Authority is the second book in the Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer. After the strange, horrifying events that took place in Area X during the twelfth expedition there, John ”Control” Rodriguez is sent to Southern Reach to get some answers about what really happened. Unfortunately, he finds that people are not so obliging when it comes to providing them, and nothing is as it seems. It is much, much worse. In what feels like a nightmare, he tries to find out the truth about […]
Divided we fall
I’ve owned the Southern Reach trilogy for ages. I don’t even remember how I found out about it, if it was a fellow Cannonballer who recommended it or if I read about it on a friend’s Facebook page or something else entirely. I lent it to my dad before I had read it, and, because he lives in another country, it took about a year before I got it back. So when I finally started reading it, I had forgotten what it was about. I’m […]
The Black Mirror vibes are strong with this one
”Stories of your life and others” by Ted Chiang is a collection of fictional short stories about such diverse topics as the tower of Babylon, superintelligence, and automata. It also includes the story that the movie ”Arrival” was based on, so add ”aliens” to this list of topics. Considering how wide the thematic spectrum of the book is, it comes as no surprise that the language and tone varies. Some of the stories are so horrifyingly dystopian that they could be easily turned into […]
We’re all flawed
It’s impossible to write a review of Harper Lee’s ”Go set a watchman” without comparing it to her masterpiece ”To kill a mockingbird”. My comparison is short: The former not even close to the latter. ”To kill a mockingbird” is a classic for a reason. That’s not to say that ”Go set a watchman” is a bad book; it has many redeeming features. But more on that later. Jean Louise (aka Scout) Finch, one of the central characters of TKAM, is now an adult. She […]