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Book Rec: Dear Cyborgs

Dear Cyborgs is a collection of interwoven vignettes that touch on community, politics, the technological interplay between both, the nature and forms of protest, what it means to be an outsider that serves the group and an insider that takes from it. The end left me gasping with tears.

Favorite character: Ms. Mistelto, the so-called villainess of this potential future/alternate universe who calls to mind the freedom fighter/terrorist perspective coin-flip that pulled me so closely to Liber8 in Continuum, among others.

Favorite quotes:

"For the experience, I invite you to participate in city ghostliness. It's an odd sensation that quickly becomes almost comfortable, almost second nature. Now human exchange has been reduced to transaction. That's what makes the ghosting possible. We ever prefer it, at first. It's less energy to simply watch the numbers go up or down than try to confront a person's expression. And we don't realize until it's done that we've disappeared, gone invisible beside the transaction. We uncloak when we need to, I suppose, for touch, for anger or love. But if you have no reason or opportunity to, then you can live for quite a long time as a ghost, as an unseen agent in the market, softly padding to the void. Try it. It's little more than a loosening up, a letting go." (page 93)

- - -

"In line for our drinks, Muriel said, 'I guess what we just saw was death, death speaking.'

'But not its threat,' Frank said, 'not the grim reaper speaking, which is what people usually mean when, if ever, they talk about death speaking.'

'No, you're right," Muriel said. 'This time it was true death we heard - oblivion, void, the absolute - and the beauty of the experience was rooted in our sadness in acknowledging living within it. That's what True Death would say. Not I'm coming for you but You always dwell within me.'" (page 124)

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