Some quick reviews. This post talks about The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, Die Hauptstadt, Serverland and Antifragility.
The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet (Becky Chambers, 2014) was the best and most imaginative sci-fi book I’ve read in quite a while. The basic setup – a long space journey alongside a zany space crew – is very traditional, but the character writing and the world-building are top notch. Sci-fi is meant to be this wide-open genre about impossible worlds, but so many sci-fi authors seem perfectly content to keep writing the same three or four stories about space swashbuckling. TLWtaSAP, not so much. I can guarantee you that you’ve never read about this kind of world before. We need a lot more sci-fi that’s written by non-straight, -white, -cis and/or -male authors, because I don’t think a story like this could’ve possibly come out of the good old sci-fi country club.
I also liked Die Hauptstadt (Robert Menasse, 2017), but I can see why it would be controversial. The book combines a crime thriller with a melancholy slice-of-life character portrait and at least three different political satires, and every part of the plot somehow manages to work. Certain cities (like Brussels or Strasbourg) really do feel like they’re just in Europe, rather than any specific country, and the book captures that impression quite well. The ending is… unconventional, and not exactly what I’d call “emotionally satisfying,” but the author does tell you in advance that this isn’t ending well.
Serverland (Josefine Rieks, 2018) was a letdown. There’s this thing in literature where the author hints at some fascinating worldbuilding, but then we spend the entire plot stuck in the head of some incurious dullard who doesn’t understand the setting at all. The premise is great – IN A WORLD where the Internet has been shut down, ONE MAN and several dozen friends go spelunking for cool videos in an abandoned YouTube data center. Except… nothing comes of it. We don’t learn why or how the Internet was “shut down” or if the spelunking campaign has any impact. We do get a running commentary on the state of the breasts of various female characters, though. The book feels like a great first act, but unfortunately most of the story is missing.
Last but certainly not not least, Antifragile (Nassim Taleb, 2012) was the first book in a long time that I couldn’t be bothered to finish. In every chapter, the author introduces an interesting concept; explains it with an obviously flawed metaphor; gives the concept a funny non-descriptive name; builds an entire worldview out of the flawed metaphor; then finishes with fifteen paragraphs about how everyone who “fails to respect” the concept is a self-serving liar. Also, for some reason Nassim included a fanfic in which his self-insert OC wins a debate against Socrates. You might still get something out of this if you ignore everything that isn’t directly related to financial advice.