Books

The Martian Chronicles is a roughly connected collection of short stories written at various times by Ray Bradbury that were about humans going to Mars. They don't really have a coherent story but some of the characters and events cross over and it beats having to read 50 stories separately but is it worth reading them at all?

Where Fahrenheit 451 showed the sci-fi side of Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles shows his poetic side.

In many ways it is more ambitious than 451, indeed many of the themes that Ray had to connect with the thread of storytelling show themselves off beautifully here with short stories exploring colonialism, religion, need of belonging, blowing ourselves to bits (something that doesn't sound as far-fetched considering the events we are all going through) and he creates a wonderful mythology about Mars one that is more fantastical than realistic for sure but feels lived in.

Although even when talking about hardcore science-fiction books this little collection of stories manages to achieve something that I have seen very few stories do right, namely that it shows how weird and magical and utterly incomprehensible that other lifeform (be it Martians or otherwise) can be.

Ultimately this is a book about people and their stories, experiencing it brought out a lot of emotions and I was ultimately left amazed by how well the whole was written.

Highly highly recommended if you're into short stories

hello, i am very new to reading ad recently fell into booktok, TikTok about books, in which they recommended to read books by Frieda McFadden, has anyone read her novels? Let me know what you think and which one is your fav, thanks!!

Hello I’m fairly new to reading and am wanting to see what books people recommend and why, also i really enjoy horror/mystery!

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/10559643

From the article:

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Portrait of author Mary Shelley left, the frontispiece to Shelley's novel 'Frankenstein' by Theodor von Holst, right| People's World composite

Yet another Frankenstein film has made its way to the screen. Despite critical acclaim and projected awards, it has little in common with Mary Shelley’s novel. Readers interested in Shelley’s political vision and the historical pressures that gave rise to the book are far better served by turning to the original text. To mark the 175th anniversary of Mary Godwin Shelley’s death, we revisit this novel.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein—written in 1816, when Mary was eighteen, and published two years later—emerged during a period of political conservatism in post-Napoleonic Britain. Fear that revolutionary ideas from France might cross the English Channel fostered an increasingly repressive social climate. The legacy of the French Revolution, followed by years of war and economic crisis, produced widespread unrest and prompted the British state and its allies to suppress ideas perceived as destabilising.

Radical politics, religious dissent, and new scientific theories about life and matter were regarded as threats to social order. Materialist models in particular, which explained life through body, sensation, and experience, as well as early evolutionary approaches, came under sustained conservative attack. Journals such as the Quarterly Review denounced materialism and anti-scriptural science as threats to the established Church and as deeply system-destabilising. Debates about the nature of life were treated as politically suspect, leading to renewed calls for censorship and prosecutions for blasphemy. Popular unrest was further fuelled by economic hardship, industrial change, and movements for political reform, and included the Luddite uprisings (1811–19).

Shelley’s novel must also be understood in the light of her family background and intellectual inheritance. As the daughter of William Godwin, the leading English radical philosopher of the 1790s, and Mary Wollstonecraft, a pioneering advocate of women’s rights, she grew up immersed in debates about reason, perfectibility, gender equality, and social reform. Mary Wollstonecraft, who died days after giving birth to Mary, was the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Frankenstein reflects this legacy. The novel engages seriously with contemporary radical science, presents life as a product of material processes without divine intervention, and derives human development from sensation, environment, and experience. In doing so, it explicitly aligns itself with materialist modes of thought that were under fierce attack in Britain.

The frontispiece to the 1831 ‘Frankenstein’ by Theodor von Holst, one of the first two illustrations for the novel| Public Domain

The Shelleys’ and Byron’s exile on the Continent underscores this pressure: Percy Bysshe Shelley’s outspoken atheism and radicalism made England an increasingly hostile territory for him. After leaving Britain in 1816, Mary and Percy Shelley never returned during his lifetime. From Switzerland and later Italy, they observed British repression; Shelley and Byron produced some of their most radical works, while Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein.

Frankenstein was conceived in the summer of 1816 on the shores of Lake Geneva, within the exiled circle around Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, Claire Clairmont, and Byron’s personal doctor, John William Polidori. Persistent bad weather—the “Year Without a Summer”—forced the group to spend long evenings indoors, filled with conversations about philosophy, natural science, and the nature of life. After collectively reading German Gothic fiction (especially the recent collection Fantasmagoriana [1812]), Byron proposed a literary competition: everyone should write a ghost story.

This prompt gave rise to two texts of lasting significance: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Polidori’s tale The Vampyre (1819). Polidori’s text established the modern literary archetype of the aristocratic vampire, Lord Ruthven, portraying him as a metaphor for a dangerous, blood-drinking feudal lord and thereby directly paving the way for Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula (1897). Viewed in its historical context, this tale too is highly politically charged. While Byron and Percy Shelley’s own texts remained fragments, Mary Shelley transformed her vision into a philosophical novel that far exceeded the original “ghost story” and became a foundational reflection on science, power, responsibility, and social exclusion.

One of the most famous stories in world literature, Frankenstein tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, a young scientist driven by curiosity and the desire to transcend natural limits, who animates a Being from assembled body parts. Rejecting the Being at the moment of its animation, Victor abandons his creation and leaves it to its fate. The Being initially behaves kindly, acquires language, literature, and human conduct, and carefully prepares for its first encounter with people. Repeated rejection, cruelty, and Victor’s persistent neglect eventually drive it to seek revenge on its creator.

The novel’s settings, Geneva and Ingolstadt, function as fundamentally opposed political spaces. Geneva, Victor’s place of origin, embodies the dialectical legacy of the Enlightenment: it is both a stronghold of repressive Calvinism and the birthplace of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose philosophy radically challenged that order. The city thus represents a tense field of bourgeois duty, familial obligation, and the unrealized potential of radical social designs. Shelley counters this with Ingolstadt as a deliberately chosen site of rupture. In contemporary British perception, the city was inseparably associated with Adam Weishaupt’s Illuminati order, which conservative circles—stoked by pamphlets such as John Robison’s Proofs of a Conspiracy (1797)—regarded as the epitome of a Jacobin-atheist world conspiracy.

By having Victor Frankenstein establish his laboratory precisely here, at the epicenter of the feared “conspiracy of reason,” his seemingly private experiment becomes politically charged. His secrecy, solitary pursuit of creative omnipotence, and deliberate circumvention of established institutions mirror the conspiratorial practices attributed to the Illuminati. Shelley thus situates Victor’s ambition within a space of revolutionary transgression that links scientific creation with social re-creation. Victor’s failure lies not in his pursuit of knowledge, but in its irresponsible execution, his decisive abdication of duty.

In the original 1818 edition, Shelley finally performs a remarkable reversal: it is not Victor Frankenstein, but the Being he creates, who proves to be the reflective observer, consistent moralist, and analytical thinker. Victor’s failure lies not in his pursuit of knowledge, but in its irresponsible implementation. Shelley’s tone towards Victor is often ironic or quietly contemptuous; he appears intellectually reckless, emotionally immature, and incapable of sustained responsibility. Shelley dramatizes the collapse of Frankenstein’s godlike ambition: “But now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart” (Chapter 4). What follows is a decisive abdication of responsibility.

By contrast, the Being functions as an attentive scientific observer. It carefully documents its development and systematically reflects on sensation, language, emotion, and social relations. Its gradual learning unfolds through sensory experience, observation, imitation, and engagement with literature (Plutarch, Goethe’s Werther, Milton’s Paradise Lost). This process mirrors contemporary physiological and pedagogical research, particularly theories that emphasize the shaping role of environment, nerves, and experience. Shelley thus links scientific attentiveness with ethical competence: in this respect, the Being succeeds where Victor fails. It follows processes through, observes consequences, and reflects on the moral implications of knowledge.

Crucially, Shelley presents the Being as fully human. It is a moral creature with a developing character. Naturally benevolent, it performs good deeds in secret, restrains its anger, and approaches its first attempt at human contact thoughtfully, hoping that reason and compassion will overcome prejudice. Its moral goodness endures repeated rejection and violence; only the systematic denial of recognition and care—primarily by Victor—ultimately transforms its desire for compassion into revenge. Its plea for a female companion is expressed as a claim to natural justice, sociability, and mutual affection, and Victor’s destruction of the half-finished female marks a decisive betrayal that completes the Being’s isolation.

Shelley reinforces this critique through the novel’s structure. After Elizabeth’s murder—Victor’s bride—the narrative reverses the roles of pursuer and pursued: Frankenstein becomes the obsessed hunter, mirroring the Being’s earlier quest for compassion. Victor thus suffers the fate he had imposed on the creature, should he create a companion—exile from the “civilized” world into the wilderness. It is no coincidence that their final chase takes place in the Arctic, a region of eternal ice associated in Shelley’s Europe with political stagnation and restorative conservatism. Walton conveys the perspective of this society. The Being is granted nearly the last words of the novel: in an extensive account of its perspective, it confesses its crimes, expresses remorse, and declares its intention to withdraw from the world, while Victor dies unrepentant, clinging to his self-justification.

The novel closes with the tragic insight that neglect, isolation, and the refusal of responsibility by individuals and society can destroy even the most promising moral beginnings. The monstrous, Shelley suggests, lies not in the creature’s origin, but in Frankenstein’s abdication of scientific, social, and ethical duty.

Read in this light, the novel’s subtitle, The Modern Prometheus, articulates on the level of myth the same political problem embedded in Victor’s education and ambition. Mary Shelley frames Frankenstein with Milton’s Paradise Lost, using as her epigraph Adam’s challenge to his maker: “Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay / To mould me man?” The question shifts judgment away from the creator’s authority towards his responsibility and towards the rights of the created. The Being’s grievance is therefore as political as it is moral: it is denied recognition, community, and justice; it embodies the radical claim that authority without responsibility generates violence. The epigraph thus positions Frankenstein as a critique of illegitimate power and aligns scientific creation with contemporary debates about tyranny, equality, and revolutionary reform.

Finally, the novel situates its concerns within the broader horizon of imperial and expansionist ambitions. Victor’s friend Clerval’s idealistic desire to improve living conditions in India (clearly representing the thinking of the British Empire), and Walton’s Arctic expedition in search of a Northwest Passage—still largely unexplored in 1816—evoke the glorification of expansion, mastery over nature, and empire. Victor embodies the dangers of this mindset: while seeking to penetrate the secrets of life itself, he lacks the ethical and social resources required to wield such power responsibly. By contrast, the Being cultivates discipline, reflection, and moral restraint, carefully navigating social encounters and ethical choices. Only sustained exclusion and rejection transform this moral potential into violence.

The Being’s response to societal abuse prefigures Heathcliff in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, some thirty years later. Heathcliff’s trajectory similarly exposes societal hypocrisy and confronts readers with their prejudices. In different registers, both women challenge the norms of British bourgeois society, issuing a powerful plea for radical rethinking.

We hope you appreciated this article. At People’s World, we believe news and information should be free and accessible to all, but we need your help. Our journalism is free of corporate influence and paywalls because we are totally reader-supported. Only you, our readers and supporters, make this possible. If you enjoy reading People’s World and the stories we bring you, please support our work by donating or becoming a monthly sustainer today. Thank you!

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/23699947

I need books that fit the conditions.

1. Genre Challenge (https://app.thestorygraph.com/reading_challenges/773a2d1a-8003-4fed-9b22-c84abd8c0438): a) A short story collection in translation b) A nonfiction book about Indigenous history c) A queer historical romance novel d) A translated classic e) A young adult novel by a Latinx author f) A biography about a Black historical figure g) A crime novel set outside of the US, UK, or Canada h) A nonfiction book about philosophy i) A literary or contemporary debut published in 2026 j) The first book in a fantasy series

2. Reads the World Challenge (https://app.thestorygraph.com/reading_challenges/cb532d43-e473-410f-92da-8471b21eee86): a) Afghanistan b) Albania c) Bulgaria d) Croatia e) France f) Iraq g) Morocco h) Senegal i) Sweden j) Thailand

"The Cat Who Tasted Cinnamon Toast" (1969) by Ann Spencer is a delightful and funny high-culture treat for children and adults.

What a lovely book! And how sad it is that I'm almost the only person in the world who seems to remember it. But I read it to my son several times when he was young, so I've done my part to share the memories. I should note that my parents read it to me when I was a toddler!

The book was both written and illustrated by the talented Ann Spencer. It's the story of an elderly millionaire, Miss Margrove, whose cat Augie suddenly goes through a strange transformation: he absolutely refuses to eat cat food. One taste of cinnamon toast, and all is undone; he now insists on only the finest gourmet fare. His psychologist is unable to explain this mysterious change.

Augie is fickle in his tastes, venturing into the haute cuisine of one culture after another. Miss Margrove's stable of chefs eventually lose their tempers and quit. Fortunately an unexpected television appearance by the French Chef, Julia Child, inspires Miss Margrove and saves the day.

The balance between text and art is particularly well done. Each page features large, finely-detailed black and white illustrations. Unusually, there is absolutely no "talking down" to the young reader; words and phrases like "Escoffier", "truite amandine", and "la vie en rose" are sprinkled liberally throughout the text. Nonetheless, the story is quite easy for children to comprehend, and the humor of the words and illustrations is ideal for a child.

I first began reading The Cat Who Tasted Cinnamon Toast to my son when he was about four years old, at a guess. He loved it; it helps that he's a cat-lover (and any child who is a cat-lover is sure to like this book). There are no serious crises, no moments of terror or stress. Augie is naughty at times, but in a very lovable way. It's a perfect bedtime book.

Reading the book aloud takes about half an hour, including the VERY necessary time spent allowing the child to look at each picture. As I noted above, some of the cooking-related language is a bit esoteric; if you're not familiar with the words, you may want to look up pronunciations before reading it aloud. It's definitely worth the effort.

There is one illustration which might trouble some parents. When Augie sneaks out to the Omar Khayyam restaurant to be inducted into the wonders of Persian cuisine, the illustration includes a representation of a fairly large painting on the background wall that depicts a naked woman seated (with legs turned sideways) next to a man. So far, my son has never commented on it, and I see no reason to call it to his attention or be concerned. When I was a child myself, I never noticed it through many readings.

For very strict parents, I suppose the page where Augie gets drunk on baba au rhum could also be a concern. My son found it hysterical. So do I.

If you're reading aloud, a passable Julia Child impersonation adds quite a lot to the experience (she has a short but memorable television appearance in the book). It's also useful to be able to sing the old "Let Your Fingers Do The Walking" jingle from the Yellow Pages commercials in the 1960s and 70s (it's on YouTube now). But neither is a requirement, of course!

The book is out of print forever, I suppose. It represents what might now be considered an impossibly "high culture" moment in America, an aesthetic which I cannot imagine will ever return to public awareness, much less popularity. And that's sad. Still, if you're lucky enough to find a copy, it's a wonderful, memorable book.

#Books #ChildrensLiterature #BookReview

Also available in Shavian: https://a.co/d/gpq8LFK

I'm looking for something similar to how Emily Wilson translated the Odyssey, ignoring societal biases and creating something as close as possible to what Homer intended

Specifically, I want something that doesn't misrepresent the original writing, for example how things about children were changed to be about homosexuality, and how the word "virgin" is nowhere near what the original texts said

[Objectionable words have been passwordified; they do not appear that way in the article]

My fiction was too much for the Starmer government

By Ben Sims

In the House of Lords 65 years ago this month, the 6th Earl of Craven reminisced: “It was the day that Lady Chatterley’s Lover was on sale to the public and there, at every serving counter, sat a sn1gger of youths. Every one of them had a copy of this book held up to his face with one hand while he forked nourishment into his open mouth with the other.”

Young people reading novels was scandalous then – but that was the past. Lady Chatterley’s Lover was unbanned, as were Ulysses and Fanny Hill. I grew up with the freedom to think that things said daily in the real world were worthy of written expression. Much of my teenage reading, and likely what made me a writer, seemed to me incorrigibly edgy: The Picture of Dorian Gray, Naked Lunch, The Satanic Verses. It used to be understood that, however disagreeable the content, books deserved to be read if they possessed enough literary merit.

I therefore took it as a considerable critique when my own fiction was banned this week (2 December). Under the UK’s Online Safety Act, AI filters censored and suppressed one of my short stories, published 277 years after Fanny Hill. All UK-based users would have to prove they were over 18 before reading me. My unremarkable short story, “Nothing Unmediated”, described a Nobel Laureate and Oxford fellow who, on his way to a college dinner, is assaulted by muggers. Admittedly I, a mere gay man, had no right to use the words “p00f” and “f@gg0t” in the quoted speech of criminals in fiction. This was “hate content targeting people based on… sexual orientation” (presumably the terms on which the story was hidden from unverified users).

The government had a point. Having been called both a “p00f” and a “f@gg0t” many times in real life before the age of 18, I do wonder if I could have handled encountering those words in a short story. Likewise, it would probably have been wise to shield me from another blocked category, “realistic acts of serious violence or injury to people, animals, or fictional creatures”, such as the harpooning of Moby Dick, the duel in Eugene Onegin, or the Crucifixion of Our Lord.

Many now make their entire living from Substack. Because my writing has less literary merit than Fanny Hill, I do not – but nevertheless I was given no notification or warning that my work would be censored. After profuse whining, “Nothing Unmediated” appears to be accessible again. The principle remains. Fearing a fine of 10 per cent of its revenue, Substack has, sensibly, kowtowed to Ofcom. All sane platforms will.

This is because of how the law is interpreted by Substack, the incredibly genteel publishing platform, now with 50 million users, including novelists Hanif Kureishi, Salman Rushdie, and Ottessa Moshfegh. Following my august example, these and thousands of writers may become inaccessible without age verification.

My fiction being gatekept surreptitiously for two days was hardly a Stasi-like outcome. However, AI-automation (the only way anything as huge as the Internet can be policed) means you now have to seek exemption retrospectively. You are guilty until you request and are granted your innocence.

Perhaps access to fiction might encourage young people to read. But of course, that might cause them, in Lord Craven’s words, “to indulge in a feast of mental, and probably physical, impurity”. Maybe we’re better off keeping them away from challenging literature. Can we expect children to understand something our sensible government can’t?

This book collects 58 pieces of fiction that Anton Chekhov published between the ages of 20 and 22. Many appear in English for the first time. In her introduction, Rosamund Bartlett refers to the material with disarming candour as a ‘wholly unremarkable debut’. Is there ever any point in publishing juvenilia?

In his first years as a medical student Anton Pavlovich dashed off these pieces for a few kopecks a line (his father, born a serf, was a bankrupt shopkeeper). Ranging in length from three paragraphs to 76 pages, they appeared under pseudonyms in lowbrow comic magazines that included another Spectator (founded in Moscow in 1881). Unremarkable they may be – but they open a window on provincial Russia in the early 1880s, the tense period before and after revolutionaries assassinated Tsar Alexander II in St Petersburg. The reader will also enjoy identifying the seeds of the master’s mature style; and indeed some of the stories are worth reading in their own right.

Chekhov’s world unfurls in these pages. Character types limber up, preparing to emerge fully formed in the later work – among them Trifon Semyonovich, the owner of 8,000 acres of black earth, who enthusiastically fleeces ‘peasants and neighbours’ in the short story ‘On Account of the Apples’. Orioles whistle in the blackthorn; a tarantass rumbles past, loaded with travelling rugs and hunters’ guns; the whiff of salted fish pervades the spring air and everywhere narrators (often first-person ones) perceive ‘a sense of tedium… in people’s faces and in the whining of the mosquitoes’.

Experimentation with form is less familiar. The volume includes elaborate parody, satire, gothic fiction and sci-fi (in an example of the latter, mischievously attributed to Jules Verne, a fellow from London’s Royal Geographical Society tries to drill a hole in the moon). Chekhov even employs the epistolary form, in part to indulge his fondness for puns. The very first entry consists of a letter written from the village of Eaten Pancakes. The editors have curated this disparate, uneven stuff skilfully. The excellent footnotes explain the abundant wordplay.

As for the translation, the book is the result of a remarkable international collaboration. Eighty-three individuals from nine countries have each translated a piece and then passed it around for team revision. No individual translator’s name follows any one story, but a group credit appears at the beginning. This cooperative approach, a notable success, achieves a consistency often absent from multi-translator anthologies.

Returning to the ‘unremarkable’ aspect of the whole: endings do tend to have a dying fall, as though Chekhov were in a rush to get the thing off his desk. The squibs and comic skits are of the schoolboy variety – though I quite liked the Spectator fake ads, one offering sausage-free worms. ‘The Distorting Mirror (A Christmas Tale)’ was the only piece here that Chekhov included in his first Collected Works, and one can see why. The story has a thematic unity lacking elsewhere in this debut spread.

Chekhov had not found his voice by 1882 – but you can see him searching for it. (One novella foreshadows the theme of his celebrated story ‘The Bet’.) In short, the everyday realism of the later work is on display in this collection, but not its psychological depth. After all, the callow youth had not yet experienced the emotions at the heart of the later great stories and plays. (In Britain he is best known for his stage work; in Russia, for his short stories.) He had not confronted the unfathomable realities of life, nor the ambiguity and nuance that govern human behaviour. We go to the theatre to hear the Trigorins and the Prozorovs express elegiac melancholy – and that is not a young man’s game. On the other hand, the slapstick here humanises the writer whose sense of dramatic economy once caused him to note with approval the effect of placing a pistol on a table in the first act.

What links should we seek between an author’s early and late work anyway? How many of our juvenile preoccupations still concern us in middle age? The man who conjured Uncle Vanya was once a coltish 20-year-old. The trajectory from the inky youth of this book to the titan we know from the plays might be the most Chekhovian theme of all.

Hungarian László Krasznahorkai, who won the Nobel Prize in literature for his lyrical novels that combine a bleak worldview with mordant humor, gave a lecture in Stockholm on Sunday in one of his rare public appearances.

The lecture was part of the Nobel week that is underway in Stockholm and Oslo with laureates holding news conferences and giving speeches before they are awarded the prestigious prizes.

Krasznahorkai’s lecture, which he gave in Hungarian, ranged across topics such as old and new angels, human dignity, hope or the lack thereof, rebellion and his observations of a clochard — or tramp — on the Berlin subway.

He introduced his lecture, according to the English translation, by saying that “on receiving the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature, I originally wished to share my thought with you on the subject of hope, but as my stories of hope have definitely come to an end, I will now speak about angels.”

As opposed to “the angels of old,” the new angels, Krasznahorkai said, “have no wings, but they also have no message, none whatsoever. They are merely here among us in their simple street clothes, unrecognizable if they so wish.”

“They just stand there and look at us, they are searching for our gaze, and in this search there is a plea for us, to look into their eyes, so that we ourselves can transmit a message to them, only that unfortunately, we have no message to give,” the author said.

Expressing himself in his long, winding trademark sentences full of apocalypse and without full stops, he says it comes as a shock when he “detects the horrific story of these new angels that stand before me, the story that they are sacrifices, sacrifices: and not for us, but because of us, for every single one of us, because of every single one of us, angels without wings and angels without a message, and all the while knowing that there is war, war and only war, war in nature, war in society, and this war is being waged not only with weapons, not only with torture, not only with destruction: of course, this is one end of the scale, but this war proceeds at the opposite of the scale as well, because one single bad word is enough.”

When the Nobel judges announced the award for Krasznahorkai in October, they described the 71-year-old as “a great epic writer” whose work “is characterized by absurdism and grotesque excess.”

“Krasznahorkai’s work can be seen as part of a Central European tradition,” the Nobel Prize organization said. ”Important features are pessimism and apocalypse, but also humor and unpredictability.”

His novels include “Satantango,” “The Melancholy of Resistance,” “War and War,” “Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming” and “Herscht 07769,” which are available in English.

Last year’s winner was South Korean author Han Kang. The 2023 winner was Norwegian writer Jon Fosse, whose work includes a seven-book epic made up of a single sentence.

Meanwhile, the director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute, Kristian Harpviken, said Saturday that Venezuelan Peace Prize laureate and opposition leader María Corina Machado will come to Oslo this week to receive her award in person.

The 58-year-old, who won for her struggle to achieve a democratic transition in the South American nation, has been in hiding and has not been seen in public since January.

Harpviken told Norwegian public broadcaster NRK that Machado was expected to personally pick up the prize Wednesday.

“I spoke with the Peace Prize winner last night, and she will come to Oslo,” Harpviken said, according to NRK.

The Nobel Prize award ceremonies will be held Wednesday on the anniversary of founder Alfred Nobel’s death in 1896. The award ceremony for peace is in Oslo and the other ceremonies are in Stockholm.

After this, I think I'll read something by the "Irish Mabanckou" (i.e. Beckett) 🙄

A refreshing change from the depressing dystopian science fiction which seems to be de rigeur these days. And ironically, that makes it more like actual science fiction than the "realistic" SF that just brings me down.

Framed as a series of oral history interviews of survivors of the end of capitalism by the authors about the emergence of a post-capitalist society, or cooperating societies, it's a surprisingly hopeful read, even though there are elements that may seem rather alien to the modern reader. Particularly straight older readers like me!

But the idea of a world of communes without money or wages, where people feed and care for each other simply because they're human beings, is incredibly refreshing. It makes me want to read more.

There are a couple of points that did strike me as odd, though. One was the almost total lack of any mention of New England. The oral histories focus on New York, but the near-total lack of any sort of role for New England seemed a bit odd to this New Englander. It's as if the whole region had been scraped off the map! Other areas were mentioned, such as New Jersey and New Orleans. But not one word about anywhere in New England except Maine, and that was very limited. I couldn't help but wonder why.

Another odd point was the near-universality of trans-hood (if that's the right word for it). Virtually everyone interviewed was trans to one degree or another, and I can't recall a single cis person. In fact it was specified that the incidence of transsexualism had been constantly rising since the initial crisis point and failure of capitalism.

This was explicitly tied into huge technological advances in the field, including the option for any gender to gestate offspring. Although initially done via surgical alterations, it was specified later that gene therapy could also accomplish complete regendering - a process which was apparently a relatively casual choice.

This is the point where I'm guessing many readers of this review will find me hopelessly old-fashioned and sexist and contemptible, I suspect. I don't find the notion of gender change particularly disgusting; Robert A. Heinlein was writing about that sort of thing in the '80s, as I recall - albeit in a frequently creepy way. The oft-neglected Justin F. Leiber (son of the great SF author Fritz Leiber) covered the same subject far more professionally in Beyond Rejection (1980). I just find it strains my suspension of disbelief to buy the notion that the majority of the human race would effectively abandon the whole notion of gender within a period of 50 to 80 years.

Maybe I'm wrong. We'll see. That said, I would gladly adjust to any number of changes in order to live in a world where we survive the end of capitalism and fascism. And "Everything For Everyone" presents a vision of such a world in a way that gives me hope.

I'll definitely read it again.

It was never that great to begin with, but now it blocks me because I use a VPN, and worse, it forces you to create an account if you want to do anything more than a superficial search. So much for free and open inquiry!

Another example of this (surprise, surprise) is amazon. You used to be able to look through all their reviews, but if you want to look at more than the first couple you have to have an account and sign in. Back in the day, you didn't need an account for either of these things. Pisses me off to no end.