XML apologist. Erlang enthusiast. Currently JVMs & Performance stuff at Netflix. Previously JVMs & performative stuff at Twitter. He/him.
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Tough to read many of these. Children, husbands, wives, mothers, fathers...so many meet a sad end. Also wild to see the accepted practices of the world at the turn of the century. Worth a read, but buckle up and brace yourself for a rough go.
Pretty grim...stories from another age, full of death and disappointment.
For the Wyndham!
From science fiction visionary Annalee Newitz comes The Terraformers, a sweeping, uplifting, and illuminating exploration …
A really wonderful take on colonization and identity. Fast paced and full of some truly original takes on technology and the balances (and imbalances) of power resulting from the dynamics of capitalism in a seemingly post-scarcity era.
Who owns the land? What is intelligence and what rights (if any) does intelligence deserve? What if naked mole rats could talk and what if Miyazaki's catbus was part of an anarchist collective that lived under an active volcano?
These and many other questions are wrestled with in the this light and heavy sci-fi gem.
From science fiction visionary Annalee Newitz comes The Terraformers, a sweeping, uplifting, and illuminating exploration …
SCIFI FTW
Content warning Mild ones, really, but maybe read the book first.
Not quite as compelling as the first, but man, still a mind-bender. Mild spoiler here is it does travel into the past. One of the things that makes "Wool" so good is it is entirely in the future. That provides the prose some latitude and that can help make or break a book when it starts to get into the awkward drama around social mechanics and institutions we are already familiar with. Anyway, before you read this write down the Silo numbers from wool, and the names of the key characters. Also don't look up anything online because spoilers abound.
Holy smokes! This was such a fun read by @scalzi@mastodon.social. Funny as hell, and with barely any tears. Maybe even no tears if you are a desiccated and empty shell like so many of us these days. Anyway, this book is brain-floss perfection, full of laughs and wit. The auther, per the note at the end, wrote this in 2021 after COVID and January 6th and writer's block and at least one existential crisis. Coincidentally I read this book after a week of the family and I, hundreds of miles from home and alledgedly on vacation, dealing with our second trip through COVID. I'd also just ripped through the first two books of Hugh Howey's "Silo" series ("Wool" & "Shift") while in the grips of the virus. Those are pretty heavy reads, and a mild fever only added to the emotional weight. This book was the perfect antidote to …
Holy smokes! This was such a fun read by @scalzi@mastodon.social. Funny as hell, and with barely any tears. Maybe even no tears if you are a desiccated and empty shell like so many of us these days. Anyway, this book is brain-floss perfection, full of laughs and wit. The auther, per the note at the end, wrote this in 2021 after COVID and January 6th and writer's block and at least one existential crisis. Coincidentally I read this book after a week of the family and I, hundreds of miles from home and alledgedly on vacation, dealing with our second trip through COVID. I'd also just ripped through the first two books of Hugh Howey's "Silo" series ("Wool" & "Shift") while in the grips of the virus. Those are pretty heavy reads, and a mild fever only added to the emotional weight. This book was the perfect antidote to wherever the fuck my head was at after all of that, and a great way to use one of the few remaining days of our "vacation". Anyway, what I am trying to say is that this a wonderfully written, fast-moving, fun-as-heck rip of a read.
You will love it. Probably.
Figured I need a break from the Wool/Silo universe for a day or two.
Here we go!
They live beneath the earth in a prison of their own making. There is a …
Man, what a trip.
No spoilers, but in the Sci-Fi spectrum of humanity coming together in the face of apocalypse or everyone fro themselves (with Rebecca Solnit's "A Paradise Built in Hell" on one end, and parts of Atwood's "Oryx and Crake" or the edges of John Wyndham's works) "Wool" is decidedly on the sharp stick-end end of that scale.
Anyway, wonderfully paced, and great world-building. Excited for the next books in the trilogy!
A classic. Reading it for the 100th time feels as fresh as the first time. Plus the essays included in this edition were...interesting.
A strong open, and a big idea, is undone by a weak ending.
As usual, Wyndham takes a simple premise and peels it apart to tease out contradictions and consquences invisible from the surface. Buried within the prose are occasional aphorisms that apply nicely to our current predicaments. But, by far, the most striking aspect of this book, published in 1960, is how it reflects (and supports) that era's nascent feminist wave. Worth a read, even though it waters out in the last act.
Here we go again.
Fascinating concept, and a narrative that leverages the rot and evil of America, and the racist AF legacy of H.P. Lovecraft to create a more...realistic universe. The writing was a little weak, though the narrative arc was well-sustained through a number of stories. A fun, quick read and ultimately worth it. Beats watching it on TV I suspect.
