User Profile

The Old Goat and the Alien is a cozy, fluffy scifi novel that is largely inwardly focused on character growth and interpersonal conflict. It's also hella queer. This book is exactly the soft hug I expected it to be.

The main plot hook is that grumpy, goat-shape Avari inadvertantly becomes the host for the newly arrived "alien" (human) Jenna who shows up through a portal with no resources and no friends. This book has a confetti grab-bag of genders and trans and queer and disability flavors. I love love the gift economy. I also super appreciate the detail of having a major side character be a plural system that is chimera-shaped.

A story with this many identities also creates so much space for nuance; there's different kinds of disability accommodations, there's two very different ways of being autistic, there's many different ways of being trans.

(also Tak! shoutout in the thanks section??)

A difficult book to read, since it mostly talks about how people are harmed, and how society fails to protect & support them. The three main topics covered are gun ownership leading to (especially) suicide, opposition to government-provided healthcare leading to worse healthcare outcomes, and school funding cuts leading to many negative outcomes. Whiteness is a political doctrine which contains many jagged bits and pieces of ideology which don't necessarily fit together neatly. One of the things this book did for me was articulate that at least in the policy areas of guns and healthcare, white people aligned with the white political project are not ignorantly voting for harmful policies. The people interviewed know that widespread easy access to guns leads to more gun deaths, and they accept and acknowledge that as a reasonable cost of maintaining their rights. Likewise healthcare: there is no confusion about the fact that moving closer to universal healthcare would help them and their communities. But they are willing to forego that benefit in order to withhold it from other, mostly non-white, disfavored groups. These are deliberate calculated choices, not ignorant policy-against-self-interest. These people have simply decided that the individual and community costs of these policies (gun access and individualized healthcare) are worthwhile. Education seems like the exception. The voices highlighted seemed to reject the legitimacy of education funding cuts after seeing the negative outcomes of those policies. They previously believed that education was inefficient and overfunded, but amended those beliefs after funding cuts hurt schools. This outcome was not consistent, but it was noticeable for happening at all in contrast to guns and healthcare. However, even when it came to education, that policy objective was less important than other objectives more closely centered around the project of whiteness. Hence interviewees who objected to local and state school-defunding decisions but were still excited to vote for Trump's ethno-nationalist policies despite disagreeing with his education policy. Overall, it is abundantly clear from these interviews and analyses that whiteness is a doctrine of exclusion, perceived scarcity, and hatred. It is probably not surprising to hear that whiteness has racial animus at its heart. What was most interesting to me was that ignorance was not a key pillar of policy decision-making. White politics entails full awareness of the harm done by white policies to white communities. It is simply calculated that these lives lost are an acceptable cost.

This anthology of transfeminine cyberpunk stories had some gems in it. The pitch made me hope for transformative ways of being intersected with surviving under oppressive social structures (it's always capitalism), and it very much delivered. It's rare that every story in a collection lands for me as a reader, but it seems a positive trait that they all didn't in this one trying to go in weirder and stranger directions.

There are so many good quotes I want to share from this collection but I'll try to limit myself.

A taste of my favorite stories: * a woman who drives a giant robot cube on the moon for scientists as a second job and dreams of moving there to have less lag in her embodiment * a bespoke body-creating artist (with their own nuanced dysphoria) trying to create body euphoria for others in a world where their bodies are callously sold at auction * an underground group who syncs their memories with each other working to collectively survive (and fight) puritanical fascists * a scientist who injects herself with own soon-to-be-shutdown nanite project and tries to figure out how to be a mother to them