As a leftist who works in tech, the stances I usually see people take towards the rise of generative AI are very black-and-white: either everything about it is evil (according to my friends + people on the internet), or it's the most exciting innovation of our time and we should incorporate it into society and our daily lives as much as possible (according to my coworkers). This book was a breath of fresh air because Murgia, as a technologist herself, refuses to provide that kind of indictment or endorsement of AI in general. Instead, she focuses on real impacts that it's having worldwide, outside the bubble of Silicon Valley and the more privileged populations of the global north.

This is a well-researched documentation of various people and places AI has already touched, and this kind of record is going to become increasingly important as AI technology continues to be developed and entrenched all over the world. It emphasized to me that fear of tech is never really about the tech itself; it's about the ways people use it to further global exploitation, surveillance, theft, and other injustices for personal gain. As more voices like the ones amplified in this book are heard, my hope is that there will be further demand for regulation of a currently unchecked tech industry, and that knowledgeable, caring people like Murgia will be at the forefront of it.

Informative, well-written, and deeply concerning. The audiobook was great!

Seasons of Glass & Iron is Amal El-Mohtar's collection of fantastical short stories and poems gathered over more than a decade of work. In her introduction, she puzzles a little over how to unite these different pieces under a common theme, which I found super interesting. She lands on the idea that they're mainly focused on women: stories of both individual women and love between women. This is definitely true and a notable common thread throughout the collection, and while I enjoyed that and many of the stories individually, it wasn't quite enough to make the whole thing feel cohesive to me.

The biggest standout to me was probably The Lonely Sea in the Sky, a sci-fi story that had a more straightforward writing style than the rest of the collection and a Black Mirror kind of sinister quality that really worked for me. It was my personal favorite, probably because it stands out more to me than the fairytale-like stories that, while lovely to read, started to blur together for me after a while. I still have some favorites from those, though! The title story (and starting point for the collection), Seasons of Glass & Iron, felt so magical that it swept me away and had me convinced the entire collection was going to be a 5-star read. The Green Book was an amazing follow-up and brought some darker fairytale energy to the table. A Hollow Play also sticks out as one I'll probably be turning over in my brain for a while.

El-Mohtar's writing made this a lovely experience overall! I was a little worried that bringing stories together from such a long span of her writing career would result in some feeling very weak, but there weren't any I actively disliked. I will say, I still felt notable inconsistency in the writing style, which makes sense -- obviously her writing would develop over 15+ years. As I read the closing stories, I also felt we'd been re-treading very similar thematic ground; there were quite a few stories focused around women taking their agency back from men, lashing out against societal expectations, etc. That's fine for stories that were originally published at different times, in different places, but reading them one after another in the same collection definitely got repetitive.

I wish I had literally anything to say about the poems, but unfortunately I've never been a poetry person. I still read them, but I was just there for the stories.

Once again, I am looking into the eyes of a Feminine Rage book and saying "it's not you, it's me".

Dead Weight follows Unnur and the ways her life changes after meeting a struggling young woman named Ásta. I can't give away much more than that without spoiling the short novella, and same goes for many of the specifics of why it didn't work for me. So I'll keep it vague: I found this highly predictable, and a very by-the-book depiction of the same Feminine Rage story I feel like I've read a million times ("Men Bad. Women Angry!") which brought nothing new to the table.

I'm starting to feel like a broken record every time I talk about how Feminine Rage stories (or anything with a heavy focus on women being mistreated by men) almost never work for me, so I'll leave the criticism at that.

As for the things I did enjoy... first and foremost, I read this in 1 day while in the midst of the worst reading slump I've had in a while. It was easy to keep turning the pages and I felt fully immersed in the story the entire time. While I may not have gotten much satisfaction from how the story played out, it was written well and kept me, at the very least, entertained. I do feel like the characters were never fully realized, but that's a gripe I have pretty often with novellas. They were still intriguing to follow!

Overall, I'd definitely recommend Knútsdóttir's previous novella, The Night Guest, a lot more. That was way more strange and unique and up my alley, but I still think this one will appeal to a broader range of readers. If you like the typical Feminine Rage Story formula, check it out for sure.