Howling Dark by Christopher Ruocchio, book 2 of the Sun Eater series. Wow. Imagine if Dune had no mention of prescience, or Warhammer 40K of Chaos, or Lord of the Rings of elves, and them a new volume brought the missing element front and center. That’s how much this book opens up Ruocchio’s setting. And while the first book was excellently plotted and written, this is a really noticeable advancement. There’s one piece of plot I didn’t care for (
Marlowe should know that Switch deserves the same mercy others gave him
) and one element I think is too close to its inspiration (
Brethren talks too much like Ummon from Fall of Hyperion, and remembered Gibson has its exact laugh
), and really, that’s not a lot. The hundred-mile spaceships, what the Cielsin use as headquarters, just how far personal modification can go, the Deep and Brethren…just wonderful. Oh, and the audiobooks have top-notch narration.
Intraterrestrials by Karen G. Lloyd. This is a book about the microbes that live below the surface of the land the floor of the ocean - from inches to miles below - by one of the scientists studying them. It turns out to be a boggling world with orders of magnitude more variety than the rest of the biosphere. Dr. Lloyd describes gathering mud cores from the bottom of the sea, samples of volcanic crater water with a Ph of 0.85, permafrost cores in Svalbard, and more. In very friendly, accessible language, she describes what microbes do to survive in almost pure acid or bleach, boiling water or perpetual freeze, crushing pressure, and like that.
She focuses in on a particular class of adaptation: the ability to live very slowly, occasionally repairing damage but not reproducing in hibernations that can last not just for years or centuries but millions of years. Nobody suspected such a thing, and it’s crucial to opening up many environmental niches.
Some samples of her prose:
This is because, in addition to sunlight, photosynthetic plankton need iron, which mostly comes from rivers and wind-driven desert dust. The middle of the ocean is thus a gorgeous wasteland with hundreds of kilometers of sparkling clear blue water. In these areas, a particle might sit at the seafloor for thousands of years or longer before enough sediment piles up and pushes it into the subsurface.
Once we had finished filtering fluid and collecting a few small tubes of sediments and gasses, we packed up quickly to get back to the village before nightfall. But first, we had to deal with the most essential of physiological necessities: finding a place to go to the bathroom in a flat landscape where the vegetation is ankle-high at best. I generally consider toileting out in nature to be a job perk—a mountain vista beats the cold tiles of a bathroom floor any day. But that day, as I moved away from my group to find a place to go, I couldn’t shake a pack of about seven curious llamas. They followed me around until I finally announced to them, “OK, we’re doing this,” and then did my business while they stood in a semicircle chewing their cud and staring at me dumbly.
Every time a scientist has said, “Hey, this is a chemical reaction that could support life, I wonder if it does …,” it eventually leads to a great discovery. Discoveries of this sort pop up every few years, like little gifts for geobiologists. And some have fun names. Anammox, for instance, was predicted in the 1970s, discovered in the 1990s, and sounds like a Marvel villain.
Oddly enough, my son and I just started watching Black Mirror at the advice of a co-worker of mine. We're only two episodes in, but we're already enjoying it immensely. I guess "Metalhead" is just three short seasons in my future.
I had been reading book 1 of the Darksword trilogy, but halfway through I just couldn't get into it. So I'm reading 2 books:
The original Dragonlance chronicles, and just started this one (It's been years since I read the more well-known Dragonbone Chair series from Tad Williams, which was good)
I had been reading book 1 of the Darksword trilogy, but halfway through I just couldn't get into it. So I'm reading 2 books:
The original Dragonlance chronicles, and just started this one (It's been years since I read the more well-known Dragonbone Chair series from Tad Williams, which was good)
Reread Otherland book 1 recently. I think it is a good book with lots of interesting ideas, but I find it a slow read, something about it makes it hard for me to to stay engaged with it too long, so haven't gone on to book 2 yet, reading other books that keep me more engaged.
Basilides by M. David Litwa. This is going to be the most schizoid set of comments I’ve reading about an audiobook.
The Reading: “This title uses virtual voice narration. Virtual voice is computer-generated narration for audiobooks. I’m impressed at how this works for general text, with a pleasant male voice and a fair amount of variation in tone. It’s come a long way but it’s completely inadequate for a book about people with Greek names. Is it “BA-si-LYD-es” or “ba-SIL-a-des”? Virtual Voice doesn’t know, and uses both, and some other pronunciations, apparently at random. Given a citation like “Ref. 7.26.8”, referring to a passage in The Refutation Of All Heresies, it says “Ref dot 26th of July dot 8”…usually, but quite always. It doesn’t know that “Matt.” is short for Matthew, or that “1 Peter” is First Peter, not “One Peter”. And on and on. I finished the book out of morbid curiosity, but can only say that this is not technology ready for use in this fashion. Maybe with extensive review and re-recording. Maybe not. But not like this.
The Book: Another fascinating book from Dr. Litwa, this one focusing on one of the earliest Christian philosophers, who flourished in the middle of the 2nd century AD. Less than two dozen passages of his work survive, all in books by people criticizing his doctrines. Litwa provides new translations of them, and a great deal of context to see what they add up to and suggest. Part of his outlook is similar to later thinkers often described as Gnostic, other parts pretty like what became mainstream doctrine. Some show a reliance on texts that aren’t quite from the New Testament as we have it - perhaps drawing on earlier versions from before their contents stabilized. If you’re interested in the Christian world before there was an orthodoxy, this is really worth your time.
Basilides by M. David Litwa. This is going to be the most schizoid set of comments I’ve reading about an audiobook.
The Reading: “This title uses virtual voice narration. Virtual voice is computer-generated narration for audiobooks. I’m impressed at how this works for general text, with a pleasant male voice and a fair amount of variation in tone. It’s come a long way but it’s completely inadequate for a book about people with Greek names. Is it “BA-si-LYD-es” or “ba-SIL-a-des”? Virtual Voice doesn’t know, and uses both, and some other pronunciations, apparently at random. Given a citation like “Ref. 7.26.8”, referring to a passage in The Refutation Of All Heresies, it says “Ref dot 26th of July dot 8”…usually, but quite always. It doesn’t know that “Matt.” is short for Matthew, or that “1 Peter” is First Peter, not “One Peter”. And on and on. I finished the book out of morbid curiosity, but can only say that this is not technology ready for use in this fashion. Maybe with extensive review and re-recording. Maybe not. But not like this.
The Book: Another fascinating book from Dr. Litwa, this one focusing on one of the earliest Christian philosophers, who flourished in the middle of the 2nd century AD. Less than two dozen passages of his work survive, all in books by people criticizing his doctrines. Litwa provides new translations of them, and a great deal of context to see what they add up to and suggest. Part of his outlook is similar to later thinkers often described as Gnostic, other parts pretty like what became mainstream doctrine. Some show a reliance on texts that aren’t quite from the New Testament as we have it - perhaps drawing on earlier versions from before their contents stabilized. If you’re interested in the Christian world before there was an orthodoxy, this is really worth your time.
When I worked recording audiobooks, there was an instance that lived in the lore of the studio when a narrator went through a string of Greek names without a blip, ended the sentence. "Sumehtimees ... that word is sometimes, let me try that again."
