Tak! commented on Those Beyond the Wall by Micaiah Johnson
Faced with a coming apocalypse, a woman must reckon with her past to solve a …
The #SFFBookClub pick for February 2025
#sffbookclub
See tagged statuses in the local BookDragons community
enne📚 commented on Power to Yield and Other Stories by Bogi Takács
Power to Yield is a collection of speculative tales exploring gender identity, neurodivergence, and religion …
I added this to the SFFBookClub poll for the month of January because I super enjoyed it.
If you don't know about it, the SFFBookClub is our informal fediverse science fiction and fantasy book club. I figure that folks from bookwyrm probably might be more interested in reading and talking about books so I wanted to post this here as well. We vote, read a book together, and then discuss via the #SFFBookClub hashtag over the course of the month. Take a look if any of these books sound interesting to you and you want to read along with others.
See: weirder.earth/@picklish/113660284130610947 for January poll
See: sffbookclub.eatgod.org/ for more general details
The boy was raised as one of the Chained, condemned to toil in the bowels …
The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain
5 stars
The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain is a deeply dark yet eventually hopeful look at the continuation of current societal structures into space.
The boy was raised as one of the Chained, condemned to toil in the bowels …
He spoke with an odd accent, intelligible but mushy, as if he held a small object in his mouth.
Ah, space danish
The boy was raised as one of the Chained, condemned to toil in the bowels …
The woman woke to the crackling of her anklet and knew the boy had come upstairs. She leaned toward her clock: the numbers glowed 06:00. The stars outside the window were growing pale. She would not sleep again now.
my every single morning
The boy was raised as one of the Chained, condemned to toil in the bowels …
The boy was taken upstairs without warning, unprotesting as he had been through all the changes in his seventeen years, the shifts from cell to cell each time he outgrew the bolt on his ankle and the Doctor came to exchange it for a larger one, an operation performed with a tool the Hold people called the Mallet, which jarred the whole leg and sometimes made the blood spray from the anklebone, and caused a sense of queasiness and superstitious awe in the boy, who would glimpse, for the instant during which the bolt and chain were removed, the shiny and alien-looking patch of underexposed skin on his leg which, according to the prophet, housed the seat of the soul.
That … is quite the #OpeningSentence
Tak! commented on The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar
The boy was raised as one of the Chained, condemned to toil in the bowels …
The #SFFBookClub pick for December 2024
Tak! commented on Kalpa Imperial by Angélica Gorodischer
«Oh, sí, mis buenas gentes, sí, ya lo creo que sí. Se puede vivir en …
The #SFFBookClub pick for October 2024
Tak! reviewed Counterweight by Anton Hur
Counterweight
4 stars
Counterweight is a nearish-future scifi thriller set on the island of Patusan, which I have just learned today has a long literary legacy.
The plot follows an unnamed employee of the LK Corporation as he attempts to unravel a series of events revolving around the world's first space elevator, erected by LK on Patusan. I enjoyed the originality of the setting, but I found the whole thing fairly convoluted and somewhat difficult to follow.
The dystopian corporation-state future where having a literal worm implanted in your brain is a condition of employment is becoming all too plausible at this point.
Tak! quoted Counterweight by Anton Hur
“Your mother is going to be a star,” said the man in the gray uniform.
— Counterweight by Anton Hur, Djuna
Tak! commented on Counterweight by Anton Hur
The #SFFBookClub selection for September 2024
Tak! reviewed Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice
"A daring post-apocalyptic novel from a powerful rising literary voice. With winter looming, a small …
Moon of the Crusted Snow
4 stars
Content warning plot discussion
This reads like a parable of the european takeover of the americas, except that the natives realized their mistake (just) in time this time around.
There wasn't much scifi or fantasy, except for the implied apocalypse that happened out of frame.
I was constantly frustrated with the characters for not being more proactive about stuff like: checking what happened with the power, being suspicious of Scott, following up on Scott after multiple red flags, etc. - but maybe I'm having unrealistic expectations about characters who don't know they're in a story.
I liked the strong themes of community and mutual support, even in the face of (imo realistic) uneven participation.
Overall a good read, I enjoyed it.
Tak! quoted Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice
"A daring post-apocalyptic novel from a powerful rising literary voice. With winter looming, a small …
A crack echoed through the boreal landscape, a momentary chaos in the still afternoon air.
Tak! commented on Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice
"A daring post-apocalyptic novel from a powerful rising literary voice. With winter looming, a small …
The July 2024 #SFFBookClub pick
Content warning now with spoilers!
I did feel like some of the plot mechanisms did get repetitive, though. For example, one of his enemies defeating him in battle, then holding him prisoner until he could be rescued. Or thinking somebody he cared about had been killed only to find out they were ok, actually.