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It's not as good as the book about the Erebus & Terror that I just read. I say that because it tries to tell a dramatic story rather than give me an idea of how likely which facts are to be true. But I came to appreciate it for not omitting colonialist racist bullshit, and for writing about it critically.

So my main points of frustration are actually the historical facts (of whichever level of facticity, shrug, ok we can call it the story, I don't care). I find the Erebus/Terror expeditions relatable because, while also being colonialist bullshit, they are about exploring areas unknown to the people doing the expeditions, about drawing maps and uuuuh collecting (cough eating cough) new-to-them species. I get why someone would want to do that. But this? This was some war bullshit, people were literally forced to go, and gosh "capturing the treasures from the Spanish" is such a petty goal.

Also! I'm irritated that this happened before people figured out how to prevent scurvy! Couldn't they just have waited until that was solved? Sounds like such an unnecessary way to suffer and die, and like, a bunch of increasingly sick people forced to keep the ship going sounds like such a nightmare.

That brings me to the island! Cold year round, bad storms, celery? Celery as the only-ish edible plant? When you're on such an island you'd better not scare off the indigenous people who know how to live with this, but also, it's such a bad place to have a shipwreck in in the first place! Who does that!

And then the big conflict is "we have to serve our country to the death" vs "I wanna go home, it's cold and there's no food". It's...... yeah idek. Did this really have to happen?? Could they not just have said "no, we're going to a warmer place with less dangerous storms"?

This book was a potential book for the #SFFBookClub poll for a while, but I ended up reading anyway because it looked intriguing.

As a reader, it seems like a novella is a hard length to hit; it's hard to have the space for both pacing and sufficient worldbuilding, and it's also hard to have enough runway for the resolution to resonate and feel satisfying. The short of it is that I feel like this novella nailed it for me.

The worldbuilding here is brutal. The book kicks off with idyllic introduction of Raquel working for the Global Institute for the Scientific and Humanistic Study of Pocket Worlds. Pocket worlds are small offshoots of reality, much smaller than our own universe--maybe the size of a meadow or a room or a bag even--and they can run at different time rates to our own universe.

After the protagonist Raquel falls into a fast time pocket world and comes back forty years later (while only a few moments have passed relatively for herself), the world has changed for the worst. Her institute is no longer doing scientific studies, her daughter has died, and capitalism has moved in to colonize the new spaces of these pocket worlds. The implications for labor when corporations have access to nearly infinite time and space goes exactly where you think it might; people signing up for a decade of work to then come back before breakfast, extra dumping grounds for garbage, or even locking rioters into these worlds. These are just a couple examples, but woof this book captures the capitalist extraction of time and space from a new technology.

Raquel is an archeologist of pocket worlds, and believes the Quisqueyan Taino people might have escaped into a pocket world to avoid genocide and is looking for clues to their past. She is the descendant of the Taino but also of conquistadors, and in some ways is at the intersection of both. What really works for me in this book is how her personal history and struggle parallels the larger story about colonialism and capitalism--she has her own insatiable wants for knowledge and family, especially around grief about her archeological work and her lost daughter.

Not my kind of book. I can appreciate a revenge story, and I like locked room situations, deserted islands and places that feel creepily off. But this didn't convince me at all. There was no building suspense for me, just single tense moments. The character motivations felt kind of random, it just didn't come together for me. And the whole story felt very long winded, the entire second half made me think "this takes too long". I finished it because the story still had all those elements that I like, and I was curious how it'd go. But yeah, no, this was not for me.

I did however have frustrated fun researching some of the things around this book.

I think the island is fictional (there is a Meroe Island, but it's somewhere else), and I didn't find a clear equivalent for it either. I think it might be partly inspired by Kure Atoll. The Wikipedia articles mention numerous shipwrecks (although no cannibalism), an airstrip (although not WW2, contrary to many other places in the area), thick vegetation (although much much lower, we're talking shrubs, not high trees with vines) and sharks, it's currently uninhabited, and it hasn't had nuclear or biological weapons tested on it, which wouldn't quite fit into the story.

I tried to look up the poisonous fish, but mostly found info on venomous sea creatures. However, I learned that many fish in the region have ciguatera poison in them from eating a certain microalgae.

These are two cool websites that I found on my search: www.airfields-freeman.com/HI/Airfields_W_Pacific.htm www.papahanaumokuakea.gov/visit/