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Excellent transhumanist post-apocalypse sci fi adventuring, reckless and fucked up in all senses of the phrase, but also a meditation on trauma and how we cope with it. Worth checking out for the following:

-Rolling Fuck, a mobile city full of posthumans who are mostly high out of their minds -the Big Bad being really awful Christian supremacists -the awful Christian supremacists getting their fucking asses kicked from here to high heaven. Or hell, more likely.

Technically that's a spoiler, but that outcome is something of a foregone conclusion. The truly interesting parts of the plot are about how the people on the "right" side, if there is such a thing, try to prevent themselves from turning into monsters in their fight to stay free, and how they deal with it when they kinda turn into monsters anyway.

One point deducted only because the writing is a bit stiff in places; the ideas and the story are fantastic but high literature it is not.

This was the #SFFBookClub book for August 2025.

In some ways, this book structurally reminded me of How High We Go in the Dark; they're both a post-apocalyptic, interconnected series of stories about humanity trying to survive. The stories here are further in the future and feel much more surreal and dreamlike. If anything, I feel like I've missed something critical as a reader--I can't quite put my finger on what this book is trying to do.

There are a few things that don't work for me. I think the stories largely don't stand on their own: there's many interesting ideas, but they don't feel connected via plot or resonate with a theme. There's also a penultimate chapter of the book where the book just out and out tells you everything it's been hinting at previously. I had guessed at a good bit of it, but it felt underwhelming to have it laid out so plainly rather than sketched across stories.

Jack Yu is a detective who is assigned to New York's Chinatown beat, where he grew up. There's a crime and an investigation and I really enjoyed that it involved shoe leather and collecting clues and not jumping to conclusions. But the heart of the story is really about Jack Yu navigating being second generation, and being a cop on behalf of a white-led power structure policing his own community. He's no dupe, but he also doesn't think Chinese people should prey on their own. A childhood friend was murdered by a Chinese gang. Jack Yu's is to become law & order. Another friend's response is to become the leader of another crew that exacts revenge. Years later, they come in contact around the crime at the center of this story.

The ethical lens is presented by the author as complex, and the portrayal is a series of fuzzy compromises rather than easy, sure answers. That feels better than a black-and-white view, but being a non-immigrant white dude, I'm missing experience and perspective.

Floyd Betts returns to his hometown Old Cypress to bury his unloved father when his aunt Constance refuses to pay the $10 the preacher charges for digging a grave in the church cemetery. Nellie and Hank Abernathy are the orphaned children of a witch, late of Old Cypress. Betts, not wanting to leave the children to beg in front of the church in Old Cypress, loads them up to take back to Galveston where he boards. Charlie Fish is... well, read the book. But suffice to say he joins Floyd and Nellie and Hank when they return to Galveston. Nellie and Hank and Charlie all have gifts, and they are going to need them as scoundrels pursue them into the face of the hurricane that wiped out Galveston in 1900.

Extremely engaging story. There's danger. Ghosts. Scoundrels. Hell and high water. Rountree has also put effort into defining his characters. Not just their backstories, but also their values.

It's also one of the best I've read recently at establishing a sense of place through description. Old Cypress and Galveston are not just described visually, but also in the sense of what it feels like to be there, the vibe of each place. This is done without feeling like an info-dump.

All packed into a long novella or a short novel. I'm not sure where it qualifies technically, but it's nowhere near doorstop weight. There's no sense of "finally done with this!" and more like "I wish this weren't over yet."

My economics background is limited to the intro macro and micro courses I took as an undergrad and in which it seemed to me every question could have numbers going up or down and I always picked the wrong one. So when presented with books like these I just look at the presented graphs and nod, and say that sounds reasonable, especially since I mostly pre-agreed with the sentiments expressed. Not that I would call myself a socialist, and I don't really think the policies recommended here are particularly radical - reducing inequality through progressive taxation and investment in education, yada yada, and endorsing Bernie Sanders (this book was published during the first Trump term) who was not above campaigning against gun control in New Hampshire and coded appeals to racists in the name of anti-globalism when he was running against Hillary in the previous race (one credit to the Trump years is that it made that kind of Democratic have-it-both-ways campaigning that got Vincent Chin killed more unpalatable these days). That is my biggest complaint about this book, it doesn't just presume but flat out states that xenophobia will not be a problem if we just have less inequality, which at least is an improvement over Robert Reich's oligarchy book where did the people-aren't-racist-it's-racist-resentment thing (which I first heard on Geraldine Ferraro's Fox News sour grapes tour after Hillary lost to Obama). Seriously, go to Reich's website where a search for "oligarchy" returns hundreds of results and "racism" has no hits. But anyway back to this book, what I found most interesting is the prescriptions for how to improve or worst case replace the EU, because really I had no idea how that thing works, just complaints from Brexiter colleagues about "unrestricted immigration" while raking in tidy salaries in California. Yeah, a UBI is really gonna change their tune.