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General Battuta posted:We are insanely inbred, just a fuckin genetic monoculture. Shameful
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Aug 16, 2022 23:01
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Honestly, someone should do humans as the stogie (neoliberal) orthodoxy vs younger but far more creative aliens.
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Aug 16, 2022 23:07
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FBH991 posted:Honestly, someone should do humans as the stogie (neoliberal) orthodoxy vs younger but far more creative aliens. That's just the Star Wars prequels.
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Aug 16, 2022 23:09
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A Wrinkle in Time (#1) by Madeleine L'Engle - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004OA64H0/ Sand (#1) by Hugh Howey - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B098SSTWFM/ Those Across the River by Christopher Buehlman - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0052RHBGC/ Horror A bunch of KJ Parker books, the ones that always go on sale https://www.amazon.com/K-J-Parker/e/B001ILKHK8/
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Aug 16, 2022 23:17
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Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:Behold Humanity is a decent sci fi series.. Quality of Behold Humanity is all over the place, but it's made up for in quantity.
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Aug 16, 2022 23:29
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General Battuta posted:We are insanely inbred, just a fuckin genetic monoculture. Shameful I can already feel my skin crawl as Robert Heinlein nods in approval from beyond the grave. FBH991 posted:Honestly, someone should do humans as the stogie (neoliberal) orthodoxy vs younger but far more creative aliens.
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Aug 16, 2022 23:32
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FBH991 posted:It's IMHO kind of even more grating because of the Terrans' total (and in some cases fully self-inflicted) material inferiority to the Galactics. IIRC being a client species is a really poo poo deal if you get on one of the bad ones and even the nice ones generally have a relationship only somewhat better than overt slavery. And as far as the galactic technologies were concerned, they didn't have access to most of it because buying access the library cost them an arm and a leg and they were pretty sure that they'd still gotten a poo poo deal on an inferior version, IIRC. I think there's a lot of reasonable critiques of those books but not wanting to be a client species seemed straightforwardly understandable.
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Aug 16, 2022 23:49
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All of this talk reminded me of the League of Peoples books by James Alan Gardner, which are pretty fun. I should reread them. For anyone unfamiliar, it's a universe where there are tons of super-advanced alien race all over the galaxies, with pocket dimensions for brains etc. Anyway the League of People has only one rule which is that non-sentient life is not allowed to pass through intergalactic space, where non-sentient is defined as anyone who would knowingly kill another sentient, including through inaction that they know results in the death of other people. If you're a non-sentient and you try and travel through space you get snuffed out when you pass the intergalactic line. Lots of aliens skirt around this rule by e.g. being a huge rear end in a top hat on their home planet so a lot of the stories are about super-advanced aliens manipulating humans or other less-intelligent aliens into doing the dirty work of cleaning up these messes.
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Aug 16, 2022 23:55
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Danhenge posted:All of this talk reminded me of the League of Peoples books by James Alan Gardner, which are pretty fun. And now after a generation of this, the only humans worth anything in a crisis are the deformed or disabled. (It's a surprisingly good series even if the writing is pretty hit or miss)
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Aug 17, 2022 00:15
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RDM posted:My favorite part of this series is that the human space bureaucracy decided that putting pretty people in danger made their friends sad and therefore less efficient, but nobody cares if uggos or the disabled die, so they get all the hard or dangerous jobs. Right, and it's worth noting that these stories are primarily told from the point of view of the people being put in danger, so it's not treated as a morally-excellent choice.
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Aug 17, 2022 00:27
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Remulak posted:Like a lot of Royal Road projects it's also on KU, and if you read it on KU so author gets paid. I assume, anyway, so I always check for this when I find something on RR that gets me reading past the first page. its called first contact on Reddit/royal road and it's up to 800 something chapters now lol. The editing and arranging is better in the KU books though. I love that it basically just blends every archetypical mil sci fi thing together and that it actually works.
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Aug 17, 2022 00:35
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SurreptitiousMuffin posted:One thing I'll say for early SF/F is that we hosed the aliens in it, we need to bring that back, it's for the species or something Did you miss the kindle screenshots from a couple pages back?
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Aug 17, 2022 00:59
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Danhenge posted:IIRC being a client species is a really poo poo deal if you get on one of the bad ones and even the nice ones generally have a relationship only somewhat better than overt slavery. And as far as the galactic technologies were concerned, they didn't have access to most of it because buying access the library cost them an arm and a leg and they were pretty sure that they'd still gotten a poo poo deal on an inferior version, IIRC. It seems like the humans basically get forced to oppress the dolphins and chimps anyway though. Like, galactic civilization is for sure not very nice, but that just makes its potential cultural superiority over us all the more sinister and frightening, a prospect that cheers me up immensely.
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Aug 17, 2022 01:05
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Kalman posted:Alan Dean Foster Damned trilogy comes to mind - humanity is unique because we’re the only species that hasn’t evolved to abhor violence, so we’re incredibly effective in the millennia-long interstellar war. Similar ground to the John Ringo Posleen works but with a much less annoying author yes. I always loved the Damned trilogy.
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Aug 17, 2022 01:39
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quote:“I didn’t expect anyone in here,” he confessed. The XO, he noted in a corner of his mind he kept carefully turned off when actually on duty, was surprisingly muscled for a Space Force officer. “It’s all right, Major,” Kurzman replied, stepping up to join him in looking out over the crater. “I didn’t mean to surprise you.” “It’s quite a view, sir,” James said slowly, eyeing the other man carefully. “It is,” Kurzman agreed. “You don’t need to call me sir,” he continued. “You report to Bloody Annie, not me. Call me Pat.” Wellesley realized he’d outright flushed at that. What was he, a giddy schoolboy? … (From The Terran Privateer, mentioned upthread) This  was a pretty pleasant surprise in a mil sci-fi book. I’d already picked up on a few actual physical descriptions of male characters so this isn’t totally out of right field, but for the genre it seems pretty progressive. Although I guess Honor hooked up with men, but Weber wasn’t exactly big on that side of things.
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Aug 17, 2022 03:23
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Yeah, Stewart is fairly inclusive, especially for mil-sf. I stopped reading that series because I got bored with the giant fleet battles eating up more and more of the books but iirc those two end up happily married, possibly with kids. At least as of the point I left off.
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Aug 17, 2022 05:36
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Just finished book 4 of the Steerswoman series and I HAD NO IDEA THAT THE SERIES WAS UNFINISHED GODDAMN IT argh I really hope she finishes this thing someday =(
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Aug 17, 2022 07:25
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DACK FAYDEN posted:Now I'm wondering what the objectively least common trait that humanity has actually is, like, if we were to somehow make first contact with 100 randomly generated species what is the thing about humanity that'd be the least likely for an intelligent species to have?
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Aug 17, 2022 08:43
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Some of the Humanity FY stuff is fun. Like previously I have read a lot more sci-fi where the aliens home planets are so harsh/deadly, it makes the aliens all super predators, ect... Some of the HFY stuff has it that every single other space faring civilization developed on super peaceful planets, geologically stable and low gravity. So they are all much weaker, and most even have slower reflexes ect. They consider Earth a death class planet, and are surprised anything sentient could come from there. The average human is super powered in comparison.
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Aug 17, 2022 09:04
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hfy is weird stuff that's like two steps removed from uptaking sf/f fascism and other reactionary tropes, no different to how rational fiction was beloved by the weirdest of online people
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Aug 17, 2022 09:18
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What exactly is 'rational fiction'? Does it just mean "like Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality"?
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Aug 17, 2022 09:30
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Remulak posted:That's Campbell's Astonishing (also astonishing) legacy again. One of the few good ones. I'm fond of the Eric Frank Russell take on that where we beat out the alien races by basically being the galaxy's greatest trolls. (And sometimes he switched it around and had us being trolled, presumably when he didn't plan on selling that story to Campbell.)
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Aug 17, 2022 10:01
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Remulak posted:Like a lot of Royal Road projects it's also on KU, and if you read it on KU so author gets paid. I assume, anyway, so I always check for this when I find something on RR that gets me reading past the first page. I have no idea whether they get paid on RR but yes, authors get paid if you read via KU, usually a tad less than half a cent per page. So they almost always get paid better if you buy the book on Kindle, but KU is also a solid and decent way of supporting them (otherwise they wouldn't put it on there).
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Aug 17, 2022 10:35
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Horizon Burning posted:hfy is weird stuff that's like two steps removed from uptaking sf/f fascism and other reactionary tropes, no different to how rational fiction was beloved by the weirdest of online people Sailor Viy posted:What exactly is 'rational fiction'? Does it just mean "like Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality"?
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Aug 17, 2022 11:48
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Gato The Elder posted:Just finished book 4 of the Steerswoman series and I HAD NO IDEA THAT THE SERIES WAS UNFINISHED GODDAMN IT I haven't read the books but I've always heard it is one of the more infamous unfinished series. Also that Uplift series sounds like a galactic MLM.
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Aug 17, 2022 12:08
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i never fail to read milsf as milf and boy would i like it better if there were more milves
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Aug 17, 2022 12:53
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Sailor Viy posted:What exactly is 'rational fiction'? Does it just mean "like Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality"? it trends to be more Adolf Hitler and the gas chambers of efficiency in topic but yeah it's generally weird fanfic poo poo like that
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Aug 17, 2022 13:13
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A Proper Uppercut posted:Also that Uplift series sounds like a galactic MLM.
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Aug 17, 2022 13:24
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When I first read HPMoR I wasn't paying close attention to the conversation it you linked in and started reading it without realizing who Yudowsky was. As a consequence I assumed no one could be taking the organizer seriously so so someone must be using an idea to its logical extreme for a laugh. I was pretty far before it dawned on me the author was serious. Yud is pretty creative, if he wasn't convinced of his own genius and believed whatever popped in his own head he could've been an ok writer of fiction, so long as he put the time in to practice writing better.
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Aug 17, 2022 13:34
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FBH991 posted:
There's always Dread Empire's Fall if you want that. The setup is that megabrutal alien tyrants showed up, bombed the gently caress out of the Earth and told us that it'd go on until we accepted total subjugation, and when we did they gave the people who were smart enough to surrender first a fuckton of cash and put them in charge of the planet while the aliens went off to conquer more species.
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Aug 17, 2022 14:05
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Gato The Elder posted:Just finished book 4 of the Steerswoman series and I HAD NO IDEA THAT THE SERIES WAS UNFINISHED GODDAMN IT I'm so sorry you had to find out this way. She is apparently still working on the last two books (The Changes in the Dark and The City in the Crags), but it's been 18 years with no ETA on either 
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Aug 17, 2022 14:50
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In Uplift, the galactic civilization is utterly sclerotic, governed by ancient hierarchies and customs set down literally millions of years ago. It's very similar to Dune in that regard. Humans accidentally made ourselves A-tier and were about to be S-tier and the Rules were about to force the Bug Empire and the Evil Shark Mouth Collective to treat us as equals, so they lost their minds and started a huge galactic war. I've always been bad at visualizing aliens based on descriptions (I just picked up that Damned trilogy and they're just throwing different alien species at me like crazy) so I always appreciated that Brin had an illustrated guide to what guys looked like. This should be made a law going forward (also an illustrated guide to what spaceships are supposed to look like)
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Aug 17, 2022 15:34
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DACK FAYDEN posted:
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Aug 17, 2022 15:35
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Gato The Elder posted:Just finished book 4 of the Steerswoman series and I HAD NO IDEA THAT THE SERIES WAS UNFINISHED GODDAMN IT I totally feel for you. Finding out a series you thought was finished isn't, after reading even 1 book, absolutely sucks. After the last one is a heartbreaker I know even if the ending comes out soon it'll be years before I feel like rereading 
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Aug 17, 2022 16:26
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Sailor Viy posted:What exactly is 'rational fiction'? Does it just mean "like Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality"? I can only imagine what their fiction is, but I'm guessing it's probably not good.
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Aug 17, 2022 16:54
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There's also Weird Humanity stuff like Humans Wanted, We're the Weird Aliens, and Pink Thing: Tales of Humanity in Space -- WH tends to be HFY-adjacent but focus more on "we're just as weird to the aliens as they are to us" than on humans necessarily being superior because of it, although a lot of WH stories set up a situation where the way in which the humans are weird helps them save the day. Answers offered to "what makes humanity weird relative to the rest of galactic society" include: - obsession with food as an art form rather than just a means of staying alive - will form an emotional bond with anything, including nonsapient animals and inanimate objects - no exoskeleton - unusually fast/slow metabolism - unusually hot/cold temperature requirements - diet requires things that are toxic to most life, or finds toxic things that most alien metabolisms absolutely require - likes tinkering with things even when they already work On the HFY side, First Contact/Behold Humanity is less "humans are inherently superior" and more "humans are the ancient, terrifying precursor race" -- IIRC the reason humanity has such a leg up on everyone else is that they've just been around a lot longer and have invented, reshaped entire stellar clusters with, and discarded as obsolete more space-warping technologies than most species have had hot dinners; and are now content to mostly shut themselves off from the squabbling youngsters of galactic society in favour of uploading themselves into hypersquid and doing full-scale Battlefleet Gothic LARPs -- until something draws their attention.
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Aug 17, 2022 17:04
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Gato The Elder posted:Just finished book 4 of the Steerswoman series and I HAD NO IDEA THAT THE SERIES WAS UNFINISHED GODDAMN IT This may be the only unfinished series that I was ok with, as each book did a good job of being a complete 'thought'. Don't get your hopes up for more, it's been almost two decades. Here's the author's blog: https://www.rosemarykirstein.com/ She was working on the fifth book in 2018 but haven't seen mention of it since, might have missed something though. Did a quick skim.
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Aug 17, 2022 17:10
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Jedit posted:There's always Dread Empire's Fall if you want that. The setup is that megabrutal alien tyrants showed up, bombed the gently caress out of the Earth and told us that it'd go on until we accepted total subjugation, and when we did they gave the people who were smart enough to surrender first a fuckton of cash and put them in charge of the planet while the aliens went off to conquer more species. I remember liking those those books. The real set-up is that the last emperor (who is the very last of the conquering aliens) is about to die and nobody really knows WTF to do next because the alien empire was micro-managerial as gently caress. "Wars" were fought by space ships rolling up to a primitive, unconquered planet, nuking the poo poo out of it (because said primitive planet was basically helpless against that) and then going "You wanna surrender and join our empire or glow in the dark some more?" Basically there's no Grand Admiral Thrawn/Captain Kirk/Commander Adama or anything like that because this empire hasn't fought a peer/near-peer conflict in centuries. So they have to figure it all out start at square one.
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Aug 17, 2022 17:32
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Gato The Elder posted:Just finished book 4 of the Steerswoman series and I HAD NO IDEA THAT THE SERIES WAS UNFINISHED GODDAMN IT Now you can subscribe to her blog and be sad like the rest of us.
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Aug 17, 2022 17:52
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pseudorandom name posted:Now you can subscribe to her blog and be sad like the rest of us. Oh is she also somehow simultaneously a fan of the New York Football Giants and the New York Jets.
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Aug 17, 2022 17:59
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