebekah Taussig makes so many good points through both her personal experiences and her research into the academic study of disability. While she cannot speak for all disabled people—and she acknowledges the privilege that her other identities and social position provides her—Taussig ultimately provides a very necessary reminder that if we are going to treat disabled people as human, we have so much further to go.

Very early in the book, Taussig rightly identifies that disability is a very contextual identity located in one’s time and place in society. She uses an example I am very familiar with: glasses. I need glasses to see anything that is farther away than about 15 cm with anything approaching fidelity. Yet I don’t consider myself disabled, because there is an unremarkable and fairly accessible prosthesis (prescription glasses) that compensate for my impairment. A couple of centuries ago, it would be hard-to-impossible for me to do many of my current jobs or hobbies. So our idea of disability shifts over time. Similarly, Taussig points out that each of us as individuals will experience disability in various ways—two years ago, I broke my elbow. I was in a cast for weeks, physiotherapy for months, and to this day I cannot fully rotate my left wrist the way I could prior to the break. Yet because this results in fairly minor impairment, I don’t call myself disabled, and it’s doubtful others would see this as a disability either. But I and everyone who lives long enough will eventually enter the category of disabled person, simply because bodies wear out, even as our society’s expectations of our bodies do not.

Taussig discusses how disability affects various aspects of her life, from employment to her relationships. I wasn’t surprised to hear about her struggles with getting housing and employment while on Medicare—I knew that a lot of disabled people have to avoid getting married or taking a higher-paid job because they will lose health benefits they depend on. In Taussig’s case, she ended up marrying her high school sweetheart more because it was convenient, and he had health benefits that would extend to her, than because of love or mutual respect. It’s both saddening and maddening that these structures in our society put disabled people (particularly disabled women) into situations where they might have to choose between marrying (or not marrying) someone or keeping their benefits. But there was plenty in this book that I didn’t know, and in general, ameliorating such ignorance is an important reason that abled people need to read this book: we need to stop assuming we know what is best for disability advocacy. “Install a ramp” is not going to fix every problem (or even many), and banning plastic straws is not going to save the environment but it does present a problem for a lot of disabled people.

The chapter where Taussig discusses teaching a high school class about disability studies resonated so much with me as a teacher. Taussig describes her discomfort over referencing herself in discussions (something I feel when discussing trans issues with my class). Moreover, she describes the resistance she encountered in the likes of “Adam”:

 

This exchange reminded me of the famous Huffington Post article “I Don't Know How To Explain To You That You Should Care About Other People”. Adam is refusing to open his mind to the experiences of disabled people because he thinks it isn’t relevant to his life. Not only is this incorrect in several ways, as Taussig points out, but it’s a disturbing level of apathy that we see repeating across social issues. We see rich people not caring about the poor, people who live outside areas affected by wildfires or rising sea levels not caring as much about the effects of climate change, etc. The neoliberal promotion of a rugged, individualistic lifestyle has eroded our sense of community, and it hurts disabled people and other marginalized groups.

Indeed, what I appreciated most about Sitting Pretty is the fact that Taussig locates disability as a social problem (rather than a medical one) and points out that accommodations are not enough:

 

Instead, Taussig says, we need to rethink how we design our society—not just accessible spaces, but go beyond that to think about the social conventions we currently take as normal. (There are connections to be made here to colonialism that Taussig doesn’t have the space or scope for, but I want to point out that part of the origin of the “nine-to-five” lies in the British state’s need to transform farmers into factory workers as part of its far-reaching imperial project. People from non-white cultures are often judged more harshly for not conforming to our society’s ideas about rigorous timekeeping and punctuality.)

She goes on to say:

 

This is why disability activism cannot be successful unless it is anti-capitalist. Accommodations are not enough. Accessibility is not enough. We need to challenge the unsustainable system that is capitalism. I am so on board with this.

 Finally, I want to make a connection between some of Taussig’s commentary and my experience as a trans woman. Now, I’m not saying that being trans is the same, in any way, as being disabled (and there are plenty of disabled trans women out there, of course, who can speak more to the intersections of their experiences than I can). Nevertheless, in her chapter on feminism, Taussig remarks:

 

Mmm, I feel that. As a trans woman, I do not always share the experiences we stereotypically associate with womanhood (or even white womanhood). So what I take away from this is that, just as cis women need to really look hard their internalized cissexism and cis privilege, it behoves us abled women to look hard at our ableism and how our internalized ideas of disability/ability affect how we include or exclude disabled women from spaces.

 Sitting Pretty is careful and caring, and I really, really think that abled people need to read this (and more books like this) so that we challenge ourselves. As Taussig makes very clear, this is not just about changing how we behave towards individual disabled people, nor is it about making better accommodations that allow disabled people to participate more fully in the rat race that is our capitalist life. Instead, we need to rethink our perspective on ability and disability entirely and build systems and expectations that work for all types of bodies and minds.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.