Let’s Get Literate! Holiday Reading Recap
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ladybusinessThe holidays were great for my reading, which was a nice change. It was mostly rereads, to various levels of success, and a book I will be nominating for the Hugo Award, probably, unless something else I finish before nominations challenges how much I love one (1) monkey bot.
The Exiled Fleet by J.S. Dewes | Tor Books | August 2021
It's easy for me to forget that these books are not short. The pace of the story is like a bullet train straight to Emotional Damage. The first book in the series, The Last Watch, felt like traditional military science fiction and then careened with wild, joyful abandon into Robust Space Opera, complete with space magic. The follow up goes, "Ready for more space magic? Let's fucking go." I love space magic, strong friendships, surprise allies, dramatic third act revelations, gloriously uncomplicated villains, and call backs to everything from Mass Effect to Star Wars. There's probably more I missed as my brain made happy shrieking noises every time something else dramatic was revealed. The relationships between Adequin Rake and Cavalon Mercer goes from a mentor/student vibe to something else that could have dramatic consequences in later books (because there WILL be more than three books, RIGHT? RIGHT, TOR???). There's also the introduction of a character I didn't expect on my first read through. I loved this revelation even more this time.
There's a lot of themes in this book around morality and ethics, the dangers of power, and what makes a someone a person. Another aspect is the human costs of waging a war: the feeding and care of a rebel army, how to navigate building coalitions in disparate groups, and leadership struggles along delegation/trust lines. My love of this story is wrapped up in the realization of the characters that they deserve better than the people charged with their well-being gave them; the additional realization of "it's punching time" is just a bonus. The compassion they have for each other, even when they disagree, is wonderful. I fully expect the theme of leaning too heavily on allies to come up again. This book raised it a few times, but I suspect it will feature in future books (books, plural, right Tor? RIGHT?).
All Systems Red by Martha Wells | Tordotcom | May 2017
If it's getting cold and dark early, there's a good chance I'm under a blanket somewhere ready to begin Yet Another Reread of the many adventures of Murderbot. My thoughts from my very first read-through haven't changed much at all. Even with the additions of the sequels, the core of what made me love the first entry persists. I've got to find where I can buy these audiobooks either digitally in a way I can download them without DRM, or via audio CD. I will go old school so I can listen to these books any time. Predictably, using the library for the audiobooks is hard because Murderbot is so beloved. Every library I have access to has a hold list.
Storm Over Paradise by Robyn Donald | Harlequin Presents | September 1992
One summer, I found a box of romance novels in our guest bedroom. I was too young to read these on my own without at least an adult to ask questions. Did that stop me? Absolutely not. My other options were: several encyclopedia sets/reference books; nursing manuals; books about how aliens built our society, actually; religious and spirituality texts; SF tie-in novels; and self-help by white dudes. The nursing manuals had interesting photos/diagrams and might have set me on an early path to a medical career, but they were beyond my reading level at the time. The SF tie-in novels were about movies I hadn't seen yet (wooo rural life). I was already a baby agnostic so the religious stuff and the stuff about aliens made me dubious. Therefore, faced with the romance novels or the encyclopedia (again), I read every single romance novel in the box that summer multiple times. Last year I became obsessed with finding them all again. This book was my first success!
It is terrible.
There's sexual assault of a minor, sexism, misogyny, ableism, and then of course the dude who does the sexual assault is super kind and well respected, truly! He's also the reason our heroine, Fen, didn't have sex with anyone else: she was his from their first kiss/grope (IT WAS ASSAULT). The family tree in the book is confusing enough that the main character explains it to the reader under the guise of explaining it to a teenager. The love interest is a half-brother to Fen's own half-brother, but they are not related. Which makes the banging that comes later fine, I guess, if we ignore the verbal abuse aimed at Fen from recipient of banging. Reader, when I was a child, this would have been normal! It's how men in my life talked to women (it's still how men in my life talk to me because I work in politics). Baby Renay was not prepared to deconstruct any of this.
There was a strong line of "indigenous folks are competent" and "white folks who screw over indigenous communities suck", which I didn't expect. Baby Renay also did not pick up on these things. It turns out her favorite parts were A) the dude being nice (it happens like, three times total and I don't think the romantic resolution counts, unfortunately), B) the very strong sibling relationship between Fen and her young brother, and C) the dude being traumatized by mass death and showing human emotion beyond condescending judgment. I did know what that was on my first time through. My memory has this book as much longer than it is but I'm amazed at the level of detail I recalled.
Internalized misogyny is a hell of a drug. I give this book -10000 palm trees, but my memory 20 gold stars.
The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport by Samit Basu | Tordotcom | October 2023
This book is bananas.
It's rare I crack open my Tome of Shamelessly Bananas Fiction to add a new entry. There was Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir (maybe the sequels? I haven't read them! No spoilers!!). Then Descendent of the Crane by Joan He; we were robbed of the series that should have spawned from that book. Hollow Kingdom by Kira Jane Buxton is also in the Tome. It features a crow named Shit Turd, his trusty canine companion Dennis, and a zombie apocalypse. It is the most normal book on this list. And yes, it's still the most normal book even with the newest addition.
Because I'm 100% adding The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport to the Tome.
The comps on this one sold a lot of people (when I was scoping out reviews it kept coming up), but they made me dubious. I wasn't sure what a "mash up of Aladdin and Murderbot" would mean. Aladdin is a big, boisterous story. Murderbot I enjoy more for the interiority, frank discussions of anxiety, creative problem solving (often in the face of oncoming doom) and the recognition that sometimes it's fine to hide and watch media. This story seemed to need something more keyed to the Aladdin vibe than the "panicked reflections when being perceived by too many humans" or "having a mental health crisis in the midst of a meatspace crisis" vibe. The good news: the Aladdin story is definitely here! The bad news: this isn't very similar to Murderbot in tone, even if we have a bot telling the story. The other good news: I think Moku and Murderbot would get along well. The bad news: Murderbot would lock Bador in an airlock within 35 seconds of meeting him. Not sure how long it would like; once Murderbot found out how much Moku likes humans and Bador is tired of them and their contradictions, it could change. Maybe the comps were picking up on something else; the wider universe is a mystery in this world, deliberately so. The Corporation Rim might be just offscreen.
This is how epic fanfics are born.
The novel plays with perspective via our narrator, a story-bot named Moku who Bador, a monkey android, rescues from a cache of buried technology. There is a lot of distance between Moku and the other characters; he is using his skills to weave a specific narrative and he's a little over-confident about his abilities. In the beginning of the novel, he tells Bador and Lina, Bador's human sister, that he shouldn't be a part of the story in the way they're using him. His concerns on that score are dismissed, and we watch how that unravels his motivations, changes his perspective, and hilariously, shows us how little he knows himself. A lot of people thought the end came out of nowhere, while ignoring all the things Moku missed throughout the story about other characters. I'm still mulling it over, so maybe it did come out of nowhere. But humans can lie to each other and themselves. I'm not sure, in this universe, if bots are so different.
The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport is otherwise a wide-ranging critique against capital, oligarchs, corruption in government, forced scarcity, the surveillance state, over-reliance on technology, and the unknowable complication of consciousness. What I found most interesting is the debate that comes back to conversations we're having even now in every society around the world. Can we fix the master's house with the master's tools? Or must we burn it all down first? Is it possible to fix centuries of systemic rot with a simple blank slate? Is the slate truly blank if we put the oppressed into the same structures and systems that led to the oppression? Can we truly take away the excesses of the wealthy in a way they can't one day undo? Is there a middle ground in any of these paths that would be visible to us with different perspectives? There's a lot of philosophy here, both moral and political. One thing that calls back to Murderbot is the debate about bots and bot rights. Preservation Alliance is ahead of Shantiport on this topic.
The book is slow to start. The pacing feels very uneven for the first 30%. Then everything gets so supercharged that it's hard to stop turning the pages. Amid the giant robot battles, political monologues, evil villain monologues, explosions, and familial drama, there's the city of Shantiport. The city is dirty, broken, corrupted by oligarchs, and yet beloved by the people who have carved out lives there and know it could be better one day. It's a very relatable problem. It came up again and again: Lina wants to stay and reimagine a Shantiport for all. Bador wants to leave for epic space adventures and a less tenuous, marginalized existence. It feels like the chorus that goes around social media whenever a voter suppressed state gets another terrible law or policy passed: "Why don't you just move?" or "Well, they live there and haven't left so they deserve it." That ignores so many things: money, for one. It ignores ability, resources, power dynamics, the gutting of social programs like education that would teach us how to navigate these systems. Most of all, it ignores connection to a physical place and the culture that can only be found there. When you love the place you're from it's hard to give up on it. Lots of people in the U.S. South know that with collective effort, more reliance on community, and less on short-term technological fixes, things could change. In the end, I understood Bador's perspective, but I sided with Lina. They could make it beautiful there.
Artificial Condition by Martha Wells | Tordotcom | May 2018
Ah, my annual Murderbot reread…or maybe it's biannual now. Every time I do a series reread since I passed reread #5 I muse, "This is the time where I will finally have had my fill." but even upon finishing this I could have turned around and read it again. This entry is Murderbot making friends, discovering it likes part of its function, and adjusting to being a truly free agent.
Murderbot delves into its past in this book. I've never thought too deeply about it. This time, though, I thought more about how dismissive it is of Comfort Units. Nothing drastically changes, but the shift after Murderbot learns more about its origins pre-hacked governor module is intriguing. Obviously, no one, not even a Murderbot, unlearns prejudices that fast, but here I think we begin to see the beginnings of it, that are repeated in the next book, brought up again in Fugitive Telemetry, and may come up again one day more explicitly. Wells has left herself so many open doors in this universe. Yes, I will read all of them. Then I'll start them all again from Episode 1 of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon.
The Paradox series by Rachel Bach | | Orbit | 2013 - 2014
This series contains Fortune's Pawn, Honor's Knight, and Heaven's Queen. I started three of these and finished two, and I tried to get through the third book but I simply could not handle any more. I loved Fortune's Pawn the first time I read it. Looking back over that review fresh from a reread, I see why past me loved the first book so much. It's also clear that I was really annoyed at some of the reviews by dudes in fandom. There was so much casual sexism in fan reviewing! I'm sure there still is; I'm just pickier about the reviews I read. According to my reading log from the past, I also read Honor's Knight. The book had four stars but no heart in my old filing system, which translates to a 2/3 star read for me today because I have finally thrown off the shackles of peer pressure re: star ratings. I barely remembered it; the reread was like a first read. I didn't remember the last book at all. I have no record of starting it and therefore assume I either tried and failed or never even bothered to try.
My main critique of the first book back then was this:
It's true for the whole series. I had fun with the reread of Fortune's Pawn but didn't enjoy the book like I did the first time. The whole book is gratuitously unsubtle in a very Feminism 101 way. Sometimes gratuitously unsubtle is what I want! It's still readable, like a big budget disaster movie is fun in the moment but absolutely nothing holds up when examined. Alas!
I've read enough good romance now that the romance felt forced and manipulative. The second book was always going to need to do some heavy lifting based on what happened in the first book and it did not. In the second book, the author leans heavily on romance/kink tropes that deserve to come with content warnings. I hated the love interest by the time I hit the middle of the second book after all the lying, memory manipulation, attempted murder, etc. All the things I loved in the first book get tossed out in favor of a plot that I found undermined the whole idea of supposedly writing feminist science fiction. The interesting crew members we meet in the first book are sidelined in favor of spotlighting the miserable captain and other characters who were empty avatars. The captain getting a bigger role really irked me. I disliked him in the first book and only proceeded to dislike him more until I DNFed the third book and looked eagerly at the end of the book to see whether he died miserably or not.
There was also a backstory for the main character who comes from a society with a monarchy where there are sacred royals. They believe democracy is unholy, somehow? And that eugenics is…cool, actually? Some genocide is fine and necessary? Although the books did finally draw the line at "using child soldiers against their will is bad", even if most of the characters are like "but this is how we've always done it! We can't change now!".
There was some promise for the first book in a series, but it did not bear out in the subsequent books. Although if you're in search of some wild, "no thoughts, head empty" space dramatics with creepy romance vibes, this series might work out for you! It didn't for me! I continue on in search of space opera romance that sticks its landing.
The Exiled Fleet by J.S. Dewes | Tor Books | August 2021
It's easy for me to forget that these books are not short. The pace of the story is like a bullet train straight to Emotional Damage. The first book in the series, The Last Watch, felt like traditional military science fiction and then careened with wild, joyful abandon into Robust Space Opera, complete with space magic. The follow up goes, "Ready for more space magic? Let's fucking go." I love space magic, strong friendships, surprise allies, dramatic third act revelations, gloriously uncomplicated villains, and call backs to everything from Mass Effect to Star Wars. There's probably more I missed as my brain made happy shrieking noises every time something else dramatic was revealed. The relationships between Adequin Rake and Cavalon Mercer goes from a mentor/student vibe to something else that could have dramatic consequences in later books (because there WILL be more than three books, RIGHT? RIGHT, TOR???). There's also the introduction of a character I didn't expect on my first read through. I loved this revelation even more this time.
There's a lot of themes in this book around morality and ethics, the dangers of power, and what makes a someone a person. Another aspect is the human costs of waging a war: the feeding and care of a rebel army, how to navigate building coalitions in disparate groups, and leadership struggles along delegation/trust lines. My love of this story is wrapped up in the realization of the characters that they deserve better than the people charged with their well-being gave them; the additional realization of "it's punching time" is just a bonus. The compassion they have for each other, even when they disagree, is wonderful. I fully expect the theme of leaning too heavily on allies to come up again. This book raised it a few times, but I suspect it will feature in future books (books, plural, right Tor? RIGHT?).
All Systems Red by Martha Wells | Tordotcom | May 2017
If it's getting cold and dark early, there's a good chance I'm under a blanket somewhere ready to begin Yet Another Reread of the many adventures of Murderbot. My thoughts from my very first read-through haven't changed much at all. Even with the additions of the sequels, the core of what made me love the first entry persists. I've got to find where I can buy these audiobooks either digitally in a way I can download them without DRM, or via audio CD. I will go old school so I can listen to these books any time. Predictably, using the library for the audiobooks is hard because Murderbot is so beloved. Every library I have access to has a hold list.
Storm Over Paradise by Robyn Donald | Harlequin Presents | September 1992
One summer, I found a box of romance novels in our guest bedroom. I was too young to read these on my own without at least an adult to ask questions. Did that stop me? Absolutely not. My other options were: several encyclopedia sets/reference books; nursing manuals; books about how aliens built our society, actually; religious and spirituality texts; SF tie-in novels; and self-help by white dudes. The nursing manuals had interesting photos/diagrams and might have set me on an early path to a medical career, but they were beyond my reading level at the time. The SF tie-in novels were about movies I hadn't seen yet (wooo rural life). I was already a baby agnostic so the religious stuff and the stuff about aliens made me dubious. Therefore, faced with the romance novels or the encyclopedia (again), I read every single romance novel in the box that summer multiple times. Last year I became obsessed with finding them all again. This book was my first success!
It is terrible.
There's sexual assault of a minor, sexism, misogyny, ableism, and then of course the dude who does the sexual assault is super kind and well respected, truly! He's also the reason our heroine, Fen, didn't have sex with anyone else: she was his from their first kiss/grope (IT WAS ASSAULT). The family tree in the book is confusing enough that the main character explains it to the reader under the guise of explaining it to a teenager. The love interest is a half-brother to Fen's own half-brother, but they are not related. Which makes the banging that comes later fine, I guess, if we ignore the verbal abuse aimed at Fen from recipient of banging. Reader, when I was a child, this would have been normal! It's how men in my life talked to women (it's still how men in my life talk to me because I work in politics). Baby Renay was not prepared to deconstruct any of this.
There was a strong line of "indigenous folks are competent" and "white folks who screw over indigenous communities suck", which I didn't expect. Baby Renay also did not pick up on these things. It turns out her favorite parts were A) the dude being nice (it happens like, three times total and I don't think the romantic resolution counts, unfortunately), B) the very strong sibling relationship between Fen and her young brother, and C) the dude being traumatized by mass death and showing human emotion beyond condescending judgment. I did know what that was on my first time through. My memory has this book as much longer than it is but I'm amazed at the level of detail I recalled.
Internalized misogyny is a hell of a drug. I give this book -10000 palm trees, but my memory 20 gold stars.
The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport by Samit Basu | Tordotcom | October 2023
This book is bananas.
It's rare I crack open my Tome of Shamelessly Bananas Fiction to add a new entry. There was Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir (maybe the sequels? I haven't read them! No spoilers!!). Then Descendent of the Crane by Joan He; we were robbed of the series that should have spawned from that book. Hollow Kingdom by Kira Jane Buxton is also in the Tome. It features a crow named Shit Turd, his trusty canine companion Dennis, and a zombie apocalypse. It is the most normal book on this list. And yes, it's still the most normal book even with the newest addition.
Because I'm 100% adding The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport to the Tome.
The comps on this one sold a lot of people (when I was scoping out reviews it kept coming up), but they made me dubious. I wasn't sure what a "mash up of Aladdin and Murderbot" would mean. Aladdin is a big, boisterous story. Murderbot I enjoy more for the interiority, frank discussions of anxiety, creative problem solving (often in the face of oncoming doom) and the recognition that sometimes it's fine to hide and watch media. This story seemed to need something more keyed to the Aladdin vibe than the "panicked reflections when being perceived by too many humans" or "having a mental health crisis in the midst of a meatspace crisis" vibe. The good news: the Aladdin story is definitely here! The bad news: this isn't very similar to Murderbot in tone, even if we have a bot telling the story. The other good news: I think Moku and Murderbot would get along well. The bad news: Murderbot would lock Bador in an airlock within 35 seconds of meeting him. Not sure how long it would like; once Murderbot found out how much Moku likes humans and Bador is tired of them and their contradictions, it could change. Maybe the comps were picking up on something else; the wider universe is a mystery in this world, deliberately so. The Corporation Rim might be just offscreen.
This is how epic fanfics are born.
The novel plays with perspective via our narrator, a story-bot named Moku who Bador, a monkey android, rescues from a cache of buried technology. There is a lot of distance between Moku and the other characters; he is using his skills to weave a specific narrative and he's a little over-confident about his abilities. In the beginning of the novel, he tells Bador and Lina, Bador's human sister, that he shouldn't be a part of the story in the way they're using him. His concerns on that score are dismissed, and we watch how that unravels his motivations, changes his perspective, and hilariously, shows us how little he knows himself. A lot of people thought the end came out of nowhere, while ignoring all the things Moku missed throughout the story about other characters. I'm still mulling it over, so maybe it did come out of nowhere. But humans can lie to each other and themselves. I'm not sure, in this universe, if bots are so different.
The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport is otherwise a wide-ranging critique against capital, oligarchs, corruption in government, forced scarcity, the surveillance state, over-reliance on technology, and the unknowable complication of consciousness. What I found most interesting is the debate that comes back to conversations we're having even now in every society around the world. Can we fix the master's house with the master's tools? Or must we burn it all down first? Is it possible to fix centuries of systemic rot with a simple blank slate? Is the slate truly blank if we put the oppressed into the same structures and systems that led to the oppression? Can we truly take away the excesses of the wealthy in a way they can't one day undo? Is there a middle ground in any of these paths that would be visible to us with different perspectives? There's a lot of philosophy here, both moral and political. One thing that calls back to Murderbot is the debate about bots and bot rights. Preservation Alliance is ahead of Shantiport on this topic.
The book is slow to start. The pacing feels very uneven for the first 30%. Then everything gets so supercharged that it's hard to stop turning the pages. Amid the giant robot battles, political monologues, evil villain monologues, explosions, and familial drama, there's the city of Shantiport. The city is dirty, broken, corrupted by oligarchs, and yet beloved by the people who have carved out lives there and know it could be better one day. It's a very relatable problem. It came up again and again: Lina wants to stay and reimagine a Shantiport for all. Bador wants to leave for epic space adventures and a less tenuous, marginalized existence. It feels like the chorus that goes around social media whenever a voter suppressed state gets another terrible law or policy passed: "Why don't you just move?" or "Well, they live there and haven't left so they deserve it." That ignores so many things: money, for one. It ignores ability, resources, power dynamics, the gutting of social programs like education that would teach us how to navigate these systems. Most of all, it ignores connection to a physical place and the culture that can only be found there. When you love the place you're from it's hard to give up on it. Lots of people in the U.S. South know that with collective effort, more reliance on community, and less on short-term technological fixes, things could change. In the end, I understood Bador's perspective, but I sided with Lina. They could make it beautiful there.
Artificial Condition by Martha Wells | Tordotcom | May 2018
Ah, my annual Murderbot reread…or maybe it's biannual now. Every time I do a series reread since I passed reread #5 I muse, "This is the time where I will finally have had my fill." but even upon finishing this I could have turned around and read it again. This entry is Murderbot making friends, discovering it likes part of its function, and adjusting to being a truly free agent.
Murderbot delves into its past in this book. I've never thought too deeply about it. This time, though, I thought more about how dismissive it is of Comfort Units. Nothing drastically changes, but the shift after Murderbot learns more about its origins pre-hacked governor module is intriguing. Obviously, no one, not even a Murderbot, unlearns prejudices that fast, but here I think we begin to see the beginnings of it, that are repeated in the next book, brought up again in Fugitive Telemetry, and may come up again one day more explicitly. Wells has left herself so many open doors in this universe. Yes, I will read all of them. Then I'll start them all again from Episode 1 of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon.
The Paradox series by Rachel Bach | | Orbit | 2013 - 2014
This series contains Fortune's Pawn, Honor's Knight, and Heaven's Queen. I started three of these and finished two, and I tried to get through the third book but I simply could not handle any more. I loved Fortune's Pawn the first time I read it. Looking back over that review fresh from a reread, I see why past me loved the first book so much. It's also clear that I was really annoyed at some of the reviews by dudes in fandom. There was so much casual sexism in fan reviewing! I'm sure there still is; I'm just pickier about the reviews I read. According to my reading log from the past, I also read Honor's Knight. The book had four stars but no heart in my old filing system, which translates to a 2/3 star read for me today because I have finally thrown off the shackles of peer pressure re: star ratings. I barely remembered it; the reread was like a first read. I didn't remember the last book at all. I have no record of starting it and therefore assume I either tried and failed or never even bothered to try.
My main critique of the first book back then was this:
There was no nuance; it felt like the book was simply dobbing spaces on the sexism bingo card in order to entrench Devi's position as a take-no-shit badass lady.
It's true for the whole series. I had fun with the reread of Fortune's Pawn but didn't enjoy the book like I did the first time. The whole book is gratuitously unsubtle in a very Feminism 101 way. Sometimes gratuitously unsubtle is what I want! It's still readable, like a big budget disaster movie is fun in the moment but absolutely nothing holds up when examined. Alas!
I've read enough good romance now that the romance felt forced and manipulative. The second book was always going to need to do some heavy lifting based on what happened in the first book and it did not. In the second book, the author leans heavily on romance/kink tropes that deserve to come with content warnings. I hated the love interest by the time I hit the middle of the second book after all the lying, memory manipulation, attempted murder, etc. All the things I loved in the first book get tossed out in favor of a plot that I found undermined the whole idea of supposedly writing feminist science fiction. The interesting crew members we meet in the first book are sidelined in favor of spotlighting the miserable captain and other characters who were empty avatars. The captain getting a bigger role really irked me. I disliked him in the first book and only proceeded to dislike him more until I DNFed the third book and looked eagerly at the end of the book to see whether he died miserably or not.
There was also a backstory for the main character who comes from a society with a monarchy where there are sacred royals. They believe democracy is unholy, somehow? And that eugenics is…cool, actually? Some genocide is fine and necessary? Although the books did finally draw the line at "using child soldiers against their will is bad", even if most of the characters are like "but this is how we've always done it! We can't change now!".
There was some promise for the first book in a series, but it did not bear out in the subsequent books. Although if you're in search of some wild, "no thoughts, head empty" space dramatics with creepy romance vibes, this series might work out for you! It didn't for me! I continue on in search of space opera romance that sticks its landing.
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Date: 2024-01-16 10:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-01-17 05:29 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2024-01-16 06:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-01-17 05:31 pm (UTC)Tanai was great and now that you outline his archetype, I totally see it.
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Date: 2024-01-18 05:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-01-17 07:07 am (UTC)Thank you for the list of shamelessly bananas books; I've put the two I wasn't familiar with on my TBR wishlist because I love shamelessly bananas.
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Date: 2024-01-17 05:32 pm (UTC)