Reviews: Your Mother's Fox, Murderbot 3, Tomorrow 2

Niv Sekar — Your Mother's Fox (comics)

Aug 16

A short and melancholy story, about that point in early adulthood where you start to measure yourself against your parents and aren't really sure you like your score.

Martha Wells — Rogue Protocol: The Murderbot Diaries

Aug 25

Continuing to enjoy Murderbot. Also, I'm really glad this series has been getting a lot of love from elsewhere! People IRL have been bringing it up spontaneously! (Including my sister, who I don't think reads this journal.)

Sidenote, I'm starting to think I misjudged the title choices on these. I figured the episode titles were from someone in the editorial or marketing chain grasping for plausible nonsense that sounded badass and vaguely technological, but now I think they're tongue-in-cheek. After all, our protagonist's "rogue protocol" consists of making shit up as they go along and trying not to have a panic attack. And then if I look at it from another angle, there's this element of kind of sweet encouragement to it, too, right? Murderbot might see these misadventures as a frustrating and disappointing anxietyfest, but from the outside, it's all very much as exciting and badass as their beloved TV serials, and you could read the titles as telling them "buck up buddy, this is very hard and you're doing a good job."

Anyway, the end of this one was quite sad, and while slipping out the back door might not have been the coolest move, I'm not sure what else Murderbot should have done in that situation. Staying probably wouldn't have helped.

Oh, lemme throw YET ANOTHER tangent about novellas in here. If a short story ought to be about a movie's worth of story, and a novel is at least a season of TV's worth, how much story can a good novella fit? Three episodes of hour-long TV? More, less? This metric didn't even occur to me until I was already finished with this one, but I'll try to watch for the "episode breaks" next time.

Adolfo Bioy Casares — The Invention of Morel (re-read)

Sep. 1

This existential comedy/horror story remains a fuckin' delight.

Eleanor Davis — Tommorow, ch. 2 (comics)

Sep 26

(gumroad link)

This comic makes me feel very comfortable and very uncomfortable at the same time.