Historical sf/f. Steampunk. In the late 19th century, idealistic (but somewhat misguided) socialists from Europe and formerly enslaved people from North America purchase territory in what is now the Congo from the brutal colonial regime of Belgium’s King Leopold II, and join forces with those already living there (some of whom have mysterious access to …
A collection of pieces by organizers and scholars who have been part of the movement in Canada in the last two years to defund the police and work towards police and prison abolition. I interviewed one of the editors and one of the contributors recently, so check that out for more details: https://mediacoop.ca/node/119048. I won’t …
Cosy hopepunk-ish sci-fi, from one of the authors responsible for the recent popularization of that sort of book. It is, in fact, the fourth (and I believe final) instalment in the series that started with Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. This one is set at an interstellar truckstop of sorts, on a planet …
Prehistory. A massive book that looks at what is known and what can be reasonably guessed about the trajectory of human existence in the distant past, written by an anthropologist and an archaeologist. It is a bold new synthesis woven in part from straightforward reporting of empirical evidence long-known in specialist circles but rarely disseminated …
Science fantasy. Spaceships and necromancers. Sequel to Gideon the Ninth. Because it is a sequel, I can’t say anything about the plot without spoiling the first book. I will say that I was a little hesitant to read this one because I thought there was no way that it could match the intricacy and sheer …
A mixture of movement memoir and grounded theorizing about some key areas of reflection and debate in movements. The author is one of the three Black women who initially coined the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter. She was already an experienced organizer at that point, having cut her teeth doing neighbourhood and city-wide organizing in the Bay Area …
Sci-fi novella. The next entry in the Vorkosigan saga, which I am slowly working my way through. The series largely follows Miles Vorkosigan, scion of a powerful house on a planet with a deeply engrained, quite feudal, very hierarchical, and intensely militarist social order that is, in all of these respects, gradually becoming looser, more …
Sci-fi short stories, plus three essays about the genre. Translated from Chinese. The stories cover a real range of kinds of science fiction and kinds of writing, so it is hard to make any general statements about the book, and the introduction by the editor/translator quite rightly warns against reductive Orientalist readings of their Chinese-ness. …
Memoir. By someone who is part of southern Ontario/Montreal anarchist networks, about their decade working as a stripper. Rich and nuanced, vehemently refusing the caricatured understandings held by many who do not do this work. As the backbone of the book, uses fragments, moments, nights, weekends extracted from their time at the various clubs where …
Sci-fi. A first contact story set in 2007. The protagonist is the estranged oldest daughter of a narcissistic publish-all-the-leaks anti-government guy. He releases a leaked memo indicating that the US government has been covering up the existence of extraterrestrial life on earth, but she has no interest in this and wants nothing to do with …