I think I’m done dipping into card’s particular mind palace after this; it’s exhausting, somewhat triggering, and I don’t think he has anything more to say
maybe culture series next? or dresden files. or some classic 60s sff
culture for the influence on bungie alone
Culture stuff is…OK? Sometimes pretty good but not like spectacular. 60s SF has so much cool stuff in it though…and definitely stuff to avoid (and lots of Problematic stuff, not like in OSC terms as much as sexism/racism).
Also, just kinda amused that OSC’s baseline “intent as the most important thing” ethics is somehow more something (Weird? Simplified? Problematic? All of the above?) than the Catholic Catechism (which I only went to look up because it was mentioned in the one quoted post above, and learned a lot about thanks to Jesuits in high school).
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I would actually recommend player of games, the second culture book, as a palate cleanser for ender’s game and its breeder colonialism
This time its a dude fighting an implacable foe through the medium of games only to question his role in the not-discussed colonial arm of the utopia he’s bored of
If you go with new wave 60s sf, just read a bunch of delaney and le guin
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Player of Games is excellent, like a lot of Banks’ work it gradually builds over the course of the book until the table shakes with every step. Excession is another of my favorites in the Culture series, with an emphasis on what’s owed to those who come after you. Inversions is like a take on Hard to be a God – speaking of which, run through Strugatsky Bros. work if you’re into socialist-minded sci-fi, they’re all dealing with a fallout from their ideals and the fallen world around them. The Doomed City is spectacular, a chronicle of a life spent searching for the good and the truth and a succession of failures in others and oneself.
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yeah tbc both culture and dresden files would be rereads for me
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Yeah, I adore the Strugatsky Bros, they’re also wonderful in the light-hearted pastiche mode of “The Dead Mountaineer’s Inn”
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In my continuing attempt to reconnect with French culture to some extent, I looked around for French sci-fi novelists to read today. I know in the abstract that’s a thriving genre in France but I think I’ve never actually read one, partly just because French book cover art is much lower-budget to be honest.
The “classic” books I checked out so far look pretty dull to me, but I think I just found a catchy one published in 2019 called Crimes, Aliens & Châtiments. It’s a collaboration between three sci-fi authors featuring themselves as self-insert protagonists, and the premise is that after the aliens land, sci-fi book sales fall off a cliff and in desperation, they enter a new line of business as private detectives specializing in alien-related matters
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Here’s what french sf I have on my to-read list
Raymond Roussel’s Locus Solus
J.H. Rosny’s works
Jean de la Hire’s the Nyctalope on Mars
Gustav le Rouge’s Mars novels
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I was reading Clarice Lispector’s An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures, but my patience for metaphysical modernists off their linguistic rockers is not at its most right now. I usually like Lispector but, despite being supposedly one of her like most accessible and kind of mass appeal novels, I thought this one was even harder to follow than the stories and the other novel I read by her The Passion According to G.H.
Would like to write a little about two other books I read recently when I have the energy and time: George Perec’s Ellis Island and Rafael Bernal’s His Name Was Death. Loved both of these, could talk a lot about them, and should.
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Just for kicks last night I read The Medium is the Massage by McLuhan and Fiore, and was totally in love with this kind of method for explaining McLuhan’s work. I don’t think there’s a form like this for the work of every academic or scholar, but I’d like to think basically every one of them could benefit from studying the rhetorical strategies this book engages with. Hopefully it’d at least be a bonk on the head to make them realize, oh! there are other ways I could be doing things, and good reason to do them differently too!!
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I have recently completed Absolute Book which is like a Dan Brown conspiracy book but involving gods, demons and the fae. As well The King Tides which is one of those books about a grizzled military veteran/retired cop/PI who is thrilled to not have to play by the rules so he can bring bad guys to justice, etc, etc.
I am not the target demo for either of these books and frankly I forget how these came into my digital possession.
I also read a little short story by Dean Koontz called Ricochet Joe and I gotta say that the title was 100x cooler than the story and that makes it even more disappointing than the other two, somehow.
Somehow this book I’m reading about an evil crisis hotline operator (who is evil I guess because her marriage sucks and her life isn’t what she wants it to be?) is not going to be the palate cleanser I need.
Good grief.
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this is why i dont read
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I read Painted Ladies, the second of three Spenser novels written by Robert B Parker but published after he kicked it. It’s fine. Really weird to see this hard-boiled noir detective reference tina fey though.
It’s actually funny reading the first and last books and almost no others - the tone softens significantly. I prefer the more “gritty” tone of the earlier ones I’ve read, plus the fact that Spenser is poor, horny, and single kinda makes it feel more like a real story vs. the 40th book in a series that’s been going for almost as many years.
Anyway it’s perfect for reading in one sitting and just making a “hmm” face for much of it trying to figure out the mystery. Just fine!
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Have reached the “hearing an extra-muppety Jordan Peterson Voice recite this ridiculous shit, in my head” stage of my lurching, attenuated read through D.H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classical American Literature.
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I mean I guess I could run “is my eye color why I tend to disassociate?” by my therapist this week
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Still looking for French SF I’m passionate about. Actually it’s not rocket science, there’s several yearly French SF awards to use as a starting point, and then when I google those authors I find blogs and stuff mentioning similar authors. I just need to put in the work of curation and can’t rely on passively coming across stuff from my usual sources, which are all Anglosphere or Japan-biased.
Most of the books I’m finding I’m putting on my backlog with the attitude of “might be good, I’ll give this a chance when I have time”. But just now I discovered Alain Damasio and it’s the first author that has sparked the instant rush of enthusiasm and sense of freshness that I was hoping to find by exploring a foreign literature. Just check out the first page of La Horde du Contrevent:
And then every paragraph in the novel is preceded by one of these symbols, marking a constant rotation of narrators
It also got a comic-book adaptation:
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It looks like an English translation has been written in 2020 and currently being shopped around to publishers. A sample is posted publicly for anyone curious:
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I had somewhat strange trains of thought running through my head around my birthday. They were all about my supposed not-too-distant French ancestry. Two generations before me, there’s a French surname and family living in Maine and the Maritimes.
My mom told me that she used to have a cat named “Mootzie” which is apparently a swear in French. I tried to figure out what exactly it was and the best guess I have is Quebecois “maudit,” meaning “damn.”
Then I watched The Gleaners and I and several of the people she talks to in the country remind me so much of my uncle that it’s scary.
What makes the situation complicated is that I think the French part of my family mostly comes from my biological grandfather who abandoned his wife and children*. That would explain why the French Connection is so tenuous. It would also explain my performative hatred of the French.
I know this thread is supposed to be about books and nobody invited this discussion on my part, but I’ve wanted to have a reason to share for a couple of days now.
*It’s okay. My grandmother met a huge sweetheart later, notably not French, and she lived a very happy life after that.
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Finally read Juicy Ghosts by Rudy Rucker after kickstopping it last year.
Uh yeah the book is total gonzo transhumanist bugpunk. A real big fuck you to the right wing chuds invading leftist spaces, UC Berkeley “free speech” protests, corruption of the hacker ethic by tech bro startups, wanting to make money on crypto, nfts, the metaverse, the whole bay area internet of shit scene taking republican/ccp money, gig economy fuckery, the overabundance of toxic men in tech (Rucker worked in the silicon valley for 15 years so I bet he has hard numbers).
The book is about (among other things) digital immortality in a future where we grow all our tech from organic material, communicate telepathically with eachother by putting bugs on our necks that hook into our brains, and we ride around in giant spiders Catbus style. Rucker’s written about this kinda stuff before in his *Ware books but 40 years has given him the perspective that it would actually suck if not done smartly. Everyone was naive in the 80s about tech, which led us to how commercialised the internet is now. You couldn’t just upload your mind to a server, because these companies would eventually get bought out or corrupted and sell your mind to a gig contractor. So biohackers are fighting to decentralise all this tech and let everyone float around like ghosts and link themselves into cloned bodies (hence the title Juicy Ghosts), and not just humans either, but bugs and dogs or whatever you feel like.
Suprisingly uplifting with really fun characters (the majority of which are women (!)). A book that dares us to imagine an idyllic vision of a future internet where we’ll force all the nazis to log off and then we’ll telepathically talk to snakes about erotic asphyxiation!!! Good shit.
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