Reviews and Comments

The two planets Anarres and Urras are each other's moons, yet the people living on them hardly know what it's like on the other planet. All they know is that Urras is an archist society, while the people of Anarres are anarchists.

In this book we follow Shevek, a scientist from Anarres, who travels to Urras in a mission to facilitate interplanetary understanding. Every other chapter switches between past and present (or future and further future) and we thus get introduced to Shevek on Anarres and what led him to go to Urras while we also learn about him on Urras and how his mission is going.

But the book is not actually that interested in Shevek's story. Much time is spent showing us the workings (and failings) of Anarres' anarchist society: The education system, job distribution, living arrangements, romantic partnership, etc. Similarly, the chapters on capitalist and archist Urras further explores anarchism through Urras' people arguing with Shevek. Of course, we also learn about Urras' society, but any politically literate person should already know about such topics as wasteful production, poverty, police brutality, greed, etc.

Urras is obviously not presented as "the good ones", but Anarres isn't shown through rose-colored glasses either. It too is corrupted by power and is by no means a paradise. It's still a society made up of humans that can be shitty to each other.

In the end world building takes a bit of a backseat as Shevek's story becomes more important, but he is a stand-in for anyone. This story is not about a physicist—or an anarchist diplomat. It's about what justice, shame and greed are. What role art and science plays in politics. It's about what freedom means in a society.

One star is docked for a sexual assault that occurs somewhere in the middle. I don't have a problem with that topic popping up in general, but the way it enters into this story is just baffling: The people of Anarres are always painted as very conscious of power imbalances, going so far as describing sex as "copulating" as that is supposedly the only word that does not carry heavy undertones of something being done by one party to the other, but rather something done together. And still one of these folks does not understand the concept of consent! And it's not portrayed as that one person being "one of the bad ones". It would have needed more set up or explanation to be valuable.

Dieser Band versammelt fünf Texte über Digitale Bildkulturen. Die ersten zwei, "Gifs" und "Meme" sind realitätsfern, was heutige Internetkulturen angeht.

Weiter geht es mit "Modebilder", einem spannenden Text, der Instagram-Infulencerinnen in einen geschichtlichen Kontext der letzten 50 Jahre setzt. Wenn es um die immer gleich erscheinenden Bildmotive geht, wie sie Bo Burnham in "White Woman's Instagram" kritisiert, wird hier auch ein interessantes Argument konstruiert, welches diesen Bildern sehr wohl schöpferische Selbstbestimmung zuspricht. Und auch zur Kritik an repitiven Designs in High-Fashion wird ein Gegenpol eröffnet.

"Bodybilder" handelt von der Gestaltung von Gyms und den Social Media Kanälen von Fitness-Infulencer*innen. Hierbei wird ausgelotet, ob nun die Spiegel oder die Selfie-Kameras die "Wahrheit" über abgebildete Körper offenbaren und wie Corona das Denken über Fitnesstraining beeinflusst hat.

"Gesichtserkennung" schließlich befasst sich mit biases der Gesichtserkennung und geht über das Argument "Garbage In, Garbage Out" hinaus und stellt auch die Architektur von Gesichtserkennungssoftware in Frage. Maskierung und Bildgeneration sind auch noch kurz Thema.

Obwohl die ersten zwei Texte wenig wert haben, setzen die anderen drei Texte spannende Schwerpunkte, die sie genügend breit—aber auch tief—ausleuchten.

This is the second book in the "Tiffany Achings" series, following the excellent Wee Free Men—which I read thrice when I first encountered it!

Why am I talking about the first book? Well, because much of this book is dedicated to recap or summarize parts of it. Characters are reintroduced in detail and relevant plot points are retold in great detail. BUT, these recaps focus very much on the content and "facts" without repeating the witty prose, jokes and puns that accompanied these events in the first book. Overall, these parts just make you want to reread the first book to (re-)experience these events properly.

Next to retellings of the first book we thankfully do get a new plot and some new quirky characters. But overall, I'd say that these new characters aren't as interesting and the plot is also not as exciting. Our protagonist Tiffany is very passive and mostly gets pushed around while we are dragged along. This changes only at the very end—on the last 50 pages—when Tiffany finally acts with intelligence and agency and themes of identity and self are discussed in interesting ways.

That ending alone is worth 5/5 stars, but 300 pages of mostly mediocre fluff really drag down this book as a whole. I'm very curious to see where the next book falls.

Terrible. I got this because it was a footnote in the excellent Arcadia. I was hoping for some insights into loneliness as a concept, what it means for us today, and how we (can) deal with it.

All these topics do appear in chapter headings, but the chapter content does not really provide answers. The author seems scared to say anything in his own words and instead cites philosophers, poets, films and TV shows. Working with citations obviously is not the problem, and working with fiction as examples or to define terms is actually a thing I enjoy immensely, but the author should do more to guide us between these different voices and provide should some own commentary. In the end it reads more like one of those conspiracy cork boards with red string than a book: "What's loneliness? The protagonist of Taxi Driver describes his loneliness like this, Nietzsche says that and Kant says that. Let's talk about Social Media. Here's a poem and here's a quote by some philosopher. Next topic."

When the author does provide some of his own words it's to over-explain every little concept with two examples each. Some basic ideas are even explained multiple times in different chapters bloating this book to probably double the size it could be—and it's still just 140 pages excluding references and end-notes!

My last gripe with this book was that it gendered in every way possible: It uses a generic "he", sometimes a "he or she", once a "s/he" and a couple times "they". Any one of these would have been better than to mix them all throughout!

Overall, no fun at all to get through, while also not providing any great insights, ideas, or food for thought. You'd be better off reading the opening four paragraphs of the Loneliness Wikipedia page. I wrote that as somewhat of a joke, but I just checked It's actually got 95% of the facts that I took from the book.