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I love the conflicts, I love the characters, I love the playfulness of super big questions, I love how it's hopeful in ways that feel doable, I love the dating, I love the family stuff, I love the perpetually annoyed folks, there's just a lot about this that I like.

I just read this interview with the author about this book, and it's also great: www.bookpage.com/interviews/ruthanna-emrys-interview/

This novella was excellent.

Scorn is an emancipated AI investigator who has lost ten days of memory and is trying to retrace zir steps and figure out what story ze was trying to track down. It's a short quick to read novella with some noir detective pastiche, a lot of worldbuilding and characterization packed into its short length, and a lot of fun.

This is going to be compared to Murderbot a lot, so I'm just going to get that out of the way first. There are certainly some moments where Scorn and Murderbot have a very similar wry tone. It's third person perspective and not Murderbot's first, but it's very much in Scorn's head (or whatever body metaphor makes sense when Scorn doesn't have a head). However, Scorn is much more in tune with zir emotions (and can tune said emotions). Unlike Murderbot, ze has a complicated family relationship with zir two mothers/creators (who are fighting with each other) and a brother ai. It's also got a similar dystopian capitalist corporate future, although here artificial rights for bots and lunar autonomy are the big political issues of the day.

I wouldn't go so far as to call this a trans story at all, but there's definitely a few whiffs of this here. (Yes, yes, I hear you yelling in the back about Murderbot book 2.) This book is not really about gender, but Scorn has changed zir name, gets deadnamed by various mothers, and also has disappointed said mothers' expectations in who ze has decided to become, so it's hard not to feel some of this.

If I had any complaints, it's that it's over way too quickly. Scorn certainly does a lot of work on zir investigation to follow leads, but in the end it feels like too much happens at zem rather than because of zir actions. Regardless, I would have read an entire novel of this or ten more novellas.

Oooooh I love it so far. The beginning gives me "Close encounters of the third kind" vibes despite being much more lighthearted, and led by queer parents with their kid. I didn't know this was precisely what I needed, but now it makes so much sense (I love that movie tbh, and I love queers). And then..... so geeky and soft. I'm currently at the dinner party and it's just really good, ok.

It's much more serious than my usual kind of scifi. Like, it's spanning centuries and it's kinda technical in its descriptions of... stuff. It's also a little more heteronormative than I'm used to. But it's still cool.

Some things that I enjoyed: - copying your consciousness as needed, creating diverging timelines of yourself, both virtual and physical, communicating between them and merging them back together - the ship is alive and it's angry - sometimes you just sleep for a few centuries and tell the computer to wake you if anything interesting happens

Read it for the second time. I had forgotten how much violence of various kinds there was. I had also forgotten about some of the fantastical elements. There's a lot of relationships being negotiated under marginalisation and repression. The plot is pretty cool, the whole story is just very intense, with all that interpersonal stuff. I fell asleep for the last half hour or so, and it felt super absurd, waking up to that story having finished, and instead my flatmates talking about the cats.

Oooh. It's. Uhmmm. It started with a complicated military scifi vibe and I thought "oof that's a bit hard to follow in my current thinkiness level" but now it's closer to my space-opera-ish preferences but still hard to follow. Also some very cool things though. Including ones thatiI'm not thinky enough though. Copying consciousnesses, creating diverging timelines of yourself, yay. One downside so far is that it feels very straight. Also the audiobook is read so fast that I double-checked if I had accidentally set the speed to 1.5x or smth. I hadn't.