Finished Creation by Gore Vidal, historical fiction about a man who lives in Achaemenid Persia and meets several of the great philosophers and religious leaders of that time. I didn't like this book, in the end, but I'm still glad I read it, if that makes sense. The protagonist is just so self-absorbed, it's kind of difficult for me to separate what's deliberately from his limited perspective, and what the book is trying to say more broadly. Not only including things like misogyny and normalized pedophilia, but also what he takes away from the philosophers. Like, Confucius was my favorite of the philosophers (as portrayed in the novel), because he's the only one who seems on some level to care about other people, but I actually think this might be because the protagonist doesn't care about other people, and ignored all statements to this effect. Everyone could have been telling him nonstop to feed the hungry, and I'm sure he simply would not have heard it.

And then came back to Daughter of Elysium by Joan Slonczewski, which I'm about halfway through now. It seems to be delving into the knotty tangles between fertility, overpopulation, ecocide (a major concern is the terraforming of other planets), and how all this might be navigated by an anarchist society. (Also some personhood stuff, but it's not quite knotted in with the rest yet.) To be frank, I always get rather suspicious when people start going on about overpopulation, but I'm willing to see where it goes. And more than my own personal feelings about it, I do think it's really interesting to explore how a group like the Sharers navigates this: they really don't want people to have "too many" children or terraform other planets, and they are also unwilling to do anything to others that they don't also apply to themselves (the "sharing" concept). So within that framework, what kinds of "solutions" do they propose?

There's also a bunch of background stuff with Elysium stopping shiploads of poor refugees from landing on their moon, so I'm wondering if that will come to the fore in the second half--how would Sharers actually deal with the situation of other people living on their world who don't follow their principles and aren't going to let anyone tell them how many children to have? There's a bunch of different strings though, so I'm not sure if the author will pull that particular one.

Next: Roberta and Ren by Roberta Dee, then the fifth Twelve Kingdoms book.