Reviews and Comments

I really liked this. There's enough historical detail to be convincing, and enough "reimagining" to ignite curiosity.

Murderbot just has near infinite potential as a character. It's multiprocessing nature makes the stories complex but so rich, I feel like starting the whole series again now to pick up the bits I missed.

Starts out as an amnesia plot thriller, which can be interesting but won't hold my interest without adding something else. It then gets into the characters and climate theme which it does well and thoughtfully. There's a little sci-fi woven in but it doesn't overreach, and works to provoke thoughts about what climate migration may look like.

The conceit - are plants using us more effectively than we use them? - still works over 20 years later. The stories still feel relevant even if they have since taken some unexpected turns. An interesting contrast to Camille Dungy's "Soil", but as a non-gardener they both have my admiration.

I don't relate to these characters quite as well as the Murderbot crew, but they did get me in the end. The story just gives them a giant, wondrous playground.

I enjoyed this story for young adults while also appreciating how Le Guin weaves some deeper themes into something that appears a little formulaic at first. Savoring how one by one the mainstream expectations are broken, especially considering what those expectations would have been in 1968, made it an appealing read.

This was better than I expected from a random impulse read. It's a pretty good mix of characters in a climate-themed story that is consistent, makes some cultural commentary, and tries some unconventional narrative devices that work pretty well. There are scientist characters, but it's not a particularly science-driven story.

A simple story of survival in the early colonial American wilderness gracefully deepens into poetic meditations on nature, geography, guilt, death, history, and culture.

Distinctive among apocalypse stories for its vivid portrayals of the natural world. Also it takes place in a part of Colorado where I've lived, and I enjoyed having a sense of the geography.

I love that this story which begins on a hippy commune really wrestles with the fact that people do attempt to create lifestyles that reject some of the insanities of our mainstream culture, and probably always have, but it rarely becomes the dreamed-of utopia. And for a publish date of 2012 there is an eerily familiar pandemic event that gives even more gravitas to a very convincing story.

An impassioned argument for the honest inclusion of the day-to-day realities of the naturalist in nature writing, and for some long-absent diversity in this. And plenty of nature, too.

For me this was an introduction to Danish history via the island town of Marstal. Though I have some seafaring ancestry in the Dutch branch of my family, that was just enough keep my curiosity perked in these stories where the sea is always present. The human characters were foreign enough to keep me guessing, and they grew to inhabit a realistic historical world. Not sure how I came across this book, but glad I did.

I grew up in Wyoming but not in ranch culture. Still, I think I had enough exposure for some of this to ring true, and the solace is there for me.

This story is not surprising, hopefully one day it will be. But the graphic novel format and the artwork grabbed my attention in a way I can't explain.

This is an area of research with huge potential impacts that I had little understanding of. The basic explanations are pretty good, though I still have plenty of questions. Why are CRISPR RNA sequences palindromic? Etc. Mostly this is the stories of the people, though. Somehow I hadn't heard that there are genetically modified humans walking the earth, and how that happened is pretty interesting. Also these researchers managed to agree on some guard rails to safeguard our species, which has parallels with what is happening with artificial intelligence now.