Laurie PennyReviews

I love Laurie Penny

This is a short story about angels and demons that work in a call center. About an angel in particular, that is our narrator. The premise is really good and I thought this was going to be a comedy, but it turns out it had serious moments and surprising sex scenes too.

The story starts with the line “All prayers are answered, but sometimes the answer is no” and with a depiction of how it’s like to work in a call center. Having worked in two of those myself, those scenes were particularly funny. Besides those moments, the narrator also tells about their past sexual involvement with humans and how all of those ended.

I really enjoyed this story but it felt very much like a draft of an idea instead of a complete work and that is a shame. The characters and themes weren’t fleshed out enough and there was very little world building. I seldom have that last complain about anything, but by the end of this story I had so many questions about how this call center worked and how it came into existence and what was the actual purpose of it all. I really wish this story was longer.

I love goodreads. I hadn't heard about this novella before a review by Alice showed up in my feed. Thanks to her review I got to read this thought provoking SF novella.

There's a lot of ideas to think about, the one that struck me while reading, is how the powerful have always stolen the time of the less powerful, be they the slaves, peasants, factory workers or just the working class. In reading the acknowledgments the author points out a real world inspiration As I write, a public inquiry into the misuse of powers by undercover police officers in the United Kingdom is ongoing. Which I hadn't considered.

Angels work. Of course we do. We’re all on zero-hour contracts. Time, after all, is a human idea.

We get twenty-five minutes of it for lunch, with deductions for any bathroom or smoke stops we might have taken. Hating your boss is also a human idea.

The day everything changes, I spend my lunch in the break room with Gremory. There are many rooms in my Father’s house, but only one with a functioning coffee machine.

Meh. (FWIW, angel fiction is generally meh, from my perspective.) If angels and demons working a call center following a heavenly merger (and all that that implies) sounds good to you, YMMV. Available free from Tor:

http://www.tor.com/2016/03/15/your-orisons-may-be-recorded/

This was a quick read. Nothing really new, but very well put and collected. To sum it up, a quote from the book:

"According to the current logic of online misogyny, a woman's right to self-expression is less important by far than a man's right to punish her for that self-expression. What appears to upset many of these men more than anything else is the idea that any woman or a girl, anywhere, might have a voice, might be successful, might be more socially powerful than they themselves are - at least, that's the message I get every time I'm told that I've got a lot to say for myself, and my silly little girl's mouth could be more usefully employed sucking one of the enormous penises that these commentators definitely all possess."

I can't really say it any better than that. I mean, the book deals with other stuff as well, and it's an enjoyable read, if you can say that about a depressing subject.

A provocative and enlightening collection of essays over relevant topics. The first and last chapters are the best.

Interesting premise, but not much else. The characters, setting, plot, and writing just didn't do enough, for me.

Heaven has modernised. Prayers are routed to a call centre where the staff of angels and demons - we are told that heaven and hell merged more than a millennium ago as a cost-saving measure - answer prayers with banal platitudes meant to keep the 'call' below seven minutes and encourage 'repeat custom'. It's not possible to speak to someone higher up as management has long been absent.


Our protagonist takes far too long speaking to clients - she loves humanity in a profound and, whenever possible, physical way - and so spends far too much time walking the Earth.


This is a fun, funny and deceptively light story that I found quite moving, and not just because of any similarities to my own working environment.

I like Laurie Penny's voice. There's something very urban and English about it along with an attitude like a younger and slightly less cynical Warren Ellis.

(Link: https://www.tor.com/2019/09/11/the-hundredth-house-had-no-walls-laurie-penny/?ut...

This is a gorgeous little short-story at Tor.com which I liked in the first place because it had all the whimsical hallmarks of modern fairy tales that I love and it's light and it's funny. And then it made me cry (happy tears; I don't do sad).

5 stars *****

Oh - what's it about? How the King of the land of Myth and Shadows, who could conjure up anything he wished for (which was how he was chosen to be King) found the love of his life and learned how to woo a princess.

Great book.

There is no excuse for the poor formatting of this Zero books ebook. The last line of each paragraph overlaps the first line of the next paragraph slightly. Marked down one star for being so hard to read.

Marked down another star for excess use of political terminology instead of normal language.

The other stars were removed for lack of anything useful to say and for excessive ranting. The only positive thing to say about this book is that is short. Actually by now I should be in negative stars, but 1/2 will have to do.½

Upon winning a free copy of Unspeakable Things by Laurie Penny from Goodreads, the voice of Penny made the book difficult to read. Ranging from sentence structure to spelling issues as well as a negative view of society and unknown reference point made this book hard to read and follow in her thinking. An interesting idea of a book yet needs a little bit of work.

Cybersexism is an excerpt from Laurie Penny's book Unspeakable Things: The New Sexual Counter-Revolution.

I have no idea who the target audience for this piece is, but it wasn't me. I've been there, online, right next to Penny; none of this is new to me. Dozens and dozens of feminists online have said all these same things and I've watched it happen in real-time.

This excerpt reads like one long stream of consciousness blog post, containing Penny's thoughts on sexism and details about her personal sex life. She is a good writer, but it's distracting and confusing the way she shifts back and forth from serious discussions to an ode to sex toys.

As I said, I'm not the target audience for this piece and probably not for her upcoming book. But if you aren't familiar with the state of sexism online then you might be.

(Provided by publisher)

Polemical rather than analytical. It's a bit dispiriting to see women still having to shout about the same things I was shouting about 40 yrs ago.

Best for: I don’t know. Maybe new feminists looking for some decent writing?

In a nutshell: Journalist Laurie Penny collects some of her greatest hits into one essay collection.

Line that sticks with me: “It’s easy to criticize call-out culture, especially if the people calling you out are mean and less than merciful. It’s far harder to look into your own heart and ask if you can and should do better.”

Why I chose it: I don’t know. I probably shouldn’t have, as there are so many other writers out there taking on these topics.

Review: Only after I brought the book home did I realize that one of the blurbs was from Caitlin Moran. That should have been enough to make me second-guess my choice, as I think Ms. Moran views the middle-class white woman experience as some sort of universal stand-in that represents all that feminism should address. I also should have second guessed this purchase when I remembered that Ms. Penny wrote “I’m With the Banned,” a (I believe) well-meaning attempt to profile the rise of the new white supremacists in our culture, especially in light of the New York Times piece that recently painted Nazis in a sympathetic light.

With all of that as preamble, I do think that many of the essays in this collection are insightful. I believe all are pulled from previous writing, but only one was familiar to me. It’s a good one called “On Nerd Entitlement” and is a response to an article from a white tech guy who denies that he has benefited from male privilege. She handles the issue with sensitivity and acknowledgment that privilege doesn’t prevent you from experiencing pain.

I don’t generally find myself disagreeing with any of her analysis, and I appreciate the subject areas that she chooses to cover from her perspective - love, culture, gender, agency, backlash, violence, and the future. I could see many of the essays generating good conversation among women, and possible being something to share with men in your life who maybe get it but don’t fully get it.

One thing I noticed was that many essays ended awkwardly. The last paragraph or two often includes a sentence that suggests a connection or argument that wasn’t made in the essay, or a bat turn of phrase that reads a bit like how I wrap up my own writing when I don’t have the time to put in. Which is odd for a fully edited and printed book.

Oh look, another pained and angry woman writing powerfully but depressingly about what it’s like to be in 2017 in the US/UK as a feminist. Which is to say: it’s good, but I don’t know how many more of these I can read without giving up. “All politics are identity politics, but some identities are more politicised than others.” Penny thinks that self-blame on the left is in some sense a self-protection technique: if it’s our fault, then there’s something we can actually do, rather than the situation being beyond our control. On online harassment: “Every so often I wonder why I didn’t become a restaurant critic. They get free dinners. Being a feminist journalist, I get free death threats.” She argues that it’s better for most young, heterosexual women to be single, mostly because men their age usually haven’t learned to treat women like people; you might find a unicorn, but probably you’ll be wrong about that. Penny reads Austen and finds her an amazing horror writer, whose heroines are depressed and economically desperate in claustrophobic environments whose only escape is by marriage. She diagnoses rape culture as one in which (1) women (and children) are assumed to lie about rape and thus are not credible when they speak out, and simultaneously (2) rape is so omnipresent that all activity should be calibrated to avoid it, and when it happens there’s always some way to say “she was X so what did she expect?” She also describes the Wives of Mad Max: Fury Road as “what would happen if someone decided to heavily arm a Burberry ad,” heh. (And then she adds that the movie gives the lie to the idea that, in societal collapse, women will want men to protect them—men might be “precisely the thing they are trying to survive.”)

Read as part of the Hugo 17 Voter Packet. I liked this, but even though it was short, it seemed a little long. I am not sure if that makes sense.

I ended up following Laurie Penny (@pennyred) on Twitter at some point. She’s a UK-born-and-bred white journalist who writes about feminism, class, geek culture, and all that lies in between. She covered the Occupy movement, and many other uprisings stemming from young people recognizing that they are currently getting the shit end of the stick. If any of you are familiar with Anita Sarkeesian and Feminist Frequency, you might have come across the above video, as it was the second part of a conference talk in which Ms. Sarkeesian participated.

I enjoyed this book. I thought she shared interesting ideas in a way that I hadn’t been exposed to. This book is as far away from the Sheryl Sandburg-style b.s. lean in feminism as I think you can get if you are a white woman (which I think necessarily limits one’s ability to fully understand and discuss the intersection between gender and race that black women and other women of color experience). While nearly 250 pages long, the book only has five chapters, and I think that’s a good thing. It allows Ms. Penny to focus on creating mostly well-crafted and interesting essays on topics that, if you’ve read about, you’ve probably not read about in quite this way.

I enjoyed in particular her take in “Lost Boys,” which looks at the ways in which men are angry because they aren’t getting what they think has been promised them. She discusses the real ways that the patriarchy (oh, yeah, I said it) doesn’t just fuck over women, but it fucks over the majority of men as well. “People are realizing how they have been cheated of social, financial and personal power … but young men still learn that their identity and virility depends on being powerful. What I hear most from the men and boys who contact me is that they feel less powerful than they had hoped to be, and they don’t know who to blame.”

But lest you worry that this is a book about feminism that just focuses on men, the other chapters are full of somewhat new and definitely interesting ways of looking at gender and sexuality from the perspective of those who are freshly out of high school or college, or making their way into their late 20s. I just barely avoided joining the Millennial generation (I’m about a year too early, and thus a Gen X-er), but they have grown up in a world that is drastically different from the one I grew up in, and it shows in many ways, including how gender and class intersect.

She talks elegantly about rape culture, including sharing her own experience confronting her rapist years after the fact. She talks about the ways in which society puts the onus and blame on women to protect themselves, as opposed to on the men to, you know, not rape. And she rightfully points out that rape culture isn’t just about men raping women, but that it’s about the culture around how women are treated, from the work they might engage in (including sex work) to the clothes they wear to the choices they make around employment (if they even have choices).

I think this is a good book to add to the list of those who value feminism and who have some understanding of its background and history. It’s not as accessible a book to use to introduce a skeptic to feminism as, say, Full Frontal Feminism by Jessica Valenti, but not every book needs to – or should – be that.

Our long-suffering narrator works Up There, fielding calls from all over the world, doing their best to answer, comfort and help the people who call. (I use 'their' with good reason because the angelic host don't have fixed genders, though they can assume either sex at will.) The problem is that the boss is absent, the facilities aren't quite up to scratch ('There are many rooms in my Father's house, but only one with a functioning coffee machine'), and the floor manager Uriel keeps a tight rein on call-handling targets and production goals. Our narrator isn't quite up to scratch: they're too compassionate for their own good, which can't be said for their colleague, the demon Gremory ('Hello... my name is Legion. How can I help you?'). This, then, is an odd-couple story of the best kind ('We all have our demons. Mine just knows me a bit too well'), irreverent, cool and funny, with eye-opening revelations about how angels spend their free time. Probably not one for the devout. Naturally, it is impossible to read this without thinking of Good Omens.

Witty feminist book about the personal and the political; not new but said well. “Feminism, like wealth, does not trickle down, and while a small number of extremely privileged women worry about the glass ceiling, the cellar is filling up with water, and millions of women and girls and their children are crammed in there, looking up as the flood creeps around their ankles, closes around their knees, inches up to their necks.” I also liked “The past is a different country: people are always laying claim to it in the name of one ideology or another, with no regard for the people that actually live there.” On men suffering from patriarchy: “What we are asking men to do is hard. Let’s be perfectly clear: we have careted a society in which it is structurally difficult and existentially stressful for any male person not to behave like a complete and utter arsehole.” Also: “Teaching men self-disgust is crucial to maintaining the architecture of modern misogyny. If sex weren’t dirty and degrading, there would be less reason to loathe women for letting you do it to them, no matter how much you want to.” On nonconsensual porn: “A naked picture is never an empty boast: it is proof, proof of your power over another person, and culture still tells us that power over another person is what makes a boy into a man.” On the insufficiency of physical violence to preserve patriarchy: “The threat of violence is a fearful thing, but its injustice is clear, and there is always the risk of rebellion…. To threaten them with loss of love, however, is a violence far more profound and painful ….” On the modern condition: “Under late capitalism almost all of us are damaged goods, but it is women who end up trying to fix that damage, or at least keep the gears greased so the machine carries on functioning. I see so many bright, brilliant women pouring their energy into salving the hurt of men who cannot turn to each other for comfort. We do it as sisters, as mothers, as friends, and especially as lovers and wives, because of the sheer number of men and boys who are socialised out of intimacy with anyone they’re not fucking…. [Y]ou can’t save the world one man at a time. That doesn’t stop many of us from trying.”

Novella about a life extension technology available only to the rich due to intellectual property laws. Lots of think-worthy stuff here, including the point that elite perspectives on global warming would change fast once they expected to be alive 200 years from now. Class rebels, infiltrated by a corporate stooge, try to change the world; it doesn’t go the way they expected. I enjoyed it a lot and will be reading more by Penny.½

This was an amazing book. It is really something special and something that both men and women should read. If you are looking to learn more about feminism and what it is and how it fits into our society today, then this really is a great starting point. It's written in an easy and accessible way, which for me is what makes it so powerful. Penny discusses issues that affect women and men and how gender roles and gender stereotypes can stifle progress and understanding.

Many people have called Penny angry. Her proses are unapologetic and her arguments are clear. Penny's anger is justified - everyone should be angry about inequality and harm gender roles can inflict on men and women. Although, Penny's writing is more than just angry. It is hopeful and encouraging. It is comforting and challenging.

You need to get this book and read it. And then buy a copy for everyone you know and give it to them at birthdays and Christmas or just because it's a Tuesday. No seriously. Go, buy this book!

Disclaimer - this was written by a friend from uni. Well, I think of her as a friend from uni, but I bet lots of people drawn by the glamour of fame think of her as a friend from uni - 'you know, Laurie Penny stayed in my house once!' - and she probably doesn't really remember us.

It's a dystopian novel set in Oxford. A pill has been invented that extends healthy life, but the pill is only affordable to the extremely wealthy. So the novel looks at what the world is like in a world where the rich (or those patronised by the rich) can live for hundreds of years more than the masses. Through the lens of how to fight back against that, and with a side order of plot about undercover agents who sleep with people in the organisations they're spying on. It's very Oxford - the book opens with the protagonists breaking into a May Ball - and it's a book that's very critical of Oxford, with its privilege and money. And surprisingly sympathetic to terrorism - gorgeous, awful, terrible terrorism. It has a wide range of protagonists - gay, trans, people of colour, disabled people - and if sometimes it feels a little too self aware that it wants a wide range of protagonists, that's forgivable, and better than the alternative.

It's wafer thin - more like a novella than a novel - and a very quick read, and I was left wanting more about everything.½

Entertaining and thought-provoking, this novella left me wanting more. (Sooooo much more!)

(Full disclosure: I received a free ebook for review through NetGalley. Trigger warning for rape.)

“All I wanted was to make something small and bright and good, something that lasted a little while, a little while longer than I did. All I wanted was to push back against the darkness just a little bit. To live in the cracks in capitalism with the people I care about, just for a little while. But it turns out I can’t even have that. And now I just want to burn shit down.”

It's the turn of the century - the 21st, to be exact - and humanity has finally discovered the fountain of youth. It comes in the form of a little blue pill that will cost you $200 a pop on the black market; a little less, if you're one of the lucky few who has insurance. Most don't, as this "weaponization of time" has only exacerbated class inequality.

Only the wealthiest citizens can afford life-extension drugs; regular folks deemed "important to society" - scientists, artists, musicians, the occasional writer - may receive a sponsorship to continue their work, but ultimately they live and age and die at the whim of those more powerful than they. Show a modicum of concern for the working class, and you just might find your sponsorship revoked.

Alex, Nina, Margo, Fidget, and Jasper are a group of artist/activists living in a dilapidated, mouse- and mold-infested flat in the underside of Oxford city. They work day jobs where they can find them, but their real passion is playing at Robin Hood. A few times a week, they load up their food truck with cheese sammies or mystery stews made of reclaimed food, and distribute free meals to Oxford's neediest citizens. At the bottom of each foodstuff is a happy meal surprise: a little blue pill, most likely stolen. One per person, so second helpings.

The group's machinations are kicked up about twenty notches when they meet Professor Daisy Craver (d.o.b. April 14, 2003), a 95-year-old woman in a 14-year-old girl's body. She was one of the pioneers of the fix; now she wants to be its downfall. Or rather, its equalizer.

Complicating matters is Alex's duplicity: for the past three years, he's been working for Daisy's employer, TeamThreeHundred, as a snitch: infiltrating the group and reporting back on their activities.

(Given that he's sleeping with Nina, this raises some pretty thorny ethical questions, as explored in "AFTER SARKEESIAN: A RADICAL FEMINIST CLOUDCAST." Penny based this particular plot point on contemporary reports of undercover officers in the UK "deliberately engineer[ing] relationships with activists to facilitate their work.": "Interviews with the agents spin these stories as tragic doomed romances. The women involved describe the experiences as a violation. We believe them.")

So I'm really enjoying Tor's new series of novellas; it gives me a chance to read more authors and explore more fictional worlds than I could otherwise, thanks to the shorter format. As with Kij Johnson's The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe, Everything Belongs to the Future expertly walks the tightrope that is the novella. Penny introduces a world that is rich and complex and vividly imagined, giving us a plot that's fully fleshed out and resolved satisfactorily, all in just 112 pages. And she leaves us wanting more. (So, so much more!) This is an idea that could easily support a full-length novel - or a whole series of them - and yet still makes it work in a fraction of space.

The characters are all wonderfully developed, from Nina and Daisy to Margo and Fidget. I especially loved the introduction of Milo; he could easily carry a spin-off novella on his own (someone make this happen please?). Penny tackles a wealth of issues: class, race, religion, the meritocracy, sexuality, representation, gender identity, activism, gender, rape, consent, climate change, biodiversity, science and ethics. Everything Belongs to the Future exhibits greater diversity than the entire oeuvres of some authors, and is all the better - more real, engaging, and compassionate - for it.

To summarize, I cannot recommend Everything Belongs to the Future highly enough. The only real downside is that it makes me super-depressed that Penny hasn't written more fiction, on account of she's so damn good at it. Le sigh.

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