Category: Politics
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Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente
Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente Rating: 4/5, good When this was published last year (2018), it took the Twitter world by storm. It seemed like everybody was posting about it, but I didn’t buy it when it first came out because the premise didn’t appeal to me. It’s a scifi novel about some Earthlings…
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Infomocracy by Malka Older (Centenal Cycle #1)
Rating: 4/5, good Infomocracy by Malka Older is a political science fiction thriller. It’s about a near-future world where 20 years ago, the peoples of the world split off from traditional countries into small local voting blocks of 100,000 people known as centenals. The people in these centenals vote to choose which global government to…
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Work: Capitalism, Economics, Resistance by Crimethinc
Rating: 3/5, average This is a decent, accessible primer to anti-capitalist thought (with lots of pictures!). It’s main failing, which is common to a lot of anti-capitalist stuff, is that it goes into detail about the evils of capitalism and gives very little attention to solutions, improvements, or alternatives to capitalism. It starts off with…
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Born That Way: Genes, Behavior, Personality by William Wright
Rating: 4/5, good I picked this book up thinking it would be about the science of genes, behavior, and personality, but it’s really more about the history and politics of the field called behavioral genetics. It doesn’t answer the question, “How much are we controlled by genes, how much by environment, and how much by…
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I Hate the Internet by Jarett Kobek
Rating: 4/5, good “A useful novel against men, money, and the filth of Instagram” I Hate the Internet is a very strange book. It’s half novel and half anti-tech industry diatribe. Jarett Kobek beats his breast to social justice precepts while railing against call-out culture and slacktivism. There are characters, but they take a backseat…
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So Rich, So Poor by Peter Edelman
Rating: 4 So Rich, So Poor encapsulates in 162 pages the forces that keep people in poverty in America. It’s written by Peter Edelman, a lawyer and former policy advisor to Robert F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton. He draws on fifty years of experience in government to give a perspective on poverty in its historical,…
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All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders
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Rating: ☆☆☆☆✮ January 2016 I’ve been following Charlie Jane Anders’ career for a couple of years now, and so I was super excited when I heard that she released a science fiction/fantasy novel. She was a writer and editor at i09, a science, science fiction, and pop culture news blog. Charlie Jane Anders is also the host…
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The City & The City by China Mieville
Book Title: The City & The City Author: China Mieville Year Published: 2010 Publisher: Random House Rating: ☆☆☆✮✮ I read this book for science fiction club. I’ve seen news about China Mieville on a lot of literary scifi blogs, so I was looking forward to reading this one because I thought the prose would be a…
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Atlas Shrugged – Review, Summary, and Quotations Guide
So, a little over two months ago, I started reading Atlas Shrugged. It’s a book my Dad has been suggesting I read for almost ten years, and since I’m currently unemployed and don’t have any more college reading to do, I figured I’d buckle down and git ‘er done. What I found is that Atlas…