Bookish Thoughts

Autonomous  is all about, you guessed it, autonomy. It asks what it means to be in charge of your own life, to what extent you can be, and how to find the balance between independence and interconnectedness. The story takes place in the far future where drug patents have severely restricted who has access to medicine. Pirates work to reverse-engineer and sell these drugs on the black market. And the drug companies send people after them to protect their intellectual property. This is all interesting stuff, but the book is also shockingly violent. I had a hard time with the various interrogation scenes and ended up really hating a character. The book didn't condemn that character nearly enough for me (it didn't help that large sections were narrated by his love-interest who wasn't really thinking critically about the harm the two of them were causing). My hatred of said character and the book's efforts to humanize him ended up making me dislike this book more than I ot...

This year tor.com has started releasing bundles of short fiction, free to download if you sign up for their newsletter. All the stories in the collection were eventually published on their website, but it was nice to get them bundled together and have access a few days before everyone else. Even if I didn't actually finish the collection until after they were all released. It's nice to be able to download these to my work computer and read a story over the course of a day (my work is such that I often have 15-20 minute chunks of time waiting for data to load or simulations to run, and it's a good time to get some reading in). Some of the stories were better than others, and most were excellent. They all used fantasy elements to tackle common relationships in new ways. A chef is trying to recreate his mother's signature recipe after her death, and it takes an encounter with his abusive sister to help him let go of the past. A man is dealing with the imminent death of h...