Suzie

This is one of those foundational sci-fi books in which the tropes of a thousand other books are conjured up in a nascent form. The prose compels you to read with much the same intensity that the main character is compelled to follow his driving passion for revenge. Ideas explode off the page with force and wit–but as with many golden era sci-fi, don't expect too much in the way of characterisation.

Hard to believe this was written by the same author as ‘The Long Way to a Small & Angry Planet' - this one is so much more complex and thoughtful in how it handles characters and themes.

A tight focus on two POV characters helps really dig into their experiences and arcs. There's an interesting and cohesive structure with the flipping back and forth in time, and some nice background stuff to be picked up on (like the origin of Pepper's name). It's worth trying this book even if you found the first one tedious.

I like Mark Manson's blog. And there are some good ideas in this book. But, unfortunately, his book is remarkably tone deaf and really quite sexist.

He talks about unreliable memory. But his example of unreliable memory... is a woman with a false memory of sexual abuse. He talks about the importance of being honest with people. But his example of him being an honest and trustworthy partner he is... is him telling his wife she looks like shit.

This is a book written for young fairly privileged men. And so it is unfortunate that when he talks about a victim mentality he mocks college life ‘safe spaces'... and not men who attack women for playing video games or complain about comic books pandering to the PC police.

It's a shame he spends time talking about men jailed because of false rape accusations but never mentions men killing women because they falsely believed they were cheating.

The truth is, he conflates the inevitable trauma and grief that is a part of all human life, with the systematic trauma and oppression that comes about from living under a patriarchal, capitalist system. This system is designed to remove people's agency and ability to choose. You can't respond to it in the same way that you respond to individual loss, like the death of a close friend. One requires collective action, the other requires individual responsibility. And this book does not recognise the difference between the two, and chooses instead to hype up individualism at every step.

Malala cannot single-handledly dismantle the Taliban, however much we love our hero narrative. We all have choice and responsibility, it's true. What Mark misses, is the fact that those of us with more agency and privilege need to step up and take responsibility for the safety of other people as well. Not by taking part in a co-dependent relationship, but by examining and dismantling the systems that keep some people powerless and other people overpowered.

What's most interesting to me are the ideas that More assumes as default (slavery, capital punishment, men as the head of the family) which nowadays we would probably not include as part of our description of utopia.

What assumptions do we make about ‘the natural order of things' or ‘human nature' that will one day be considered barbaric?