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‘the paper menagerie’ is pretty good and probably a better showcase for ken liu than ‘grace of kings’ for people who aren’t already stupid nerds about chinese history

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this is still one of my fav Le Guin books because I guess Le Guin doing a PKD novel is something I really wanted.

I don’t take the ‘philosophy’ on display with any seriousness because it’s just white people daoism and even in that regard it’s better argued/conveyed in her Earthsea books.

And I’ve finally finished this, feel free to estimate my reading speed and free time based on this.

I like it, but it is a very different book than the previous two entries. Those were each somewhat narrowly focused on a specific problem or idea while this one is just a sprawling “let me get to every idea I can about this universe” epic. At times it suffers due to this as so many grim situations are waved away in order to continue further down the timeline of ideas, but the flipside of this is that you do get many more ideas thrown your way.

hey, related to Ken Liu / Liu Cixin, this is a really weird question but: I don’t have my copy of TBP on hand right now, can anyone quickly tell me basically what chapters are included in parts i, ii, iii of the book? so like:

Part One: Silent Spring
Chapter 1 - Chapter XX
Part Two: Three body
Chapter XX - Chapter XX
Part Three: Sunset for Humanity
Chapter XX - Chapter 36 (right?)

it’s… for a project

Part One: Silent Spring
Chapter 1 - Chapter 3
Part Two: Three body
Chapter 4 - Chapter 20
Part Three: Sunset for Humanity
Chapter 21 - Chapter 35

Thank you!!!

Oh that reminds me the third one came out in English this fall. I should find my Kindle.

Stand on Zanzibar is way longer than the other old scifi I’ve been reading. Each chapter is labeled Continuity (main plot), Tracking with Closeups (side characters), The Happening World (out-of-context quotes/streams-of-conciousness/set-pieces), & Context (excerpts). It make for a really immersive world, but it also means the main plot is only like 200 pages (out of 700, also ignoring the first half which is just setup).

It’s clearly a 60’s novel, with plenty of excerpts from The Hipcrime Vocab, & dated mass-media announcers hanging alliterations off everything + using anti-matter/poppa-momma to mean ante-meridian/post-meridian. Brunner coins a wonderful term: broadcast TV includes segments starring Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere doing exciting life experiences in topical far-off locations, and viewers configure their TVs with their race/sex/age, and then the Everywheres appearance approximately resembles the viewers. But, if they purchase the optional homimage module, the Everywheres appearance exactly matches the viewer. Homimage is only used twice in the novel and it destroyed me each time.

I guess Gibson read it because there’s a lot of proto-cyberpunk in here, dreck and monofilaments and dystopian future with powerful corporations.

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Bring the Jubilee didn’t read like a 60-year-old time-travel story! I don’t know much about the US Civil War or Gettysburg (except for checking out the map for Tattered Flags #1 : The Wheatfield). The anti-climax is the most depressing thing I’ve read this year.

one of my fav sci fi novels

I started Carl Sagan’s Dragons of Eden last week. I usually only read fiction, but I was curious on what he thought about the evolution of the human mind.

Man, I sure did run out of steam fast on this one!

It’s very dense with seemingly incidental details, like he’s trying to provide as much information as a comics panel with every sentence. Too exhausting too read during the depths of one of my worse recent depressions; I think I stopped before page 50.

But the same was true of Voice of The Fire, which I really do love, more than his comics work. I’ll get back to it one of these days.


I recently picked up John E. Mack’s T.E. Lawrence biography A PRINCE OF OUR DISORDER. The very first page is, uh, interesting to read nowadays:

Yes, I still have to make it through Voice of the Fire, which for some reason the font of bothers me a lot to read, but I enjoyed the first section. So I can get bailing on it if you weren’t in the right mindset.

just started Invisible Planets, an anthology of chinese sci-fi translated by Ken Liu

I don’t know if it’s last week talking but MAN did the first three short stories by chen qiufan make me feel Not Great (in a good(bad) way), especially Year Of The Rat

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I just started on The Three Body Problem, also translated by Ken Liu, so that is a thing.

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hey thread–i am hoping to do some catching up on relatively accessible political stuff about us politics (and i guess canadian? if such a thing exists) and activist stuff, i dunno how else to word this, one thing i am planning on reading is The New Jim Crow. Any other recommendations? I should probably read Zinn because I never have, and yet, I don’t really want to tackle something that comprehensive.

by ‘accessible’ i mean i’d prefer not to read anything that leans too heavily towards marxist or postcolonial theory. not because i don’t like it, but because i read enough dense stuff as it is for work and i am less likely to be able to get through stuff like that in my main leisure reading hours e.g. bedtime. the more journalistic/historiographic it is the better.

yeah that’s next on my list! excited to get to it

The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley was supposed to be a short quick read, but man is it dense. :sweat:

More updates from the $2 science-fiction table.

Dorsai! (George R. Dickson) is Dune starring a fresh-faced Wehrmacht officer (why is fascist sci-fi a thing). This edition came with an appendix talking about how great the Childe series was/is going to be, and called the protagonist a full spectrum individual (referring to how he is not only a master tactician & strategist, but also insightfully empathetic and good at all that icky feelings stuff). The love-interest’s partner is court-martialed & executed by the protagonist extremely early in the story, so.

Gather, Darkness! (Fritz Lieber) is pitched as a Science vs. Religion deathmatch, set in a future dark age ruled by a global theocracy. I expected a heavy-handed “emotional beliefs bad, rational thought good”, and the opening did little to dissuade me. Then it got weird, and good: e.g. witches’ familiars are miniature clones, genetically-modified to remove their organs, so they suckle on their sisters’ circulatory system to exchange waste/nutrients. Update a couple of bits of jargon, and no one could tell this was published in 1950.

The Winds of Limbo (Micheal Moorcock) aka The Fireclown has a stupid-awesome cover of the clown riding a stallion into the sun, but surprise! it’s actually about the political jousting in a utopian world government headquartered in the City of Switzerland. This is probably the worst book from the $2 table, and I bought a lot of Shadowrun novelizations. The prose sucks: the would-be president’s private secretary is stealthily monitoring the Fireclown, but he’s Zimbabwean. so 70% of the time he’s just referred to as the Negro; joints are called marijuanas; wtf is a wind of limbo.

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Started reading Gormenghast and My Brilliant Friend, love both.

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