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There are creatures in the water of Con Dao. To the locals, they're monsters. To …
Every Ray Nayler book is a philosophical conundrum wrapped in an ecological tragedy wrapped in a rad scifi story.
There are creatures in the water of Con Dao. To the locals, they're monsters. To …
The framing of "point fives" is particularly thought-provoking given the steadily increasing number of news reports of llm-induced psychosis
The framing of "point fives" is particularly thought-provoking given the steadily increasing number of news reports of llm-induced psychosis
There are creatures in the water of Con Dao. To the locals, they're monsters. To …
This society—what we call modern society, what we always think of as the most important time the world has ever known, simply because we are in it—is just the sausage made by grinding up history.
There are creatures in the water of Con Dao. To the locals, they're monsters. To …
Someone said that people don’t really want to date other people. They don’t really want equal partnership—you know, two full people in a relationship. Two people with demands and desires and differences of opinion about everything. What they want is one-point-five people in the relationship. They want to be the complete one, the person who controls the relationship—and they want the other person to be half a person. You know, someone who gets them, but who doesn’t have their own demands. Someone who appears complete, with all these personality quirks and their own opinions and stories about the world—but not in an annoying way. Not in a way that would demand you change.
I have never read such a short passage that provides such deep insight into human behavior
There are creatures in the water of Con Dao. To the locals, they're monsters. To …
The world still contains miracles, despite everything that has been done to it.
There are creatures in the water of Con Dao. To the locals, they're monsters. To …
The great and terrible thing about humankind is simply this: we will always do what we are capable of.
There are creatures in the water of Con Dao. To the locals, they're monsters. To …
The plastic awning of the café streamed with rain.
There are creatures in the water of Con Dao. To the locals, they're monsters. To …
The #SFFBookClub pick for December 2025
What does it mean to "be-in-kind" with a nonhuman animal? Or in Dr. Sean Kell-Luddon’s …
How to review this without spoilers for things that it is definitely worth encountering at the speed they're written?
I found this a hard book to read, because so much of the plot is driven by the protagonist making decisions that are clearly bad in the moment they are made. I felt a bit like the stereotypical moviegoer wanting to shout "no, don't do it" at the screen. But I ultimately came to see it as a classic tragedy: a whole series of painful events driven by the hero's fatal flaw. And it is all aspects of the same flaw, and the flaw is one that's very recognisable looking around at society.
It's also a story of the right size for the novella format. Sometimes I get frustrated that novellas feel incomplete, rushing to an ending and/or leaving too few characters fleshed out. This one just felt tightly …
How to review this without spoilers for things that it is definitely worth encountering at the speed they're written?
I found this a hard book to read, because so much of the plot is driven by the protagonist making decisions that are clearly bad in the moment they are made. I felt a bit like the stereotypical moviegoer wanting to shout "no, don't do it" at the screen. But I ultimately came to see it as a classic tragedy: a whole series of painful events driven by the hero's fatal flaw. And it is all aspects of the same flaw, and the flaw is one that's very recognisable looking around at society.
It's also a story of the right size for the novella format. Sometimes I get frustrated that novellas feel incomplete, rushing to an ending and/or leaving too few characters fleshed out. This one just felt tightly focussed.
And it has one of the best closing sentences of anything I've read, up there with The Dispossessed for how perfectly it recapitulates the whole story, and how little it will mean prior to having read the story.
What does it mean to "be-in-kind" with a nonhuman animal? Or in Dr. Sean Kell-Luddon’s …
#SFFBookClub November
Ten years have passed since a widespread blackout triggered the rapid collapse of society, when …
I found this a very satisfying continuation and conclusion of the story started in Moon of the Crusted Snow. It has a very different mood and focus, so much so that in this review I'm trying to avoid spoilers for the previous book more than for this one. Where Crusted Snow gets a lot of its tension from us as readers learning things as the protagonists do, this one is mostly not a suspenseful story. The broad outline of how things have to go is apparent from early on, and most of what makes it interesting is atmosphere and character development. Even the cover art of the two books does a pretty good job of communicating their relative moods.
I'm pretty sure this book would stand alone far better than most sequels do, because it largely follows a character too young to remember the events of or background …
I found this a very satisfying continuation and conclusion of the story started in Moon of the Crusted Snow. It has a very different mood and focus, so much so that in this review I'm trying to avoid spoilers for the previous book more than for this one. Where Crusted Snow gets a lot of its tension from us as readers learning things as the protagonists do, this one is mostly not a suspenseful story. The broad outline of how things have to go is apparent from early on, and most of what makes it interesting is atmosphere and character development. Even the cover art of the two books does a pretty good job of communicating their relative moods.
I'm pretty sure this book would stand alone far better than most sequels do, because it largely follows a character too young to remember the events of or background to the first book. This neatly gives Rice a way to work in some rehashing naturally as people answering her questions, but also this book fills in a lot of information that none of the characters knew during the first one. That said, I'd still recommend reading Crusted Snow first because the most emotional parts of this story are bound to have more impact if you've had longer to get invested in the older characters.
CWs: racist violence, and this one's a real tear jerker.
#SFFBookClub (we read the first one as part of the book club last year)
What does it mean to "be-in-kind" with a nonhuman animal? Or in Dr. Sean Kell-Luddon’s …
Content warning Feed Them Silence review with spoilers, because I can't figure out how to do it without
This was a hard read.
I identified quite a bit with Riya from the beginning, particularly including the criticism that the researchers were literally objectifying an animal for their own purposes, which did not happen to include helping the animal.
I'm glad that the brain pattern anomalies turned out to be from brain damage instead of something like a two-way connection - it's much more fitting from scientific, literary, and justice perspectives.
I'm missing a sense of finality in the end, feeling a little like Sean's own frustration - Sean didn't grow or change, the corporation keeps on corporating, the research doesn't go anywhere, the wolf pack is going to agonizingly peter out. We just get a snapshot of a bleak slide along an unchanging trajectory from not great to less great, just like real life.
For what it's worth, I'm glad they didn't go all in on the wolf sex.
What does it mean to "be-in-kind" with a nonhuman animal? Or in Dr. Sean Kell-Luddon’s …
Content warning Feed Them Silence chapter 1
It would be pretty hard to be married to somebody that I felt like their whole career was unethical
What does it mean to "be-in-kind" with a nonhuman animal? Or in Dr. Sean Kell-Luddon’s …
The portable surgery unit hulked at the edge of a tract field, ringed by four-byfours and a lone Jeep.
What does it mean to "be-in-kind" with a nonhuman animal? Or in Dr. Sean Kell-Luddon’s …
#SFFBookClub November
