Black Star Rising by Frederik Pohl

So, somehow I’ve managed to fit in some reading this year, but I haven’t posted much about it. I figured I’d rectify that by doing a quick post about everything I’ve read, but… well, I started and then found I had a lot to say about several of the books. Here’s the first of them, a book I read this summer, after finding a hardback in a box at my mom’s house. Frederik Pohl’s Black Star Rising is a 1980s China-in-charge novel. That’s a subgrenre of SF, isn’t it? Some others that depict China on top, or flirt with the idea of …

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Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand by Samuel Delany

Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand is a very difficult book to talk about. It’s a challenging book to read, too, but talking about it seems harder than reading it, to me. That’s usually a sign that there’s something worth thinking over, though I am struggling to find a way into discussing it. Certainly, a mere “reader reaction” of the type that one sees all over the internet seems insufficient, for the same reason it strikes one as ridiculous for someone to walk out of a hall where a piece by Mahler or Webern or Stravinsky has just …

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