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A dysfunctional team of four conwomen (the boss, the hacker, the distraction, and the driver) get caught and imprisoned in Justice, an ancient spaceship whose AI goes around collecting tithes of prisoners to run it; despite their fraying relationships, the four of them have to find their footing in the cultures and towns that are flourishing on the ship, escape the eyes and hands of the AI, and run one more con to escape the ship together.

Genre-wise, there's a lot of "low tech" here, such that it almost felt like a fantasy book of towns, swords, and politics but on a space-ship. It reminded me a good bit of Elizabeth Bear's Jacob's Ladder books.

The character dynamics really drove the book. Murdock (the hacker) is the first person perspective here; her main goal is to prove herself to Hark (the boss), and she has an icy relationship with Fitz (the distraction) because of Fitz's attention from Hark. From the get go, the Justice AI creepily sticks its nose into these relationships and tries to win Murdock over to its side. The book revolves around all of these shifting relationships.

Overall, this was a fun romp if you want some conwomen spaceship escape adventures.

So, the "Before the body says no" chapter is one that I'll need to have a look at in written form. The Compassionate Inquiry journaling practice sounds like I'd like to try it, and the thing after that maybe too. I do have my small book of explory stuff that I'd like to try, and I could take notes in it while listening to this chapter another time.... but I think I'll try to get a paper copy, or at least a pdf.

I've been looking forward to reading this since the authors essay on the subject matter was released on tor.com (I highly reccomend the essay). This is absolutely a book that will stay with me for a long time and one that is worth a slow burn, or if you're like me and can't put it down, then a re-read. It was devastatingly beautiful, brutally human.

The most fascinating and compelling aspect of the book for me was the interplay between the relationships: to the multitudes of inner selves and their relation and manifestation to other selves l, and to the feedback loop that exists with all social interaction. This is a story about how we relate to others (no matter their embodiment), and how those relations are influenced by our own perspective and habituated behaviors. It's also about so many other things that are best discovered first hand.

The sheer amount of depth and nuance in such a small space is a work of art and I'm sure a result of much painstaking effort. There is a beautiful economy of words, that when constellated, emerge as something entirely new.

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