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On the SF side, this is a story of people who know that Earth has only months left (an asteroid is on a collision course with the planet). What do you do? Go bucket list? Throw yourself in front of a bus? Carry on as if little has changed? The societal changes are perhaps less unique in SF, but this is still excellently done. It's not a complete collapse, but a lot of changes (rationing, corporate collapse) matter. There's cults and cabals and ... it's all great!

On the crime novel side, the apparent suicide that kicks off the novel is the kind of simple case that cops actually deal with, not the complicated serial killings of a Jo Nesbø novel or many people have motives Knives Out movie. The bad guys are not mustache-twirlers. The newly promoted detective actually investigates, somewhat amateurishly due to his lack of experience, but still investigation. It ticks all the boxes of what I like in a crime story.

I'm old and tired these days. It takes a very engaging book for me to stay up past my bedtime. With 20% left, I decided I had to finish last night. I couldn't put it off until after work today.

Despite my critical comments, I think this is a largely positive book detailing some techniques of good communication. However, it's really not a how-to. The rough outline for each technique goes: anecdote about a communication breakdown, review of research about a technique, anecdote about someone who is good at it (a supercommunicator), and a cursory, hand-wavey things you might want to try section. The overviews/reviews of research are the best part. The how-to is too general to be of real use.

And to repeat my comments in the review itself, the author tends to glorify good communication itself, rather than as a means toward an end. That is readily apparent in the sections on communicating about race & identity, where the author never really identifies that racism, sexism and other issues related to identity are the real problem, not just that communication about them is fraught.

His information on communication itself seems pretty solid though, from the bits I checked.

It gets worse. Current chapter covers internal and external controversies over "identity" at Netflix. One after an executive in charge of communications used the n-word, and the company embarked on a series of open internal communications. "Tough conversations." Yadda yadda. Then after praising Netflix for transforming itself into such a diverse company as a result/correlation, jumps into the Chappelle special controversy from 2021. That's the one where they published a Chappelle comedy special where he made fun of trans people. So more internal conversations were had, and the result was bupkis. But the author praises Netflix for having internal conversations where everyone got heard. It's the same thing as my last comment on the book, where the communication is the goal.

Maybe there's some tangible results that he doesn't go into or doesn't know about. I am not going to do a ton of research into changes made at Netflix. I'm just irritated at this pedestalling of the communication itself without going on to what the communication is supposed to enable.

Ugh. This book just presented a whole chapter on an experiment in communication designed to get opposing sides of guns/gun-control debates talking with each other. I could see where this was going, but I decided to give it a shot and the author failed.

Where did I see this going? The author presented the the experiment as successful because it showed that both sides didn't have to hate each other. Is that good? Yes. Is that good enough? No. As if both sides of this debate are equally moral sides. They are not. I get that it's probably not useful to hate people who want to enable killing kids, but there are other books out there explaining some of the research that goes beyond communicating to persuasion. This is the "why can't we all just get along" of chapters on communication.

I'd quote, but listening to the audiobook so I don't have an accurate transcription.

Accomplished courtier, attendant to five English Queens, pivotal in annulling a royal marriage, this is Jane Boleyn’s own story spanning 1534 to 1542.

Jane has been much-maligned, but I always considered her a complex woman who was buffeted by circumstance, finding nuance even in the most vicious assassinations of her character. Gregory definitely has a modern view of Jane, and clearly seeks to rehabilitate history’s view of the infamous Lady Rochford.

While Jane Boleyn is sensitively portrayed, I didn’t feel “Boleyn Traitor” added much depth to my understanding of her character. However, Gregory does make a compelling argument for Jane’s skill as a courtier and spy, as she rightly points out how long Jane survived in the lethal court of Henry VIII. I’d never before considered how odd that was.

Gregory also portrays Catherine Howard in the most sympathetic light I’ve encountered yet. She does a great job in painting a picture of how appalling it must have been for a somewhat silly teen to be married to the ageing King of England at the peak of his unpleasantness.

Generally, Gregory’s writing is absolutely fine, but I found this a little over-long and slightly tedious. I think I’d have liked it more had I known less about Jane. I do think anyone who is interested in the Tudor’s but hasn’t read much about Jane Boleyn will find this novel both interesting and enjoyable.

I've never cared much for stories that incorporate telepathy. Usually it adds little except perhaps a novel way to depict the violation of a beautiful woman's consent (looking at you, Star Trek The Next Generation). But Karen Lord uses telepathy to explore intimacy and consent in a positive way, albeit set against the backdrop of a genocidal catastrophe. Our heroine, Grace, is a middle-aged civil servant who gets assigned to be a liaison between her government and a group of refugees who have come to make a new home on her planet after theirs was destroyed. Not only that, but because of the stricter gender roles in the refugees' society, the survivors skew male at a rate of about 80%. So they and Grace set off on a cross-planet adventure to visit various communities whose values and genetics are compatible with the survivors' in order to help them find wives in a way that does not disrupt the existing society's mores. This may sound far-fetched, but in the notes, the author says that this was based on real events, specifically the aftermath of the south Asian tsunami on Dec. 26, 2004. A great many fisherman survived due to being out at sea when the tsunami came, while their wives and children, at home on a Sunday in their homes along the shore, mostly perished. Along the way... well, that's the whole story, isn't it. Ultimately the tale brings us all around the planet (which Lord says she envisioned as an intergalactic version of the Caribbean), hints at some time traveling as well, and then concludes on a hopeful, wholesome, and almost romantic comedy-esque note. I really enjoyed it and it's inspiring me to go back and try "The Galaxy Game" again.