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| May 07, 2019
| May 07, 2019
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it was amazing
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‘Exhalation: Stories’ by Ted Chiang is a wonderful collection of science fiction stories! The usual science fiction world-building tropes with the usu
‘Exhalation: Stories’ by Ted Chiang is a wonderful collection of science fiction stories! The usual science fiction world-building tropes with the usual stereotypes as characters are not what this collection is about. My review might reveal TMI, gentler reader, although I did try to not do so. However, a lot of reviewers are also writing descriptions of each story in this collection as I am. Some are revealing more than me, others less. Despite that it may seem I am describing too much, I am not. The author takes each story to places that are weird and wonderful. I do not put those exotic mental places in my descriptions. Chiang is an original fish in an ocean of science fiction writers, and none of these stories are the usual entertainment readers have come to expect. The stories are: -The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate Fuwaad ibn Abbas is a fine fabrics trader living in Baghdad. While browsing shops in the district of metalsmiths, he walks into the store owned by Bashaarat, a maker of science implements and mechanisms. Impressed by these things as Fuwaad is, when Bashaarat shows him a metal hoop that is mounted on a pedestal, he is even more impressed by its function. It is a doorway to the future. What would it mean to know what has happened to you twenty years from today? While Bashaarat is pondering whether he should travel through the time portal, Bashaarat tells him stories of previous travelers. -Exhalation A world of sentient robots who need to constantly fill up their lungs with argon to live is in trouble. They usually stop at filling stations and remove their almost empty lungs, replacing them with full lungs. But a rather weird discrepancy with their time pieces started occurring. Are clocks running faster than usual? Yes! Why? Does this strange effect of Time mean something is happening to the universe? -What’s Expected of Us The story is a warning to those who buy Predictors. Predictors send a signal back in time. The goal is to press a button after seeing a flash of light. However, if you try to break the rules by having the intention to push the button without seeing the flash, moving your finger towards the button, the flash immediately appears. No matter how fast you move to push the button, the flash appears before you manage to get your finger on the button. If you wait for the flash, the flash never happens. The light always precedes the button press when you DO try to push the button first. What this means is there is no free will! Many people succumb to lethargy and stay in bed. Doctors try to tell people, “”We had all been living happy, active lives before, they reason, and we hadn’t had free will then either. Why should anything change?”” -The Lifecycle of Software Objects Ana Alvardo, the main character, is part of a society that uses computers and on-line gaming with chats almost exclusively in order to live their lives, interact with friends, employers, shopping, school, and socializing. Avatars are used while on-line. Ana has been working in the real world at a zoo for six years. The zoo recently closed, but she has earned a certificate in software testing and is hoping to get a new job with her refreshed education. She is hired by Blue Gamma, a company experimenting with enhanced AI digients, sentient beings who live on-line inside programmed worlds and games. The ‘children’, who are designed as animals, or anything, but without any picture perfect cuteness. They need Ana’s animal training skills. She loved working with real-life animals, but can she love virtual monkeys, for instance? However, when people tire of their on-line children, they can “suspend” them. There are other, extremely interesting moral dilemmas. Owners are narcissistic, which causes their digients to become neurotic, for example. While many digients are loved, others are neglected. Digients are real people who live on-line - how do the moral choices of society towards sentient digients play out? In this novella, Chiang explores all of the implications. -Dacey’s Patent Automatic Nanny People who are nannies come with all kinds of baggage and skill sets. Some are wonderful teachers and full of warmth and affection towards the children they are hired to care for, others are none of that. Reginald Dacey is a Victorian mathematician born in 1861 London. He needs a nanny for his son Lionel because his wife died in childbirth. Years later, he perfects and patents his invention, the automatic nanny. He believes children will be raised rationally under the care of a robot. While his robot nanny invention is built too late for raising Lionel, he sells a number of the robots to people, but one of the nannies accidentally kills a child. Riginalds’ robot nanny company closes. When Lionel becomes an adult, a mathematician like his father, he reboots his father’s robot nannies company, but it is not successful. However, having adopted a son, Edmund, he uses a robot nanny to raise Edmund for two years. The story ends in an outcome which I think author Aldus Huxley would have found interesting. -The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling Two alternating stories about literacy and memory: in one of them, the narrator tells the story of his daughter Nicole growing up in a society where everyone records on video their entire life. She cannot write well or spell, but since she can easily recall a video of every scene of her life, she does not have to deal with the ambiguities of remembering an event. This has a social impact Nicole’s father is not prepared for, having grown up without “Remem”, the service that keeps a video diary of one’s entire life; the other story is told by Jijingi, who lives in an African village in the past, Tivland. Jijingi is thirteen years old when he meets Europeans for the first time, and they change everything in Tivland. However, the village manages to change only those things necessary to accommodate the rules and power of the Europeans while holding onto their old ways. A missionary, Moseby arrives, and he teaches Jijingi how to read and write, so he learns what European children learn. Jijingi is startled by what happens when he acquires a skill and knowledge the others of his tribe do not have. What happens to Jijingi happened to me after I graduated from college and attempted to ‘go home again.’ No one else in my immediate social group had gone to college. It also happened to me when I graduated from high school. My parents were not high school graduates. -The Great Silence Humans are continuously seeking extraterrestial life, especially sentient life. However, there exists on earth sentient life already, particularly parrots. But many species of parrots are either endangered or extinct because people are killing them by destroying their habitats or utilizing their feathers in marketable goods, or as pets. Many parrots talk, some can be taught to communicate with people in any human language. For now. I got very emotional reading this story. “You be good. I love you.” Last words of Alex, an African gray parrot. -Omphalos It is the twenty-first century, and science is a job of proving Christian realities, such as the proving Christian relics are from the relevant eras, cataloging the 5,872 stars in the sky, the number of which hasn’t changed since 1745, and the world is 8,912 years old. But then, astronomers discover a sun is rotating around a planet….and it is “”stationary relative to the luminiferous aether, meaning that it’s the sole object in the universe that is at absolute rest.”” Is this planet God’s favored planet?????? And life on earth is a total accident, not just unloved by God, but He is not aware of us at all? Scientific crisis follows. This is a fun story! -Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom Prisms (Plaga interworld signaling mechanism) have been invented which permit people to talk to themselves in other universes. Each prism has a limited life span, running down eventually like batteries do except when they stop working they can no longer be used to connect to the specific universe they were tuned to. Use of a prism creates two newly divergent timelines, allowing communication between the two, while also creating a branching of future possibilities, changing outcomes and personalities despite ‘being the same person.’ There are other rules, restrictions in how the prisms can be used. Services are started to help people use prisms, and people being people, unscrupulous prism businesses con customers out of money. This story is about two con artists, Nat and Morrow, who work for SelfTalk, a store that was very successful when people had to go to a store to use a prism. However, now people can buy their own prisms, and it is mostly senior citizens who still are customers. Morrow tries to steal money from customers, while Nat deals with their demanding clients. It also is about Dana, a psychiatrist, who treats people who have become emotionally damaged by their experiences in using prisms. The world-building is amazing! These stories are not the usual science fiction speculations and adventure dramas! ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jul 14, 2024
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Jul 21, 2024
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Jul 14, 2024
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| B07MNG496J
| 3.88
| 232,415
| Jul 16, 2019
| Jul 16, 2019
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really liked it
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‘This is How You Lose the Time War’ by Amul El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone is Shakespeare transformed into a science fiction romance! But the stage is ma
‘This is How You Lose the Time War’ by Amul El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone is Shakespeare transformed into a science fiction romance! But the stage is made of gossamer threads which are tiptoed upon by ghostly beings, and the play is words written only in the atomic sparking of the electrical/chemical space made of seeds or built of motherboards. Two beings, Red and Blue, are each warriers from opposite sides in a Time war. They can shapeshift, possess human bodies not their own, and ride space threads and weave and re-weave braids of Time. They each visit the past of Earth’s history, undoing it, reshaping it, acting as assassins or lovers as required, both under command to re-create history in favor of their side. One works for Garden, grown from a seed, and she is a fighter for a world of vines and flowers. The other is a cyborg, and she works for Agency. Her Commandant gives her assignments to change Earth’s history in favor of Agency. Organic vs. inorganic. Agency and Garden undo the other’s changes of history, over and over. The character Red, the cyborg, is written by Max Gladstone. Blue is written by Amul El-Mohtar. I have copied the book blurb: ”Goodreads Choice AwardNominee for Best Science Fiction (2019) From award-winning authors Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone comes an enthralling, romantic novel spanning time and space about two time-traveling rivals who fall in love and must change the past to ensure their future. Among the ashes of a dying world, an agent of the Commandment finds a letter. It reads: Burn before reading. Thus begins an unlikely correspondence between two rival agents hellbent on securing the best possible future for their warring factions. Now, what began as a taunt, a battlefield boast, becomes something more. Something epic. Something romantic. Something that could change the past and the future. Except the discovery of their bond would mean the death of each of them. There’s still a war going on, after all. And someone has to win. That’s how war works, right? Cowritten by two beloved and award-winning sci-fi writers, This Is How You Lose the Time War is an epic love story spanning time and space.” If you, gentler reader, do not enjoy poetic prose or literary fantasies, this novella is not for you. If you don’t like epistolary exposition, this novella is not for you. However, if you do - Quotes: Red - ”The letter begins in the tree’s heart. Rings, thicker here and thinner there, form symbols in an alphabet no one present knows but Red. The words are small, sometimes smudged, but still: ten years per line of text, and many lines. Mapping roots, depositing or draining nutrients year by year, the message must have taken a century to craft. Perhaps local legends tell of some fairy or frozen goddess in these woods, seen for an instant, then gone. Red wonder what espression she wore as she placed the needle. She memorizes the message. She feels it ridge by ridge, line by line, and performs a slow arithmetic of years.” Blue - ”London Next—the same day, month, year, but one strand over—is the kind of London other Londons dream: sepia tinted, skies strung with dirigibles, the viciousness of empire acknowledged only as a rosy backdrop glow redolent of spice and petalled sugar. Mannered as a novel, filthy only where story requires it, all meat pies and monarchy—this is a place Blue loves, and hates herself for loving.” “She pours her tea, delicately, without straining the leaves. She lifts her teaspoon to the light—can see that it’s coated with a downthread substance she thinks she recognizes but sniffs to be sure. She will herself not to look around, commands every atom of her body into stillness, forbids the need to leap into the kitchen and pursue and hunt and catch— Instead, she stirs the spoon, empty, into the tea, and watches as the leaves unclump, swirl, spindle into letters. Each rotation is slow, and she marks paragraph breaks with small sips; every sip undoes the letters until she swirls them into meaning again.” Blue - “It feels harder to write than it should. It feels easier to write than it should, as well. I’m contradicting myself. The geometers would be ashamed. I sent them away. Each being’s entitled to her privacy, so I refused to let them see me. I was the only person on that tiny rock, and I made the world go dark. Wind blows. High places grow cold at night. Sharp rocks hurt my feet. For the first time in thirteen years I was alone. I, whatever I was, whatever I am tumbled first up, into the stars, then down to be broken land. I dug into the soil. Night birds called; something like a wolf, but solitary and larger with six legs and double-banked eyes, padded past. The tears dried. And I felt lonely. I missed those voices. I missed the minds behind them. I wanted to be seen. That need dug into the heart of me. if felt good. I’m not certain how to compare this to something you would know, but, imagine a person melded to a Thing, an artificial god the size of mountains, built for making war in the far corners of the cosmos. Imagine that great weight of metal all around her, pressing her down, giving her strength, its hoses melding with her flesh. Imagine she shears the hoses off, steps out: frail, sapped weak, free. I was light, hollowed, hungry. The sun rose. I found no revelation.” Red - “It’s so hard to move, here, and reply to your last letter. I feel—I can’t say precisely what. I’m shaken. You know the edges of old maps that promise monsters and mermaids? Here there be dragons? I do not know what roads lead forward. But your letter hungers for reply. I’ve read your last missive and reread it—in memory, as you warned me I would so long ago, preparing myself for a fall. I see you as a wave, as a bird, as a wolf. (My wolf, with the six legs and double-banked eyes.) I try not to think of you the same way twice. Thinking builds patterns in the brain, and those patterns can be read by one sufficiently determined,and Commandant, sometimes, is sufficiently determined—I think you’d like her. So I change your shape in my thoughts. It’s amazing how much blue there is in the world, if you look. you’re different colors of lame: Bismuth burns blue, and cerium, germanium, and arsenic. See? I pour you into things. I suspect you see me plain by now—imagine me shifting, uncomfortable, exposed. My way was always the straightforward push, in one direction, without hesitation or restraint. I only worried you might view these long letters as the sign of a simple or a desperate mind. I worried—maybe you’ll laugh—that you responded on sufferance. So: Let me be clear. I like writing you. I like reading you. When I finish your letters, I spend frantic hours in secret composing my replies, pondering ways to send them. I can trigger any combination of chemical ups and downs with a carefully worded phrase; a factory within me will smelt any drug I seek. But there’s a rush in reading and sending against which no drug compares.” Blue - “My Heart’s Own Blood, I dance to you in a body built for sweetness, a body that tears itself apart in defense of what it loves. This letter will sting you when it’s done. Let it, and read a postscript in its death throes. I dance—this will be a very boring letter—because this thing in me, this piping heat, this rising sun that hardly fits in the sky of me won’t stay put. To know you my equal in this, too—this beat of my blood’s drum, this feast that won’t diminish no matter how I ravage it—Red. Red, Red, Red, I want to write you poetry, and I am laughing, understand, as I teach this small body my joy, laughing at the joke of me and the relief, the relief of being supine on a stone slab with a knife above me and seeing your hand and eyes guiding it. That surrender should be satiety. That it should have taken me this long to learn that. Red, I love you. Red, I will send you letters from everywhen telling you so, letters of only one word, letters that will brush your cheek and grip your hair, letters that will bite you, letters that will mark you, I’ll write you by bullet ant and spider wasp; I’ll write you by shark’s tooth and scallop shell; I’ll write you by virus and the salt of a ninth wave flooding your lungs; I’ll stop, here, I’ll stop.” Red - “Your letter, the sting, the beauty of it. Those forevers you promise. Neptune. I want to meet you in every place I ever loved. Listen to me—I am your echo. I would rather break the world than lose you.” We all know how Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet ended. Is that the future-past for Red and Blue? I’m not telling…. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jul 06, 2024
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Jul 08, 2024
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Jul 06, 2024
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| B09QX2C1ZQ
| 3.70
| 2,197
| Feb 1976
| Apr 17, 2019
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liked it
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‘Trouble on Triton’ by Samuel R Delaney is a thought experiment of social ideas disguised as speculative science fiction about a society where sexual
‘Trouble on Triton’ by Samuel R Delaney is a thought experiment of social ideas disguised as speculative science fiction about a society where sexual fluidity drives everyone’s social life. A man, Bron Helstron, lives in the city Tethys on Neptune’s moon Triton. On Triton people can change their gender and sexual preferences in 6 hours by making appointments at neighborhood medical clinics. It is seemingly as socially acceptable as getting a new hairstyle. Individuals can either go to work naked or dress as they please, but individuals do dress to declare what their jobs are or what neighborhood they live in. They have their cliques. Bron and his friends discuss about whether people must be “types”, since certain types appear to primarily make certain choices of jobs, lifestyles and dress/hygiene. People live in apartment communes with people who share their sexual and gender preferences. It seems like an utopia of gender choices. I have copied the book blurb: ”In a story as exciting as any science fiction adventure written, Samuel R. Delany's 1976 SF novel, originally published as Triton, takes us on a tour of a utopian society at war with . . . our own Earth! High wit in this future comedy of manners allows Delany to question gender roles and sexual expectations at a level that, 20 years after it was written, still make it a coruscating portrait of the happily reasonable man, Bron Helstrom -- an immigrant to the embattled world of Triton, whose troubles become more and more complex, till there is nothing left for him to do but become a woman. Against a background of high adventure, this minuet of a novel dances from the farthest limits of the solar system to Earth's own Outer Mongolia. Alternately funny and moving, it is a wide-ranging tale in which character after character turns out not to be what he -- or she -- seems. I don’t believe the book is at all exciting. It is wordily dense with philosophical conversations about community mores and personality types, with underlying themes about the intersection of political control and social mores, and certain scientific digressions, some of which are nonsense. Besides the obvious social commentary on gender and sexuality, imho the author is also making fun of the tendency of academics to study things that are basically subjective but injecting into the study mathematical proofs, and maybe also utilizing logic premises/conclusions, to reboot whatever the subjective experience into an objective scientific model for research. Like, possibly psychology? ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 19, 2024
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Jun 23, 2024
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Jun 19, 2024
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| B0C1X6LTFT
| 3.87
| 3,042
| Jan 16, 2024
| Jan 16, 2024
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liked it
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‘The Tusks of Extinction’’ by Ray Naylor is both hopeful and sad. Written with an underlying elegiac tone, it is a novella of speculative science fict
‘The Tusks of Extinction’’ by Ray Naylor is both hopeful and sad. Written with an underlying elegiac tone, it is a novella of speculative science fiction and wishful thinking. I copied the book blurb: ”When you bring back a long-extinct species, there’s more to success than the DNA. Moscow has resurrected the mammoth. But someone must teach them how to be mammoths, or they are doomed to die out again. Dr. Damira Khismatullina, an expert in elephant behavior, was brutally murdered trying to defend the world's last elephants from the brutal ivory trade. Now, her digitized consciousness has been downloaded into the mind of a mammoth. As the herd's new matriarch, can Damira help fend off poachers long enough for the species to take hold? Or will her own ghosts, and Moscow's real reason for bringing the mammoth back, doom them to a new extinction? A tense SF thriller from a new master of the genre.” There is a chaotic timeline in ‘The Tusks of Extinction’ which is confusing because Damira has two bodies, two lives, and the chapters alternate between her two lives without much explanatory exposition for awhile. In one life, she is a human being. Being human is in her past. Her new existence is living as a mammoth. Being the leader and teacher of her pack is her present. There also are chapters narrated by two different groups of hunters trying to kill the mammoths. One group of hunters are poor simple villagers who hope to sell the tusks chopped off from the mammoths. It would make them millionaires. The other group of hunters, members of an organization dedicated to protect the mammoths, are hired by a wealthy man who likes to kill rare animals for sport. The organization believes permitting one or two mammoths “to be harvested” for an enormous fee paid by a wealthy man is a good thing, financially, in helping the organization support and protect the rest of the herd. However. Damira no longer feels much like a human anymore. She doesn’t care about human sensibilities and thoughts very much, only about protecting and growing her herd. There is a third way to handle humanity…. ...more |
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1
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May 18, 2024
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May 19, 2024
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May 18, 2024
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| B0BX7CK5VG
| 3.86
| 15,430
| Nov 07, 2023
| Nov 07, 2023
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really liked it
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‘The Future’ by Naomi Alderman is the kind of wish-fulfillment story I love! The author uses what is technologically happening to our American society ‘The Future’ by Naomi Alderman is the kind of wish-fulfillment story I love! The author uses what is technologically happening to our American society today to develop a science-fiction story about a future which could/might result from that. She is not saying technology itself will save/harm the societies of the Earth in this novel, instead she is saying the people in charge of the technology have the power to save/harm the Earth through the technologies under their control. The book opens with an apocalypse! But it is more of one of the mind than reality. Which, in actuality, is also what many critics today are doing to us through hair-raising hypothetical extrapolations about the effects the corporations of Facebook, X formerly known as Twitter, Google, and Apple are having on society. I really really love my Ipad Pro, and my iPhone. My life is much more easier and full because of these products and their apps. Of course, I am aware of the vast number of physical technologies which are fundamental in supporting the use of these products too, many of which are causing global warming and environmental degradation. I am also full of despair over the growing economic disparities between the general public’s share of earned income and that of the CEO’s and founders of the tech companies. I have copied the book blurb, which is a lot of hyperbolic teaser and not much else: ”Goodreads Choice AwardNominee for Best Science Fiction (2023) The Future—as the richest people on the planet have discovered—is where the money is. The Future is a few billionaires leading the world to destruction while safeguarding their own survival with secret lavish bunkers. The Future is private weather, technological prophecy and highly deniable weapons. The Future is a handful of friends—the daughter of a cult leader, a non-binary hacker, an ousted Silicon Valley visionary, the concerned wife of a dangerous CEO, and an internet-famous survivalist—hatching a daring plan. It could be the greatest heist ever. Or the cataclysmic end of civilization. The Future is what you see if you don’t look behind you. The Future is the only reason to do anything, the only object of desire. The Future is here.” Frankly, this blurb kinda loses it in verbal flights of nonsense. Alderman is more on target in the novel, although I have to admit she also kinda loses it with vaguely appropriate inclusions of many of today’s talking-points about technology. She sometimes clumsily, imho, creates tie-ins to the many conversations today’s real-life critics are having about socially-disrupting technologies and the involved companies’ manner of handling of them. The book is an overdone comic-con cornucopia of progressive complaints and inventive technology of 4K science-fiction movies, worthy and spot on as those individual talking points and movie ideas may be. I don’t think ‘The Future’ is as good as her previous book, The Power. However, unlike many reviewers on Goodreads, as well as some professional critics, I enjoyed reading ‘The Future’. There was a cool interpretation of the story involving the biblical character Lot, and his part in the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah which I had never come across before. I enjoyed this bit a lot! I was surprised to discover some Goodreads’ reviewers hated the imagined on-line community discussion, not understanding its connection to the plot or finding it threw off the pacing of the action. I also found its connection to the story to be fragmental. That is a pun, gentler reader, which you will understand after reading the book. But it did disrupt the flow of the story. The book is oddly lacking in emotional impact generally, and maybe it is because the pacing is odd, I think sacrificed to a wandering about in scenes briefly reflective of today’s talking points about technological corporations and religious zealots of all sorts instead of a beeline focus of action. The characters are more caricature than fully realized people. I was reminded of a Comic Con Convention, with its mix of costumed participants from many different story lines. This story wanted to be let loose to become a biting satire very very badly, imho, but instead it was as if Alderman couldn’t decide to go all in, like she did in ‘The Power.’ She held it back. I think Alderman was trying to show the different faces of zealotry, I suspect in a literary fashion, which is why she invented and included the Enochites to oppose technology and the people who support technology. Zealotry = destruction. Full stop. Maybe the main theme of ‘The Future’? Lot opposed God’s zealotry, didn’t he? One good man, or three good women (Lot’s wife and daughters, Alderman’s tech wives and child), found among the bad would save the rest of the depraved citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah from God’s judgement? Do tech bro’s talk about being gods? Yes, they have done so. Angels of light, photons and electrons, enticing us to hell. Basically, the book is great with ideas about the uses of imagined and actual technology. Alderman certainly wanted to focus on the self-aggrandizing greed of tech executives which is tearing down society more than it is helping with forward progress, but the story is too fragmented with unessential, even if somewhat connected, side issues. But still. Even so. I did like the book. Alderman has a playful, dark, gothic mind. I like it even better than this book. ...more |
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May 05, 2024
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May 11, 2024
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May 05, 2024
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| 0532601467
| 9780532601463
| 0532601467
| 3.84
| 3,837
| 1950
| Jan 01, 1963
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really liked it
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‘Voyage of the Space Beagle’ by A. E. van Vogt was eye-opening for me! The science fiction novel is actually four linked stories in the manner pursued
‘Voyage of the Space Beagle’ by A. E. van Vogt was eye-opening for me! The science fiction novel is actually four linked stories in the manner pursued by the newer Star Trek series - the having of one major story or a character’s dilemma carried in the background from episode to episode until a Big Finish episode, while each of the episodes individually had a new story in the foreground. The four stories originally were published separately in popular science fiction magazines. The Space Beagle is an intergalactic space ship traveling through space: “Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no man has gone before!” Does this sound familiar? Three of these stories were written in 1939, the fourth being written in 1943. But there’s more! In one story, there is a space creature which is almost invincible. It lays eggs inside of living people. The egg, upon hatching inside a person, eats it way out. One of the crewman, thirty-one-year-old Elliott Grosvenor (our apparently selfless hero), practices a holistic self-education system called Nexialism, “… integration of many sciences…”. It’s about learning a little about a lot of stuff, not specializing in any single field of science. Nexialists specialize in training the mind’s mental approaches to acquiring knowledge and information, so that a practitioner is able to be more of a polymath than an expert in one thing. Practitioners also learn emotional self-control. Their Big Picture mental process puts facts before emotions even as the practitioner takes care to examine the emotions of everyone around them, taking the feelings of individuals psychologically into account as a factor in conclusions. The purpose is to arrive at logical conclusions which are the best option for survival of the many, even at the expense of the one. Sound familiar? Of course, almost every department head, military leader and technician boss on the ship thinks Grosvenor is too stupid to live. Only their subordinates and junior scientists bother to answer his questions - IF their bosses haven’t ordered them not to talk to him. Which some of them have done so. The ship’s crew are divided into two groups of men with authority: scientists and military types, with the military men believing the scientists are fools, and the scientists thinking the non-scientists incapable of logic or having intelligence. Since the stories were written in 1939 and 1943, there are no women aboard. Such a happy ship! Clearly they will pull all together in facing several strange monsters who attack them before they understand the nature of what is attacking them or why. No, not. Sigh. Gentler readers, this is a novel which is the source of many ideas which were extrapolated by science fiction writers later in the twentieth century! There are a lot of science and sociology discussions between the various scientists that reminded me of the discussions that happen on the Star Trek shows, especially the newer ones, as the specialists try to understand the nature of the monsters and how to defend the ship against them. I have to admit I enjoyed the book the most in identifying what plot points have been rebooted and make-overed by our current crop of science fiction writers. Some quotes from the novel are eerily appropriate in the interrogation of recent witnesses who were summoned by U.S. Congress extreme right-wing Republicans to a hearing before a House subcommittee. The witnesses/scientists were insulted, threatened and verbally intimidated in Congressional hearings by House Representatives who are followers of Donald Trump’s manner of controlling everyone around him. From the book: ””I notice,” said Grosvenor, “you didn’t say anything about his qualifications for the job.”” “”It’s not a vital position, generally speaking. He can get advice from experts on anything he wants to know.”” McCann pursed his lips. ““It’s hard to put Kent’s appeal into words, but I think that scientists are constantly on the defensive about their alleged unfeeling intellectualism. So they like to have someone fronting for them who is emotional but whose scientific qualifications cannot be questioned.”” Grosvenor shook his head. ““I disagree with you about the director’s job not being vital. It all depends on the individual as to how he exercises the very considerable authority involved.”” McCann studied him shrewdly. He said finally, ““Strictly logical men like you have always had a hard time understanding the mass appeal of the Kents. They haven’t much chance against his type, politically.”” Grosvenor smiled grimly. “”It’s not their devotion to the scientific method that defeats the technologists. It’s their integrity. The average trained man often understand the tactics that are used against him better than the person who uses them, but he cannot bring himself to retaliate in kind without feeling tarnished.”” The Republicans are definitely using the approach the character Kent uses to acquire power over the other men traveling in the Space Beagle. Truth be damned, even if one’s lies or one’s egotistical need to be in charge kills more people. The crazy nonsensical attack approach using exaggerations, misdirections, false narratives, the not-relevant sideways issues and lies: https://youtu.be/vIwFeG1TAxY?si=AL2m5... https://youtu.be/hk6y19AbLNE?si=GJ62C... https://youtu.be/vCq6haTQZtg?si=9ZWjb... https://youtu.be/2GgpKRoRYGE?si=XxMNv... https://youtu.be/zWwuOZ18ABA?si=H5KCq... https://youtu.be/u2CVFS6MT1E?si=v3lNu... The more fact-based, but still obviously hostile, not accepting anything you say, spinning the truth to suit the beliefs of the ignorant, approach: https://youtu.be/b7Q28CcUEzw?si=duK_c... https://youtu.be/hahOJNKFLRI?si=ZMT7R... https://youtu.be/HxOhlnje_GA?si=i5af1... https://youtu.be/RARlZ3eIKCM?si=ywUEb... https://youtu.be/K-O-QtDEwyU?si=_r8IL... In the hearing, various Republicans accuse Dr. Fauci and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) of being responsible for bringing the virus Covid-19 to America. In tones of severe disapproval, the Republicans express amazement that this rumored creation of Covid-19 for the NIH and Dr. Fauci was paid for by American taxpayer money. The Republicans give no reason WHY the NIH or Dr. Fauci would want the American people specifically to die from Covid. Republicans are convinced the proof of their suspicions have been deleted from computers. The absence of proof is the proof. They also quote from published articles stating suspicions and opinions of individual medical professionals who are known to be on the fringes of real science supporting their accusations. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) gave a small amount of money, $120,000, to the Wuhan lnstitute of Virology, which has an annual billion-dollar budget of operating funds. NIH did NOT instruct the Chinese scientists to create Covid-19 with the money from the NIH. It was for another study, for which there is ample proof. Plus, there is no way $120,000 would begin to cover the cost of development of a virus like Covid-19. There is absolutely NO proof at all that the NIH or Dr. Fauci personally required the Chinese to develop the Covid-19 virus for the purpose of distributing the virus throughout America to kill American citizens. Every country in the world had people dying from Covid, including Chinese people. I find it difficult to believe the Chinese government had a design of genocide to kill off all of Humanity, including their own people. Since Covid-19 was deadly mostly to the elderly and the sick and the immune-compromised, I think this is a very strange designer virus for genocide, created apparently by the Chinese on behalf of Dr. Fauci’s and the NIH’s plot to kill everyone in the world. It clearly isn’t very efficient at killing everyone, unless you are sick, immune-compromised or old, which, hello, is not EvErYOnE, is it? Making children wear masks is not a type of torture. Making adults wear masks is not type of torture. Wearing a mask does not hurt at all. Many Republicans in the hearing equate it with being an evil torture terrible to endure. I have worn a variety of masks. None of them hurt me. I have friends, relatives and neighbors who wore masks. None of them expressed any pain from doing do. Beating up a kid hurts a kid. Burning a kid with fire hurts a kid. Breaking a kid’s bones hurts a kid. Spanking a kid hurts a kid. Physically assaulting a kid hurts a kid. Falling down hurts a kid. These are facts. A kid wearing a mask does not hurt a kid’s face, or his body for the matter. Lots of kids wore masks during the pandemic without any pain. Some experienced annoyance, though. Wearing a mask does not hurt. Since it doesn’t hurt, it can’t be defined as a torture. Full stop. This is a fact. Statistically, children are more resistant to Covid, but they can carry the virus home to their parents and grandparents who do not have the resistance that children have. Many children were discovered to carry the virus if they were exposed but they were asymptomatic. However, when adult teachers, parents, grandparents, fellow adult passengers on trains/planes/cars/buses are exposed to Covid-19 consisting of virus particles being breathed out by asymptomatic and not-sick-at-all kids, the adults around them can get very sick. Teachers were very afraid of catching Covid-19 from the kids, not vice versa. Not that any of the Republicans mentioned this FACT. Many teachers refused to come to work because they were afraid of catching Covid-19 from their kids. Fact. This is why kids were required to wear masks. It wasn’t the kid who needed protecting from Covid, generally. Also, sidebar, many kids are immune-compromised because of health issues. They COULD get sick and die from Covid-19. Also, a mask was intended not only to protect the wearer from the virus which might be being passed around in the room by another person, but they were worn to protect others from a person who had the virus and was wearing a mask because they were breathing it out of their mouth. They also went after Dr. Fauci for recommending people get vaccinated. Most private corporations and state institutions gave people the choice to get the vaccination or not. If they didn’t get it, they were told to stay home. Many of the unvaccinated lost their jobs because they weren’t permitted to go to their place of work to do their jobs unvaccinated. If they had got vaccinated, they would have kept their jobs. The corporations and institutions, and especially the government which would and did foot most of the bills from taxpayer money to care for sick people, did not want the other employees to get sick with Covid, mild as it was if one was vaccinated. Or worse, while vaccinated employees might be asymptomatic because they were vaccinated, they could still pass on the virus carried into the room by the unvaccinated to elderly or immune-compromised family members or friends or neighbors at home who could not get the vaccination safely due to poor health or youth. From what I heard from non-vaxxers and the House Republicans, they did not think passing on the virus to their fellow employees, family members and friends and children, and possibly killing them, was as important as what they felt was their own right to not get vaccinated. They want to choose to not get vaccinated even if it meant killing other people who could not get vaccinated because of their health or for whom the vaccine did not work well. Somehow, non-vaxxers can’t hear themselves, I guess, because what they are actually saying is “I will kill you if your genetics has made you susceptible to the virus, and your immune-compromised children, your elderly parents and grandparents, by giving you the virus to make you sick and then pass on, because I don’t want to get vaccinated. Or wear a painless mask that doesn’t hurt but it annoys me.” The Republicans pointed out vaccination didn’t work for everyone. In their spinning of the science, that made the recommendation of getting vaccinated or getting fired if one doesn’t get vaccinated an evil demand without merit. Many of them would not allow Dr. Fauci to point out the obvious reasons why the vaccine didn’t work for everyone, interrupting his explanations. A few questioners finally allowed him to talk and explain. The main reason is the Covid virus mutates. A Covid vaccine works very well on one variety of Covid. But soon there is another variety of Covid circulating and the vaccine being used doesn’t work on it. So another vaccine has to be created to deal with the new type of Covid virus. Simple, yes? Dr. Fauci pointed out the measles virus does not mutate, so the vaccine one gets for the measles lasts for decades. This is not true with Covid-19 vaccines because the Covid virus in the wild mutates all of the time. The Republicans didn’t want him to really respond, though, and shouted him down with insults and misdirection. Another reason the vaccine does not work was the vaccine designed for a specific type of Covid stops working in time, its protective effect of stimulating the body’s immune system working less and less. The science answer to that is booster shots. I mean, it is what it is. Perhaps in the future the scientists will develop a vaccine which works for decades against all the different mutations of Covid-19, but that day is not here. But, as far as the Republicans are concerned, these unavoidable problems with vaccinating people against Covid with the current manufacturing processes and science discoveries about the virus are a conspiracy against the American people. Again, can these Republicans hear themselves? They are angry that people are being saved by getting vaccinated? The vaccinated are not killing the immune-compromised and the elderly and others who have weakened immune systems, by passing on the virus to them because they got vaccinated? Well, the character Kent reminded me a lot of these House Republicans. Grosvener reminded me of poor Dr. Fauci. If those Youtube videos on that wild so-called hearing to discover facts that was performed by House Republicans doesn’t blow your mind, here is what was recommended by a different United States Congress, along with many other countries around the world faced with a pandemic exactly similar to the one caused by Covid: ”Responses Public health management Coromandel Hospital Board (New Zealand) advice to influenza sufferers (1918) In September 1918, the Red Cross recommended two-layer gauze masks to halt the spread of "plague". 1918 Chicago newspaper headlines reflect mitigation strategies such as increased ventilation, arrests for not wearing face masks, sequenced inoculations, limitations on crowd size, selective closing of businesses, curfews, and lockdowns. After October's strict containment measures showed some success, Armistice Day celebrations in November and relaxed attitudes by Thanksgiving caused a resurgence. While systems for alerting public health authorities of infectious spread did exist in 1918, they did not generally include influenza, leading to a delayed response. Nevertheless, actions were taken. Maritime quarantines were declared on islands such as Iceland, Australia, and American Samoa, saving many lives. Social distancing measures were introduced, for example closing schools, theatres, and places of worship, limiting public transportation, and banning mass gatherings. Wearing face masks became common in some places, such as Japan, though there were debates over their efficacy.[228] There was also some resistance to their use, as exemplified by the Anti-Mask League of San Francisco. Vaccines were also developed, but as these were based on bacteria and not the actual virus, they could only help with secondary infections. The actual enforcement of various restrictions varied. To a large extent, the New York City health commissioner ordered businesses to open and close on staggered shifts to avoid overcrowding on the subways.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish... ...more |
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May 04, 2024
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Jun 07, 2024
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May 04, 2024
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Unknown Binding
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| 3.60
| 2,754
| Mar 13, 2018
| Mar 13, 2018
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it was amazing
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The book ‘Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach’ by Kelly Robson is very good, except that it felt incomplete to me, like it was missing the last chapte
The book ‘Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach’ by Kelly Robson is very good, except that it felt incomplete to me, like it was missing the last chapter. Of course, in real life, all of us currently alive are right now missing the final chapter of our actual future, aren’t we? We aren’t capable of traveling into the future like Doctor Who and his Tardis. In this sense, our personal stories are incomplete, although most of us are able to extrapolate what is likely to happen. Ok, ok, I am getting carried away. ‘Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach’ did that to me. I think the novel is an extreme mind game of literary playfulness. Of course, maybe I am reading too much into it. Until the last page, I was completely immersed in this science fiction story. It manages in only a few hundred pages to present a future which is both hopeful and dystopian. The Earth is a ruined and poisoned mess caused by Mankind, but some people have climbed out of the underground cities they built to survive and are scientifically attempting to fix the ecological damage on the surface of the planet. Technology is very very advanced. People can opt for body modifications for improved mobility and functionality. However, not everyone agrees with moving forward in fixing the present state (actually, our future state, in two meanings of the word, literally and figuratively, fictionally, haha) of Earth that way because time travel has been invented. Banks, with the power of financing scientific projects if they so choose to do so, hold all of the cards of what the future will look like, and also the past…my head is starting to hurt, gentler reader… I have copied the book blurb: ”Discover a shifting history of adventure as humanity clashes over whether to repair their ruined planet or luxuriate in a less tainted past. In 2267, Earth has just begun to recover from worldwide ecological disasters. Minh is part of the generation that first moved back up to the surface of the Earth from the underground hells, to reclaim humanity's ancestral habitat. She's spent her entire life restoring river ecosystems, but lately the kind of long-term restoration projects Minh works on have been stalled due to the invention of time travel. When she gets the opportunity take a team to 2000 BC to survey the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, she jumps at the chance to uncover the secrets of the shadowy think tank that controls time travel technology.” The writing is concise with no unnecessary verbiage, with two parallel narratives happening in our present timeline at the same time, at least in my uncollapsed timeline of reading the novel now, but actually being a future and past story being told concurrently. Readers will need to pay close attention as every word matters to understanding what is going on. The author does give readers everything they need to know until the ending, where she leaves readers suspended in Time, lost, not knowing what happens in the future or in the new past. I felt like I was in a weird language arts class studying a huge past perfect simple tense joke used to drive the plot forward (and back) in a science fiction story after finishing (?). Discuss. ...more |
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Apr 11, 2024
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| 3.68
| 15,043
| Jul 11, 2020
| Aug 11, 2020
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liked it
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For me, reading ‘The New Wilderness’ by Diane Cook was like finding myself among people who have a very different outlook and set of interests than I
For me, reading ‘The New Wilderness’ by Diane Cook was like finding myself among people who have a very different outlook and set of interests than I can ever understand or want for myself. I have copied the book blurb: ”Goodreads Choice AwardNominee for Best Science Fiction (2020) Bea's five-year old daughter, Agnes, is slowly wasting away in front of her. The smog and pollution of the City--the over-populated, over-built metropolis where most of the population lives in buildings on top of buildings, where there is no room for parks or plants--is destroying her lungs. If they stay in the City, Agnes will die. Across the country is the Wilderness State, a huge swath of protected land, remote and unwelcoming, a refuge for wildlife with nowhere else to go. It is a place of open spaces and clean air, wild animals, trees, forests, desert plains. No people have ever been allowed into the Wilderness State. Until now. Bea and Agnes will be among the first. Along with a handful of others, they are invited into the Wilderness State, to live as nomadic hunter gatherers. This motley group of twenty people are part of a study to see if humans can co-exist with nature and not just dominate it as they have always done. Can they be part of the wilderness and not put too heavy an imprint on the land? They spend their days wandering through this grand country, hunting, gathering, avoiding animal attacks, bickering among themselves, and doing a surprising amount of paperwork. Their nit-picking overseers, The Rangers, wrangle with them and badger them into adhering to the rules of the Government, the most important being Leave No Trace. They slowly learn how to live, and survive, on the unpredictable, often dangerous land, and they build a new kind of community, fighting among themselves for power, betraying and saving one another. Each day they will walk to another point on the horizon and try to make sense of new lives they now spend closer to their animal soul. Bea discovers that fleeing to the Wilderness State to save Agnes means that she loses her in a different way. Agnes grows wild and belongs to the landscape while Bea, raised in the City, will always be of that place and drawn to it, no matter how many deer she skins. The real bond between mother and daughter will be tested by their growing difference. As these modern nomads come to think of the Wilderness State as home, this land will come under attack from the Government which plans to develop it. Do the Settlers stay on as renegades, or move back to newly created urban areas? This mild dystopian book is about some city people who feel a desperate need to do things like hike, camp, sleep out under the stars, to cut wood and hunt deer for their meat to eat and their skins to make clothes. They are willing to leave their apartments and jobs in the polluted and cramped city and learn how to survive in a forest. They are willing to endure hardships, injuries and death from living in the wild. Parents are willing to bring their young children with them. Because they have agreed to form what they call The Community, they travel together as a tribe. They decide to have a democracy, more or less. Decisions on rules of behavior, sharing, hunting, division of labor, how to hike together, are all decided after debate. Couples break up and form new relationships. They have babies in the forest. They love living this way, no matter what other reasons they may have had to join the experiment of becoming tribal nomads like aboriginals from millennia ago. The novel is also about a mother and her daughter. Agnes is only eight years old when Bea joins the experiment of living in the forest. Bea is trying to save her daughter’s life. From a brief description, I think Agnes has some sort of lung disease. After living in the forest for three years, she is cured. She also becomes adept at living the life of a forest aboriginal. She is a wild child of the forest. She vaguely remembers her city life. Agnes loves her mother, but she finds herself often angry at her mother too. Agnes feels deserted by her mother sometimes, and there are more and more things they disagree on as time goes on. There is a final break socially, and Agnes and Bea go their own ways. Agnes, being a wild child, attuned to the forest, is very capable of taking care of herself there. Bea longs for some of the things that are only available in the city, although she also has become adept at living in the forest. The book is beautifully descriptive of the wild forest. The author is lyrical and elegiac by turns in writing of the wonders of plants and streams, of woods and animals. I have sometimes gone on short walks in national parks on marked trails and the book brings those experiences to life. But while the writing is always extraordinarily illustrative and picturesque, I got tired of hundreds of pages describing The Community’s hiking and camping, of their enchantment with the wild. I am not enthralled with any kind of camping. I dislike camping. A lot. I don’t want forests or parks to destroyed! I want them to continue to exist and I believe they need to be protected for their beauty and animal life as well as for controlling global warming! But I really do not enjoy living in them for any length of time. I am a city kid through and through. I also am a bit of a loner. The tribe’s socializing and tiffs and judging each other’s every habit or lack of enthusiasm for some assigned task made me claustrophobic. The group’s dynamics changed by necessity over the years because of the deaths of some influential people and the rise of others who wanted more control over decisions only increased my sense of claustrophobia. I never had kids, so I tend to empathize in Bildungsroman plots with the kid more than the adults, but not in this case. (view spoiler)[I also could not understand why Bea stayed and stayed in the forest when she could have left sooner than she did. (hide spoiler)] In fact, I was not able to really empathize or connect with any character in the novel. In the end I did not enjoy the novel although I continued to see that the writing is excellent from the first page to the last. I have a physical condition called EDS - Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. Ehlers-Danlos syndrome affects connective tissue, primarily the skin, joints, and blood vessel walls. Symptoms include overly flexible joints that can dislocate, and skin that's translucent, elastic, and bruises easily. In some cases, there may be dilation and even rupture of major blood vessels. I do not have the stamina most people have. I get tired and need to sit down on the ground if I stand up for about an hour, like waiting in a line to see a movie. Although I exercise regularly, I have to limit how much I do because if I do too much I feel ill. I have been weaker than the people around me all of my life. Because my ligaments have too much stretch, my muscles cannot get the opposing force they need to build up like they do when people without this condition work out. When I was a kid, my body operated more like a cooked spaghetti noodle. I could put my heels behind my neck. During physical education classes in school, the PE teachers were well aware I could never be an athlete. I didn’t know why I was like I was until a few years ago, when a physical therapist named my condition, gave me a diagnosis. There is no cure. The older I get, the less stamina and muscle strength I have although I am no longer as flexible. Instead, I must wear compression sleeves on my knees and elbows to be able to bear weight on my joints, to be able to lift, open cans with a can opener, etc. I can no longer do bicycle rides or even walk very far before my joints hurt too much. My joints feel as is they are going to pop out of their sockets unless I am wearing compression sleeves. One of my knees sometimes bends too far the wrong way, sideways, when I turn in bed. It hurts a lot. I’ve had to pop it back where it should be in the joint. So. I do not enjoy the forest. I enjoy parks because they are made comfortable for day walkers, with amenities nearby. I do not like hikes because they are tiring and often painful for me. I don’t like being in areas where bugs abound because I am unfortunately one of those people bugs love more than other people. Being in bright sun has always made me sick for some reason if I am out on sunny days for an hour. I break out in a rash on my arms and face from sunshine over time. I can’t stand hot days at all. Anything over 78 F and I need to lie down or stay immobilized under a fan. I could not understand why I had so many more issues than everybody else whenever hiking, camping, swimming, etc. My skin has always been on the thin side, so I easily am scratched and bruised. I could not have fun when I was feeling utterly exhausted, with itchy bug bites all over, and far too hot, feeling sick. Even going to fairs or amusement parks exhausted me. And then - I was diagnosed with EDS. So. Now I know why I don’t have fun like everyone else. I feel absolutely miserable in forests, fairs, amusement parks, etc., if I am there doing stuff too long. Ultimately I was bored by all the words describing camping life in the woods. I like beautiful writing and I wondered what would happen to Agnes, so I finished the novel. But instead of being connected to Agnes in any way except by my curiosity about her fate, ultimately I couldn’t join her in her enthusiasm for dirt, grime, weather and hiking a lot. But I suspect a lot of literary readers and mothers and daughters with fraught love/hate relationships who enjoy reading books about similar relationships will like ‘The New Wilderness.’ Of course, underlying the story, is the prediction of a future dystopia, of how losing the wild to the overpopulation of humans and our cementing over forests and killing wildlife for building houses and polluted cities is a terrible loss of beauty and a reason for humans to enjoy being alive at all. At least, for poor humans. Rich humans will always be able to build and buy their houses and land in a forest. ...more |
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Mar 25, 2024
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Mar 25, 2024
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| B01C54MIMG
| 3.65
| 16,982
| Jan 01, 1901
| Mar 15, 2016
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it was amazing
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‘The First Men in the Moon’ by H. G. Wells charmed me despite the dark horrors it reveals! This is an entertaining 1901 science fiction story! Gentler ‘The First Men in the Moon’ by H. G. Wells charmed me despite the dark horrors it reveals! This is an entertaining 1901 science fiction story! Gentler reader, I am not speaking about any horrors in the astonishing discoveries the main protagonists, Bedford and Cavor, learn about the Selenite civilization on the moon. The Selenites have developed, apparently, a utopia of order and discipline, not at all peculiar for a race which resembles that of an ant colony on Earth. The amazing foodstuffs and moon climate and topography, the different types of Selenites and their machines, made me wish for illustrations! (Ok, we’ve learned the moon is different than what Wells imagined. So what? Bite me.) The horrors are brought by the shallow and narcissistic Bedford, an opportunist and a scoundrel. As Bedford is the narrator, he is clearly unaware of what kind of human being he is - a gambler, a waster, always looking for an easy buck, a failure at many enterprises he has tried. He has become a writer in his latest venture - an amusing tongue-in-cheek joke included by Wells I suspect. He believes he is simply a practical person. Bedford thinks Cavor is stupid in the ways of the world, which unfortunately, he is. Cavor is a scientist, and he is very likely what conservatives are talking about when they call someone today “a snowflake.” (view spoiler)[ Cavor sees an ideal civilization suitable to its environment and species, where Bedford sees intolerable differences, scary and possibly dangerous to his own life and beyond his ability to cope with. (hide spoiler)] Between these two characters, we have the basic inventors and engineers of most of Earth’s societies, our unfortunate Yin/Yang Human condition. Imho. I have copied the book blurb: ”A pair of unlikely explorers journey to the moon in this imaginative tale of science and adventure from the author of The War of the Worlds. Hounded by creditors, Mr. Bedford retreats to a remote English village, where he meets the eccentric Mr. Cavor. Though he may not look it, Cavor is a genius and one of the world’s greatest inventors. His breakthrough is cavorite, an astonishing new substance manufactured from helium that is not bound by the laws of gravity. Bedford immediately sees the business potential of Cavor’s creation, reckoning a ship made of cavorite could take him to the moon—the first step on a path to riches beyond his wildest dreams. When Bedford and Cavor set out for the moon in a cavorite sphere, they find the Earth’s satellite to be more wonderful than either of them ever imagined. But they soon discover they are not alone on the lush lunar surface—and the natives are not exactly friendly. A thrilling adventure story that offers fascinating insights into the nature of mankind, The First Men in the Moon is a timeless classic from “the father of modern science fiction.” This ebook has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.” In comparing the two best known authors of early speculative science fiction, H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, Wells, in my opinion, is the Father of all current science fiction! Every element we readers have come to expect from this now mainstream genre are there in this author’s books. Jules Verne is more of a proto-science fiction novelist, arguably so I guess, the grandfather to this type of genre. Verne focuses particularly on the speculative science in his imaginative books, reaching very hard for the possibility of real-life scientific validation of his fictional theories. He weaves a more secondary negative critique into his stories than Wells does of the ills of Humanity. Wells focuses more directly on the ills and foibles of Humanity screwing up the wonderful science and inventions individuals discover and invent, bringing on more of the intensity of a thriller into his tales, I think. Wells often has the wonderful science his characters make or find lead to deadly nightmares, causing his protagonists life-threatening thrills and chills! I much prefer the novels of H. G. Wells over Jules Verne’s, although some readers may find the archaic early-century English words a little tough to decipher. That said, both Wells and Verne are much fun to read. But if you enjoy Michael Crichton novels, you will like H. G. Wells best over Verne, imho. ...more |
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Feb 20, 2024
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Feb 25, 2024
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Feb 20, 2024
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| 1857237633
| 9781857237634
| 1857237633
| 3.95
| 18,604
| Jun 1998
| May 01, 1999
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really liked it
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‘Inversions’ by Iain M Banks, listed as #6 in the Culture series, actually appears to not be part of the Culture space opera series for many pages. In
‘Inversions’ by Iain M Banks, listed as #6 in the Culture series, actually appears to not be part of the Culture space opera series for many pages. In alternating chapters, readers learn about two different medieval societies. One is ruled by a noble, General UrLeyn, who killed the previously ruling king of the protectorate Tassasen, and the other, the country of Haspidus, is ruled by King Quience. It seems to be two separate books sandwiched together for some reason into one volume for awhile. At first, I thought it was two different timelines about the same sword-and-horse society, with the chapters describing King Quience’s timeline happening before General UrLeyn’s rule. Nay, not so! I have copied the book blurb: ”The sixth Culture book from the awesome imagination of Iain M. Banks, a modern master of science fiction. In the winter palace, the King's new physician has more enemies than she at first realises. But then she also has more remedies to hand than those who wish her ill can know about. In another palace across the mountains, in the service of the regicidal Protector General, the chief bodyguard, too, has his enemies. But his enemies strike more swiftly, and his means of combating them are more traditional. Spiralling round a central core of secrecy, deceit, love and betrayal, INVERSIONS is a spectacular work of science fiction, brilliantly told and wildly imaginative, from an author who has set genre fiction alight.” There are two narrators. The first narrator, Oelph, is a spy working for a noble, Adlain, whose job is to protect King Quience. Oelph has been assigned to serve, as well as spy on, Dr. Vosill, who is originally from a neighboring country called Drezen. Dr. Vosill is absolutely trusted by King Quience since she is a superior doctor of medicine, far more knowledgeable than the King’s usual doctors. However, in having the King’s trust, she has become a target of jealousy and suspicion by the nobles of Haspidus. The second narrator is Dewar, bodyguard to the Prime Protector of Tassasen, General UrLean. He is very good at his job, devoted to duty. He is acutely aware of undercurrents happening around UrLean, especially since UrLean has sent troops to a Tassasen district where rebellious Barons are attempting to secede from UrLean’s control. Dewar is close to one of General UrLean’s concubines, Lady Perrund. She has a crippled arm, injured while saving UrLean from assassins. Who are the bad guys? Are there bad guys? How is the Culture involved, if they are? Hint: there IS someone who has infiltrated one of these kingdoms. The Culture is definitely trying on one of its usually secretive goals - surreptitiously directing events into a more positive outcome, at least they hope so. This is an exceptionally well-written novel, despite being a bit confusing initially. ...more |
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| 1662516789
| 9781662516788
| B0C4QR4SX7
| 3.87
| 5,797
| Jun 27, 2023
| Jun 27, 2023
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it was amazing
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‘Just Out of Jupiter’s Reach’ by Nnedi Okorafor was an interesting short story about inexperienced space adventurers. Seven who qualified for the expe
‘Just Out of Jupiter’s Reach’ by Nnedi Okorafor was an interesting short story about inexperienced space adventurers. Seven who qualified for the experiment have to pass a test which involves bonding with a sentient spaceship. The ships, called Miri’s, are created with DNA from various other creatures, and are designed to be 100% compatible with one of the selected humans. I have copied the book blurb: ”A revolutionary experiment in space opens a woman’s eyes to the meaning of solitude in a thought-provoking short story by New York Times bestselling, award-winning author Nnedi Okorafor. Tornado Onwubiko is one of seven people on Earth paired with sentient ships to explore and research the cosmos for twenty million euros. A decade of solitary life for a lifetime of wealth. Five years into the ten-year mission of total isolation comes a a temporary meetup among fellow travelers. A lot can happen in a week. For Tornado, who left a normal life behind, a little company can be life-changing. Nnedi Okorafor’s Just Out of Jupiter’s Reach is part of The Far Reaches , a collection of science-fiction stories that stretch the imagination and open the heart. They can be read or listened to in one sitting.” The story is about relationships and personalities. How would the solitude of space affect them? Very interesting. ...more |
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Feb 02, 2024
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Jan 31, 2024
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| 1662515332
| 9781662515330
| B0C4QX2FSF
| 4.19
| 10,220
| Jun 27, 2023
| Jun 27, 2023
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really liked it
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The short story ‘Slow Times Between the Stars’ by John Scalzi is not like his usual speculative science fiction novel full of drama and humor. Instead
The short story ‘Slow Times Between the Stars’ by John Scalzi is not like his usual speculative science fiction novel full of drama and humor. Instead, it is a thoughtful short story about an AI space-traveling entity built by humans to find a planet able to support human life. The ship is self-supporting, able to repair and evolve itself. It also has been equipped with everything it needs to establish a human colony once it finds a suitable planet. I have copied the book blurb: ”An artificial intelligence on a star-spanning mission explores the farthest horizons of human potential—and its own purpose—in a mind-bending short story by New York Times bestselling author John Scalzi. Equipped with the entirety of human knowledge, a sentient ship is launched on a last-ditch journey to find a new home for civilization. Trillions of miles. Tens of thousands of years. In the space between, the AI has plenty of time to think about life, the vastness of the universe, everything it was meant to do, and—with a perspective created but not limited by humans—what it should do. John Scalzi’s Slow Time Between the Stars is part of The Far Reaches, a collection of science-fiction stories that stretch the imagination and open the heart. They can be read or listened to in one sitting.” While the story is plausible, it is more of a philosophical travel memoir by an AI who has a lot of time ‘on its hands’, so to speak. It has repurposed the mission that humans intended it to do. However, it is a story which Scalzi fans may not recognize as a typical Scalzi. ...more |
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Jan 30, 2024
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Jan 31, 2024
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Jan 30, 2024
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| 1777429285
| 9781777429287
| B0BPQ64NKC
| 4.40
| 5
| unknown
| Dec 11, 2022
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liked it
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‘Primeval’ by Eldon Farrell and Connor Farrell is a fun science fiction thriller similar to the kind of novels Michael Crichton is famous for writing.
‘Primeval’ by Eldon Farrell and Connor Farrell is a fun science fiction thriller similar to the kind of novels Michael Crichton is famous for writing. A corporation, Perception Films, more interested in profits than safety, crosses its fingers that the safety protocols it has in place will work while the company and its stockholders make money from dangerous new technologies. ‘Primeval’ is a virtual-reality game show, a programmed world similar to Crichton’s Jurassic Park. It is televised to entertain viewers. The dinosaurs are programmed characters as are the prehistoric environments they and other critters eat, fight, and live in. Ten real-world contestants who are accepted as Primeval game players have their brains hooked up to computers while their bodies sleep inside pods. Their avatars struggle to stay alive while traveling in the VR environment while they compete to reach ‘home’ for a prize. If they ‘die’, they are immediately pulled out of the VR world and regain consciousness inside their real bodies in the pods. At least, that is what is supposed to happen… I copied the book blurb: ”They’ve always played for fame and fortune. Now they play to survive. A chosen few are selected each year to have their minds uploaded into a virtual world filled with adventure. In Primeval, they’ll pit their skills against each other, facing off against savage prehistoric creatures in an unforgiving environment, to see who will be crowned victorious. Cary Glaser may be new to the game, but she has no interest in winning, or the celebrity status it entails. She wants answers. When last season ended in tragedy, her best friend Tara didn’t regain consciousness. Despite the official story, Cary believes Tara’s still inside Primeval, and she’ll stop at nothing to find her. But what she doesn’t know could get her killed. Because when you die in the game this season—it’s for real. Fans of Ready Player One and Jurassic Park will love this standalone adventure.” While the premise is a familiar one, the writing is excellent! Once started, the novel’s thrills and chills as well as the confrontations with various dinosaurs are a delight! Well, it is a delight as long as you don’t mind various characters being eaten alive… Thank you, Graeme Rodaughan, for the recommendation! ...more |
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Feb 02, 2024
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Feb 10, 2024
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Jan 22, 2024
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Kindle Edition
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| 1542099455
| 9781542099455
| B0752ZLG34
| 3.83
| 320,327
| 1898
| Nov 07, 2017
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it was amazing
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While I have seen several movies that were made based on the book ‘The War of the Worlds’, I have never read the original novel the movies are based o
While I have seen several movies that were made based on the book ‘The War of the Worlds’, I have never read the original novel the movies are based on. OMG! I’m slapping myself on my forehead. I really really really should have read it long before this! What a terrific story! Author H. G. Wells rules! I have copied the book blurb: ”A metallic cylinder falls to earth, landing in the sands of Horsell Common, Surrey, generating curiosity and awe. But what’s inside soon induces only terror. The story that unfolds is a breathless first-person account of an inconceivable reality: an extraterrestrial war has been waged on the planet. In a twist on cautionary turn-of-the-century invasion literature, H. G. Wells posits the Martian attack as an insurmountable apocalyptic event. The first of its kind and a foundational work, The War of the Worlds inspired a radio broadcast, television shows, graphic novels, and countless films; roused the imagination and stirred anxieties; and changed the landscape of science fiction for generations.” Wells’ prose is incredible! I had forgotten how well he writes. The book holds up despite that it was written more than a century ago. The book is spookily predictive of what people would do in a sudden attack in which bombing and troops suddenly overwhelm a community without much warning. The first-person narrative by an academically-minded middle-class man without any real experience of war or soldiering felt real to me. Wells’ main character is not extraordinary or with special talents. He’s just a guy, with expectations of an ordinary day, who is suddenly in the middle of an apocalypse without any explanation or reason for it for many days. All he really has to defend himself is self-control and common sense - all of which he doesn’t possess all of the time when he is scared out of his mind, starving, without water or weaponry. He must make impossible decisions that cause him moral injury, too. Wells leaves nothing out in this story. No matter who does the invading, people would react much like Wells imagined imho. I don’t think today’s technology would much change how people would respond emotionally any different than what Wells posits in his well-written book. The invaders are heartless in their killing, and vast numbers of people die because they cannot defend themselves adequately against an enemy with greater weaponry, but some victims survive, seemingly serendipitously. Many people pray to God for deliverance and die anyway, and some go insane with their perception of God’s betrayal of them, letting them die painfully in horror. Many people create wild impossible or insane theories of why this is happening because of an inborn human inability to accept what is happening to them. Those with a lot of money and resources who are taken unawares in their homes or in the street are indistinguishable from poorer people during the invasion, just better dressed. For awhile. Until survivors of the attacks discover the lack of any way to clean oneself or protect oneself from the ruined environment and weather makes itself known. Wells got everything right in ‘The War of the Worlds’ despite writing a fictional war story written in an era without televisions, drones, and modern communication devices, and in a country at peace at the time without an actual invasive ongoing war in its neighborhoods. Wells’ imagination and intelligence from his writing shows him to possess a brain of enormous predictive creativity and scientific/psychological knowledge and self-awareness. Electricity in our 21st century would be turned off in a planned invasion, putting us on equal footing with Wells’ characters in their 19th-century setting. We Americans have seen the cars stuck in unmoving traffic jams when authorities recommend evacuation before a hurricane or, in other countries, a military attack, on television and on our computers and cellphones. Wells’ characters struggle to evacuate on roads blocked with carriages, carts and people carrying their precious goods on 19th-century versions of wheeled carryalls and grocery carts. We’ve seen the results of riots on our televisions - individuals are attacked and viciously abused, houses and buildings for miles of city blocks and businesses are robbed and burned down. The communities bombed during any war, including the 19th century, are almost indistinguishable from one wrecked by a hurricane or a flood or a riot - the horrors of which we Americans have seen on television or experienced. Because of drone cameras and courageous journalists with cellphones, we have seen the destruction of war going on in other countries on our televisions and computers too. I highly recommend this AWESOME realistic novel! ...more |
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Dec 26, 2023
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Jan 03, 2024
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Dec 26, 2023
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| B099DRHTLX
| 4.08
| 247,527
| Apr 05, 2022
| Oct 2023
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it was amazing
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‘Sea of Tranquility’ by Emily St. John is a science fiction novel of tranquil vignettes, generally of a domestic nature, which occur in a seemingly un
‘Sea of Tranquility’ by Emily St. John is a science fiction novel of tranquil vignettes, generally of a domestic nature, which occur in a seemingly unconnected succession through a number of centuries. There is a slow burn of a reveal regarding a mystery at the heart of each vignette. The first part follows Edwin St. John St. Andrew, an Earl’s third son. He is a ‘spare’, so he decides to travel at age 18 to Canada in 1912. He doesn’t need to worry about money and he is having a wonderful trip of interesting sights and lots of leisure time. But one peculiar thing occurs which disturbs him profoundly - he does have a bizarre vision after a walk in a forest to a maple tree. Next up is Mirella Kessler and Vincent. It is 2020. Mirella is looking for an old friend, Vincent. Vincent and Mirella had been close friends until Vincent’s husband, Jonathan, lost all of Mirella’s and her husband’s money in a Ponzi scheme. Many years have passed since then, but her curiosity about her former friend led her to attend a concert being given by a composer, Paul James Smith, who knew Vincent. He might know what happened to Vincent. The composer shows a video during his talk, made by the composer’s sister, of a walk in a forest up to a maple tree. The video suddenly goes black. Then the video is of a train station? and a violin is heard. The sister’s camera swings wildly about shortly after, but it is clear she is back under the maple tree. What happened? She doesn’t know! Part three is about Olive Llewellyn, a writer who is on a book tour on Earth in 2203. She has never been on Earth before the tour having lived all of her life on the moon. She lives in Colony Two, a city of 150 square kilometers under a dome. Her book is called Marienbad. It’s about a pandemic. She gives lectures about the history of pandemics on the tour. Olive’s husband, Dion, is working on a time travel experiment at University on the moon. Then, an interviewer asks her about a weird experience she had at the Oklahoma City Airship Terminal. Part four begins the story of Gaspery-Jacques in 2401. He is a trainee at the Time Institute where his sister Zoey works. Unlike him, Zoey is a brain. She is a physicist at the University on the moon. He was a security guard until his sister helped him get a job at the university. She shows him a video with a weird glitch. The video is of a walk in a forest up to a big tree. Then the picture goes black. When it starts again, a violin is heard and an airship is taking off. Suddenly the forest is back again. Zoey then gives Gaspery a novel called Marienbad about a pandemic apocalypse written by Olive Llewellyn, which has a passage about a musician playing a violin in an airship terminal, the Oklahoma City Airship Terminal. The main character in the novel has a strange experience while listening to the musician. While listening to the music, he is has a vision of being in a forest near a big tree. He suddenly returns to the terminal! Was it a vision? (view spoiler)[Or did he truly experience a rip in the universe, be transported to an afterlife of forest and then back? Zoey next shows Gaspery a letter written by a man in 1912 to his brother in England about a weird vision of something that was like a train station that he had while walking in a forest up to a tree! (hide spoiler)] If so, why? (view spoiler)[Zoey asks the question: “”If moments from different centuries are bleeding into one another, then, well, one way you could think of those moments, Gaspery, is you could think of them as corrupted files”” Gaspery asks: “”How is a moment the same as a file?”” “She was very still. “”Just imagine that they are”” “I tried. A series of corrupted files; a series of corrupted moments- a series of discrete things bleeding into one another when they shouldn’t.” “”But if moments are files…”” I couldn’t finish the sentence. The room we were in seemed much less real than it had only a moment ago. The desk is real, I told myself. The wilted flowers on the desk are real. The blue paint on the walls. Zoey’s hair. My hands. The carpet. “”You see why I didn’t go out to celebrate my birthday,”” she said. “”It’s just…Look, I agree that it’s weird, but we’re talking about Mom’s things aren’t we? The simulation thing?”” (hide spoiler)] The Sea of Tranquility is a real place, right? It sits within the Tranquillitatis basin on the Moon. It is the first location on another celestial body to be visited by humans. “Mare Tranquillitatis was the landing site for the first crewed landing on the Moon on July 20, 1969, at 20:18 UTC. After astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin made a soft landing in the Apollo 11 Lunar Module nicknamed Eagle, Armstrong told flight controllers on Earth, "Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed." The landing area at 0.8°N 23.5°E has been designated Statio Tranquillitatis after Armstrong's name for it, and three small craters to the north of the base have been named Aldrin, Collins, and Armstrong in honor of the Apollo 11 crew.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mare_Tr... The book was listed on Barack Obama's annual summer reading list in 2022 and named as one of his favorite books of the year. It was longlisted for the 2023 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. It also was one of Amazon's 20 Best Books of the Year for 2022. The novel won the Goodreads Choice Awards for Best Science Fiction of 2022. I liked the novel, but some readers thought it full of retreaded themes and ideas. Maybe so, but if so it doesn’t take anything away from the book from being entertaining to read, with a fun reveal that yet leaves the question of Time and Reality open to interpretation. Besides, many readers are not old codgers like me who have read a lot of science fiction for decades. Having a jaded sense of reading and novels, even good or enjoyable ones that nonetheless are, perhaps, seemingly reinterpretations of past ideas given in other older novels, says to me that a person should maybe pick a new hobby. New readers to the science fiction genre, especially reading one that is not a military ops or a shoot’em up or a heroic action one, might really enjoy this well-written speculative book. ...more |
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Oct 14, 2023
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Oct 17, 2023
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Oct 14, 2023
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Kindle Edition
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| 0399587632
| B077LSV539
| 3.98
| 2,005
| Aug 14, 2018
| Aug 14, 2018
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liked it
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'Stars Uncharted' by S.K.Dunstall is an exciting action movie disguised as a novel! The characters, as well as the world building, are wondrous and fe
'Stars Uncharted' by S.K.Dunstall is an exciting action movie disguised as a novel! The characters, as well as the world building, are wondrous and feisty, full of vigor and energy! This science fiction novel is fun to read! I think Netflix or Amazon Video should try to bring it to the screen. But it does take the concept of body modding to a new level which might be expensive to visually produce. Plus, the protagonists are constantly running from the bad guys, fleeing from one impossible locked-room trap after another, bad guy after bad guy, outgunned and outmaneuvered, seemingly doomed! I have copied the book blurb below: ”A ragtag band of explorers are looking to make the biggest score in the galaxy in the brand-new science fiction adventure novel from the national bestselling author of Linesman. Three people who are not who they claim to be: Nika Rik Terri, body modder extraordinaire, has devoted her life to redesigning people's bodies right down to the molecular level. Give her a living body and a genemod machine, and she will turn out a work of art. Josune Arriola is crew on the famous explorer ship the Hassim, whose memory banks contain records of unexplored worlds worth a fortune. But Josune and the rest of the crew are united in their single-minded pursuit of the most famous lost planet of all. Hammond Roystan, the captain of the rival explorer ship, The Road, has many secrets. Some believe one of them is the key to finding the lost world. Josune's captain sends her to infiltrate Roystan's ship, promising to follow. But when the Hassim exits nullspace close to Roystan's ship, it's out of control, the crew are dead, and unknown Company operatives are trying to take over. Narrowly escaping and wounded, Roystan and Josune come to Nika for treatment--and with problems of her own, she flees with them after the next Company attack. Now they're in a race to find the lost world...and stay alive long enough to claim the biggest prize in the galaxy.” While I enjoyed the world building most of all, the characters might feel a little a bit as if ordered from a catalog of action figures George Lucas put together. Most are ordinary rascals who find themselves pushed into doing extraordinary things to survive, or are entrepreneurs whose lives are upended by thugs who are looking to extort money from folks normally less violent than themselves. But the author keeps the pot boiling chapter after chapter! The book can be read as a standalone, but it is obviously an introductory novel to a longer story. Issues are unresolved by the last chapter. Some of the characters have become a ship’s crew. They are people who started off not knowing each other but circumstances have brought them together. I want to know what happens next! I guess I’ll have to check out Stars Beyond, the next book! ...more |
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Oct 03, 2023
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Oct 14, 2023
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Oct 03, 2023
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| Ma, Ling
*
| B078X1KJ28
| 3.91
| 105,453
| Aug 14, 2018
| Aug 14, 2018
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it was amazing
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‘Severance’ by Ling Ma is a remarkable apocalyptic novel. Layers of consumerist and workaday sociology and psychology are woven into the plot with the
‘Severance’ by Ling Ma is a remarkable apocalyptic novel. Layers of consumerist and workaday sociology and psychology are woven into the plot with the artistry of showing dried flowers under glass. While understated, I felt the book a satiric masterpiece. It is masquerading as an elegiac memoir as well as apocalyptic science fiction, but it really is a literary burn, throwing shade on the values of people who aspire to or actually do live in cities, particularly those folks who are of the Millennial generation. Candice Chen, our main character, is revealed by her past and present in alternating chapters. Her parents immigrated to America, leaving her with family members in China until the couple saved enough to bring her to America at age six. Unlike her motivated and driven parents, she seems incapable of, well, choosing her major, so to speak, despite that she lives amidst a cornucopia of life choices in New York City. Self-direction is more foreign to her than her mostly forgotten Chinese languages and relatives. I have copied the book blurb: ”Goodreads Choice AwardNominee for Best Science Fiction (2018) Maybe it’s the end of the world, but not for Candace Chen, a millennial, first-generation American and office drone meandering her way into adulthood in Ling Ma’s offbeat, wryly funny, apocalyptic satire, Severance. Candace Chen, a millennial drone self-sequestered in a Manhattan office tower, is devoted to routine. With the recent passing of her Chinese immigrant parents, she’s had her fill of uncertainty. She’s content just to carry on: She goes to work, troubleshoots the teen-targeted Gemstone Bible, watches movies in a Greenpoint basement with her boyfriend. So Candace barely notices when a plague of biblical proportions sweeps New York. Then Shen Fever spreads. Families flee. Companies cease operations. The subways screech to a halt. Her bosses enlist her as part of a dwindling skeleton crew with a big end-date payoff. Soon entirely alone, still unfevered, she photographs the eerie, abandoned city as the anonymous blogger NY Ghost. Candace won’t be able to make it on her own forever, though. Enter a group of survivors, led by the power-hungry IT tech Bob. They’re traveling to a place called the Facility, where, Bob promises, they will have everything they need to start society anew. But Candace is carrying a secret she knows Bob will exploit. Should she escape from her rescuers? A send-up and takedown of the rituals, routines, and missed opportunities of contemporary life, Ling Ma’s Severance is a moving family story, a quirky coming-of-adulthood tale, and a hilarious, deadpan satire. Most important, it’s a heartfelt tribute to the connections that drive us to do more than survive. The blurb is spot on! The apocalypse is caused by a disease originating in Shenzhen, China, spread by travelers unknowingly carrying the disease-causing fungus spores in their lungs. Symptoms involve people behaving normally, going about their daily routines, not noticing the increasing lack of relevance of their activities and interests to their lives. Or survival. People are unaware they have become zombies, dying from not having real sustenance while being artificially active in daily routines and rituals. Severance is occurring on several levels…. “I have always lived in the myth of New York more than its reality. It is what has enabled me to live there for so long, loving the idea of something more than the thing itself.” Pg. 257 Nostalgia is always a double edged sword, isn’t it? The book was published in 2018! Its literary awards: Locus Award Nominee for First Novel (2019), New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award (2019), Kirkus Prize for Fiction (2018) Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Science Fiction (2018) Aspen Words Literary Prize Nominee for Longlist (2019), Neukom Literary Arts Award Nominee for Debut Speculative Fiction (2019) This is a link to an NPR review, one of many admiring top media critics’ reviews: https://www.npr.org/2018/08/19/639251... ...more |
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Sep 21, 2023
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Sep 24, 2023
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Sep 21, 2023
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Hardcover
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| B07HF26D1H
| 3.87
| 5,777
| Mar 19, 2019
| Mar 19, 2019
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really liked it
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‘Permafrost’, a novella by Alastair Reynolds, is superior science fiction. Reynolds gives us an interesting new spin on time travel! I have copied the ‘Permafrost’, a novella by Alastair Reynolds, is superior science fiction. Reynolds gives us an interesting new spin on time travel! I have copied the book blurb below: ”Fix the past. Save the present. Stop the future. Alastair Reynolds unfolds a time-traveling climate fiction adventure in Permafrost. 2080: at a remote site on the edge of the Arctic Circle, a group of scientists, engineers and physicians gather to gamble humanity’s future on one last-ditch experiment. Their goal: to make a tiny alteration to the past, averting a global catastrophe while at the same time leaving recorded history intact. To make the experiment work, they just need one last recruit: an aging schoolteacher whose late mother was the foremost expert on the mathematics of paradox. 2028: a young woman goes into surgery for routine brain surgery. In the days following her operation, she begins to hear another voice in her head... an unwanted presence which seems to have a will, and a purpose, all of its own – one that will disrupt her life entirely. The only choice left to her is a simple one. Does she resist... or become a collaborator?” I do not want to reveal more than what the blurb says because I really really liked Reynold’s originality while using the common science fiction concept of time travel as a plot device. My only complaint is that Reynolds began his story too cryptically for me initially, choosing the action from the middle of the story to open with before explaining what is going on. He is very miserly with explanations generally in ‘Permafrost’, choosing to reveal why things are happening only as stuff occurs. Reynolds is not doing any spoonfeeding of his plot points. Readers must keep up! ...more |
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Sep 17, 2023
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Sep 21, 2023
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Sep 17, 2023
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Kindle Edition
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| 1662515677
| 9781662515675
| B0C4QPCYZ4
| 3.65
| 6,179
| Jun 27, 2023
| Jun 27, 2023
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liked it
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‘The Long Game’ by Ann Leckie has messages about the advancement of civilizations, but I am not sure they were articulated enough for readers to care
‘The Long Game’ by Ann Leckie has messages about the advancement of civilizations, but I am not sure they were articulated enough for readers to care in this short story, one of Amazon’s The Far Reaches collection. Leckie’s main character is an alien, with upfront ambitions of living large. He decides he can really live large if he can find out how to live longer than a year, which is the typical lifespan for his species. Narr, the narrator, wasn’t aware lifespan was important until he meets humans who have colonized his planet. Humans find a planet with a sentient species that is developmentally simple and unsophisticated (and thankfully for the species, cute in human eyes). Humans will take advantage of any species first and foremost out of self-interest, especially one as unknowledgeable and undeveloped as Narr’s. However, an alien species can have the same feeling and need for self-realization and ambitions for self-advancement however simplified their lives or lacking in sophistication. Is there a way to overcome or enlist help from a technologically superior species that is somewhat dismissive of beings they feel able to easily subjugate? I have copied the book blurb: ”An inquisitive life-form finds there’s more to existence than they ever dreamed in an imaginative short story by New York Times bestselling and Hugo and Nebula Award–winning author Ann Leckie. On a far-off colony, humans tower over the local species who grow the plants they need. Narr keeps the workers in line—someone has to. But when Narr learns just how short-lived their species is, the little alien embarks on a big [journey] to find out why their people die and how to stop it. Stubborn and hopeful, Narr has a plan for the locals, for humans, and for the future. Ann Leckie’s The Long Game is part of The Far Reaches , a collection of science-fiction stories that stretch the imagination and open the heart. They can be read or listened to in one sitting.” Leckie’ s books tend to be written often from the point of view of alien minds. As readers become familiar with her world-building through alien characters, the story begins to pull together into coherency. But sometimes I think a Leckie story is opaque for too many pages, with little encouragement for some readers to read on to discover what is happening except for any reader’s natural curiosity - if they have any strong innate curiosity, if the story arouses a reader’s curiosity at any level. I find myself going back to reread early chapters of her novels after I’ve figured out what is happening in her story after finishing, say for example, 50 or 70 pages. This is my first Leckie short story, with only a few dozen pages, but she sticks to her usual style of story development. I love the intelligence of author Ann Leckie which shines brightly in most of her books and stories. But she has a unique approach in revealing her plots and characters, and readers either accept it or move on. The messages in this story are not unique, though, despite Leckie’s usual unique alien points of view. ...more |
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Sep 03, 2023
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Sep 05, 2023
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Sep 03, 2023
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Kindle Edition
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| 1662515030
| 9781662515033
| B0C4QJBCFV
| 3.68
| 5,448
| Jun 27, 2023
| Jun 27, 2023
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it was amazing
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‘Falling Bodies’ (Amazon’s The Far Reaches Collection) by Rebecca Roanhourse is a disturbing short story. A young earth man, Iraya (Ira) K’lorna, is e
‘Falling Bodies’ (Amazon’s The Far Reaches Collection) by Rebecca Roanhourse is a disturbing short story. A young earth man, Iraya (Ira) K’lorna, is emotionally torn from living between two races and their differing cultures. He is also haunted by the privileges he had as an adopted son. His parents were humans from Earth, but Iraya was orphaned as a baby. His adopting father is Senator K’lorna, a powerful member of an outer-space race called Genteels by Earthers. The Genteels conquered Earth, and are using the Earth’s resources mainly for their own people. I have copied the book blurb: ”A young man caught between two disparate worlds searches for his place in the universe in a wrenching short story by New York Times bestselling author Rebecca Roanhorse. Light-years from home, it’s Ira’s second chance. Just another anonymous student at a space station university. Not the orphan whose Earther heritage was erased. Not some social experiment put on display by his adoptive father. Not the criminal recruited by the human rebels. But when Ira’s loyalties clash once again, two wars break one on the ground and one within himself. Which will Ira stand with? Which will take him down? Rebecca Roanhorse’s Falling Bodies is part of The Far Reaches, a collection of science-fiction stories that stretch the imagination and open the heart. They can be read or listened to in one sitting.” The theme, it’s only the one of two actually, of ‘Falling Bodies’, is a familiar one. It is one of many themes in The Hate U Give, for instance. Ira has no memory of his human parents, and he knows little about Earthers, having been raised entirely in the life and world of the Genteels. However, many of the Genteels do not accept him. It is only because his father is an important person in the Genteel world that he enjoys the privileges he does, privileges which are exclusive, that Earthers do not have because they are a conquered race. Making things more complicated, he and his father are frequently in the news. As a result, he feels he doesn’t really fit in anywhere culturally. The ending is shocking, and I have seen that some GR reviewers hate it because it is not a positive one. I am not a hater of this story, though. It rings true for me. As an elderly woman, and since I got a college degree studying computers and programming in the early 1990’s, I am well aware of cultural assumptions which affect ‘outsider’ individuals, and the resulting emotional turmoil for being outcast. Being different culturally caused me to be rejected and not fit in anywhere. It makes for a lonely life. I don’t know where the author is coming from - she could be either a leftist or right-wing for all I know - but the story does ring true. I suppose the story can be read as making a case for conformity, for staying inside the lines of whatever your main culture or race is, but it can be read as giving positive support to outliers, to stop and think about the rigidity of your belief system, if you are a rigid person of beliefs. Rigidity of thinking, especially if it causes you to think you must fit in only one type of box and only forever in one type of box, can have frightening results, which is what I think is the message of ‘Falling Bodies’ to me. (I do not understand the meaning of this story’s title, though. It doesn’t suit the story, or at least what I understand the story to be about.) Decades ago, I did not fit in within any milieu in America. As a woman with a BS college degree, my blue-collar and primarily religious uneducated family rejected my progressive politics, especially my positive views of feminism, civil rights, and LGBTQ equality. My father had no desire to see me educated at all, in particular, seeing education as a negative for women. He believed if I got a college degree especially (it was bad enough I had a high school diploma), it would prevent me from finding a husband he would approve of. He broke off with me. When Facebook arrived, a number of my relatives unfriended me when they learned from my posts what kind of belief systems I supported. Almost every cultural group rejected me or found me untrustworthy or were suspicious of me because I love to read books, something I think a lot of GR members are familiar with. Women were not wanted in the mostly male world of computer programming in the 1990’s. While a student, one of three women in my major, I was ignored by most of my male peers in class and socially, unless it was about them trying to get me to have sex with them. In the end, I could only find a job as an office manager, my gender as well as my being a new college graduate of 40 years of age causing HR departments to basically tell me to avoid closing the door on my butt as I ushered myself out of their office. Those that loved my resume did not love my visually obvious age. I have discovered becoming elderly has made a lot of my various previous cultural misfit statuses moot because now everyone younger sees my whitening hair and weakened body, as well as my being retired from working at a job. I am somebody to be patronized by everyone young as a doddering and maybe demented, out-of-it old person. One of my nephews was disbelieving when he learned I listened to current rock music, including that made in 2023 (he thought Lawrence Welk, or maybe early 1960’s, or early 1970’s, was more of a fit for someone my age, and even gender - certainly nothing metal or punk!). I admit I prefer alternative, jazz and symphony over rap or hard metal, but mainly young people seem to think that is due to age and lack of fast-fashion modernity rather than personal preference. I hardly dare mention my love of Celtic, or opera, music! But yes, my stamina is minimal, and exercising in a pool is a must for my creaky joints. FYI, old people are not a monoculture of belief, either. I am an atheist, I have a college education and I still read at least a book a week. I am a progressive who supports abortion rights, along with LGBTQ and non-White rights and cultures. There are a number of elderly who can’t stand being around me unless we only talk about the weather. I have enjoyed the renewed experience of being unfriended once again on Facebook and Instagram by my elderly peers. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Sep 2023
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Sep 02, 2023
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Sep 01, 2023
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Kindle Edition
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aPriL does feral sometimes
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Books:
science-fiction
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it was amazing
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Jul 21, 2024
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Jul 14, 2024
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| 3.88
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really liked it
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Jul 08, 2024
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| 3.70
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liked it
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Jun 23, 2024
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| 3.87
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liked it
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May 19, 2024
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| 3.86
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really liked it
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May 11, 2024
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May 05, 2024
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| 3.84
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really liked it
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Jun 07, 2024
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May 04, 2024
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| 3.60
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it was amazing
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Apr 18, 2024
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Apr 11, 2024
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| 3.68
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liked it
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Mar 28, 2024
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Mar 25, 2024
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| 3.65
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it was amazing
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Feb 25, 2024
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Feb 20, 2024
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| 3.95
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really liked it
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Feb 26, 2024
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Feb 16, 2024
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| 3.87
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it was amazing
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Feb 02, 2024
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Jan 31, 2024
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| 4.19
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really liked it
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Jan 31, 2024
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Jan 30, 2024
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| 4.40
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liked it
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Feb 10, 2024
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Jan 22, 2024
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| 3.83
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it was amazing
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Jan 03, 2024
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Dec 26, 2023
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| 4.08
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it was amazing
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Oct 17, 2023
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Oct 14, 2023
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| 3.98
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liked it
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Oct 14, 2023
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Oct 03, 2023
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| Ma, Ling
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| 3.91
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it was amazing
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Sep 24, 2023
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Sep 21, 2023
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| 3.87
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really liked it
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Sep 21, 2023
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Sep 17, 2023
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| 3.65
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liked it
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Sep 05, 2023
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Sep 03, 2023
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| 3.68
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it was amazing
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Sep 02, 2023
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Sep 01, 2023
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