I like it too.

Pneumatic tubes. They're kinda steam punk. And you can send kittens through them.

Solaris. Stanislaw Lem worked as a scientific research assistant (after intentionally failing his medical boards) and the thing about Solaris is that even after years and years of study, and even after knowing a lot about it, it remains fundamentally alien and in many ways unknowable.

How do you find out how it sounds? Do you go to bookstores and pick up all the books?

But you do pick your books based on something. Reviews? Recommendations? Cover art that assumes books by women should have pink hammers on it? Do you think that those things are not influenced by this? Your choices are being shaped by what people do when they don't review work by women if the result is that less…

I guess I'd have to ask, what kind of books do you like to read? There are a lot of women writing in the field but the range is so wide—so if you liked Cyberpunk in the day I'd say check out Pat Cadigan, whose stuff was pretty seriously cyberpunk and whose stuff hasn't dated. If you like space opera, nobody does it…

Agreed, who doesn't kind of wish they were Ursula LeGuin? The other person I thought of was Karen Joy Fowler. It's so difficult to peg her stuff by genre, though. Sarah Canary is science fiction, but then again it isn't. But it was an awful question because really I felt a lot like some of the others, I don't know…

There are a lot of reasons to question a future of Chinese ascendancy. But your belief that 'all that Tiger Mother stuff that was such a scandal awhile back? In China, that's called "parenting"' is incorrect. As Alli_91 points out, the Chinese one child policy has turned Chinese parenting inside-out. One of the…

Polyandry as practiced in Tibet was hard on women. It's a society where marriages are arranged, often young. The woman, in effect, becomes servant and concubine to several men. When I first heard about it I had huge hopes for a system where the woman was more autonomous, and the situation was more equal, but that…

Well, there's Ishi as a cautionary tale, although hopefully a Neanderthal raised by humans wouldn't feel as isolated. [en.wikipedia.org]

The whole 'Mark Spitz' nickname thing was delightfully weird. I kept thinking of how evocative it was for me and how obscure it might be for someone twenty years younger than me. All the echoes of culture lost, and masks of identity. The writing is very very controlled, and yet the book is unhinged.

I was personally delighted that a character reached into her purse and pulled out a grenade. I love it when something viewed as female and silly (like a purse) used this way. It's not quite as good as the way the Terminator in the first movie is thwarted by a woman with no weapons (a drill press isn't usually…