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sol2070

[email protected]

Joined 1 year, 5 months ago

From Brazil. #scifi #philosophy #nature #politics #tech #fantasy

Costumo ler sci-fi, filosofia, natureza, política, tech e alguma fantasia. Mais livros no blog → sol2070.in/livros Também escrevo ficção científica → fic.sol2070.in/ Mastodon → @[email protected]

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sol2070's books

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Helen Phillips: Hum (EBook, Simon & Schuster) 3 stars

From the National Book Award–longlisted author of The Need comes an extraordinary novel about a …

Tenderness in a suffocating setting

3 stars

(em português: sol2070.in/2024/12/livro-hum-helen-phillips/ )

“Hum” (2024, 272 pages), by Helen Phillips, is a dystopian fiction that is both suffocating and sensitive, about the difficulties of a woman and her family in a techno-surveillance society in ecological collapse.

Despite the futuristic setting, it could just as well be set today, with our current dependence on screens, corporate domination, ubiquitous digital ads, non-existent privacy, disastrous politics and the horror of environmental collapse. The difference is the absurd intensification of these factors, which includes the presence of advertising androids, called “Hum”.

But anyone expecting traditional science fiction may be disappointed, this is more like a backdrop for the drama — of marked internalization — of the protagonist May. Not that this is a flaw, I especially liked the psychological side, without seeing anything too special in the techno-dystopian part.

After losing her job to an AI, May undergoes facial microsurgery, in search of …

replied to nigini's status

@nigini Na verdade, uma união das esquerdas já existe mais ou menos no Brasil -- onde muito anarquista fica confortável em se declarar socialista (acho questionável isso), já que o socialismo antecede Marx. É fora do Brasil que a rixa entre marxistas e anarquistas é mais forte, talvez pela história dos movimentos terem sido mais fortes fora daqui. A crítica anarquista básica ao Marxismo é a que Bakunin fez diretamente à Marx: um estado centralizador socialista está fadado a falhar, ele se torna aquilo que deve ser combatido, como aconteceu na USSR. Isso antes de anarquistas serem expulsos da Internacional. Acho que ela continua válida. Um estado autocrático socialista, pra mim, deve ser destruído, assim como um capitalista. É por isso que há tantos precedentes de marxistas difamando (o que continua hoje), prendendo e executando anarquistas.

reviewed Aceitação by Jeff VanderMeer (Comando Sul, #3)

Jeff VanderMeer: Aceitação (Paperback, português language, INTRINSECA) 5 stars

É inverno na Área X, a misteriosa região selvagem que há trinta anos desafia explicações …

Resenha de toda a quadrilogia

5 stars

( artigo completo, incluindo a seção de Spoiler: sol2070.in/2024/12/quadrilogia-comando-sul-jeff-vandermeer/ )

Depois de ler "Absolution" (2024), a quarta parte da série "Comando Sul", de Jeff Vandermeer, fiquei com algumas interrogações, já que a última vez que havia relido os livros anteriores foi há mais de um ano.

Em um dia em que faltou energia aqui, comecei a folhear Aniquilação para passar o tempo. Não consegui parar e acabei relendo toda a trilogia, pela terceira vez. Essa foi a melhor experiência até agora.

"Comando Sul" é a única série que li mais de uma vez, e continuarei relendo. Um banquete para quem gosta de ficção especulativa e, especialmente, ecológica.

Área X é uma região costeira isolada do sudeste dos EUA cuja natureza enigmaticamente torna-se completamente selvagem, intocada e livre da contaminação anterior; seu povoado desaparece e uma barreira inexplicável se ergue. Invasão alienígena? Mutação natural? Acidente com experiências secretas? Portal de outra …

J. G. Ballard: The Drowned World (1962, Berkley Publishing Corp.) 4 stars

Fluctuations in solar radiation have melted the ice caps, sending the planet into a new …

A classic sixties trippy SF

4 stars

(em português: sol2070.in/2024/12/livro-the-drowned-world-jg-ballard/ )

"The Drowned World" (1962, 198 pages) is one of the first novels by englishman J.G. Ballard, from the period when he was dedicated to more genre science fiction.

Known for the film adaptations of David Cronenberg's "Crash" (1996) and Steven Spielberg's "Empire of the Sun" (1987), Ballard combines delirious imagination and hypnotic prose like no other, transcending genres and entering the pantheon of literary genius.

This novel is an end-of-the-world dystopia with cities overrun by the sea, deadly heat and nature mutated by solar radiation. The planet's habitable zone has been reduced to the poles and the biospheric transformation also ends up affecting the human mind evolutionarily, making the story a perfect example of the altered consciousness of sixties New Wave science fiction.

A biologist studies the changes in an abandoned London and, for him, this is not necessarily a catastrophic scenario — as is usually …

Martin Aitken, Karl Ove Knausgaard: Third Realm (2024, Penguin Random House) 5 stars

From bestselling author Karl Ove Knausgaard, a kaleidoscopic novel about human nature in the face …

Hell breaks loose

5 stars

(em português com links: sol2070.in/2024/12/livro-the-third-realm-karl-ove-knausgard/ )

In "The Third Realm" (2024), Karl Ove Knausgaard continues his captivating kaleidoscopic saga that mixes literary realism with science fiction and even horror, in the third installment of the "Morning Star" series.

The previous book, "The Wolves of Eternity" (2024), seems almost independent, while this one is clearly a sequel. Although the author envisioned the books as a loose series, in which it would be possible to read any of them without having read the others, "The Third Realm" picks up where the first book left off, when a great star takes over the sky and the unexplained begins to interfere in the characters' lives.

Although the supernatural becomes more explicit, the book retains the style of delving into the routines and minds of the various characters, each with engaging parallel stories. It's as if there were several short stories embedded in the main …

Karl Ove Knausgaard: Wolves of Eternity (2023, Penguin Random House) 5 stars

The future is no more, and eternity has begun.

It's 1986 and a nuclear reactor …

"Eternity has begun"

5 stars

(em português, com links → sol2070.in/2024/11/livro-the-wolves-of-eternity-karl-knausgard/)

"The Wolves of Eternity" (2024, 800 pgs.), by Karl Ove Knausgård, is the second book in "The Morning Star" series, about routines transformed by the appearance of a big new star in the sky.

Volume one covers the first and second days from the point of view of nine people in present-day Norway. "Wolves", on the other hand, is a kind of interlude focusing more on two key people. The young Norwegian Syvert returns from military service at the time of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and discovers his deceased father's secret past, which connects him to the Soviet Union. In contemporary Russia, Alevtina is confronted with personal crises and her obsession with the essence of biological life.

The narrative at the end integrates deeply with the series and its huge themes of death, life, human crisis and nature. But this book has few of …

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Ursula K. Le Guin: The Telling (2003, Ace) 5 stars

Once a culturally rich world, the planet Aka has been utterly transformed by technology. Records …

Thoughtful tale of culture vs monoculture

5 stars

The cover blurb makes it sound like a cautionary tale about our highly-tech-dependent world (even in the 1990s!), but it's not the technology that's the problem. It's the homogenization of culture, and the insistence that there be one perspective, and only one perspective, that really matters.

Think of how we travel and find the same chain stores, chain restaurants, the ISO standard Irish Pub with its bric-a-brac decor, and how our TV and movies are full of endless reboots, spinoffs and sequels.

We see it first in Sutty's memories of Earth, controlled largely by a theocracy until contact with alien civilizations kicks their support out from under them. And then in the world she's trying to understand, one that's undergone a complete transformation in the time it took her to travel there at relativistic speed. She knows there were flourishing cultures here before she left Earth. She studied the few …