Search results

Big books? Big series? This is the song of my people. The Sun Eater Saga by Christopher Ruocchio is my current fin of this sort. Seven big volumes - the seventh is coming in November - and several interstitial novellas and four volumes of related short stories. What began as excellent but...

That’s in my queue. Glad you enjoyed it so much.

Gotta like that. August was a month of really big books for me, four ranging from 27 to 47 hours. September has been a month of smaller ones, and heavy on nonfiction ranging from history to moral philosophy. We’ll see what October turns out to be.

This is where I plug paleontologist Peter D. Ward as an excellent science writer, too. Out Of Thin Air, Under A Green Sky, The Medea Hypothesis…a lot of very accessible fascinating work.

I’m mildly interested in that. Are there any particularly good starting points? I’m one of those people who’s sort of a hardcore fan of a Star Wars that never quite existed. I thought at the time that Empire went off the rails with the Skywalker family stuff, which undercut the kind of drama it...

Bernie Taupin, Elton John’s long-term lyricist, wrote “We Built This City On Rock and Roll”, with Martin Page. And also “These Dreams” for Heart.

Yeesh. Yeah. Back to Bruce Sterling: “The Street has its own uses for things.” Whatever a controlling interest is up to, it won’t last. Whatever comes next will probably be better and worse and different.

Oh, yes, good point. The two trends are siblings in mutant deviation.

Arguably, “D&D but narrative” is the oldest genre of play that’s distinct from D&D as whatever TSR/WotC is doing at the moment. It emerged in the first few months of D&D being for sale, with various communities of connected people and campaigns taking various approaches to mechanics and...

Yeah, about the closest I can think of are stories where a harsh Singularity drastically dehumanizes its victims, turns the planet into grey goo, or something like that. And even some of those show that better outcomes may still be possible.

I probably did when it was new, but not since.

Michel Foucault Plays D&D. Thoughts While Reading Disciple & Punish: In discussing premodern (before the last couple centuries) punishment in European legal codes, Foucault discusses various ways the body of the condemned is made to testify to the finding and sentence, a second testament for...

there’s also Mary Robinette Kowal. Her Lady Astronaut of Mars series begins with a large-ish asteroid crashing into the Atlantic and wiping out a lot of the Atlantic coast, including Washington DC. What follows is very much like vintage hard-ish sf except the narrator is a Jewish woman who flew...

David Dunham used to run cyberpunk with lightly modded Pendragon, which worked greets. You can define cultural and subcultural priorities with sets of traits, and passions for individual priorities. The pursuit of glory is the pursuit of glory. The Ringworld skill system is nicely expandable...

Yup. Wells earned his reputation and then some. It’s a gripping yarn and a brutal deconstruction of colonialism, both at full bore. I never really thought about the naming or lack thereof! That’ll teach me something. I think it’s in leaping with the journalistic style of the time, which named...

Bruce Sterling called his book Islands In The Net “cyberstraight” in a lighthearted moment.

Thanks! I get worried when my tastes seem too popular. :D Seriously, though, very good explanation, and I cannot endorse reading comfort too highly.

Oh, yes, that Earthsea omnibus is such a beautiful book, and a paradigmatic example of Doing It Right.