clownface's reviews
77 reviews

i am so tired of uninteresting and uninspired personal memoirs masquerading themselves as informative nonfiction

was good when it stuck to eel facts. was boring when it talked about our author's personal life. who cares.

i am being harsh here for comedic effect

really good book to talk about at parties. roach is top-notch as always

I came to this book after watching the Netflix series, and, warning: they're very, very, very different.

I think Land is a wonderful writer, I adore how open and honest she is throughout this memoir. Yeah!

Really, really strong worldbuilding; some of the best I've ever read, up there with Le Guin, honestly. The characters are fun, feel fleshed-out, and their motivations and inner worlds feel real. Some incredibly original concepts in here! I love that the octopus language doesn't get decoded fully; that would be very unrealistic and fully take me out of the world, coming from an anthropology/linguistics background.

Thematically, it's so tight! It's incredibly good at burying the lede of the theme and letting you connect the dots - it's fundamentally about communication and the foibles within. Comparing to another sci-fi "first contact" work ostensibly about communication, Embassytown by China Mieville, this book carried the theme much stronger and in a way that I ideologically agreed with more. It's everywhere you look - obviously the human-octopus contact, but also the attempts to reason with a slaving ship AI, with communicating with a semi-smart "soulmate" AI, with finding connections between humanity and AI and octopuses, etc... so lovely.

I think the three plotlines were all engaging in their own way, but there was an obvious weak link among the three - I'm sure you'll find it if you read the book. That's where the half-a-star deduction came from.

One of the most pointless, meandering, uninteresting books I've ever read. There's nothing interesting from a sci-fi worldbuilding point of view, the characters are flat and bland, and the moral conflict is contrived and boring.

Wonderful beautiful prose, obviously, but wow, Joan really doesn't want us to know she's rich despite how often she talks about things only rich people could do.

One of the strongest, most engaging concepts I've ever read in a sci-fi book! All of the concepts were explored in exactly the way I wanted them to be. Knocking off a few stars because of the very, very overt and uncomfortable sexism throughout the book. I understand it's because it's a Product Of Its Time, but yiiiiikes. Almost every female character is motivated exclusively by sex and seduction, and of course there's the woman who mentally regresses to being a baby and then develops a romantic and sexual relationship with her surrogate father as she "grows up"...YIIIIKES!

A little too navel-gazey for me at times. The beginning half was much better than the ending half.

some really fun info in here, very good at balancing "quirky fun facts" and "sad depressing facts". i just don't know why macfarquhar felt the need to describe Bahrain as a "Lilliputian island nation" three separate times. also don't like his ambivalence on the israeli occupation of palestine.

brilliantly written, some of the best prose i've read in years. the opening scene, with dolores in the wheelbarrow, is such incredibly beautiful and provocative imagery. also, the prose shifts to accommodate the various mental states of characters - the schoolmaster is almost always focused on his own disgust towards himself and his involvement with the other survivors; dolores thinks slow, so the prose grows languid and focuses on the here and now, her surroundings; the matriarch and jan have this intensity to their perspective not found elsewhere, focused on the others and their slights towards them, and towards the future

this book is chock-full of themes and motifs and i personally felt that they were all adequately explored! how does one interpret humanity in the post-apocalypse - by mental capability, by physical appearance, by moral standing? how is a human meaningfully different from a stone when there is no more society? 

the aquinas stories were shocking and enjoyable - the one about the girl with the perfect life and her epileptic brother will stick in my head for ages.

will definitely be checking out williams' next publication.