recent read: Janelle Monae's The Memory Librarian, a series of short stories set in the universe of her Dirty Computer album. I have not listened to Dirty Computer and I'm honestly not sure what I was expecting out of this book, but I loved it! Janelle Monae can do anything, seems like. For the unfamiliar, this verse involves a surveillance state that deals heavily with memory: memories can be uploaded for currency, they're seen as a public good, and are surveyed, while delinquent populations (aka "dirty computers": queer, black/brown, or anyone else otherwise considered deviant) get their memories wiped as part of reprogramming. Very interesting concept and one that seems uncomfortably plausible at the same time. 

My favourite theme in this book was less about memory, though, and more about time. In one story, a couple moves into an apartment that contains a closet where time stops. This one has a lot to say about class difference and ideology versus practice; that's as coherent as I'll get, because this is the one that I finished and then had to stare out the window of the subway for the rest of my commute and not read anything else. In another story, the daughter of a mind-wiped revolutionary receives a magic stone that can turn back time, and she uses it to protect her sister from detainment--after having the most risky night of her life. And then the last story is about kids who develop an altar that takes them into a more hopeful future. The stories also have a lot to say about community care--what happens when your biological family is gone, not necessarily for not wanting you, but because they can't take care of you? What happens when you have to take care of them? When push comes to shove, who throws you under the bus and who can you count on? It's a great book that is explicitly queer, explicitly Afrofuturist, and... explicitly hopeful? In all the stories (with the exception of the time closet one, sort of), the protagonists find a way to hold on, fight back, and reclaim something of their own. Really, REALLY good. Also a book that made me think a lot about how time doesn't necessarily need to be linear (a combination of reading the time altar story, having been really fascinated by Arrival back in college, and reading a fanfiction amnesia story lol). Like, what would be different if we didn't experience time that way, you know?

In the same vein of "fascist surveillance state", I recently read a hockey fanfiction (I know, I know) set in a, now, thankfully safely au 2026, where US-Canada relations deteriorate to the point of cold war and nationalistic terrorism, and the NHL is dissolved to make way for two separate leagues. One guy, who gets given the oldest daughter syndrome treatment in just about every fic as the oldest of three brothers who all play pro hockey, chooses to stay in Canada with his team while his brothers are in the US, and it seems like they cut off contact with him and he has to make hard choices to figure himself out and keep the trust of his teammates. Real interesting shit. Not too shippy either--I don't read hockey RPF for the shipping so much as I read it for everything else going on in hockey RPF. Like the intense and just a little too realistic dystopia AUs.