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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Autumnal" data-source="post: 9670798" data-attributes="member: 6671663">Two great books finished on the weekend.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 ([SPOILER]Marlowe should know that Switch deserves the same mercy others gave him[/SPOILER]) and one element I think is too close to its inspiration ([SPOILER]Brethren talks too much like Ummon from Fall of Hyperion, and remembered Gibson has its exact laugh[/SPOILER]), 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:Really a delight.</blockquote>

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