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Hi all, With Suttree being a longer book, and with library holds being longer queues due to the recency of the death of the author, we're continuing it through August, as I posted in the BotM discussion megathread. HOWEVER, now is the time to plan for September! Yesterday there was this insane hearing in the US Congress on UFOs/UAPs in which, under oath, a career military and civilian intelligence officer testified that the US was in possession of non human intelligence craft and bodies ("biologics" in exciting pol wonk talk). Whether its true or not, who cares, this is The Boon Barn not D&D or CSPAM. What we care about is alien related book fare! SO in honor of this bonkers claim, September's Book of the Month will be on the topic of: First Contact With Aliens! Post up your suggestions ITT, and from these I will, near the end of the month, create a poll from the top 5 or so popular suggestions. This should be grounds for fertile suggestions. Already on the discord folks have suggested such luminous works as Under The Skin, XX by Rian Hughes, and Carl Sagan's Contact and Demon Haunted World. Solaris I think was already done in a BotM but its a classic for a reason so if folks wished to revisit, so be it! Post your suggestions ITT!
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Jul 28, 2023 04:01
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| # ? May 15, 2024 16:21 |
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Clarke’s Childhood’s End is somewhat relevant, being about a “peaceful” invasion of aliens called “Overlords” running a multigenerational experiment on humanity. Gets into some cold war sf tropes like emergent evolution, an “erosion” of creativity etc
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Jul 28, 2023 21:20
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However I’d like to propose Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness or Rocannon’s World, both of which I haven’t read personally yet, but the short story that later became the introduction of Rocannon’s World called “The Dowry of Angyar” is excellent and I think available online or in her excellent short story compilation The Wind’s Twelve Corners which I have read.
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Jul 29, 2023 14:46
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I just finished Rocannon's World and loved it, so I'd be up for more Le Guin. (Actually, do that one so that I can sound smart without having to do any more reading)
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Jul 29, 2023 15:49
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Fitzy Fitz posted:I just finished Rocannon's World and loved it, so I'd be up for more Le Guin. (Actually, do that one so that I can sound smart without having to do any more reading) How was it? I’ve only read The Dispossessed for my research project on critical utopias and caught the Le Guin bug, so I’m eager to dive further into the hainish cycle. Not sure where to start though. I heard Left Hand is good, hence my personal interest
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Jul 29, 2023 16:19
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It had an ethereal, mythical quality that sort of reminded me of Tolkien, which is seriously impressive for a story that features helicopters.
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Jul 29, 2023 16:53
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Robert L. Forward's Dragon's Egg is interesting for being a hard science story about aliens living on a neutron star. It's mostly about the aliens, but first contact with humans is crucial to the story. EDIT: Also, this is the first mention I've noticed of a Discord, so that might be something to add to the main thread. AngusPodgorny fucked around with this message at 17:55 on Jul 29, 2023 |
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Jul 29, 2023 17:51
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AngusPodgorny posted:Robert L. Forward's Dragon's Egg is interesting for being a hard science story about aliens living on a neutron star. It's mostly about the aliens, but first contact with humans is crucial to the story. The discord is a general Book Bran one with a channel for BotM, which came about back during the Lowtax troubles a few years ago: https://discord.gg/76Kv7tfz We did Left Hand of Darkness in more recent BotM memory, and its a good one, but its more a mediation on gender than first contact per se, at least according to my memory of it (and its been ages since I last read it)
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Jul 29, 2023 19:34
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Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem, which is book one of the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy. Mostly hard sci-fi with a little of the fantastical thrown in under the guise of the "sufficiantly hi-tech ... indistinguishable from magic" meme; his take on the topic is notably different from most western authors'. The ending of the second book, the way the conclusion was built up to and finally revealed, left me kind of quietly sitting there for the rest of the day thinking about the implications.
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Jul 31, 2023 21:13
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Cactus posted:Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem, which is book one of the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy. Mostly hard sci-fi with a little of the fantastical thrown in under the guise of the "sufficiantly hi-tech ... indistinguishable from magic" meme; his take on the topic is notably different from most western authors'. just wait until you read the third then
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Aug 1, 2023 00:07
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^^^ Personally I feel like they really went downhill after the first. And the third felt like the author giving critics "what they wanted." But to be fair it was a real tough act to follow. I'll throw A Case of Conscience on the pile. A Jesuit Biologist, Military Physicist, Geologist, and... Anthropologist(?) are assigned to determine how mankind should treat a newly found planet. The planet happens to have the first alien species that mankind has encountered. Half the book is about the team learning about the planet and making their recommendation. The second half is about the fallout from that decision. Edit: James Blish, forgot to mention the author habituallyred fucked around with this message at 07:19 on Aug 8, 2023 |
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Aug 7, 2023 03:58
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habituallyred posted:I'll throw A Case of Conscience on the pile. A Jesuit Biologist, Military Physicist, Geologist, and... Anthropologist(?) are assigned to determine how mankind should treat a newly found planet. The planet happens to have the first alien species that mankind has encountered. Half the book is about the team learning about the planet and making their recommendation. The second half is about the fallout from that decision. Thought initially it was a bio of Teilhard de Chardin... Sounds interesting, we'll toss it on the pile/add it to the poll list.
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Aug 7, 2023 05:00
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Reminder suggestions for books on a theme of First Contact with aliens is still open for nominations. I will close this up in a few days and set up a poll afterwards.
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Aug 19, 2023 15:33
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Blindsight. You want a first-contact story with some seriously alien aliens? This is it, the high-water mark. Hard sci-fi tinged with cosmic horror, not in the sense of "oh no it's very tentacle-y" but in the sense of, "We are very, very small and the universe is very, very terrible," with a delightfully high thought-provoking-concepts-per-page density. There's a reason it comes up constantly in the SF/F thread and has people asking what to read that's like Blindsight, and being constantly disappointed that the answer is, "nothing, you read the one thing that is like Blindsight, sorry." As a bonus, the author released it for free, so it's available from the author's site and any other PDFs or ebook file formats you might find out there are legit.
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Aug 22, 2023 03:14
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Kestral posted:Blindsight. You want a first-contact story with some seriously alien aliens? This is it, the high-water mark. Hard sci-fi tinged with cosmic horror, not in the sense of "oh no it's very tentacle-y" but in the sense of, "We are very, very small and the universe is very, very terrible," with a delightfully high thought-provoking-concepts-per-page density. There's a reason it comes up constantly in the SF/F thread and has people asking what to read that's like Blindsight, and being constantly disappointed that the answer is, "nothing, you read the one thing that is like Blindsight, sorry." this is amazing, thanks!
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Aug 22, 2023 05:03
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Wherever Seeds May Fall is in my list to read. quote:The Prince of Darkness is coming. Comet Anduru skimmed the clouds of Saturn. Rather than being drawn into the gas giant, it skipped back out into space. With the comet heading for Jupiter, speculation is mounting it's an alien spacecraft making its way to Earth. Lieutenant Colonel Nolan Landis and Dr. Kath McKenzie are caught between an angry public and an anxious President as they grapple with the scientific, social, and political implications of First Contact. The other books in the First Contact series are all stories about various first contacts, sort of twilight zone style each of them their own universe with their own contact events. Blindsight is very good too, but I feel like it can be a hard sell because of the autistic vampires and the fact that 75% of goons have read it.
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Aug 22, 2023 06:22
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