Right now, Artemis by Andy Weir. I like his stuff because he creates a future that’s a lot more of a blue-collar space experience. His heroes are not the graduates of space academy and don’t necessarily have their shit together. They mess up, they do stupid things. They just plain don’t know what they’re doing.
I really enjoyed The Martian, I loooved Project Hail Mary but Artemis was lower down the rung for me. I think just because of Jazz. I couldn't gel with her, and maybe I'm being cynical but her character felt very 'male author struggles to write a woman'. Still, I love what he does with his books. The nerd stuff is the action and it's a delight to follow along.
It pushed Blindsight out of my top two. I have had probably 3 hours of discussion related to the order, magnitude and direction of why that book is so awful and why Andy Weir must never be allowed to write again.
One of my Hollywood Parables is M. Night Shamalyan. He used to mention to screenwriters, by way of inspiration, that it had taken seven drafts of Sixth Sense before he knew Bruce Willis was dead. I follow this up by pointing out that it was the last time M. Night Shamalyan was required to write seven drafts of anything, let alone anything after the seventh draft, which is why he mostly makes dreck like "The Happening" and "Lady in the Water." It also applies to Kevin Smith - once he made Dogma he no longer had to hear "no" from anyone so he surrounded himself with people who only said "yes." It took him from being the guy who kept Jason Mewes alive to being the guy who nearly died by imitating Jason Mewes. Andy Weir released The Martian a chapter at a time after spending two years honing it. Each chapter he could see what worked and what didn't. He could see what people liked and what they hated. And he never worked that way again. The Cold Equations is a short story about pathos that blames physics (or more specifically, engineering) for the plight of its protagonists. It is written by someone with no understanding of physics or engineeringl. Kaleidoscope is the exact same short story (5 years earlier but who's counting) that doesn't need any blame. They teach Cold Equations in English class because Kaleidoscope is too expensive to license; it's a Ray Bradbury. Ray Bradbury had the confidence to know that tragedy fucking happens you don't need to fumblefuck your way through a Rube Goldberg machine to justify it. Andy Weir is here for the Rube Goldberg machine. What's that quote? Andy Weir loves science like a child loves posies.Despite Wright's orations to the contrary, I came to the conclusion that he was not genuinely interested in the theatre. He certainly knew next to nothing about it. Yet he loved it, as a child loves posies without knowing how to make them grow.
I'm honestly not sure, and it's pretty embarrassing. I'm sorry. I don't know you. I've just been lurking here for a really long time and had some kind of episode last night. I must have disagreed with an opinion of yours? I'm not entirely sure. My bad. I can tell you this crow tastes terrible, though. I wouldn't recommend it.
Just say I'm sorry, I cannot provide a response next time
Just finished American Desert by Percival Everett. I loved it though I gather Everett afficionados don't rate it among his best books. Next is to read Plains of Promise by Alexis Wright. After that, I'll be jumping into the latest Booker winner.
Adding my own two cents: Fifteen Hours by Mitchel Scanlon - a story of a guardsman on his first deployment. It's 40k, so you know it's a tale of merrymaking and sunshine. I was afraid people oversold this book, but it turned out to be pretty dang good. TL;DR: a Vietnam war movie with an arc from FNGs to body bags, but with laser guns and space-orcs. Chivalry and Courtesy: Medieval Manners for a Modern World by Danièle Cybulskie - it's the same author who wrote How to Live Like a Monk -- mentioned in the last thread -- who this time takes on manners, grooming, and upbringing of children. It's... hm. I didn't find it to be as good, but probably because I didn't learn all that much new stuff from it? Wholeheartedly recommend it, the substance is there, it was just a tad too introductory to someone who read some of the sources beforehand. A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. You know what? It's the same problem as with Chivalry and Courtesy: I'd love this book 10-ish years ago, but now it felt like marathoning 12 straight hours of something like SciShow on youtube (neither a channel recommendation nor lifestyle idea). There's a lot of trivia on history of science that I'll probably struggle to recall in three months, and a more than a couple things that are no longer correct, but I don't regret picking it up or recommending if that's your jam or didn't do well in the science classes. De Generibus Dicendi (On the types/kinds of speeches) by 'Iacobus Gorski' (Jakub Górski, or Jacob Mountain-like if you're into silly translations) - It's one of the first Loeb-inspired (Latin text on the left, Polish on the right) books published here, and a real treat. It's an overview of ancient and contemporary (XVI century) rhetoric, and a bit of a instructor's handbook on the topic. I've also tried to go through Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, but it's been a fucking slog even in audiobook form.
Fifteen Hours is so much of what's great about 40k writing. Can't say enough good things about it. Also I can't put my finger on exactly why, but I have always enjoyed Brave New World. Sorry you're slogging with it. I only recently found that my opinion on George RR Martins style has changed enough for me to do ASOIAF in audiobook format.
Oh, I didn't mean to underplay Fifteen Hours. My approach was cautious, but I thoroughly enjoyed the read. Kinda makes me wish I had time and folks to play Only War with, but that's gotta wait. I'd be also interested in your takes on Horus Heresy books and 40k in general. Got any other IG recommendations? I dropped reading GoT around the middle of book 1, in the chapter where old-ass lecher betroths his whichever daughter to one of the Starks where we get name-drops of no fewer than thirty characters and I knew this is just author trying to waste my time by putting in hooks that'll never pay off. It annoyed me enough to ignore the show by association, but maybe it'd be fair to give audiobook a go.
When I say I enjoy the ASOIAF conspiracy theories on youtube as much or more than the actual main story I am pretty serious. The world is rich and deep and fans starved of new content have wrote themselves years worth of filler and fun speculation. I definitely don't think you're undervaluing Fifteen Hours. The Horus Heresy and Siege is entirely heavy on Space Marine and Primarch perspectives. The writers are aiming for greek myth down to demi gods and culture heros mixed with historical figures. As we have gotten closer to the end there has been a lot more inclusion of the baseline human or Mortal perspectives. There is a limited throughline from the very beginning of a few very important mortal figures that have carried into the conclusion of the heresy, and those storylines reaching maturation has been overall pretty cool. Specifically, certain aspects of the Imperium of 40k culturally are directly determined by how the Heresy found its final conclusion. I can point to an immediate small example that on Terra in 'contemporary' 40k specifically there is a population level terror of Adeptus Astartes that was not present in 30k. That bias exists because an entire Legion of traitor Astartes spent a few weeks-a few months turning the entire population of a medium sized country into snortable, injectable, boofable drugs. The process being excruciating and extended for the victims. So a lot of what I find enjoyable about 30k is it gives the historical explanations of many different minutia of the Imperium's culture and functioning. The second example I would point to would be the formation of the Black Templars, specifically with the ascension of the first Emperor's Champion, Sigismund. As someone who has love for Dorn and his sons, you would appreciate the absolute LOVE shown to the Fists during the entirety of the Siege. I don't want to spoil too much, but in my mind the tension between the Fists focus on the material world and only taking into account the hard truths of things and the open acts of divine intervention that have protected their leaders and line brothers alike is SO. COOL. The Siege is worth reading alone even if you don't feel like slogging through the entire giant heresy.
It's fascinating to me that you find Huxley a slog. Is it the language? I don't consider it a great book but I've probably coverIIcover'd that thing three or four times just because teachers have a hard time arguing with anyone's interpretations, so it's a perfect lazy student's fallback. I once re-read it and vomited out a 500 word essay (longhand, in pen) in the six hours it took to make it home from Colorado in the back of a van. I've never played Warhammer. I played Battletech and my cursory spot-check found their novels to be largely ghastly. That said, what ones I tried clearly owed the whole of their existence to The Forever War, which is worth being familiar with.
Huxley is interesting, with a lot of ideas thrown from the get go, and it's more likely my current workload and family bullshit at the distance preventing me from enjoying the story. I rarely don't give a book multiple chances, so we'll see. Right now, it's flatter than my color perception, but the language isn't a problem. re 40k: I usually recommend people start with Sandy MItchell's Ciaphas Cain books, who's pretty much Blackadder given a role of a commissar (political/morale officer) and a gun to execute morale problems. Comedy of errors/accidental hero is a good framing for grimdark.
I did The Gates of Europe. it's a good book, gives you good perspective on Central Europe and Russia. Then I did A Brief History of the Vikings which pretty much makes the point that Europe is nothing but Vikings from Ireland to Turkey. Then I did War and Punishment which isn't as good a book as The Gates of Europe, but it's got some slightly different slices through history. Also it hates the Russians more. Then I tried They Can Live in the Desert But Nowhere Else for... the third time? and I mean... that's not some light reading. So I put it down and tried So You Want to Talk About Race but it's pretty much "eat a dick, white person" and I just couldn't. I was reminded that Clifford Simak is probably the most optimistic person in science fiction and I figured I could use some optimism. So I started City which actually isn't all that optimistic so far.Way Station was great though so I'm not about to give up. I'm two and a half books into the Arkady Renko series. They're grim as fuck. It's kind of amazing to me how we all knew in the '80s how ghastly desperate life was in the USSR and then we all shined it on until all of a sudden the VDV is parachuting into Kyiv.
My partner and I polished off the Red Rising series (Book #7 still to come). They're not literary masterpieces but it was a very entertaining time, they're accessible page turners. My partner is more discerning than I am, about what she reads, so I wasn't expecting her to give it a go. However one day she began the series herself, while I was reading book #4. Then, because she reads so much faster than I do, she read the first three before I finished #4, then stole book #4 from my bedside table. She read it, returned it, and carried on with the series. I've just started House of Leaves which is uhhh a tonal shift.
Does the second trilogy hold up? Morningstar was sufficiently satisfying a conclusion that I didn't feel much urge to go back for a second helping.
Reading Iron Gold I found myself struggling to get through it. There was a timeskip and a sudden shift to multiple POVs. Both aspects surprised me and I found myself trudging through it a little bit. It was hard to suddenly care about these strangers after having one POV the entire time. However about 1/3 of the way through it clicked and I was on board again, as things began to coalesce. The next two books I didn't have any issues with and devoured them greedily. Especially as later on you get the POV of a character whose head I always wanted to get inside of. I also felt Morningstar finished in such a way that had nothing else been written after, I'd have been happy. That said I'm very glad I got past my initial reluctance in fourth book, it was well worth it and I'm hanging out for the final book now!
Finished book #1 of The Exapanse series. Pretty good physics. Another 8 books left. Daunting.
Once upon a time in Hollywood, I was invited to a closed-door Writer's Guild event with Tim Kring. The finale of Season 1 of Heroes had just aired, and he was talking about it. I got to get him aside at one point and ask several questions - when did they know this? What made them think of that? What about this other thing? If you haven't watched Heroes, you don't know that the first season is an impeccably-tightly-plotted little mystery with a whole bunch of interesting things flying about. It lands... not great but better than 90% of the shows on TV at the time. Really, it's an impressive little bit of writing. But after that? Thing is? Kring & Co stumbled into Season 1. They thought HRG and The Cheerleader were minor characters. They envisioned the whole of the show as Peter Petrelli vs. Sylar. But what they discovered is that their backup characters were more interesting, had more stuff going on, could have a more fleshed-out backstory, and could generally take things in a more interesting direction. But they didn't have that direction so they started Season 2 with a whole new set of characters that everyone hated. Kring later said they were lucky in that the Writer's Strike brought things to a premature close, allowing them to back up and start over again with the characters the audience actually cared about. Not that they did a great job. HRG and the Cheerleader are interesting for a season. They drag the fuck on for seven. My theory with The Expanse is Abraham and Frank had a really cool story idea around a gumshoe and a rich girl that ends with the discovery of a new alien life form on Venus. And they did so well with it they went "we can do anything" rather than "we wrote a closed-loop story with two interesting characters in it that we just killed off and now we need to make Holden and Naomi interesting for as long as we can, despite the fact that their principle character traits are whininess and petulance." It's like trying to write the Jack Reacher series after you've killed Jack in Book 1.
100%. I read the entire series Miller is the only character who is actually interesting. They tried real hard to add arcs to the others and I think they all fell flat.My theory with The Expanse is Abraham and Frank had a really cool story idea around a gumshoe and a rich girl that ends with the discovery of a new alien life form on Venus. And they did so well with it they went "we can do anything" rather than "we wrote a closed-loop story with two interesting characters in it that we just killed off and now we need to make Holden and Naomi interesting for as long as we can, despite the fact that their principle character traits are whininess and petulance." It's like trying to write the Jack Reacher series after you've killed Jack in Book 1.
Thanks. Yeah I'm still around, just too busy most of the time to post much. My wife is a huge sci-fi fan. She read all 9 books and wanted me steeped in the lore. She's also watched the entirety of the show, which I started with her, but backed out after an episode or two because I didn't want it distorting my experience of the literature. My wife fucking rocks, obviously.
For non fiction my diet has been pretty sparse, but not nothing. American Prometheus - Nothing earthshattering. Gave good context for Oppenheimer I felt. Curious if anyone else has read it. The Woman They Could Not Silence by Kate Moore - A 13 hour telling of the work of Elizabeth Packard exposing the horrors of the mental health treatment system of 1860's era america by the same author who wrote Radium Girls. Mini book club with my wife on this one, she finds it relates a lot to her work in behavioral therapy with very young, very combative children. Now to the candy and confectionaries The End and the Death Volume 2 - The second of the final trilogy of the extended Horus Heresy series and the Siege of Terra. There's nothing but brief vignettes in this one, almost all of them so emotionally taxing in different ways the sum effect is numbing. At least if you give a shit. Lots of critique that its dull and unnecessarily long. I enjoy it a lot. The final scene is so bleak it was painful. It's the known, prophesied, long coming, guaranteed outcome of a fight that had its conclusion written in like 1991 in a footnote of ancient sci-fi history. This entire series truthfully is the exposition of about 3-4 paragraphs in a rule book from a tabletop game that almost nobody plays anymore. Wild stuff. Helldivers XI: Renegades - Absolute pulp, also bleak, but chewy and enjoyable in the same way Phase 1 Marvel was enjoyable. No real surprises but the author has managed to keep my interest over close to a hundred hours of what amounts to contemporary spaceman spiff ray guns and aliens and Thomas A Swifts Electric Rifle saving the day, and that's something. I'm drawing a parallel to the collection of Western pulp novels my grandfather accumulated over a lifetime. I inherited most of them. A Song of Ice and Fire - Over the summer, I finally half-watched game of thrones while hiding from the sun from extended antibiotic treatment this past summer. Apparently this changed my taste enough that I can listen to the ASOIAF audiobooks and enjoy them. There was some quality to them stylistically that I couldn't really get into when Game of Thrones was popular. But I'm halfway through A Clash of Kings right now and enjoying it a lot. Honestly I think I enjoy ASOIAF conspiracy theories on youtube and reddit almost as much.
Read it many years ago, I knew very little about Oppenheimer going into it. The main takeaways was the sheer size of the Manhattan project, the curious nature of Oppenheimer as a person, and then the political intrigue that followed related to his security clearance over the suspected association with the Communist party. I particularly liked the "competency porn" aspect of it; remarkably talented individuals doing things that require remarkable talent. It scratches that "gee I wish I was a genius" itch you get in fiction like The Martian or whatever. But this was a real genius working with other genius's to do something momentous. I remember reading Bryson's book at the same time as this and it explained much of the explosion in physics around the 20's and 30's and the big players involved. As a self professed nerd I knew I'd like the science stuff but was surprised to find the political bits pretty interesting. The paranoia of the time period, the creation of a new age, what it means to create something you cannot control, being discarded once you have served your purpose, the beginning of the cold war, and perhaps the social structures in the US at the time, were all fascinating. I ended up reading Caro's LBJ biographies not to long after which though not completely related, have some overlap with the social paranoia and McCarthyism. The part that stayed with me afterwards was how Oppenheimer was such a difficult person to really get a grip on. He was clearly brilliant, and charming, but also depressive and emotionally complex. Morally ambivalent? Is that a good term for it? He wrung his hands and quoted the bhagavad gita over his role in making the bomb, but then celebrated the anniversary of the day the bomb was dropped in costume dress up for the rest of his life... Was he too brilliant to comprehend, or just a messed up clever individual? The book was good to not spell out too much its views, although given it took years to write I wonder how much bias it contains. As for the movie, I've seen it once and was underwhelmed, I'm holding judgement until I watch it again.American Prometheus - Nothing earthshattering. Gave good context for Oppenheimer I felt. Curious if anyone else has read it.
I have thoughts. I will extend this post with them later. I saw Oppenheimer in true giant IMAX as a double feature with Barbie. This is how those films should be enjoyed IMO, back to back. Barbie has to live in the world Oppenheimer helped create. I'm half joking half serious.
I've been enjoying slogging through Grueber's The Dawn of Everything. As for a bit of lighter reading, I just started Titanium Noir from Nick Harkaway and have what if? 2 for when I'm in the mood for silly physics. It's not his best work but it's passable and scratches an itch. Quick vent, I have not been reading much the past two years and it's frustrating me to no end. I've been religiously time-tracking my reading since February of 2017 and it looks like this: 2017: 167 hrs 2018: 249 hrs 2019: 152 hrs 2020: 143 hrs 2021: 123 hrs 2022: 65 hrs 2023: 52 hrs ...yeah, I just looked, I have 5 unspent Audible credits and 3 books I have already loaded up (The Goneaway World by Nick Harkaway, The Song of the Cell by Mukherjee and Hidden Potential by Adam Grant). I have a pretty good (as in, long) commute now but haven't been motivated enough to jump from light podcasts to a book.
I spent a weekend and rocked through the entirety of Bone recently which was super fun
Just finished The Dark Forest. It was pretty good, I enjoyed it more than the first (which I can barely remember). Started on The Templars but I dont think it will stick with me for long. I'm also reading The Murderbot Diaries which are fun little scifi stories but nothing earth shattering... Politics on the Edge was surprisingly good! A Tory (conservative) politician runs for office in a small province and makes his way to the UK cabinet, detailing the madness of UK politics along the way. I'm about 40% through The Brothers Karamazov audiobook and Im enjoying it but its so long winded I get tired and have to switch to something else for a while. This happens whenever I try Russian novels, and I believe it to be a deep character flaw.
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