Reviews / Books

This page is for tracking and talking about books I've read, because I am sick of Goodreads. I will probably not write a whole review for every one unless I feel inspired to.

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7.15.25

Shards of Earth by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Orbit, 2021

This got recommended to me when I finished the Three-Body Problem books, and I was kind of surprised by that once I got into it. There is just the right amount of goofiness here—it could easily fly over the edge into quipping territory, but never does. Still, the characters and the network of worlds they come from are all a lot of fun (planet of crab-type alien guys whose social strata are defined by being good at board games). Tchaicovsky excels here at making the strange familiar, and totally made-up and bizarre creatures sort of relatable. I liked this enough that I immediately picked up the sequel, and I'm having a lot of fun with that too.

★★★★

7.12.25

The Tusks of Extinction by Ray Nayler

MacMillan, 2024

Nayler's debut novel The Mountain In The Sea was really great at creating a world alarmingly adjacent to our own and wedging open those differences until the whole thing spiraled into abstraction. This book does the same thing in much less time, imagining a world where elephants are extinct but mammoths have been engineered back to life, and where the expertise of the world's last elephant expert is crucial to keeping them alive. It has some pretty wild ideas, some of which you just have to buy because they make the story work, but his prose is smooth and this one is a pretty quick read. I liked it.

★★★

7.9.25

The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation by Cory Doctorow

Verso, 2023

I've had this book kicking around forever and put off reading it because I figured I had already gleaned Doctorow's thesis ("enshittification," etc.) through osmosis and posting. But the case he makes here—founded on the principle of interoperability, and describing in alarming clarity the fundamental failures of regulation in tech—is compelling, concise, and loaded with anecdotes that will make you mutter "oh, no" á la The Unaccountability Machine. It's highly readable and fairly digestible, but honestly feels a little short. I feel like there is a 400-page Director's Cut of this book that I would like even more.

★★★★

7.6.25

OceanSpace by Allen Steele

Ace, 2001

Yeah, this one was fine. Whatever. The main thing I will remember from this book is the extremely 2001 idea that "obviously books will be electronic in the future. They will be two iPads hinged together, each of which holds one copy of one book."

★★

6.30.25

Fine Structure by qntm

2021

I grabbed this alongside There Is No Antimemetics Division and I think I ended up enjoying this one a lot more. It's weird, and a little unpolished, but it is absolutely packed with ideas and it never stops moving. The first three or four chapters basically read like a short-story collection, introducing different characters in different places, and then gradually weave together until the whole thing is blasting along at breakneck speed. Has some ideas and setpieces, especially toward the end, that I have kept thinking about how cool they are.

★★★★

6.18.25

Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams

MacMillan, 2025

I would liken this book to The Unaccountability Machine pretty closely, and in fact I might recommend reading that before you read this, the story of the 2010s at Facebook and the complete disregard by its makers and managers for the increasingly real hell it was unleashing on society. I also found it kind of charming how culpable Wynn-Williams is throughout, acknowledging immediately that she's embarrassed to have thought working at Facebook was aspirational even in 2009. Also I can't believe she waits until the epilogue to reveal that her psycho boss was dating Bobby Kotick.

★★★

6.14.25

There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm

I have been online enough to hear periodically about the SCP project, but I've never really explored it in much depth. To me, the most interesting stories people submitted were the silly anomalies like “We found a vending machine that still has Pepsi Blue. Not clear who is stocking it” and the rest was amateur horror for the TVTropes crowd. But it's also true that I am a hater and a snob.

Anyway, I picked this up off a recommendation and just took it straight without thinking about the broader "universe" and I really liked it. The concept of an entity that is dangerous because it insists on being forgotten is a very funny idea, and it's rolled out to every possible corner here to form a story that more than once got me to think "but what if you tried—" and then tried it. And for my previous writeoff of the SCP setting, I honestly really liked the hook being that all these characters are facing down this cosmic threat for a day job, which lends a shade of Vandermeer. The jumps between characters and the occasional weird, unexplained prop or setpiece thrown in keep the pace up and the energy high, and the prose itself flows professionally, if some scenes get a little gratuitous.

★★★½

5.29.25

The Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davies

University of Chicago Press, 2024

I really liked this book in the way you can like a political thriller or a Conner O'Malley bit, which is to say I was thinking "uh-oh" pretty much nonstop throughout. Davies leverages the midcentury school of cybernetic thinking—largely forgotten now after a brutal erasure by the profit-worship thinking of Friedman and Welch—and makes the argument that if emergent systems like corporations and states can be reasonably called "artificial intelligences," it might logically follow that they can become, in a sense, mentally ill.

The concept described in this book of the "accountability sink" (a name for the practice of making evil decisions but framing them as inevitable policy-following) is something I know will permanently inform the way I see the world. Human-built systems have broken the reins of human control; no single person can be satisfactorily put on trial when a corporation or other cybernetic organization causes death and suffering.

Overall I think this book is a great introduction to cybernetics (I understood it okay) and gives you some great references to read later. The middle chapters are basically a retelling of Stafford Beer and can get a little slippery, but the amount of real-world observation backing up Davies' claims keeps it from getting too abstract.

★★★

6.3.25

American Bulk by Emily Mester

2024

This one is great. Mester's way of writing is so lurid, so immersive, and frequently extremely funny. The very first essay, about how she learned to associate brand names with logos before she learned to read, does so much to hook you immediately, and while there are a few slouches later on it keeps firing like that nearly the whole time. I tore through this book in two or three days. It is the best narrative critique of capitalism I think I've ever read.

★★★★

5.26.25

Mindbridge by Joe Haldeman

1976

A little while ago I read Haldeman's The Forever War and I thought it was pretty good. I found Mindbridge a little weirder and further-reaching and I liked it a lot more. Telling the story partially through future-dated excerpts of research papers and biographies is genuinely a fun idea, and the setup (a team of people with the hyper-hazardous job of exploring and terraforming alien planets by way of a matter-transmission technology) makes this sci-fi story totally devoid of spaceships, which I think is pretty interesting, as is the titular Mindbridge. For being 50 years old this one is refreshingly original.

★★★★

5.22.25

In Ascension by Martin MacInnes

Atlantic, 2023

When I started this book I thought I would probably knock it out in a couple days, since it's only about 200 pages. Instead it took me about a week and I was constantly surprised at just how much plot had happened compared to the page count.

Really I think this could be three books: A literary novel about a Dutch woman's abusive childhood, a mystery set at sea, and a near-future sci-fi story about a deep-space mission. But managing to pack those all together in a way that fits takes a lot of talent. A huge variety of settings are made to feel increibly real and alive, and the characters you get to spend any time with feel just as vivid.

★★★

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