#Cameron Reed

[nenan]

TINA photographed by Cameron Reed for Why2Kay

[specialagentartemis]

THE FORTUNATE FALL RE-RELEASE IS OUT!

A cyberpunk novel from the 1990s that’s been out of print for years, and just got a new release, new cover, new introduction, under the author’s new name. And all of that FULLY DESERVED because it’s one of my favorite novels of all time. Cameron Reed only has the one novel and she knocked it out of the park.

Maya Andreyeva is a "camera," a reporter with virtual-reality-broadcasting equipment implanted in her brain. What she sees, millions see; what she feels, millions share. And what Maya is seeing is the cover-up of a massacre. As she probes into the covert political power plays of a radically strange near-future Russia, she comes upon secrets that have been hidden from the world...and memories that AI-controlled thought police have forced her to hide from herself. Because in a world where no thought or desire is safe, the price of survival is betrayal - of your lover, your ideals, and yourself.

Maya Andreyeva is a “camera,” a VR journalist who used to do real work and is now reduced to doing celebrity puff pieces and stories that don’t really matter. She does work she no longer thinks matters and goes home to an empty apartment and it’s a cyberpunk near future surveillance state where she feels like nothing she does matters anymore.

So when she stumbles on evidence of a massacre—a genocide— that the government would really rather have everybody forget, she decides she’s going to make this her swan song of a broadcast. Along with her new screener—a real-time editor she only knows from VR sharing her brain, who edits her raw experiences for broadcast—she’s going to expose these crimes to the world, and then maybe die or run away to claim asylum in Africa together, she doesn’t know yet and it almost doesn’t matter to her. Until it does.

It’s gay. There are whales. It’s weird and different and so worth reading. It’s bleak and sad and often harrowing, and does not shy away from what Maya finds out about the covered-up genocide. It’s about truth and justice and love and survival and journalistic integrity and the media, and it is so, so, so good.

[transbookoftheday]

The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For by Cameron Reed

In a corporate-run dystopia, a trans girl plucked out of poverty to give birth to a clone meets her replacement.

[queereads-bracket]

Queer Fiction Free-for-All Book Bracket Tournament: Round 1D

Book summaries and submitted endorsements below:

Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan

Will Grayson meets Will Grayson. One cold night, in a most unlikely corner of Chicago, two strangers are about to cross paths. From that moment on, their world will collide and lives intertwine.

It's not that far from Evanston to Naperville, but Chicago suburbanites Will Grayson and Will Grayson might as well live on different planets. When fate delivers them both to the same surprising crossroads, the Will Graysons find their lives overlapping and hurtling in new and unexpected directions. With a push from friends new and old—including the massive, and massively fabulous, Tiny Cooper, offensive lineman and musical theater auteur extraordinaire—Will and Will begin building toward respective romantic turns-of-heart and the epic production of history's most awesome high school musical.

Contemporary, coming of age, young adult

The Fortunate Fall by Cameron Reed

Endorsement from submitter: "The best cyberpunk book in the World"

Maya Andreyeva is a "camera", a reporter with virtual reality broadcasting equipment implanted in her brain. What she sees, millions see; what she feels, millions share.

And what Maya is seeing is the cover-up of a massacre. As she probes into the covert political power plays of a radically strange near-future Russia, she comes upon secrets that have been hidden from the world… and memories that AI-controlled thought police have forced her to hide from herself. Because in a world where no thought or desire is safe, the price of survival is betrayal—of your lover, your ideals, and yourself.

In The Fortunate Fall, we hear a new voice so assured and so intimate it seems we must always have known it, and so electrifying we know we have never before heard its like.

Science fiction, dystopia, cyberpunk, speculative fiction, near future, adult

[heliological]

🚨🚨🚨 new Cameron Reed story 🚨🚨🚨

[specificpollsaboutbooks]

Favorite Standalone Books

Round 1

Propaganda for The Three Musketeers : "Dumas was told that his title was nonsensical (because there are 4 musketeers) and he basically said good, that way people will be surprised"

Propaganda for The Fortunate Fall :

"It’s weird and sad and brilliant. It’s about journalistic integrity in a cyberpunk dystopia. It’s about how we failed to save the whales. It’s about uncovering the truth of a genocide that the government doesn’t want to talk about, with your illegal lesbian girlfriend who’s sharing your brain. It’s not a happy book. It’s a brilliant one though." - @specialagentartemis

[grandhotelabyss]

Have you ever read a book that was virtually unknown even in literaly circles, yet great?

I notice that great-but-unknown books are getting memed more and more into popularity or at least cult status by social media. There's Mating, of course, which I find unreadable. But when did I Who Have Never Known Men become the it-girl/hot-girl book of the decade? Or Come Closer everybody's hip Halloween read? As one heard the band in a small club before it started selling out arenas, I read these two now-trendy novels years before BookTok did, for whatever it may be worth. I remember enjoying the latter, but not the former.

I unimaginatively read too many already famous and canonical books for this exercise, but I will put it in a word—though it may have missed its moment now that we're so post-woke—for The Fortunate Fall, a 1996 cyberpunk hallucination, a lesbian love story by a trans writer who never wrote another novel, a political thriller about genocide and environmentalism and online news and internet swarms and Slavo-dystopianism and Afro-futurism and brain implants, a prose-poem spiked with Shakespeare, Milton, Melville, Stein, and Nabokov, and an all-around under-rated book. I read it when I was 14 in 1996, plucked from the new book shelf at the public library, and never forgot it. In some ways, it is only intelligible now. I see it was republished literally two months ago, so here is everybody's chance to turn it into the new accessory.

(Also science fiction, also gathered at random from the new shelf at the public library, also prose-poetic and cyberpunk-adjacent, also unknown, but much more recent, is The City of Folding Faces, which I wrote about here.)

[katenepveu]

Everyone please read The Fortunate Fall by Cameron Reed, which has snippets of a computer language with native human speakers (called KRIOL) that gets you things like:

and(!come(!live.with(me)), Come live with me and be my (!=love(my))) love

Sorry, I'm legally obligated to recommend this amazing post-cyberpunk novel at every opportunity. Carry on.

I think that prose needs to utilize brackets the same way mathematics does.

This is a sentence (this is something I want to point out (and here’s another detail)). — NO!

This is a sentence [this is something I want to point out (and here’s another detail)]. — So much clearer to me

We need a solution for nested quotes, too. I can’t stand ending something on a ‘“. Like that feels so messy

[lusthabits]

Cameron Foster and Spencer Reed, Beefcake in Training (2011)

[nenan]

RAMA photographed by Cameron Reed for Why2Kay

[kissesforcarmenn]

Tell Elliot to come get his shirt back babes 😂 @bbbla1r @elliottcarterr

Tags🐆; @bambionedge @bamaaaa @bbbla1r @elliottcarterr @hannahthekook @alextoofyeee @altheaclemonte @auroraaugust @kurodahana @kiaraac @kenziezieglerrr @greenlungzz @vinn1emullz @m1chaellmyerss @masonperez112 @miaryderanon @meilanirivera @maeve-fischer @john-bookerroutledgee @jadecarterr @johnnyybboyy @jjmakesbank @zarrisxoxo @doriansfilms @delilahroutledge @whofwluka @yktayy9669 @thecoolermaybank

[wintersnails]

female character hated by half the fandom save me

[queereads-bracket]

Queer Fiction Free-for-All Book Bracket Tournament: Round 2B

Book summaries and submitted endorsements below:

Dykes to Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel

Endorsement from submitter: "Long running serial comic about lesbian life. Incredibly relatable, evolves with the times. A classic of the genre."

From the author of Fun Home—the lives, loves, and politics of cult fav characters Mo, Lois, Sydney, Sparrow, Ginger, Stuart, Clarice, and others

For twenty-five years Bechdel’s path-breaking Dykes to Watch Out For strip has been collected in award-winning volumes (with a quarter of a million copies in print), syndicated in fifty alternative newspapers, and translated into many languages. Now, at last, The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For gathers a “rich, funny, deep and impossible to put down” (Publishers Weekly) selection from all eleven Dykes volumes. Here too are sixty of the newest strips, never before published in book form.

Settle in to this wittily illustrated soap opera (Bechdel calls it “half op-ed column and half endless serialized Victorian novel”) of the lives, loves, and politics of a cast of characters, most of them lesbian, living in a midsize American city that may or may not be Minneapolis. Her brilliantly imagined countercultural band of friends—academics, social workers, bookstore clerks—fall in and out of love, negotiate friendships, raise children, switch careers, and cope with aging parents.

Bechdel fuses high and low culture—from foreign policy to domestic routine, hot sex to postmodern theory—in a serial graphic narrative “suitable for humanists of all persuasions.”

Graphic novel, humor, slice of life, politics, series, adult

The Fortunate Fall by Cameron Reed

Endorsement from submitter: "The best cyberpunk book in the World"

Maya Andreyeva is a "camera", a reporter with virtual reality broadcasting equipment implanted in her brain. What she sees, millions see; what she feels, millions share.

And what Maya is seeing is the cover-up of a massacre. As she probes into the covert political power plays of a radically strange near-future Russia, she comes upon secrets that have been hidden from the world… and memories that AI-controlled thought police have forced her to hide from herself. Because in a world where no thought or desire is safe, the price of survival is betrayal—of your lover, your ideals, and yourself.

In The Fortunate Fall, we hear a new voice so assured and so intimate it seems we must always have known it, and so electrifying we know we have never before heard its like.

Science fiction, dystopia, cyberpunk, speculative fiction, near future, adult

[heathenbreath]

the boys as posts