User Profile

What do you need? A robot bodhisattva.

Lovely cozy futurist feminist stories that all have bikes.

A bit fae/folk, a bit Borges or Lovecraft or... surprisingly cohesive for being a bit uncategorizable.

How cathartic for the author, to process the horror of Trump's first years of headlines by writing humanizing behind the scene stories of people caught in the chaos, often low-level bureaucrats. Really well done, really hard and doubtful to read.

This is stronger in many respects on re-read, somehow my dystopia lens last time glossed the climate youth aspect, the neurodiversity aspect, the ways she keeps the story focused on community and change at the same time so structurally.

Childhood memoir, experiencing war, abuse, varieties of homelessness. I gather he's shared most of this in prior books, but a quick grim read with a love of books at the end.

Confirmed my love of treehuggers and wilderness and distaste for the wealthy, their cronies, and government agencies captured by industry, and draws a full picture of the wild marine ecosystem, especially sea turtles, of our Atlantic barrier islands. Suitably conflicted about how to be a human in nature, through the conflicted story of Carol's life.

Fast moving "we've colonized the solar system and can rewrite minds at will" romp, there's some wonderfully inventive scenes and ideas, some of the implications are followed pretty deeply while many are just scratched, some cringes but actually turns into something of a plot!

Raw, mystery, missed connections.. Slum & urbane, a spectrum of casual, mass, intentional, personal violence. Brought very sharp by a not-overused multiverse premise. Like a Mad Max version of Butler's Kindred? Good.

Nicely explained stress/strain/torsion relationships to strengths of materials for architectural needs... whether human infrastructure or biological systems. Irreverent and focused on accidents and what for most of human history has been pragmatic guesses and extrapolations rather than maths, I enjoyed it.

A love of libraries, centered on the destruction and renewal of the Los Angeles Central Library but history and anthropology and psychology wandering out from there.

Arguing for a wider range of human differences in the experience of consciousness beyond the universalizing view of continuous, narrative, story-self-authored-as-meaning. And counter-positions on what a materialist view that doesn't try to explain away or deny conscious experience implies for morality, fate, death, etc. Enjoyable for clear thought and how often he deftly turns to literature's depictions of author or character's inner states as evidence.

Unpretentious and unfrivolous intersection of art and zen, beginning with Loori's own journey from photographer to priest. A fine angle to introduce buddhist approaches to calm, impermanence, direct experience; or approach it as a varied source of creative inspiration, every couple pages has a beautiful reproduction to go with meditative practices.

Suitably KSR, this is dry, procedural, deep, a montage of near future heroic and tragic efforts between a few human threads of lived-experience-if-not-plot. I was anticipating optimism, technological and human spirit, and that's all here but not as much as struggling with the absolute and relative violences and deaths of current delay on climate response, of terrorism and surveillance and refugee camps and wealth. And plenty of meetings. A lot of thinking about the scale of actions necessary, and great essays on where exactly we are stuck.