clownface's reviews
77 reviews

nothing really happens. there aren't huge changes of status quo. the biggest one, klara using some of her robot brain fluid to destroy a machine, literally impacts nothing at all in the story. there's mentions of klara maybe being less functional afterwards, so we get a single scene where she's disoriented (but not enough for any characters to comment on it, and definitely not enough to negatively impact anything); the machine gets destroyed (but another one arrives like 10 pages later so it was all for nothing). klara might have to reinvent her entire identity to please her family, but that idea is never taken further. klara agrees to tutor her child's friend, but she never does. 

josie, The Sick Kid, is the most generic, toothless, "feel-good" portrayal of chronic illness i've ever read! her character arc is straight out of a c-grade hallmark movie! 

there are so many interesting (but, honestly, not really new) concepts presented here - the idea of an AI being forced to reinvent their self-conceptualization for the benefit of those around them; the idea of a grieving mother literally making a fake replacement baby but it Comes Out Wrong; the idea of a "trade-off" between maybe giving your kid a chronic illness in exchange for more societal respect; the idea of an AI independently developing a personal religion - but not a single one of these ideas is given space or thought beyond the very very surface level, and none of them really matter to the characters or plot

also, from a thematic standpoint: why does klara spend the first 100 pages of the book obsessed with the idea of human loneliness, but then not even bring it up when she admits to spending most of her life, recently, being Locked In A Storage Closet? like. what?

so yeah, read this if you want a fake-deep story for your book club, but you can find the actually good concepts here done much better in countless other books.

Lydia is one of my favorite protagonists in a while; Fitz is exactly as well-developed as he needs to be for the story. Actually, the book overall is very good at developing characters to the exact level needed for the plot. Every piece of dialogue was important! 

The worldbuilding is some of the best I've seen in sci-fi. It's very obvious that Robson knows his way around the modern internet, and knows the current trends in web design and how they'll develop. I think there were quite a few points where Lydia explains things for no reason - it's her perspective, and she clearly knows what this new tech is, so why is she explaining it?

The murder mystery plot was very well-executed! Not much more to say there. All the pieces fit, for me, and I was making conclusions just as Lydia was, which was very satisfying.

Personal taste: I think the aliens could've been significantly weirder. The plot wouldn't really have to change at all if you replaced them with, say, beefy Maltese ambassadors. 

It's classic Le Guin! Highly developed and distinct characters, interesting explorations of culture and religion, strong anti-capitalism. My only complaint is that it's an awkward length. Another 50 pages would've made this book incredible, or cut out some exposition and make it a short story. 

It's depressing how, 50 years later, people with political beliefs like Davidson (who is, without a doubt, one of the most unlikable characters I have ever read about), seem more common than ever....

it's a good book, with good info, and i'm a personal fan of gretchen mcculloch's work! giving it a review this low hurts me, honestly. but there's simply not enough meat in this book for me. it spent way too long explaining beginner concepts of linguistics - again, a personal complaint! not a knock against the book itself. it's just, this book was billed to me as the end-all-be-all of linguistics on the internet, and it simply wasn't that. there's so much more to internet linguistics - even stuff that mcculloch herself talks about on her blog! - that just wasn't mentioned at all here. idk if it was an issue with getting a publisher to actually accept it, but, i'd really love if this book had just an extra 100 pages to round out with even more stuff.

simply a good book. there's so much going on (that's why i deducted a half-star - the beginning is simply too slow; there's too much to introduce, and it's just a little awkward to get through the first 50ish pages). the best way to describe it is a telenovela in book form, with a bit of magical realism thrown in. i found it compelling and enjoyable. enjoy it like a telenovela! not like a piece of fine supreme literature. it's well-written, but the real draw is the sometimes-silly twists, the intense relationships, the happy endings, the sad endings, the way that one person can be so much to so many different people. it's good

pretty good book. it covered a lot of interesting historical ground that i've never heard of before. man, life used to SUCK for people and animals alike. 

TERF bullshit: the book. 

I don't know if Bieker identifies as a TERF. I don't mean to accuse her of that. However, even a surface-level reading of Godshot is uncomfortable biological essentialism. Women can never do wrong; men can only do wrong. Women are constantly defined in relation exclusively to their vaginas and ability to get pregnant. All the women in this book are explicitly defined by the way that men have hurt them. Men are explicitly defined by how they hurt women.

Our protagonist has a complicated relationship with her mother, who is outright abusive and neglectful. However, the ending focuses on our protagonist deciding that her mother was not an awful person; rather, she was a virtuous good woman driven to do terrible things by an unseen, unknown man.

If you want feminist literature, read something that allows women to be complex people, rather than creatures defined exclusively by their genitals and by how much they can suffer.

This collection made me realize that I don't actually like Vuong's poetry all that much. It's good though! Just not for me, I guess.

So, I enjoyed this book a lot. But also, I have nuanced takes. I love me some sci-fi, especially linguistics-related, alien-culture-related sci-fi. I think the concepts presented here are really, really interesting. However, I don't think they're nearly as original as a lot of people seem to believe. Almost every detail about the Ariekei as people and as a culture, I've seen in other sci-fi, and often explored in more detail there. Aliens that use specially-bred biotech instead of machines was in All Tomorrows; people have been discussing the idea of a double-voiced alien language since, like, the 90's, on conlanging forums; "aliens that can't lie, but can communicate through elaborate metaphors to real events" was done on Star Trek! Halfway through, though, the ideas get more interesting. The Festival of Lies was definitely a new - and incredibly intriguing - concept, for me, at least. A group of aliens engaging in self-mutilation to avoid drug addiction is pretty neat, and presented as the horribly graphic-yet-confusing event it should be presented as. And the characters, generally, are pretty enjoyable.

The theme - what is a mind, when communication is so complex - is never stated out right, but is present in every single story beat. That's pretty neat, to me. Even Avice, early on, wondering about Ehrsul's cognition as a sentient AI, reinforces it.

My biggest gripe is that the ending just feels

imperialistic as fuck, and in a way that's portrayed as mostly uncomplicatedly good? Like, I understand that I, as an anthropologist and linguist, am probably going to have a weirder perspective on this than most readers, but how the hell is "all the aliens learned English and adopted European architecture" a GOOD ending? Have the Ariekei and the Embassytowners develop a creole that they can speak together! It's not a bad enough ending to ruin the book for me, and to be honest, you can see it coming 100 pages beforehand, but it just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I mean, I kind of was rooting for Scile's side - interfering with an alien culture strongly enough to change the entire way their society functions is so not anthropologically-approved. Also, Scile was just a more interesting character to me than Avice. Avice's main arc is that she... learns she has skills beyond doing the bare minimum? And then she yells at abunch of aliens so bad that their brains get irreparably changed? Meh.