#hummingbird salamander

[brownpaperhag]

the southern reach was cool but we should talk about hummingbird salamader can we talk about hummingbird salamander im dying to talk about hummingbird salamander

#hummingbird salamander #a hummingbird. a salamander.

[st-just]

We lived in a generic version of reality. The house was settled on in a suburban neighborhood had few differences from the other houses on the block - or the block after that. Call our neighborhood 'Meadow Brooke' or 'Canopy Trail' or 'Lake Shore' or any other name that fucks with your head if you think about it for too long. Because there isn't a meadow or a canopy or a lake, anymore.

-Hummingbird Salamander, by Jeff Vandermeer

#quote #hummingbird salamander #jeff vandermeer

[that-dinopunk-guy]

I bought some books.

#books #the expanse #imperial radch #southern reach trilogy #ambergris cycle #borne #the strange bird #veniss underground #hummingbird salamander #dead astronauts #noor #james s. a. corey #ann leckie #nnedi okorafor #jeff vandermeer

[literary-illuminati]

Book Review #1: Hummingbird Salamander, by Jeff Vandermeer

Okay, so 60 books and a review for each one, totally reasonable New Years resolution, right? Lets go. First up is the one I got for Christmas.

I’ve been a fan of Vadermeer for a long time, and his work’s always worth reading (though the first one I read was Annihilation and nothing he’s written since has really lived up to it). This was no exception – though it was by far the least genre-ficcy thing of his I’ve ever read. Which, low bar – note the lack of invasive xenoforming processes or building-sized flying bears or alternate universes – but still, I kept expecting it to get weirder than it did?

Not that it didn’t get weird – just, ‘technothriller 20 minutes in the future’ weird, not ‘cosmic horror’ weird. Though the ending did blur the lines a bit, I suppose.

The overall tone of oppressive, apocalyptic dread, of everyone just keeping their heads down and trying to keep going about their days as the natural disasters pile up and things keep falling apart, is really very well done and vivid. Even if the politics are a bit deep green and the portrayal worst-case, it really was a future sliding into dystopia and apocalypse that felt plausible and lived in and real, compared with what a lot of climate fiction goes with.

Beyond that – plot wise, the book kind of reminded me of Strange Bird? Not so much because of any of the beats in particular, but just because it felt to a great degree like a story of failure? Like, Jane’s primarily, but also everyone else’s. There’s a lot of bathos, of missed opportunities and fuck ups and conversations that never happen and relationships ruined and people hurt for basically no gain at all. There are multiple time skips where Jane just gives up for months or years, too. The ending’s a bit redemptive, a bit transcendent, but even that – Silvina died too, and she was as close to a world-shaking heroine as the story can provide. And a lot of the suffering on the way to the ending was less necessary and more just bad luck.

Jane as a protagonist was interesting – so self-deluding, so self-destructive, so totally incapable of having a single open and honest conversation with literally anyone. To the extent the book is a technothriller, ‘security consultant whose also a former semi-pro bodybuilder and built like a brick shithouse’ sure feels like a description of a Tom Clancy knockoff’s hero (and it’s definitely a case where taking a very generic character and gender-flipping them makes them much more interesting), even if all the muscle mass in the world didn’t really end up helping too often against knives and rifles.

Anyway, as usual with Vandermeer the prose was lovely, and the cryptozoology believable and downright hauntingly beautiful to read about. Guy really should just write a birdwatching guide, or something – he’s very clearly in love with nature, in a way that’s halfway uncanny but always lovely when you read it.

Still not better than Annihilation, but not at all unhappy about having read it.

#Hummingbird Salamander #jeff vandermeer #sff #book review

[noahfromthesea]

« I´ll kill you and eat you and use your bones for soup »

Hummingbird Salamander, Jeff Vandermeer

#i just finished this book and it fucked me up #i mean #its a jeff book #but #idk #anyway i recommand #hummingbird salamander #jeff vandermeer

[maedhros-nelyafinwe]

Started Hummingbird Salamander last night

#hummingbird salamander #jeff vandermeer #books

[bookcoversonly]

Title: Hummingbird Salamander | Author: Jeff VanderMeer | Publisher: MCD (2021)

#books #Hummingbird Salamander #Jeff VanderMeer

[readingaccountability]

hummingbird salamander - jeff vandermeer

finished early dec 22

very interesting premise, though honestly i didnt love this one! the execution was a bit meandering, mainly because it felt like there was only one mystery, which was constantly being hinted without any real reveals, until the very end. if there had been one odd thing, leading to another odd thing, which then led up to more, it might have kept my attention better, but instead it just felt like one odd thing that the protagonist encountered and then the entire universe beating down on her for the rest of the book. the environmentalism thread was great, and some of the execution there was interesting - particularly the protagonist starting to care despite initially not being the sort of person who normally would. it would have been great if we had gotten more characterization on the mystery dead woman, maybe in the form of more journal entries. ultimately, the good just felt overshadowed by my frustration with the bad.

#hummingbird salamander #jeff vandermeer #bookblr #reading progress update #book tag #book review #original post #thriller

[parklandcryptid-studies]

Doing some leisure reading between classes

I love Jeff VanderMeer, and this book has been a lot of fun to read so far, even though it's less zany than the other books I've read by him.

#jeff vandermeer #current read #bookblr #studyblr #student blog #uni student #english lit #Hummingbird salamander

[parttimecosmichorror]

Grabs you by the shoulders HUMMINGBIRD SALAMANDER BY JEFF VANDERMEER AND Y/N BY ESTHER YI ARE REALLY JUST THE SAME TYPE OF STORY IN DIFFERENT FONTS. THE RECKLESS AND RELENTLESS PURSUIT OF AN IDEAL, OF AN IDEA, OF A FRAGMENT OR A FIGMENT OF A PERSON WHO YOU SO EARNESTLY BELIEVE YOU KNOW. EVEN AS IT DESTROYS YOU. EVEN AS IT TEARS YOUR LIFE APART. AN ALMOST RELIGIOUS ZEAL FOR AN IDOL. THE SUDDEN DISAPPEARANCE OF THAT IDOL LEAVING MANY BROKEN OR OTHERWISE CHANGED IRREVERSIBLY. AN IMAGINATION OF AN IDYLLIC REALITY. UNRELIABILITY OF THOUGHT, OF MEMORY. A WOMAN REALIZING SHE NEVER LOVED THOSE WHO WERE CLOSE TO HER AS SOON AS SHE STARTS TO LOVE A CONCEPT. LOVING THE IDEA OF LOVING AN IDEA. DO YOU UNDERSTAND

#.txt #hummingbird salamander #guess i should come up with a tag for the esther yi book that doesn’t get mistaken for fanfiction writing #uhhhhhhh #maybe wse (why slash enn) #wse #anyways. drop suggestions for similar books if you have any #there’s something so mesmerizing about seeing a woman (or other protagonist) destroy themselves in pursuit of an idea that might not exist #wse to me is like a trainwreck in slow motion #it’s not horror (far from horror) but you feel dread building in you the whole time #you’re gripped in fear over Something happening #and then it never happens #our unnamed protagonist finds her idol and realizes he doesn’t compare to who she thought he was #it’s like watching a 20-car pileup play out in painstakingly slow motion and then suddenly resolve itself to a scratch #anticlimactic but weirdly cathartic nonetheless #‘jane’ acts similarly except she experiences real and active danger from people just like her #and she never meets silvina #only finds her body #i suppose moon might as well have been a body to the unnamed narrator #in fact he might have been more useful to her dead than alive #when he disappeared he might as well have died #just. god #those books did something to me #i need more books that will do something to me

[filipmagnuswrites]

A Gentleman and A Scholar’s Reading List: November 2023

Huzzah, hullo, und howdy! Your MC here, Filip Magnus, reporting on a few of the books I plan on reading this month!  City of Last Chances by Adrian Tchaikovsky I’m doing it, lads! At long last, I’m reading through the glorious New Weird fantasy Tchaikovsky’s about to release a standalone sequel of very soon indeed. The Tyranny of Faith by Richard Swan I genuinely have no clue if I’ll get to…

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#Absolution Gap #Adrian Tchaikovsky #Alastair Reynolds #comics #Creatures of Light and Darkness #Hummingbird Salamander #Jeff Vandermeer #Jonathan Hickman #novels #Richard Swan #Roger Zelazny #The Tyranny of Faith #X-Men

[st-just]

The world that week seemed to be dying in flame and famine and flooding and disease. The things meant to help us were hurting us and the things meant to hurt us continued to get better at it.

-Hummingbird Salamander, by Jeff Vandermeer

#quote #lyrical nihilism #Hummingbird Salamander #Jeff Vandermeer

[judgingbooksbycovers]

Hummingbird Salamander

By Jeff VanderMeer.

Design by Jo Thomson.

#Hummingbird Salamander #Jeff VanderMeer #Jo Thomson #animals #books #book covers #birds #hummingbirds

[literary-illuminati]

First book of the year is Hummingbird Salamander and it's very pleasing to me that Vandermeer's twitter account is just perfectly literally exactly what you would expect from reading his stuff.

#hummingbird salamander #jeff vandermeer #sff #tht

[theadmiringbog]

#Hummingbird Salamander #books

[essektheylyss]

I'm currently reading The Ministry for the Future, and it's really pinpointing some of my issues with contemporary fiction and why I struggle to solve them. It's essentially a near-future speculative fiction concept about climate change, which I think is difficult for me whether optimistic or fatalistic. I am suspicious of escapism where some miraculous solution is found, because I do not enjoy being placated and I find that I have no patience for those who want to be (in this genre of fiction anyway—I personally don't like escapism in general but I acknowledge its necessity otherwise), but I also get frustrated with defeatism because it tends to fall dangerously close to, if not outright within the bounds of, ecofascism, and if a middle ground between the two within a semi-realistic story exists, I haven't found it yet.

Granted, I am only about 20% of the way into this book, so it remains to be seen if Robinson has found that, but... it is making me think I should stick primarily to second-world speculative fiction.

#granted this is also why the southern reach trilogy fucks. #no one in that trilogy has the answers and jeff vandermeer is not going to hand them to me for some false satisfaction. #that reminds me I gotta pick up the ambergris trilogy as well. #actually hummingbird and salamander is probably closest to this genre maybe i should see if my boy jeff has done it lol #I'm SORRY I'm so fucking picky and i don't like being coddled #nor do i like hopeless crying. it's useless to me and I have avoided careers where i have to listen to it. #something something never tell me the odds or whatnot #megs is reading