The Thing Itself, by Adam Roberts is a fascinating read. Especially section 5 of chapter 5 and chapter 9. I was sitting on my dockraft reading, needing to sop often, look up across the water, and just … think about what was just said. (It occurs to me that anyone seeing an old-ish woman sitting …
Category: literature
Sep 04 2025
from The Yearbook, Holly Bourne
“The group chat should essentially just have been titled Adam breathed—applaud.” p29 Was anyone else out there the invisible little sister? “The end of childhood — realizing adults don’t know what the hell they’re doing.” p55 “My future wasn’t something the family ever really discussed. I guess I was supposed to just figure that out …
Aug 04 2025
a few bits from John Scalzi’s Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded
(a collection of pieces from his “Whatever” website at https://whatever.scalzi.com/) “They don’t really advertise that they kill people,” said marine reservist Stephen Funk, about why he refused to report for active duty. “I didn’t really realize the full implications of what I was doing.” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 4/2/03 responding to that, Scalzi says “You have to …
Aug 03 2025
Mania, Lionel Shriver – VERY HIGH RECOMMENDED
This is a brilliant novel. And not at all an exaggerated prediction for a near-future. The whole Mental Parity thing (no one is smarter than anyone else) is in line with the whole trans thing (sex is a social construct, not a biological reality; I’m female if I think I am), faith-based science, postmodernism (there …
Jul 31 2025
from New Model Army, Adam Roberts
“… none of the so-called democracies in the world today are properly democratic. They are, rather, rigid hierarchies, whose oligarchs consent, every few years, to punctuate their routine with a single mass reality-TV-show-style plebiscite. That’s not what democracy means.” p3 or, said better, in my opinion, “We don’t have democracy, in the world of politics …
Jun 02 2025
a few of the many insights in Holly Bourne’s When We Were Friends
“That song [“Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow” by Carole King) is the most true song that’s ever been written.” p175 “Speaking so loudly [about football] and with such arrogant authority that everyone else sort of had to listen.” p219 “Is it just me or is it crazy that football chat is taken seriously when …
May 26 2025
Dear Committee Members, Julie Schumacher – delightful!
“… I argued that the arts are a form of diversity [which was] sadly characterized as ‘divisive’” p28 “… watching me pull at what remains of my hair while I stamp back and forth in paroxysms of incredulty caused by the half-baked ideas casually lobbed in my direction from the back of the room.” p55 …
May 14 2025
from “Emergency Skin” by N. K. Jemisin
” … the Founders told us that the Earth died because of greed. That was true, but they lied about whose greed was to blame. …” “What the Leaving proved was that the Earth could sustain billions, if we simply shared resources and responsibilities in a sensible way. What it couldn’t sustain was a handful …
May 11 2025
From Picoult’s By Any Other Name
“… he’d said the main character in her play was unrelatable, because she made questionable choices. At the time, he was producing a revival of Sweeney Todd, about a barber with anger-management issues who murdered his patrons.” p163 “Grief was the tax of having something precious.” p324
Apr 14 2025
a couple good John Varley bits
“Humans are a time-binding species, existing, in the eternal now. The future flows through them and becomes the past, but it is always the present that counts.” from “Overdrawn on the Memory Bank” I’ve been thinking that I am UNlike my dog in this respect, in that SHE lives only in the present b/c she …
fiction
