LRRC Week 29

How's this week going? Well, I wrote "June" on half of my daily to-do lists this week, so feel free to extrapolate from that.

#57: NEUROMANCER by William Gibson

I'm going to be honest: I read this book twice this week.

I'm not sure if I was just having a hard time focusing, or if, even at the absolute best of times, this book would have been a struggle, because I'll be real, I got to the very end of this book, and felt like I had understood about 30% of what happened within it.

So, I turned back to page 1, and I pulled up the wikipedia page, and I worked through it a second time. And this time, I think I understood a solid 75-80%. And you know what, I'm good with that. I'm satisfied with that level of understanding.

Aside from that: it's interesting to see the starting point for a lot of cyberpunk sci-fi, see the origin of ideas like "the matrix", and I admittedly have a bit of a soft spot for this kind of "burnt out guy gets one last mission and it's a Whole Thing" story. I do wish the book hadn't decided it needed to describe the breasts of every single female character, but hey, for a novel written by a white dude in the 1980s, the sexism is very minimal.

#58: THE CALCULATING STARS by Mary Robinette Kowal

So this book, for a number of different reasons, didn't really jive with me.

There's nothing wrong with it, it's a fine story and the characters are well-developed, and the science all probably checks out - it just turned out that it was not, ultimately, a story I was all that interested in. Which is totally okay!

The book starts out with the world, in the 1950s, getting hit with a meteorite, which triggers extinction-level climate change. However, humanity has about fifty years left, and they decide they're going to go to space in an attempt to save the species.

This is obviously a pretty anxiety-provoking premise, at least for me, and I admittedly wasn't in a great place mentally for that this week, but honestly, I'm a bit of a sucker for stories of people helping each other, and I was really into those aspects of this book. People recovering from the initial crash, and finding ways to heal, I liked all of that, I thought that was the strongest aspect of the book.

It's the astronaut plotline, which is the main plotline for most of the novel, that I wasn't that interested in. I don't really have a reason, it just didn't catch me. A lot of the story is about the main character having to deal with sexism and anxiety and anti-Semitism, and like, that's fine, and I should probably have been more invested in all that than I was, I just...wasn't really.

If alternate history and the science of space travel is your thing, I'm sure you would enjoy this! It's just occupying a weird uncanny valley for me.

NEXT WEEK'S AGENDA:
#59: Crier's War by Nina Varela
#60: An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon