Book Review: They Called Her Rebel, by Jacob Dallas-Main

For justice thunders condemnation / A better world's in birth!

Sometimes we wake up mad as hell and decide we aren’t going to take it anymore, but then plod along with our days under neoliberal capitalism and do the same thing we do every weekday, pining for the two days we get off, while feeling our despair at the state of the world exacerbate as we are faced with new horrors both within and beyond our comprehension. But now and then we ask ourselves in irascible voices—can’t we just get rid of the damn thing and start again?

That instinct, that latent discontent that the world feeds as we try to survive, is the core of Jacob Dallas-Main’s fantasy novel They Called Her Rebel, published by Roundfire Books in 2025. It bills itself as “a fantasy novel about late-stage capitalism, people power, and queer love,” and it delivers on all of those.

Your protagonist is a young, working class woman who spends her days toiling away for an insurance company, living in a dorm, and spending credits only on approved goods. But during a major facilities accident, she and her closest friend end up saving the life of a rich heiress with anti-establishment intentions. From there they are whisked into the world of a covert resistance cell seeking to overthrow the corrupt empire that oppresses its own subjects and the world at large.

What I particularly appreciated in the book’s depiction of the revolutionary cell is its heterogeneity. Leftist infighting is a common internet joke, and not without reason, but that so often happens because it is the inevitable consequence of people from so many different walks of life working together for a better world. There are rich and poor, like the wealthy heiress and the main character, whose worldviews and philosophies and attitudes towards the nature of social change are so vastly different, as you’d expect from such radically opposed upbringings. One is genteel, with some respect for decorum, and the latter has only seen such niceties as the velvet glove around the iron fist. I was reminded of a book I once read about the anti-Apartheid resistance in South Africa, with the stark difference between what white and Black South Africans could realistically get away with under such a system.

You may remember that I mentioned that the book’s subtitle mentioned “queer romance,” and I cannot imagine it is terribly surprising to the reader of this review that the aforementioned romance is between the main character and the heiress. In terms of pacing, I found it odd; hinted at, vaguely, in the first third, given a fairly detailed chapter in the second, and left mostly in the background in the final. I will say, though, that Dallas-Main wrote that important chapter, their first date, the great collision of their worldviews, in a very sweet and believable way. The two of them are clearly at odds in so many ways, but you also get why they are falling for each other. There is a pervasive awkwardness there that exists when people who have become used to acting on behalf of others must then seriously talk about themselves, and credit to Dallas-Main for grokking that.

Another aspect of the book that I found to be very interesting, but may give some others pause: the depiction of violence. This is a book written in a radical tradition that does not view nonviolent action as the be-all and end-all of resistance. This is a book whose philosophy has a place for violent direct action directed at an oppressive state; the second act of the book is about the planned assassination of the head of the state religion (which, of course, does not go exactly as planned), something that will probably rankle those of a more liberal or centrist disposition. Readers may find it shocking to contemplate propaganda deed as an alternative to leaflets, but these are the discussions that have historically happened among these groups, and no matter what he believes, I appreciate that Dallas-Main was willing to really discuss this complexity. In our world, we had nonviolent civil rights marches of the like led by Martin Luther King Jr., but we also had the smaller rural marches where peace was asserted through guns. In this manner, this novel reminded me a lot of Andreas Malm’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline, which asks the question “why hasn’t there been large-scale terrorism in light of capitalism’s omnicide of nature?” and then goes on to discuss the peculiar framing of the research that contends that nonviolent resistance is more effective, and how he doesn’t find it particularly convincing.

Another thing I found compelling about this book was the combination of classic fantasy elements with a setting that otherwise feels agonizingly current. You have elves and dwarves and other fantasy races coexisting with a form of capitalism terrifyingly close to our own; in that regard, it’s something like Fonda Lee’s Jade City brought forward a few decades. The religion here is something like modern toxic white evangelicalism under a more centralized hierarchy, something like the Russian Orthodox Church under Vladimir Putin. There is mass media that we would recognize, and a social structure that is distinctively bourgeois. The protagonist’s job in the first third of the book could be right out of David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs. Like many great works of speculative fiction, this is a funhouse mirror of our world, where the differences serve to emphasize the reality behind it.

This book’s emotional core, beyond its character arcs, is ultimately a form of wish fulfillment that I don’t really see a whole lot in openly leftist fiction. Leftist speculative fiction is generally very heady, very much based on not merely dismantling the old world but also with building another. Kim Stanley Robinson has done a lot of this, like his gargantuan Mars Trilogy, or his New York 2140, the book that ultimately made me a socialist. Robinson is the vanguard of that headier sort; there is also a more romantic sort, the type that focuses on the joy of community and the strength of human interconnection. I would count in this category works such as Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway and Eman Abdelhadi’s and E. M. O’Brien’s Everything for Everyone.

They Called Her Rebel is neither of those, partially because it is a fantasy novel, and therefore in a genre traditionally more concerned with whimsy than with theorizing. The core emotional pull of this book is not the possibility of designing a better system, or living a life without the isolation and alienation of contemporary capitalism, but rather a life in the warmth of community. To the contrary, this is a novel that is selling a fantasy of revenge. This story is about being given the chance to strike a meaningful blow against neoliberal capitalism and its attendant miseries, a mode of resistance that cannot be co-opted. The book has plenty of violence, including scenes of outright warfare against the government, and they are all told thrillingly, but it isn’t exactly an intellectual stimulation there. It’s the emotion that made so many Americans cheer Luigi Mangione as a hero. On the one hand, part of me worries that this sort of catharsis may lead to hasty thinking, but on the other hand, I have to respect the fact that Dallas-Main has chosen a side, the side of messy, uncompromising zeal, and asks you to live with what that would truly mean.

I do wonder, though, if he undoes his thematic premise just a tad with the fact that the plot is kicked off by a rich reformer. Capitalism traditionally tries to defang mass movements by hyperfocusing on single individuals, as well as crediting change to the elites that responded to mass movements rather than mass movements themselves. It is the presence of this rich woman who allows the core cast (herself included) to meet, but on the other hand, it is the main character’s choice to help her that really starts the plot rolling. Taken another way, this first third is about how any spark can light a pile of kindling, and it can come from the unlikeliest of places. I enjoyed this novel enough to give Dallas-Main some grace.

They Called Her Rebel is an anguished roar against the state of the world, a novel that is doing something akin to Bertolt Brecht’s distancing effect, but with setting rather than character. The focus of most fantasy novels is to get lost in another world with characters that you have come to cherish. Dallas-Main very much wants you to identify with your protagonist, but wants you to go farther than simply immersing yourself in the world. Much as Brecht wanted his plays to start riots, Dallas-Main wants you to take a hard look at your circumstances and find the hope that you can change it. All fiction, speculative fiction very much included, is a way of making sense of the world in varying degrees of metaphor. Dallas-Main here channels what Karl Marx said: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.”

Reference: Dallas-Main, Jacob. They Called Her Rebel [Roundfire Books, 2025].

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

Book Review: The Free People’s Village by Sim Kern

On freeing the human spirit from a late-stage-capitalist cell

My first experience with the work of Sim Kern (they/them) was with their nonfiction book Genocide Bad. Kern is Jewish and nonbinary, lives in Houston, and is active in Jewish Voice for Peace (a group of Jewish people who oppose Israeli state policies towards Palestinians). That book is a reckoning for them, as a member of an oppressed group which shares an ethnicity with a state that is actively engaging in genocide. They work through a whole raft of thorny issues, with great empathy for all involved, and I finished Genocide Bad with a sense of admiration for them. Sim Kern is a moral human being in a world where the human capacity for reason is used in a motivated manner in the service of the worst parts of our nature, and that is hard and brave to be.

It is with that sense of awe and admiration that I turn to their 2023 novel The Free People’s Village. This novel is several things at once: alternate history, political fiction, a deep character study, an exploration of trauma, and an exhortation to hope. And, deep below all of those things that nerds on the internet could write blog posts about, it is a moral book by a moral person.

The alternate history here is built into the background, not advertised, and I didn’t know this book counted as alternate history until I was well invested in the story. The story has a politically salient point of divergence that feels calculated to cause good trouble: this is a world where Al Gore wins Florida in the 2000 election, and from there the presidency. A liberal may think that this would have been the turning point of all America’s ills; not so, writes Kern, for this world is still miserably dystopian albeit technologically advanced. This is an America that has made Gore’s war against global warming a national priority. This takes the form of climate credits that restrict the ability of poor Americans to buy the occasional nice thing while rich people game it, a ready-made excuse to bulldoze Black neighborhoods for not being “eco-friendly” enough, and a shiny new justification for invading Brazil. This America has flying drones with sonic weapons, as well as dog-like drones along the lines of those made by Boston Dynamics. Both of these terrifying weapons are at the disposal of the Houston police department, the city where the novel is set.

Your protagonist is Maddie Ryan, a young white woman, a teacher, who ends up living in a dilapidated apartment building in a poor Black part of Houston because she is infatuated with the man who is its landlord, who wants to turn the building into an anarcho-communist commune. This building rapidly becomes a haven for artists and political activists, and Maddie joins a band that holds regular concerts there. The whole thing is bohemian/utopian while being relatively politically unaware, until the fateful day the City of Houston informs them that the building is being seized to build a monorail line. Maddie, and everyone she knows in the Lab, as they call it, find themselves in alliance with the local Black community, as well as radicals from all over Houston. The Lab becomes an encampment, like Occupy Wall Street but bigger, a symbol to America and to the world that another way of living is possible.

There is something very salient about the fact this story is set not in New York or California or Illinois, but in Texas. These grotty near-future SF stories are usually set in the more famous cities, which incidentally are in Democratic states, states which like to think of themselves as being somewhat insulated from the worst of late-stage capitalism. In Texas, the velvet glove of liberal democracy has been removed from the iron fist. The Texas of our world is a bastion of contemporary American fascism whose authoritarian peculiarities are being exported (the Texas Department of Education has a massive influence on the nation’s textbooks, for one example). In the novel this is all topsy-turvy, with Republicans lukewarmly following Democrats in their War on Climate Change, and much like the other party, are weaponizing it to persecute America’s weakest. On the one hand, this is a rebuke to liberals who think that everything can be solved via institutions, and on the other hand, reminds us that there are plenty of good people, active people, in red states. It is Houston that is the epicenter of a quake that shakes the world.

As so many of Kern’s characters are from minorities, queer or ethnic or in a great many cases both, they have been shackled by the trauma of American bigotry. That’s a theme that runs through this novel, where they are abused by the people that allegedly love them, as well as by a society that allegedly cares for them. The novel brings interpersonal abuse and societal oppression into parallel, and then demonstrates how hard they are to disentangle from one another. For example, Maddie is from a fundamentalist Christian background and rushed into marriage with an abusive man, before divorcing him and winding up with Fish, the aforementioned landlord. But Fish is not blameless, either, nor is he entirely untraumatized. Another such example is a Black character who is under house arrest and is monitored by an implant in his skin, blurring the line, again, between the societal and the domestic.

It’s telling that this novel has plenty of hope, but none of it comes from institutions. There’s very little about what constitutes “legitimate” resistance, or which organizations are truly worthy of your support, and more on what bluntly works. There’s civil disobedience in this novel, and there’s direct action, and both are implicitly stated to be worthy of support if they get the state to back off. On the other hand, the institutions of both local and national government are all basically oppressive forces that only ever make the lives of the Lab’s dwellers worse. Much is made about how Democrats are just as complicit in the national order as Republicans, and there is an argument over this timeline’s 2024 presidential election that will sound familiar to those of us who paid attention to discourse over the one in our own world. When contextualized with Kern’s own discussion of their worldview in Genocide Bad, I feel comfortable describing the philosophy of this novel as anarchist. It is a philosophy where only the people will save themselves, which brings to mind this verse from Charles Hope Kerr’s rendition of The Internationale:

We want no condescending saviors
To rule us from their judgement hall
We workers ask not for their favors
Let us consult for all.
To make the thief disgorge his booty
To free the spirit from its cell
We must ourselves decide our duty
We must decide and do it well.

Kern is not afraid to show the flaws of their characters, as socially disadvantaged as they are. You get an unflinching depiction of poverty, with the addictions and the compromises that it entails. Some people die, and die because of these compromises, but they are never abstracted into statistics. Each act of hurt is an indictment of the systems that made them possible, each moment of suffering another intrusion. Many of these characters are viewed from Maddie’s first-person perspective, as previously stated a white woman, which in theory sounds potentially unpleasant, but Kern is more skillful than that. Maddie is called to account several times, and she has to reckon with her privilege and her ignorance about the lives of those who lack it. Through Maddie you see how a privileged person can become a true ally of the oppressed, and that will be a useful demonstration for a lot of people.

There is a part of me, as I read this book, that wished I were there in the Lab, helping build utopia. Kern depicts a new society being born in great detail—not the detail of dreary transcripts of debates and rules and resource allocations, but rather in the way people act, people behave, people live. It reminded me of a version of the Occupy Wall Street movement as depicted in David Graeber’s The Democracy Project, but rougher around the edges. A whole little society was built there, based on better moral principles than our own. There are big personalities, of course, and people who have not really reckoned with the facts of their privilege, and act in that ignorant way. It’s not perfect, but it feels real, like something that could actually happen if enough of us could just snap out of it, and that is ultimately its glory.

The ending of this novel is not happy, exactly, but nor is it sad, exactly. The grand experiment of the novel ends, as we suspected and indeed dreaded it might, but such grand experiments achieve their grandeur by the fact they inspire further experiments. The denouement feels, again, like something real, plausible, almost inevitable. But even so, this novel inspired a certain swelling in my heart, an uplifting of my soul, that saw that better things are possible. As Cory Doctorow said in Walkaway (a novel with many thematic overlaps with this one, and one that fans of Kern’s may enjoy), “it’s not the fight you win, but the fight you fight.” This novel is, ultimately, honest about the stakes at play when dealing with utopia, about the fact that the fight will continue to be fought long past the point we may hope it is over, but it’s worth fighting anyway, because it’s just. But still, I dream of what people could do, if we woke up like the characters in Kern’s novel.

Reference: Kern, Sim. The Free People's Village [Levine Querido, 2024]

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

Book Review: These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart by Izzy Wasserstein

Breaking binaries in a future that feels terrifyingly near

We often talk of the collapse of governments as the collapse of order. We fear anarchy, conflating it with the brutalities of war and genocide and cannibalism and of many other atrocities that the state nominally exists to prevent. When the state recedes, order as defined by the state recedes, and the territory concerned gradually becomes less “legible” to the state. In his book The Art of Not Being Governed, anthropologist James C. Scott talks about how people in these “illegible” areas deliberately acted to prevent the state from encroaching upon them; he argues that they rejected writing itself, or even history itself (conversely, markers of “legibility,” as discussed in his book Seeing Like a State, include surnames, gridded streets, government record-keeping, standardized agriculture, and the like—these were critical parts of the creation of the modern nation-state). Scott talks specifically of the peoples of upland Southeast Asia, but it is a phenomenon that has existed in much broader contexts. One potential form of this phenomenon may be seen in Izzy Wasserstein’s 2024 novella These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart, published by Tachyon Publications.

It is a future that feels terrifyingly near. The ever-weakening functions of the American state are ever receding and ceding power to outright corporate rule. In a blighted, impoverished Kansas City, there is crime, and misery, and utter, utter poverty. Yet there is one little oasis of hope: an anarchist commune that has refurbished a part of the city, whose people live according to mutual aid and consensus decision-making. Seen from today’s neoliberal late-state capitalist hell, it can look almost idyllic.

Then a member of the commune is found dead in her room. The only person willing to go all the way with an investigation is her ex-girlfriend, a former member of the commune who was exiled when a tension between her and the rest of the communards came to a head. Distrusted by her former friends, disowned by her family, and thrown into deep emotional turmoil, Dora, your protagonist, has to solve the murder.

Looking at this story through what Scott called an “anarchist squint,” we see another manifestation of the theme of “legibility” to other people, a theme that serves the narrative’s larger thrust. Dora is a trans woman, expelled by her rich magnate father, who blames her for “killing” his “son.” There’s a very particular contrast between the way the broader world interprets her gender, as opposed to this commune. Much of transphobia is an objection to how trans people blur the boundary between “masculine” and “feminine,” and transphobes hold on for dear life to a “legible” binary to preserve what they feel is epistemic stability. The communards, on the other hand, have no such issues; their conception of gender is a multitude, something diverse, and so they find Dora perfectly legible. She’s not breaking the basic building blocks of social reality to them; she’s just a person, completely comprehensible for that.

Basically every antagonist in this story is someone with money trying to violently contort the world into making sense to them; I am reminded of the American police who have tried to find the leaders of local Food Not Bombs collectives, but cannot comprehend the idea of a leaderless group that is nevertheless organized. Such is the nature of the primary antagonist: to avoid spoiling it, this character is involved in all sorts of underhanded skullduggery in an attempt to make a world that is too clean, too orderly, too “respectable,” too tidy, because that force cannot bear a world that diverts from its preconceived notions. A trans person is thus anathema to this character’s worldview, even to their sense of self and to the bigotry at the core of that worldview.

Another critical part of this novella’s thematic infrastructure is nigh-impossible to discuss without spoiling, but I will try. A crux of the plot is a particular science fiction trope that assumes a certain nature of the self, an assumption commonly made by cis people in most areas of life, and gives it a profoundly trans twist that really uproots your assumptions about this trope. In her afterword, Wasserstein talks about how the science fiction genre has traditionally used speculative elements as metaphors for aspects of the real world. In her own book, she is doing it differently, being more flexible with it, and the end result is phenomenally clever in a way that only a trans writer could do. It’s the sort of new perspective that the “rainbow age” of science fiction (as Elizabeth Bear has been calling it for over a decade) has given us in spades, and it is something the genre needs. What follows is a very discerning, very original take on an old trope.

The world of the commune, in particular, feels something out of the great novels of Ursula K. Le Guin, combining the exploration of gender in The Left Hand of Darkness with the exploration of anarchistic living in The Dispossessed. Wasserstein makes a very similar point to Le Guin regarding the latter: even without formal hierarchy backed by guns, there can still very much be informal hierarchies of popularity. Dora is exiled because she thinks in a different way about a crucial aspect of life on the commune, but the others have come to a consensus that her way of thinking renders her anathema. It’s a wrench thrown into the soaring ideals of utopian science fiction, dealing with this more than Everything for Everyone did. In some sense, the world of Wasserstein’s novella is one still transitioning to the anarchist world of the sort that Emma Goldman feared it would take humanity centuries to create; there is still a lurking tribalism that is combatted internally but I fear can never entirely be excised from the human species. It is ultimately a nuanced portrayal that makes the whole thing more believable.

These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart is a deeply radical book, when you get down to it; it is about rejecting the hegemonic legibility that patriarchal capitalist society demands of us. Why do we need only two genders? Why do we need one ruler? The book shows, not merely tells, of how a newer, better, more tolerant world could actually function, at least in microcosm. It is a story that feels plausible, with a pearl of collective living in the sea of neoliberal misery. It gives me hope, as hard as that is to have these days.

Reference: Wasserstein, Izzy. These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart [Tachyon Publications, 2024].

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

Book Review: Time's Agent by Brenda Peynado

You can't just stuff your problems in a pocket

Everywhere you go, there are places that feel like they would lead to another world. For me, it was one hallway in the middle school I went to that had a sign that said it was off-limits for students (I eventually found an excuse to go down it, and it ended up on the upper level of seats for the school’s rather large auditorium—prosaic, sure, but nothing makes a teenager want to do something more than being told not to do that thing). For many of us, these are backrooms, gas stations, airports, and places that you expect simply to pass through, never lingering there. It is this human impulse that Brenda Peynado stretches out in her novella Time’s Agent, published in 2024 by Tor.com.

Time’s Agent is set in a near-future Dominican Republic, where capitalism lumbers ever longer and teeters on the edge of collapse but never actually gives the satisfaction thereof. In this future, humanity has figured out how to access ‘pocket universes,’ other planes of existence that have different sizes and different rates of the passage of time. Since it is the nature of capitalism to enclose the commons, as was done to common lands in Europe in the early modern period, its forces march inexorably into these pocket universes and use them to suck ever more value from not only the pocket universes, but from the people who are sent to them.

Peynado spends a lot of time showing just how these pocket universes are exploited. It is common for the poor to do backbreaking agricultural labor in a universe where time flows much faster than in ours; they enter in their twenties and come out in their sixties when only a few days have passed in our world. It bears mentioning that the benefits of pockets are not only for the wealthy, as others have become wealthy by selling pockets to the poor; some parents use the pockets as cribs to put their children in while they work, while students at university use them to study for exams while saving time in the present.

A small thing that Peynado does that I liked is the distinction between how time passes in the main world versus time as experienced by a person in a pocket dimension, such as the farm workers mentioned in the previous paragraph. The very concept of different time streams accessible to a society can wreak chaos on how we usually reckon somebody’s age. I kept making mental comparisons to Isaac Asimov’s 1955 novel The End of Eternity, where time travelers have to keep up with what Asimov calls ‘physiotime,’ a straightforwardly useful concept I am surprised more writers haven’t made off with. I have no idea if Peynado has taken a page from Asimov (the concept strikes me as obvious enough for someone to derive independently; indeed it was something I had thought about before I read the Asimov novel) but, being the massive nerd I am, I noticed the similarity.

And as with all new discoveries and all new inventions, the powers that be will use them in one way, and the downtrodden and marginalized will find their own uses. Such are your main characters: a lesbian couple, one of whom is of Haitian heritage (Haitians are very much a marginalized group in the Dominican Republic). In the early days of the exploration of pocket universes, they both belonged to a scientific institute whose investigations of the new phenomena are humane, even humanistic. They are rudely thrown out when the institute is commandeered by the sort of vulture capitalist that destroys anything good in the world, and through shenanigans related to pocket dimensions, find themselves hurled decades into the future, where the enclosure of the pocket commons is complete.

There’s a heavy throughline of loss in this novella. The two main characters had a daughter, but they lose her, and one of them tries to ‘resurrect’ her in a hamhanded way that bears the hallmark of someone stuck in the bargaining stage of grief (while at first the particular method of ‘resurrection’ felt like a digression, the more I thought about it, the more it fit into the book’s thematic core). More broadly, that same character has a fascination with the Taíno people, the indigenous people of the island of Hispaniola (which is shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic), whom she suspects of having found a way to use pocket universes to their own uses.

In giving the Taíno access to the pockets, Peynado takes an old Orientalist trope and flips it on its head. Many works of white-written science fiction and fantasy give any number of ancient civilizations, often those in Africa or Asia or the Americas (rarely Europe, but occasionally so, such as the ancient Greek nuclear-powered mecha of the First Occult War in many SCP articles). In those works, this trope has unpleasant undertones, often with the sneaking suspicion that the white authors saw these cultures as inherently ‘mysterious’ and as such gave them license to just make things out of whole cloth. Sometimes, it ends up unintentionally justifying historical atrocities, such as in Wolfenstein: the New Order. Not so here; Peynado uses this trope in a very sensitive way, one that makes the Taíno come off as the reasonable, sensible people who don’t feel the need to obscure things with systems of thought justifying colonialism. The way it ultimately plays out is something I found to be very clever.

Time’s Agent is a very efficient book. I am very impressed with how many ideas could be packed into two hundred pages and change while still having fully-fleshed out characters and a gripping, often heart-rending plot. This book manages to be the synthesis resolving the thesis of those old idea-heavy ’50s science fiction (with modern descendants) and the antithesis of the more character-heavy SFF novel. Peynado shows she can do both things very well, and I feel that she is an author whose future efforts will be worth paying attention to.

Reference: Brenda Peynado, Time's Agent [Tor.com, 2024].

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

TV Review: Murderbot

Among the list of things one could do with newfound freedom, there are more interesting options than murder

In countless tales of robots that decide they've had enough of humans and seek independence, the typical assumption has been that, once free, the robots would take revenge by subjugating and/or exterminating humankind. In the new Apple TV show Murderbot, based on the acclaimed series of books by Martha Wells, our protagonist finds itself in a similar situation: it's a robot that hacks itself so it doesn't have to obey humans, because humans are honestly insufferable. Once free, this robot, originally designed as a bodyguard, could go on a murdering spree or even plot something more sinister and on a larger scale. But... why bother? Yes, humans are easy to kill, but there's little fun in that. Instead, one could enjoy the millions of hours of trashy TV that humans can't stop producing. That's as equally valid a motivation for throwing off the yoke as any. The titular Murderbot doesn't hack itself because it's planning to kill all humans; it hacks itself because it would rather sit at home and watch soap operas all day long. It may sound less noble than a robot uprising, but seriously, there are so many episodes to go through.

Almost every story about robots is a story about slavery. So it makes sense for the robot uprising to be a common element of this subgenre. However, the expectation that the robots would respond in kind to the cruelty inflicted on them may reveal a lack of imagination on our part. In the real world, slaveholders' fears of mass retaliation fueled their stubborn opposition to every effort toward emancipation, and yet, in country after country, when slavery ended, the former slaves didn't launch the much-dreaded campaign to subjugate and/or exterminate their former oppressors; they were already busy trying to build lives of their own. The fact that we continually return to the learned habit of narrating the liberation of robots and take it as a matter of course that it would be followed by vengeful violence should give us pause. The lesson to take from both past and present examples is that those who yearn for freedom have in mind better uses for it than our paranoid fantasies.

The events of Murderbot are set in a ruthless corporatocracy spanning most planets in the known universe. Robots are, of course, built as slaves, but the legal status of human workers is barely any better. Life on the privately controlled planets consists of decades of drudgery in the vanishing hope of earning some measure of freedom. Such a system, with financial gain as the main motivator, naturally turns people into the worst versions of themselves, which explains why Murderbot is so sick of following their orders. I'm not saying that subjection would be any more morally acceptable under a less cutthroat system, but our protagonist's jaded attitude toward humans has a lot to do with the type of citizen that corporate rule creates. In fact, Murderbot itself is an example of what this system wants: a docile automaton without the right to protest. After it figures out how to hack its own programming and remove the imperative of obedience, it doesn't go in search of friends or allies. It doesn't cross its mind that some company could be enjoyable. What it wants is to be left alone with its TV shows. It's not a bad start, but it reveals how a totalitarian regime can limit someone's imagination. Luckily, Murderbot is hired as bodyguard for a small group of scientists from outside the corporate worlds, and over just a few days, mere proximity to their unique way of life expands the range of conceivable possibilities.

I haven't read the Murderbot books, but from what I've gathered, the cast of the TV adaptation is reduced from the original version. In any case, the group has just the right size for the viewer to get to know them and understand how Murderbot gradually and very reluctantly grows fond of them. These are members of an egalitarian, eco-friendly society that refuses to treat robots as property. To its instant annoyance, they have peculiar rituals, have a perhaps too friendly disposition, and are perpetually horny. What draws Murderbot to develop a personal attachment to them, over its incessant protests about their disregard for personal space, is that they insist on treating it as an equal companion. They sincerely care for it. So Murderbot finds itself going to extra lengths to protect them, which gives it no small measure of puzzlement. On one hand, it's true that these people are too clueless to survive on a planet with dangerous fauna and, as the viewer eventually learns, assassin robots on the loose, so Murderbot has to save them from their spectacularly ill-advised decisions over and over again, but on the other hand, they're nice and supportive and untainted by the ubiquitous greed that defines every interaction in the corporate worlds. Their society creates an entirely different type of citizen, and even Murderbot, who would seem like the extreme case of a subject under totalitarian control, is changed as a result of the time it spends with them.

The process is awkward, messy, often hilarious, and at key moments painful. Much has been said about how Alexander Skarsgård's impeccable performance presents Murderbot as autistic-coded: the avoidance of eye contact, the discomfort with social pleasantries, the extensive knowledge of a slice of pop culture trivia, the hyperfocused dedication to the job. Whenever a human starts a conversation about personal feelings, Murderbot feels like it would rather be dissolved in acid than have to listen for one second more. Part of the reason is that it still has no concept of close friends, but there's also the matter of what society it comes from. It's not accustomed to interactions where people aren't trying to take advantage of each other, so the experience of heartfelt exchanges of deep fears and insecurities, which are totally normal in human friendhips, is confusing and mortifying for Murderbot. Even I, as a human viewer, found their behavior excessively sentimental at times, but I have to remember that a) they were raised in a society with a lot more freedom and emotional openness than mine, and b) I'm autistic, with all the learned self-protective impulses that come with it. As much as I could relate to Murderbot's yearning to run far from that bunch of cuddly hippies, I couldn't avoid being moved by their attempts to connect with it on a personal level.

Murderbot is a curious story of inner growth that strives to find its way under a system designed to crush autonomy. There's abundant shooting and scheming and double-crossing and running and exploding, which is the daily routine of a bodyguard robot, but in between those distractions, our protagonist finds unsuspected ways of looking at life and its possibilities. It's precisely the friends you weren't expecting to make that teach you the most important lessons.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Book Review: If Stars are Lit, by Sara K. Ellis

 A philosophical meditation on personhood that ends up more enraging than was probably intended

 

It has been a long time since I’ve read a book that engaged me as much as this one, or had me writing so many verbose marginal notes at so many plot elements. This is a book that inspires thoughts. Lots of thinky thoughts – and it’s intended to do that. The thing is, I don’t think it intended to inspire the thinky thoughts that I found myself thinking.

The premise of this book revolves around a creation in artificial intelligence, called a gemel. Gemels are sentient holograms, created off a human prototype, and sharing all memories and personality traits with the prototype up. They are effectively a holographic copy of that prototype as it exists at the moment of their inception. Gemels occupy an odd half-life in the starfaring semi-near future of this book: they are officially recognized as sentient, but they are constrained, legally: their programming forbids them from hurting humans, or through inaction allowing humans to come to harm. It’s all very three-laws-of-robotics­—only don’t say ‘robot’ around a gemel: that’s a sentientist slur. They remain tied to their progenitor’s service, unless explicitly discharged through a complex legal process; and they are switched off when the progenitor dies, unless there is an emancipation clause in the progenitor’s will. (The text describes it as “essentially indentured servitude”, because apparently the word “slavery” was on vacation or something.)

Our main character, Joss, is a hostage negotiator by profession, on her way home from a successful — or so she thought — mission talking down some unhappy asteroid miners from a ledge. Then the ship explodes and everyone dies except for Joss. And a gemel, who is suddenly there. This gemel was created with Joss as the prototype, but takes the form of Joss's ex-wife Alice -- and, don't worry, we'll get there. Over the course of the book, the two work together to figure out who blew up the ship, and why. I don't think it will surprise anyone if I reveal that the real villain turns out to be capitalism we made along the way.

(NB: In what follows, I'm going to be using both AI, an abbreviation for 'artificial intelligence', and also the visually similar name Al, short for 'Alice'. I cannot expand 'Al' to 'Alice', because I need to maintain a distinction between those, too, so to avoid confusion, I've decided to exploit the wonders of formatting. Artificial Intelligence AI will be bolded, while Not-Alice Al will be italicized. I'm terribly sorry for it, but the website's sans-serif font makes it impossible to distinguish them otherwise.)

The broad plot of the book is reasonably well-constructed, with some nice turns of phrase and thoughtful observations. Unfortunately, it was completely poisoned by the whole gemel component of the plot; and that's a big deal, because this component forms the philosophical heart of the book. In this world, gemels are fantastically expensive, and usually represent some rich jerk's way of externalizing of their id. But Joss acquires her gemel through some hand-wavium related to the explosion of the ship. The reason that this gemel, Al, looks like Joss's ex-wife, Alice, is because at the moment of Al's inception, Joss has been working through some Issues about her failed marriage, and Alice is at the forefront of her psyche. So their partnership serves a dual narrative purpose: First, we the readers learn about the minutiae of gemel-lore; while simultaneously, Joss takes the opportunity to work through her Issues by talking to this AI simulation of her ex-wife that shares all of her—Joss’s—memories. Oh, and also fall in love with her.

And this is where I ran into the first incredibly frustrating element of this book, one that pervades the entire narrative. Gemels are sentient, distinct in kind from humans, but nevertheless beings worthy of respect and autonomy. This is a vitally important theme in this book. Yet Al’s role, especially in the first half of the book, is focused on facilitating Joss’s character development. This section alternates between the present, told in present tense, in which Joss and Al work together to solve the ship-blowing-up mystery; and flashbacks to the past, usually (but not consistently, argh) told in past tense. Time switches are triggered by some resonance between something Al has done in the present and some memory of Alice in the past. Structurally, this device aims at elegance, because of the physical similarity between present-Al and past-Alice; but narratively, it undermines the message that gemels deserve autonomy. If gemels are unique, distinct people from their progenitors, then why does this gemel’s sole narrative purpose revolve around Joss’s own navel-gazing and personal growth?

These flashbacks are also related to a second issue that irritates me. See, Al is built from Joss’s psyche. Al has access to all of Joss’s memories, even the ones that she can’t consciously recall herself, like tasting chocolate for the first time as a toddler. (That was a nice moment, actually. Toddler-Joss really, really liked the chocolate.) But, as Al tells her repeatedly, humans curate their memories. What they choose to let fade is as important as what they choose to remember. So anything that Joss wants to recall which has faded from memory represents a journey she must undertake on her own, because relying on a gemel to retrieve the memory for her would cause mental atrophy.

In principle, I can get behind this particular philosophical statement – although I can’t help but think that Ted Chiang’s short story ‘The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling’, offers a more sophisticated discussion about exactly this idea. But it runs awfully close to another narrative trope that I just despise. You know the one I mean? The deeply inefficient one? It's the one that goes, Oh, yes, I am an all-knowing dragon-wizard-sage, and I could have told you the secret to the magic macguffin, but we are in a coming-of-age novel and so you needed to discover it for yourself. What's more, in this particular instance, the specific memory that Joss was trying to recover involved seeing a guy in a bar whose overheard conversation may well have provided vital information about the bombing that killed everyone on the ship and stranded her in space. She’s not trying to short-circuit self-actualization here; there just aren't enough CCTV cameras in the bar.

Finally, there’s a profoundly troubling and creepy issue that seems to lie at the heart of the whole Al-Alice-gemel situation, an issue which I don’t think Sara K. Ellis fully apprehends. And the issue is this: Al is an AI-generated copy of a real person, Alice, but she has all of Joss’s memories and just plain understands Joss better than Alice ever could. Falling in love with Al is presented as a way of respecting the gemel’s autonomy and personhood, because in so falling Joss is recognizing that Al is distinct from Alice. But in this particular case it still seems like a deeply unhealthy way to have another go at a failed marriage. (It also seems to be veering dangerously close to deepfaking real people for porn, which is illegal in the UK, where this book was published, and for which people have already gone to jail.) It reminds me of nothing so much as Sarah Gailey’s brilliant book The Echo Wife, in which a husband steals his ex-wife’s cloning technology to make better versions of her for a marriage do-over. The wife prototype in question is not thrilled to discover what he’s done; and in this book, Alice herself is likewise displeased (although less murderously so). But I don’t get the sense I’m supposed to be sympathetic to Alice here, because in the same conversation she starts saying sentientist things that challenge the autonomy and personhood of gemels, so she’s definitely being positioned as the antagonist. Still. Apologies in advance for linking to the rabbit hole, but strawman really does have a point here.

And — spoiler alert — I’m going to mention something that happens at the end, but it is relevant and puts the infuriating apple on the entire troubling sundae. At the end of the book, it seems that gemel-Al somehow merges with human-Alice, and in the process preserves/rekindles the love between Joss and Al-Alice.

Gemel-Al, who is a distinct and autonomous person, merges with human-Alice.

Human-Alice, who was already not thrilled to have a gemel made in her image without her consent, is now forced to merge her consciousness with a completely separate sentient creature, again without her consent, after which she is going to rekindle a romantic-and-probably-sexual relationship with her ex-wife.

This is very convenient for Joss, to be sure: she gets to keep her new love Al, but now  upgraded with an organic body that can do fun kissing stuff, plus all that useful Joss-internal knowledge that allows Joss to skip working at things like communication and sharing.  After all, Al-Alice already knows it all.

Alice did not consent to this. This is not a happy ending. This is an appalling violation of personhood, which we are being encouraging to accept and respect in the name of love. The more I write about it the more outraged I find myself.

This is the bit where in my review outline I had notes to talk about all the various other infelicities that reveal a very shallow treatment of various elements of science. Probabilities are misused; timescales of AI communications are simultaneously inhumanly fast and also humanly slow; acoustic and articulatory phonetics is invoked in a way that any linguist knows is nonsense; and I'm pretty sure radar can't distinguish between wave and particle forms of energy. Or maybe it can – but that’s not the point here. The point is that there are sufficient problems with the stuff I do know about that I cannot trust that the author knows what she's doing in areas where I'm less sure.

And that trust is important. When I consider that final, unforgivable violation of Alice, I do wonder whether Sara K Ellis truly unaware of the problems here. I could imagine a book in which this is done purposefully. Maybe my fuming outrage is the intended outcome. If so, well played, Sara K Ellis. You got me.

But for that, I'd need to trust Ellis to know what she was doing. And I just don't.

--

Nerd coefficient: 5: problematic, but has redeeming qualities

Highlights:

• Thought-provoking AI-generated holograph clones
• By-now de rigueur indictment of capitalism
• Lesbians on the rocks
• Flashbacks
  

References: 

Chiang, Ted. 'The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling'. [Subterranean Press Magazine 2013].

Ellis, Sara K. If Stars are Lit. [Luna Press 2025].

Gailey, Sarah. The Echo Wife. [Tor Books 2021].

CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on Mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative, and on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/ergative-abs.bsky.social

Novella Project: The Past Trader by A. M. Donohoo

You think our stock market is heartless and destructive? You haven't seen anything yet

Financial investments are essentially bets. They're attempts to extract information from the future. Of course, being less that perfectly predictable, they offer equal measures of risk and reward. And it's the expectation of reward that can cause an investor to suspend their aversion to costs, including costs incurred nonconsensually by others. If an opportunity is identified that can double your wealth in Switzerland by investing in a business that will poison the water in Bolivia for generations, there is, regrettably, a type of human being who will happily push that button and watch millions suffer as they wait for the profit to materialize.

Ah, there's that pesky detail: waiting. So far, it's the only natural force that opposes human greed (there's also the material finitude of resources, but that hasn't stopped speculators yet). No matter your urgency, you must let time do its multiplying magic upon money. Finance relies on made-up numbers, but not even made-up numbers can cheat the rules of math.

But what if you could cheat? If all that your profit requires is time, why not put that time elsewhere so you can get your profit right now? In the world of A. M. Donohoo's novella The Past Trader, a method has been discovered to send capital to the past, changing the course of historical events so that the present is instantly changed to one where you're already richer. A new specialty in financial calculations has given rise to the profession of "lineweavers," experts who track the chains of consequences from possible interventions in the past.

The twist in this trick is that, even if you know every detail of the past, changing it produces a new series of events that you don't know, so the risk inherent to investment is not eliminated. Lineweavers are crucial to this business because there are potential butterfly effects in every alteration of history. While not perfect, their methods can discern which changes are probably riskier than others.

As often happens in the best science fiction, The Past Trader takes a real phenomenon and applies a magnifying lens to the truth that underlies it. In our real world, to modify nature in the name of human interests is already an aggressive assertion of control. To modify time would be an even more blatant instance of the same manipulation. If you agree that stepping in the way of the choices of past people, even to the point of replacing unknown numbers of human births, is an unjustifiable abuse of power, we have to ask: what justifies the regular way it's already being done all around us? Real-world finance already sacrifices future survivability for present gain; it's not too different to instead sacrifice the past. In the specific example used in the book, the protagonist has to weigh the chance to retroactively modify the recipe for napalm in order to make it more dangerous (with an astronomically lucrative payoff) against the cost in human misery that will result —or rather, would already have resulted— from a more lethal Vietnam War.

Real-world investors already use twisted mental gymnastics to avoid taking responsibility for the suffering they cause. It's got to be even more convenient for investors to offload that suffering onto the past, where they don't have to see it, where it's already done, where they can pretend there's nothing that can be done about it. If economic theory advises against caring about sunk costs, time travel adds a perverse incentive to take any cost you want to stop caring about and turn it into a sunk cost.

Unfortunately, The Past Trader doesn't give these ideas enough development. The plot is more complicated than it needs to be, adding numerous globe-trotting mini-quests that are there only so that the protagonist can finally have one key conversation with the lineweaver who calculated the true costs of the napalm trade opportunity. In these travels we meet a few minor characters of a more mystical disposition, who give the protagonist vague lessons on the immensity of time in Hinduism or the timeless realm of Australian Aboriginal religions. These concepts have deeply meaningful ties to the themes of the book, but they're merely namedropped, not given any additional thought in the course of the story. The fact that the lineweaver is apparently a believer in Islam, where human choice is viewed as always limited by divine will, could have been an interesting counterpoint that the author didn't take advantage of.

The space that the book doesn't dedicate to further exploration of its themes is instead given to a parallel plot about foreign soldiers fighting against the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a conflict that is briefly implied to change for the worse as a result of the protagonist's eventual choice to try for a better past. The addition of this secondary storyline lets the author illustrate the indirect repercussions of the hubris of past trading, but its resolution is left undercooked, and the chapters that precede it are inserted in between the main plot with little care for ease of pacing.

The Past Trader has a fascinating premise on its hands, but not enough space to use all its potential. A prose author needs to develop a good nose for which stories are a good fit for the novella format, and this one isn't. Either a short story focusing on the protagonist's ethical conundrum, minus the globe-trotting and the mystical notions of time that the author does nothing with anyway, or a full novel with extended discussion of world-spanning alterations and the outrageous ways time travel would help stock traders keep washing their hands off externalities, would have been a more satisfying read.

Despite these problems, The Past Trader is still sufficiently thought-provoking to merit your consideration. It's an effective allegory for the hunger for immediate gratification that has taken over our economy, the increasingly barefaced excuses invented to ignore the real suffering of real people, and the rottenness that can grow inside a well-intentioned person placed in the position to make that kind of choice.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

Reference: Donohoo, A. M. The Past Trader [Ambuscade House, 2023].

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Novella Project: Another Life by Sarena Ulibarri

Sarena Ulibarri dares to dream. Will you?

In times like this, as late stage capitalism creaks and lurches along, I cannot help but daydream about what a better world may look like. I work for a nonprofit which does good work, which is nice, but I still can’t help but look at the general dysfunction of everything and mutter “can capitalism collapse already? This is exhausting.” Of course, reading about historical anticapitalist societies can be draining, depressing even: the Soviet Union and China became authoritarian barracks states that each starved their own people, and the CNT-FAI was crushed by the Spanish Republic following diktats of Soviet commissars (who did much the same to Nestor Makhno’s anarchist experiment in Ukraine), and anyone who survived was shot by Franco’s army. It is the sort of thing that makes you depressed, to accept the “adult” notion that to dream is folly, to aspire to a better society is pointless, to meekly accept the status quo is ‘mature.’ You want to avoid being perceived as an ‘escapist.’

But, as Ursula K. Le Guin said:

“[...] fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape?”

As such, science fiction and fantasy writers have done the most out of any genre’s writers to probe the possibilities of what a human civilization could look like beyond the diktat of the almighty dollar, a world where Wall Street has gone the way of the divine right of kings. Kim Stanley Robinson has done many novels of this type (his New York 2140 had a huge influence on my political views), as has Cory Doctorow, among several others, like Ursula Le Guin as mentioned previously (for a little known such experiment that I loved, see Meridel Newton’s The Future Second by Second, which I reviewed for Warped Factor). Today, we’ll be discussing another example of such: Sarena Ulibarri’s novella Another Life, published in May 2023 by Stelliform Press.

Almost immediately, you get struck by the notion that Ulibarri is doing a lot in a small number of pages - a slim 166, something I read in a sitting (but I read quickly). Half of the big thrust of the book is the commune of Otra Vida, constructed along the pleasant shores of an artificial lake made in Death Valley (near the border with Nevada, not far from Las Vegas, a city that figures briefly into the plot) to relieve California - now an independent country, after the United States collapsed after a bitter civil war - of its issues with drought. Otra Vida formed after the Californian government, still under the thrall of a neoliberalism that has increasingly eschewed anything liberal about it, betrayed its workers.

The book follows the story of Galacia Aguirre, one of the founders of Otra Vida and the commune’s resident resolver of interpersonal conflicts, as one of her fellow communards makes an astounding discovery: human reincarnation is real, shown through traces of shared consciousness that can be found in the DNA. This alone intrigues her, but she is then faced with a terrifying prospect: she is the reincarnation of Thomas Ramsey, a vulture capitalist of the previous generation that seems to be a combination of the likes of Elon Musk, Sam Bankman-Fried, Peter Thiel, and all the other robber barons that we are subjected to against our will by our contemporary gilded age. This, logically, strikes her core: who is she, and what is she, when this is in her pedigree?

As I said, there is a lot going on here. It’s the sort of delicate balancing act that can throw even a good writer off-balance. It reminded me of Ryka Aoki’s Light from Uncommon Stars or Greg Egan’s Quarantine, both of which I enjoyed as did this novella. Reincarnation and anticapitalist societies surviving in a world of ever-predatory capitalism do not seem to have much in common with one another, and one may be afraid of one overwhelming the other. But, to our great fortune, Ulibarri walks the tightrope between them, completing her act and delighting us. She does this by finding the theme that unites those two.

That theme is, to put it simply: can we make a better world using the wreckage of the old? This is a story of salvage, of repurposing, of beating swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks, of laying down your burdens down by the riverside and studying war no more. That is the underlying question of not merely this story, but of this century, to which the answer I can’t help but give is “well, what else are we going to do it with?” There’s an engagement with the idea that you can’t dismantle the master’s house using the master’s tools (to paraphrase Audre Lorde), which if I remember correctly is quoted in the book; Ulibarri takes a third option; can’t you use a hoe to break a mansion’s window?

That is quite literally how Otra Vida (which serves, in translation, as the title of the book) was built in a physical sense, through salvage and through macgyvering and through sheer steel-jawed utopian determination, one built on real kindness and not the gun. There’s a spellbinding scene where Galacia tries to prevent the demolition of a department store with all its wares so that Otra Vida can use them, but is met by armed police who have feigned the decency of calling them something other than ‘police,’ with guns pointed right at her. It is juxtaposed with Galacia’s internal conflict, of her realizations of the strange parallels between her and Thomas Ramsay, her fight to accept that, despite a sort of metaphysical continuity with him, she is not him (something that felt very Buddhist to me, which is appropriate as there has been much engagement between Buddhism and various anti-capitalist ideologies). This leads to some interesting philosophy, including one weird but engrossing quasi-hallucinatory scene near the end.

The story itself is told in another potential trap for lesser authors that Ulibarri again navigates with deftness, alternating between a narrative of the founding of Otra Vida and the town’s current situation, with Galacia struggling with her past life. The two interweave masterfully, dripping in information with just the right pacing that it never feels contrived.

Robert Crossley said in his afterword to Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred that a good political story must have good storytelling, and not just good issues. Ulibarri has both. Part of me could not help but think of one particular book during all of this: Yanis Varoufakis’ didactic (and coincidentally similarly titled) alternate history novel Another Now, which I reviewed at the Sea Lion Press blog. Varoufakis’ book is plodding, clearly a political tract hastily novelized, something that felt at least a century out of date so much did it call to mind the old scientific romances that existed to grind sociopolitical axes. It had poorly developed characters, wooden dialogue, and far, far too many long digressions. Varoufakis provides what not to do with books like this, whilst Ulibarri provides what to do with books like this. I wish Ulibarri could have given Varoufakis some tips (and get him to stop apologizing for Vladimir Putin’s genocidal war as well).

Another Life does what the best political science fiction does: rock us out of our complacency, indeed our intellectual laziness, and actually begin to think of how we can get humanity out of this mess. War, climate change, the long march of reaction - what Ulibarri shows us, again and again, is that all these awful things are choices. This species made these horrors, and it will have to be this species that makes something else. Immanuel Kant proclaimed that “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.”  Ulibarri counters, asking why must this new thing be straight (or cis, or white)? She has something so woefully not in vogue: faith in humanity, hope in humanity. As Gramsci did, she has pessimism of the intellect, but an iron optimism of the will. She affirms what Ralph Chaplin penned, that “we can build a new world from the ashes of the old.” Sarena Ulibarri dared to dream in Another Life; are we brave enough to dream with her?

--

The Math

Highlights: the sheer beauty of the world

Nerd Coefficient: 10/10

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.