We’re Here Because We’re Here Because

River | they/them | 22

[moonlightmarasi]

2026 reads

- Prey, Michael Crichton

- After Dark, Haruki Murakami

- Turtles All the Way Down, John Green

- Butter, Asako Yuzuki

- the andromeda evolution, Daniel Wilson

- The city and its uncertain walls, Haruki Murakami

-murder bimbo, Rebecca Novak

- sphere, Michael Crichton

- Hooked, Asako Yuzuki

- the gunslinger , Stephen King

- the Hot Zone, Richard Preston

[inthetags]

Reblog and put in the tags what your blog title (not URL!) is a reference to.

[moonlightmarasi]

Obsessed with the thematic significance attributed to Denny’s in modern Japanese literature

[moonlightmarasi]

Going back to my roots (thinking about writing book reviews again)

[moonlightmarasi]

Just found out that EB White is a man I always thought they were a woman

[dykebeckett]

I love watching youtube book synopses and reviews by beautiful women about books they thought were stupid and bad. so much funs for me I love hating

[king-quare]

got some asshole's follow-up to The Andromeda Strain for christmas, called The Andromeda Evolution, and from the blurb it seems to be a fairly uninspired riff on VanderMeer's Southern Reach series. we will see if it's any good

[king-quare]

it's not great. put simply: the story has some good ideas and Wilson has a knack for imagery and one-liners, but the execution is remarkably wooden and the theming has huge usamerican-shaped holes in it. Overall I would not recommend. Details below.

In a literary sense it fails constantly by telling and not showing, showing and then just telling anyway, and spoiling its own twists 'n' turns by telling you how important certain details are. Writing things like "this decision would save four billion lives" and "this small detail caused a huge misunderstanding later on" is not evocative or even effective foreshadowing. It is hitting me over the head with a club that has "consequential" written on it because you think I won't notice otherwise.

Most of the book also does a middling-to-bad job of transitioning between locations and perspectives, jerking you around like a pinball and not really justifying why. Eight paragraph chapters will spend fully half their space just getting you up to speed on who is where and what they're doing there, and then rush to explain why this is relevant before spiriting you away to some other unrelated event. I think the intended effect is an impression of a big, multifaceted story with all sorts of moving parts. In practice, it just makes the book feel less like a story and more like a series of disconnected events. Very inelegant and crass narrative flow.

As prose it's not especially good or bad. There is an over-reliance on and persistent overuse of parentheticals and em dashes -- at least one per page -- which is sloppy and in many cases outright boring to read. There are occasional footnotes at the bottoms of the pages (the book is masquerading as a government report (just like the original andromeda strain)) and they tend to be placed well, offering in-setting context as needed and more than once allowing the story a moment to poke fun at itself. But this is not always successful.

Themes and morals are not amazing, but not the worst. For a novel only a few degrees separated from Crichton's Congo it has a very well-formed and carefully considered stance on the uncontacted indigenous peoples of Brazil, clearly parallelling the area's historical relationship with exploitation and colonialism with a mad scientist's crazed plotting to build a space elevator and unleash the grey goo scenario. This is probably in large part due to Wilson's own experience as a Cherokee citizen. But the theme doesn't quite land as anti-colonial because the novel cannot let go of imperialism, because it centers the US government as a major positive force.

This is where the usamerican-shaped holes come in. Attempts to patch them are made, assertions that the technology of the outside world does not make us better than uncontacted indigenous peoples, acknowledgements that the US government spying on the amazon rainforest and sending ground squads (and later, scrambling fighter jets) into Brazilian territory is in some way going to cause all sorts of horrific problems. Unfortunately, this is muddied by an air of regrettable necessity surrounding US intervention and cloying assertions to the tune of "there's only one race: the human race." Several times the mission is jeopardized by the single Chinese member of the team rightly fearing that she cannot trust these lackeys of the US Government, framing it as some moral failing to not work together harmoniously on this illegal black operation organized by a hostile foreign power. There's also an incredibly tasteless amount of shade thrown at the PRC for making their own space station after being intentionally left out of building/operating the ISS in this same chastising tone.

Back on theme, we've also got a horrid one about parentage and children. This is already a bad idea because of how overused the concept is, but it's made worse by the story not even trying to connect it to the action. It would be so easy to do, just add some lines about how the plot is about securing the future or making a better world for the future. But it just never happens. There's also an incredibly forced romance subplot between the protagonist and the only non-hostile, non-inconsequential woman in the story who isn't chinese.

All that said, the ending action sequence is killer. Wilson knows how to make an exciting mental image and narrates confrontation very well. Resolution is a little too neat and it plays a nasty trick to wiggle out of promised consequences but hey, even sticking the landing partway is an excellent outcome for such a stilted book.

On the novel as a sequel, I really like the ideas at play. Either Crichton was always in that kind of hokey comic book space (not unlikely) that Wilson seems to thrive in, or Wilson has really dialed into Crichton's kind of sci-fi nonsense. This expansion of the real world into a proper "andromeda strain setting," with a rewrite of global history to secretly be about the andromeda strain and sci-fi tech like functional brain-computer interfaces, would make for a killer conspiracy novel. If Wilson had been interested in using this as anything but set-dressing, that is. Would also make for a good SCP article.

I'd rate this 2/5. Not utter dogshit, but a pretty slapdash book, admittedly with some fun ideas. If I hadn't read it in one sitting to get it over with i would not have picked it back up.

[389]

Sulfur, salt, and other minerals color the crater of Dallol volcano, part of the Danakil Depression in Ethiopia. At 157 feet (48 meters) below sea level, Dallol is Earth’s lowest land volcano.

Photograph by Carsten Peter

[1000-life-hacks]

[archeologist-prophet]

Lovely to see we have spaces where you can gain access to so much literature!

[droids-in-disguise]

This tiktok killed me 😂

[0bscure42]

if you make six of crows fanart and you whitewash inej and jesper, i will personally feed you to the shredder

[morally-earl-gray]

rip ian malcolm u would have hated chatgpt

[valtsv]

ever since i learned about ghost buildings i haven't been able to stop thinking about them

[valtsv]

this is body horror

[zooophagous]

You may be gone and it looks like you never even existed, but you still left permanent changes in the people closest to you.

[cparti-mkiki]

"goddess" "matriarchy" "female wisdom" girl your civic rights

[tauindi]

“But I didn’t and still don’t like making a cult of women’s knowledge, preening ourselves on knowing things men don’t know, women’s deep irrational wisdom, women’s instinctive knowledge of Nature, and so on. All that all too often merely reinforces the masculinist idea of women as primitive and inferior – women’s knowledge as elementary, primitive, always down below at the dark roots, while men get to cultivate and own the flowers and crops that come up into the light. But why should women keep talking baby talk while men get to grow up? Why should women feel blindly while men get to think?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

[yeetus-6942069]

[389]

Good Morning, Mr. Orwell (1984)

[scifiblast]

Paul Lehr: 8 Magnificent Science Fiction Paperback Covers

Paul Lehr: 8 Magnificent Sci-Fi Covers

Paul Lehr: 8 Magnificent Sci-Fi Covers

[where-our-stories-start]

I think you, Aza Holmes, will have a very full life. I think you’ll go to college and study whatever you want. And you’ll have a career. One that you’re proud of. And I think you will be with someone. Someone great. I think you, Holmesy, will have an incredible love story. I even think you’ll have a family of your own one day. You’re gonna make a whole damn life for yourself. I know it. But I don’t wanna lie to you. I think it’ll be hard sometimes. I think sometimes you’ll see that life unbuilt. But you’ll always rebuild it. And you will never be alone. Promise. Because you will always love and be loved. And love is both how you become a person and why. Love, Holmesy, is how you become real.