Author: Kim Stanley Robinson

Series: Part Three of The Three Californias Triptych

Narrator: Stefan Rudnicki

Published: 1990 & 2015

Finished on: 2022-03-01

Much like the second book in the trilogy, I had some trouble getting into this novel. Although I found the setting and characters far more interesting sooner. Really, just like all the other novels in this triptych, the best part of them is in their ending. In seeing the arc of the story and being able to judge what the journey of the characters mean.

I quite liked this California. It's a utopia, people have their needs met, everyone is provided for. And yet it's not boring, there are still the regular human struggles. Love triangles, disagreements about city land use, a lucky streak batting at the softball game. In particular at the end was the best part of the entire series I think. Robinson admonishes us as readers, if we want utopia we have to fight for it. Not just dream it, think of what ifs and day dream ideal scenarios. We have to fight for it, get involved in our communities, move the society of which we are a part towards a better tomorrow. We have to hope, and try.

Author: Robin Wall Kimmerer

Narrator: Robin Wall Kimmerer

Published: 2018

Started on: 2022-02-14

Finished on: 2022-02-20

I loved this book so much! I really love plants, and the past few years I have been repeatedly delighted by books exploring the plant kingdom. Moss is truly an amazing bit of life on our planet, some of the first photosynthetic life on land! It's truly amazing to think of the smallness of moss and how it thrives despite that. Moss cultivates the kind of climate it needs to grow best! We often think of moss as an inconsequential and limitless thing in the wild. It is so small and unassuming. And yet moss is incredibly old and wise. It is a very slow growing life, sometimes moss you see on a tree will be as old as the tree itself! Take some time to slow down and notice the mossy friends around you.

Author: Kim Stanley Robinson

Series: Part Two of The Three Californias Triptych

Narrator: Stefan Rudnicki

Published: 1988 & 2015

Started on: 2022-01-22

Finished on: 2022-02-14

This one took me a long time to get into. For pretty much the first half of the book I was not very interested in the characters or their lives. Jim in particular I just found incredibly...boring. Which as I progressed through the book I realized was kind of the point. A major point of drama at the end is what Jim ends up deciding to do given all his listless meandering through life. More in the review of the third and final book of the trilogy, [[*Pacific Edge: Part 3 of the Three Californias Triptych][Pacific Edge: Part 3]].

Author: Nnedi Okorafor

Narrator: Délé Ogundiran

Published: 2021

Read on: 2022-02-04

As always I was totally enraptured by the narrative that Okorafor weaves. AO, our central character, is a young disabled woman. Once we get to know her the action of the novel takes off after she experienced a very traumatic event and has blocked all memory of it. We discover what happened to force her on the run as she does. As she is on the run she meets a young man named DNA, and they trauma bond; both having just had traumatic brushes with death. The world (both governments and transnational corporations) is against them both. Neither of them can continue with the quite lives they had hoped to lead, and all seems doomed. That is until AO gains the power to fight back.

I really enjoyed Okorafor's construction of AO. It was very nice to have a disabled character whose disability is critical to the plot without it being inspiration porn. AO's disabilities are a struggle for others, but never her. It's a part of who she is and she has no shame in accessing the technology that makes it easier for her to navigate the world made for abled bodies.

As with every single one of Okorafor's novels, I highly recommend this book.

Author: Kim Stanley Robinson

Series: Part One of The Three Californias Triptych

Narrator: Stefan Rudnicki

Published: 1984 & 2015

Read on: 2022-01-22

Another post-apocalypse story, like [[*Earth Abides][Earth Abides]]. This one is thought provoking in very similar ways. What does civilization look like after all the infrastructure has been demolished/taken away? Our main character and narrator is a young man who was born after the bombs went off, and we get to see what it's like to live in a small isolated village where folk have returned to trying to eke out an existence with fishing and agriculture.

Unlike Earth Abides however, there is still civilization out there. And as Hank encounters others from beyond his small village, he must reckon with the dis junction of his pastoral village and outsiders seeking to rebuild America. Tom the Village elder tells all kinds of stories about the old days, back when America was a great empire. He hopes to instill a vision in others of regaining all the good things that were lost. But he also bends the truth, hoping to erase the bad things that also disappeared after the bombs.

I really liked the village Hank lives in. It's full of real people who go about their lives and contribute in their own way. Every exchange Hank has with others reveals more and more and I grew to enjoy it there quite a bit. At the end Hank makes his decisions that go against the majority vote of the village and then he has to deal with the consequences. But the act of making those decisions puts him in a place to relate to adults in the village in ways that he could not previously.

Author: George R Stewart

Narrator: Tim Pabon

Published: 1949

Read on: 2022-01-09

I enjoyed this book far more than I thought I would! It has a really interesting vibe to it. It does properly belong to post apocalyptic sci-fi as a genre, but at the same time it occupies its own space there. Published in 1949, the genre as we understand it was not yet well defined. As such the whole vibe of the book has a much more exploratory feel of speculative fiction than a gritty post apocalypse adventure.

We get the narrative from Ish's perspective, a geographer who had retreated to a cabin up the mountain when a pandemic wiped out most of the human race. He returns to civilization to find nearly everyone gone. Ish sets about living in this new empty world. For awhile the water and electricity still work, but nothing is forever. Ish meets a woman, they gather with a few others who survived. They have children, life goes on. Yet Ish is occupied by that great loss of civilization. What of all the generations who will come after him? How will they live? What will they suffer having lost all the knowledge, tradition, and infrastructure of the human race's domination of the world?

In this is the theme of the whole book; "What is civilization?" What constitutes its parts, and can humans get along without it? Or will they return to lives of suffering, doomed to repeat all the same mistakes as our ancestors in order to gain the same knowledge?

Ish's opinion of civilization is distinct from my own, and much of what he finds important I thought not so much. Nevertheless it was a fascinating journey to go on with him, and I much admired him for his efforts to provide for his descendants the things necessary for a happy and fruitful life.

I was quite moved at the end of the book, where we see Ish in his old age. Dementia gradually takes him, and yet we are constrained to his view. As he loses grasp of what is happening with the tribe, so do we. It is an unnerving experience. To have once been so in command of our faculties and the world we inhabit only to slowly lose it, and to only be barely aware of that loss.

I find this book bordering on a must read for me. It is a great tale of retrospection on what this civilization is, and what might go on after us. Pause and ponder what you would like to leave for those humans that go about living after a collapse of all that makes this life possible.

Author: Natalie Zina Walschots

Narrator: Alex McKenna

Published: 2020

Read on: 2021-12-31

Sneaking one last book in at the last minute! This is the fifty sixth book for the year! And who boy was this a fun one.

Anna is such a lovable character, striving to make ends meet while working temp jobs for various Villains in a world where the existence of Super Heroes is a normal society wide thing. Walschots does a great job of blending petty revenge, theft, and kidnapping that many villains partake in with a satisfying serving of fighting the man that is the superhero bureau.

The story starts out with Anna landing a temp gig that allows her talents to shine, getting a permanent job and eventually a request from the big boss to be present for a public misdeed. In the encounter Anna stumbles in the way of a hero, who causes her serious bodily harm simply brushing her aside. And so begins Anna vendetta to make all superheros, but one in particular, pay for the pain and suffering they inflict on everyday folk.

Her long recovery leaves her with nothing to do but obsessively calculate the cost in human suffering and property damage caused by heroic idiots. She blogs about her calculations and becomes slightly infamous, which gets her noticed by THE super villain Leviathan. With the massive resources he provides and the team Anna is able to hire, Anna is able to really dig in and make super heroes lives miserable until they destroy their own public and private lives. Turns out Anna's super power is spreadsheets and data. Which she puts to great use doing her best to even the scale.

I think my favorite thing about Anna is how painfully bisexual she is. It's never mentioned or labeled, but as the story is told from her point of view, she shares several of her crushes with the reader. It's always delightful.

The last act of the story gets into some....rather intense body horror. I personally loved it, a great adventure of the hero asshole getting just utterly beaten. But if you're squeamish it might get you.

Author: Douglas W. Tallamy

Published: 2021

Read on: 2021-12-26

This was such a fun read! Pretty quick too, due to the thick pages. Tallamy goes through the year month by month, describing the various life that would exist on and around an oak tree during that period of time. My initial thoughts about examining the life of an oak tree would have been thinking about the tree itself over it's lifespan. What kinds of things does the tree do when it is young, mature, and old. Now those details are included to some extent, but the focus really is all the kinds of life that depend on an oak through a single year.

Tallamy is an entomologist by profession, and this approach makes a lot more sense when I learned that. The book is largely about the various insects that depend upon an oak tree (with examples of the insects that depend on his specific oak tree from his yard!). I did not realize that so many species of animals have evolved to rely specifically and only on oak trees. Tallamy frequently touches upon how simply planting trees is not an adequate response to help the environment. They must be the right kind of trees, particularly native trees that support other native life. I am exceptionally fond of this more holistic view of environmental action. We need to structure our built environment in ways that promote and protect diversity of life.

I was surprised to learn that song birds depend largely upon a diet of caterpillars during the winter months. I was not aware that so many caterpillars winter on trees like oaks. I guess I had just assumed that eggs would be laid and then hatch in the spring. This makes me feel a lot better about not wanting to spend the money to keep my bird feeder full of seed all winter long!

I have a big old oak in my yard, and I'm really excited to take this new knowledge and be more aware of the life that goes on around it during the year! I'm also considering taking an acorn from it and planting it in an open section of my yard that could use more tree cover.

Author: Cixin Liu

Translator: Ken Liu

Narrator: P.J. Ochlan

Published: 2016

Read on: 2021-12-15

I neglected to mention in the review for the last book: Liu has some...distasteful opinions of what femininity and autism are. They are not major points of the plot and come up mostly just in passing, but nevertheless they are there.

The conclusion of the series was a bit hard to bear at times. It's really depressing, full of twists that are nearly always not the outcome that you want as a reader. That said, it was still a fun read! Each twist left me with renewed hope for another possible positive ending for the characters we were following at that moment. Liu is imaginative in inventing new ways for human beings to strive to continue living, striving all the way to the end of the universe for just a little more life. Such is the nature of life is it not?

My favorite twists were near the very end, not anything to do with what happens to the characters but with a suggestion of the possible ways the universe is constructed. It was an interesting picture of what an edenic state of the universe might be like.

It took me all the way to the conclusion of this grand adventure before I was willing to accept Liu's central theme (look at me talking like I know how to do literary analysis ;P). Perhaps part of this was simply the fact that the theme is less familiar to my American perspective than to Liu's Chinese audience. It is a theme that I have encountered in a good deal of other Asian literature as well: You have a duty to that which came before you, and that which will come after you. We all occupy a place in time, and that very fact puts us in relation to the rest of the universe. As much as we may have our own desires for how we would like to live out our life, we have a responsibility to the rest of existence around us. This responsibility does not mean that we can't live out our lives in happiness, but it does require of us that we do our part to ensure that life goes on after we are done.

Author: Cixin Liu

Translator: Joel Martinsen

Narrator: PJ Ochian

Published: 2015

Read on: 2021-12-04

Again I am surprised with how much I really enjoy this hard science fiction! Liu sprinkles it in at just the right moments in the midst of the drama of two species at war for their survival.

Liu structures the differences between humans and the Tri-Solarans so fascinatingly. The Tri-Solarans are unfamiliar with any kind of deception and subterfuge, but possess technology far beyond what humanity is capable of. The second novel in the series then centers on how four humans selected can engage trickery and deception against an enemy from whom they can hide only their thoughts. How is it possible to fight against such a foe?

With this plot set up Liu has a great avenue for embedding fascinating drama and suspense in the midst of hard scifi details that only minimally depend on those elements. The final twist of the last human opponent to the Tri-Solarans totally caught me off guard. The foreshadowing of sociological elements as the key to the solution was really fascinating.

I read Cameron's [review of The Three Body Problem](https://www.brokenhandsmedia.com/blog/2021/11/2/camerons-book-reviews-late-2021) shortly after I finished that book and was drawn in by his mentioning how this series has a reputation for being very grim. And they certainly live up to that. The second novel does end on something of a positive note, with a truce between humanity and the invading Tri-Solarans for the time being.

Oh! I have to say, the second and third books in this series are LONG! This audiobook clocked in at 22 hours and the third is 28. I think they are the longest audio fiction I've listened to this year. I'm already part way into the next novel in the series and I have to say, it takes a dark turn again fairly quickly. I think I'll need to find something very light hearted after this.

Author: Cixin Liu

Translator: Ken Liu

Narrator: Luke Daniels

Published: 2014

Read on: 2021-11-23

This was a really fascinating read! I'm normally not one much for hard science fiction, but Liu does it really well. It's a delightful mix of physics and the social lives of physicists who research in both applied and theoretical realms.

I really enjoyed the view of academics during the cultural revolution in China. What it takes to make it through times like that, and the role of integrity and faith in that struggle.

The VR game in the novel is so much fun! It's such an interesting way to introduce an alien race, and I particularly like how it is a plot device to introduce the characters to necessary information while also introducing me as the reader to these things.

I also really like the perspective of the detective, the know nothing common man who relies upon that to avoid utter despair that scientists had been powerless to combat. The conclusion at the end is delightful. I'm very excited to read the next novel!

Author: Dee Brown

Narrator: Grover Gardner

Published: 2010

Read on: 2021-11-19

This book was a hard read. I have known that my country did terrible things to Indigenous peoples who first lived on this land, but I was not aware of just how atrocious, vile, and heartless the seizure of this land was. It's not easy, but I think every American should read these stories, to understand our history of how and why we are here. It is only through incredible violence. We committed sickening acts of violence on human beings for the sake of profit, so that we might take their lands and exploit it for profit and wealth. We killed human beings for no reason other than to continue killing the planet.

Author: Upile Chisala

Narrator: Upile Chisala

The Last Necromancer