I’ve written a review of two more novels shortlisted for the 2019 Clarke award, Tade Thompson’s Rosewater and Sue Burke’s Semiosis: I paired them because of their structural and thematic commonalities, as I probably will also with the Whiteley and the Saadawi.

The review is publicly available here as a Patreon post: https://www.patreon.com/posts/28181987

Many thanks to my patrons for supporting these! Greatly appreciated, you all are why these essays can fungally exfiltrate the biodome and successfully infect the noösphere.

Still noodling over the options of how to actually use Patreon’s posting features. I plan to continue to have both public and patron-only posts: the latter will be on Patreon out of necessity, but in future I think I’ll switch to putting the public posts here and linking them from Patreon rather than the other way around. Mostly because I much prefer the very flexible and extensive WordPress formatting options to the stark and rudimentary formatting features that Patreon provides for text posts. It is not exactly friendly to the longform essayist, that place: one gets the impression it’s designed more for embedding or linking to content than actually containing it. What I like about the new WordPress interface (the controversial Gutenberg editor) is that it seems equally at home with both. The paragraph should be treated as a quasi-magical high technology from a Lost Age, to be hoarded and dreaded for its dangerous powers, not consigned to poor implementation of paragraph and line break tags.