Reviews and Comments

A kaleidoscopic blend of genres, a supernatural mystery that keeps changing shape—amongst many other things—that requires patience, attention, and lots of post facto puzzling things out. Perhaps, for me, too much: I wasn't carried along by what I read as much as I was carried along by my expectation that there'd be more clues ahead. Then it ended and, man, I could use more.

I did not like how some of the dialogue from Black and Japanese characters was done, nor Cassie's repeated use of "Honest Injun." Fine with weird anachronisms, like people still having landlines and answering machines in a world where interstellar travel is as affordable as an RV, but some of the attitudes regarding women and racialized people don't read without mild discomfort.

Corey’s central argument—that conservatives are really reactionary counter-revolutionaries working to establish a protected and powerful group over a weakened mass of others—stands up, but I felt that a lot of the earlier chapters did little to nothing to hold it up, or even relate to it clearly.

I also felt as if there was a lack of context for, especially, the earlier works, so that their ideas were just floating around without being, as they indeed were, of and about their time and authors’ positions of power.

Frequently insightful and cutting, the book provokes thorough reconsideration of how we may understand computers and software then and today.

Nooney writes about the creation of consumer computing in the late 70's and early 80's in the US by going into the technical, economic, social, and ideological forces acting on, as well as the well- and lesser-known figures in, the establishment of consumer computer markets. Effort is made to avoid repeating the common stories, to not fall into a hagiographic focus on Jobs, Woz, Gates, etc. These differences in perspective—going into the importance of how VisiCalc was marketed and packaged—and subject—chapters on bit-by-bit copy utilities and The Print Shop—enable Nooney to break out of worn narratives about what, how, and for whom personal computing came to be.

The title of the collection and the titles of some of the stories are goofy wordplay—and it’s this surface silliness that put me off from reading it, if I am honest—but the work itself is beautiful and perverse and provocative.

“Alien Stones” and “Death of Dr. Island” and “Toy Theatre” are dense and beguiling, the sort of stuff that I liked most about Book of the New Sun and Fifth Head.

(“Three fingers” is goofy but fun; “Befana” just hammy.)