scruffyket
ash | 32 | đ¸đŹ đłď¸âđ | songsforafuturepoet @ IG & substack. my current interests are grief, gender, violence, intimate labour, critical feminism, philosophy, scifi, politics, and climate
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scruffyket is interested in reading...
1d
Kappa Quartet
Daryl Qilin Yam
Shortlisted for the Singapore Book Awards 2017 (Best Book Cover Design)
Epigram Books Fiction Prize 2015 Longlist
Kevin is a young man without a soul, holidaying in Tokyo; Mr Five, the enigmatic kappa, is the man he so happens to meet. Little does Kevin know that kappasâthe river demons of Japanese folkloreâdesire nothing more than the souls of other humans. Set between Singapore and Japan, Kappa Quartet is split into eight discrete sections, tracing the rippling effects of this chance encounter across a host of other characters, connected and bound to one another in ways both strange and serendipitous. Together they ask one another: what does it mean to be in possession of something nobody has seen before?
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1d
M Train
Patti Smith
M Train begins in the tiny Greenwich Village cafĂŠ where Smith goes every morning for black coffee, ruminates on the world as it is and the world as it was, and writes in her notebook. Through prose that shifts fluidly between dreams and reality, past and present, we travel to Frida Kahlo's Casa Azul in Mexico; to the fertile moon terrain of Iceland; to a ramshackle seaside bungalow in New York's Far Rockaway that Smith acquires just before Hurricane Sandy hits; to the West 4th Street subway station, filled with the sounds of the Velvet Underground after the death of Lou Reed; and to the graves of Genet, Plath, Rimbaud, and Mishima.
Woven throughout are reflections on the writer's craft and on artistic creation. Here, too, are singular memories of Smith's life in Michigan and the irremediable loss of her husband, Fred Sonic Smith.
Braiding despair with hope and consolation, illustrated with her signature Polaroids, M Train is a meditation on travel, detective shows, literature, and coffee. It is a powerful, deeply moving book by one of the most remarkable multiplatform artists at work today.
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scruffyket is interested in reading...
1w
Root Rot
Saskia Nislow
Come meet The Liar, The Secret Keeper, The Crybaby, and the rest.
Nine children travel with their families to their Grandfather's vacation property, where strange things begin to happen: eyes blink from the bottom up, mushrooms ooze blood, people's faces don't hang right anymore-except they do, once you look more closely. Transformations warp the children's sense of time and place, the very land itself seeming to encroach upon them.
As The Liar watches the children succumb one by one to an unknown fate, she must make sense of absent stars in the night sky, vials of amber liquid that taste of milk, a funny little rope tied in knots. She's faced with a choice: join or resist, only the choice is not so simple.
Set in The Grandfather's Lake House as he continues to extend his property lines and told in the eerie we of the children, Root Rot explores predatory family dynamics, the boundaries of bodies and home, and how individuals choose to participate in or push back against structures that would harm them.
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1w
scruffyket is interested in reading...
1w
Time Out of Joint
Philip K. Dick
Ragle Gumm is an ordinary man leading an ordinary life, except that he makes his living by entering a newspaper contest every day - and winning, every day.
But he gradually begins to suspect that his life - indeed his whole world - is an illusion, constructed around him for the express purpose of keeping him docile and happy. But if that is the case, what is his real world like, and what is he actually doing every day when he thinks he is guessing 'Where Will The Little Green Man Be Next?'
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scruffyket is interested in reading...
1w
The Anubis Gates
Tim Powers
Brendan Doyle, a specialist in the work of the early-nineteenth century poet William Ashbless, reluctantly accepts an invitation from a millionaire to act as a guide to time-travelling tourists. But while attending a lecture given by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1810, he becomes marooned in Regency London, where dark and dangerous forces know about the gates in time.
Caught up in the intrigue between rival bands of beggars, pursued by Egyptian sorcerers, and befriended by Coleridge, Doyle somehow survives and learns more about the mysterious Ashbless than he could ever have imagined possible...
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1w
Behold The Man
Michael Moorcock
Karl Glogauer is a disaffected modern professional casting about for meaning in a series of half-hearted relationships, a dead-end job and a personal struggle. His questions of faith surrounding his father's run-of-the-mill Christianity and his mother's suppressed Judaism lead him to a bizarre obsession with the idea of the messiah. After the collapse of his latest affair and his introduction to a reclusive physics professor, Karl is given the opportunity to confront his obsession and take a journey that no man has taken before, and from which he knows he cannot return. Upon arriving in Palestine, AD 29, Glogauer finds that Jesus Christ is not the man that history and faith would like to believe, but that there is an opportunity for someone to change the course of history by making the ultimate sacrifice.
First published in 1969, Behold the Man broke through science fiction's genre boundaries to create a poignant reflection on faith, disillusion and self-sacrifice. This is the classic novel that established the career of perhaps contemporary science fiction's most cerebral and innovative author.
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1w
Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It
Cory Doctorow
Explaining the process of the âenshittificationâ of digital platforms over time and what to do about it.Cory Doctorow's Enshittification takes a witty yet incisive look at the tech landscape, where platforms like TikTok, Facebook, and Google start off greatâbefore they inevitably turn terrible. In this contemporary moment of digital decline, Doctorow explores how tech giants lure users in with convenience and then degrade their services over time, squeezing profit at the cost of user experience. With a mix of sharp humor and deep insight, he unveils the slow creep of "enshittification," turning the online world into a worse place, one algorithm at a time.
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1w
Eros: Queer Myths for Lovers
Zoe Terakes
A sexy modern take on ancient Greek myths.She keeps her eyes on me while she lights the end of my cigarette. I stare back at her. Something in the pills and in her eyes is opening up my muscles like hands parting from prayer, like trees breathing.Eros is a stunning collection of short stories, grounded in truth and coloured with dazzling imagination and alluring, unpredictable mystery. Revealing how queerness, nature and myth have been intertwined for eternity, these are stories of gods and goddesses. Of Zeus, of Eurydice, of Hermaphroditus, of Icarus before he flew into the sun. Stories of queer life, lust, revenge, wrath, passion and sex. Of yearning, love, loss. Some transformations span across a life, and others, an evening. Perspectives will shift. Houses will burn. Lovers will learn their fate. Zoe Terakes has skilfully blended myth and modernity to illuminate the complex and enduring truth of trans lives, resisting a history of erasure and delivering a sexy, soul-touching book to read to your lover . . . or yourself.'Goddamn, these stories set my queer heart alight. In finally making queer and trans undertones of ancient Greek myth explicit, Zoe Terakes has forged something both classic and eternal, timely and timeless.' BENJAMIN LAW
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Post from the The Iron Garden Sutra (The Cosmic Wheel #1) forum
2w
Post from the The Iron Garden Sutra (The Cosmic Wheel #1) forum
2w
scruffyket commented on scruffyket's update
3w
scruffyket started reading...
3w
The Iron Garden Sutra
A.D. Sui
A monk joins a science team in exploring a long-lost spaceship, uncovering its dark and disturbing historyâand encountering something beyond human understandingâin this thought-provoking, metaphysical science fiction novel.
Vessel Iris has devoted himself to the Starlit Order, performing funeral rites for the dead across the galaxy and guiding souls back into the Infinite Light. Despite the comfort he wants to believe he brings to the dead, his relationships with his fellow Vessels are distant at best, leaving him reliant on his AI construct for companionship.
The spaceship Counsel of Nicaea has been lost for more than a thousand years. A relic of Earthâs dying past, humanity took the ship to the stars on a multi-generation journey to find another habitable planet yet never reached its destination. Its sudden appearance has attracted a team of academics eager to investigate its archeological history. And Iris has been assigned to bring peace to the crewâs long departed souls.
Carpeted in moss and intertwined with vines, Nicaea is more forest than ship.
But the ship's plant life isnât the only sentience to have survived in the past millennia. Something onboard is stalking the explorers one by one. And Iris with his AI construct may be their only hope for survival. . .
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scruffyket is interested in reading...
3w
Oracle (Robert Grim #2)
Thomas Olde Heuvelt
From international bestseller Thomas Olde Heuvelt comes Oracle, a supernatural thriller where an omen from our past threatens the return of ancient forces that will change the world forever.
On a foggy winter morning Luca Wolf and Emma Reich discover an eighteenth-century sailing ship stranded on a barren flower field, its name written on its side: Oracle.
Emma, unable to resist, enters the hatch on the tilted deck. The ship's bell begins to toll and no one sees her again.
Not much later, eleven people have disappeared, Luca and his mother have been absconded by a clandestine government agency which has questions, no answers, and are determined to uncover the shipâs secrets before a media storm erupts.
But as they force Robert Grim, a retired specialist of the occult with a strange history and a healthy dislike of authority, to unravel the mystery, the Oracle is revealed to be a harbinger of an ancient doom awakened underneath the sea.
What follows is a maelstrom of international intrigue, history, young love, humanityâs relationship with climate and disease, and pure terror as they come face to face with an open doorway to apocalypse.
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scruffyket started reading...
3w
The Iron Garden Sutra
A.D. Sui
A monk joins a science team in exploring a long-lost spaceship, uncovering its dark and disturbing historyâand encountering something beyond human understandingâin this thought-provoking, metaphysical science fiction novel.
Vessel Iris has devoted himself to the Starlit Order, performing funeral rites for the dead across the galaxy and guiding souls back into the Infinite Light. Despite the comfort he wants to believe he brings to the dead, his relationships with his fellow Vessels are distant at best, leaving him reliant on his AI construct for companionship.
The spaceship Counsel of Nicaea has been lost for more than a thousand years. A relic of Earthâs dying past, humanity took the ship to the stars on a multi-generation journey to find another habitable planet yet never reached its destination. Its sudden appearance has attracted a team of academics eager to investigate its archeological history. And Iris has been assigned to bring peace to the crewâs long departed souls.
Carpeted in moss and intertwined with vines, Nicaea is more forest than ship.
But the ship's plant life isnât the only sentience to have survived in the past millennia. Something onboard is stalking the explorers one by one. And Iris with his AI construct may be their only hope for survival. . .
6
3Reply
scruffyket is interested in reading...
3w
Slow Gods
Claire North
From one of the most original and dazzling voices in speculative fiction comes an intergalactic tale of conspiracy, war and the fall of empires. My name is Mawukana na-Vdnaze, and I am a very poor copy of myself. In telling my story, there are certain things I should perhaps lie about. I should make myself a hero. Pretend I was not used by strangers and gods, did not leave people behind. Here is one out there in deep-space, in the pilot's chair, I died. And then, I was reborn. I became something not quite human, something that could speak to the infinite dark. And I vowed to become the scourge of the world that wronged me. This is the story of the supernova event that burned planets and felled civilizations. This is also the story of the many lives I've lived since I died for the first time. Are you listening?Discover this thrilling and breathtakingly imaginative space opera from the multi-award-winning Claire North, perfect for fans of Ann Leckie, Adrian Tchaikovsky and Arkady Martine.
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scruffyket made progress on...
3w
Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It
Cory Doctorow
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