teleportation, demigods, hackney, stevenage etc: twenty-seven word reviews of some books I’ve read recently

Lynne Segal’s Making Trouble –  Personal is political in this engaging, thoughtful, inclusive ‘I-witness’ memoir; lived experience of 1970s socialist/ feminist community politics belies any easy ‘class struggle vs identity politics’ dichotomies.  

Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination  - Characterisation= ‘will to power’ animating bundled instincts (hardboiled). Worldbuilding= exemplary: ‘what if human teleportation?’, a well-worked 1950s thought-experiment paralleling our own real one, ‘what if the Internet?’

M.R. Carey’s The Girl With All the Gifts -  Cohort of children (or are they?) confined to dystopian secure unit, thirty years after convincingly rationalised zombie apocalypse which wrecked Stevenage (+everywhere else). Terse, ethically complex, gutsy.

Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound  -  Extraordinary flashes of imagery, insight – only momentarily tethered to lived experience (is that romantic revolt?). Potentially totalitarian ‘liberationist’ kitsch (Difference Engine-style alternate post-1832 timelines); Frankenstein’s less assimilable. 

** What if Percy Shelley was, himself, brought back from the dead by unnatural means and forced to re-write Prometheus Unbound but with zombies and 1970s trade union/ community activists in it? It would feature undead demigods throwing Alps at, and arguing interminably with, one another in blank verse committee meetings, plus a subplot involving the Amalgamated Federation of Undead Persons (AFUP).