|
Tars Tarkas posted:I will literally do this all day, settings, character guides, monster manuals, bestiaries, fake naturalist journals, starship guides, technical manuals, inject them into my veins! Yes I read real naturalist journals and guides to animals/plants/rocks/dinosaurs/invertebrates. Tracking down guides to protists was one of the first things that sent me to the adult sections of the libraries when I was like 7. There's a recent sci-fi art book that's just this! https://www.amazon.com/Teeming-Universe-Extraterrestrial-Exploration-Journey/dp/B09FCCCDRN And you'd probably enjoy these online projects too, if you haven't seen them already: https://sites.google.com/site/worldofserina/home https://mysteryfleshpit.tumblr.com
|
#
¿
Dec 15, 2021 02:58
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 15, 2024 06:16 |
|
|
Lampsacus posted:Does anyone know of a sci fi story where an object suddenly appears? For example, a giant pink triangle in the sky. Or an odd enormous sleeping hermit crab on a hill. And it's at least somewhat about people's reaction to the unexplained apparency rather than any answers. Not quite exactly what you specified, but Hyperpilosity by L. Sprague De Camp and The New Prehistory by Rene Rebetez-Cortes are similar in concept. Both involve humans undergoing an anomalous physical change that is never really explained, and the focus is on people's reactions both on an individual and social level. Oh, and I forgot this earlier in relation to "encyclopedic" sci-fi-- All Tomorrows: https://web.archive.org/web/20061124141617/http://www.nemoramjet.com/alltomorrows.pdf ScienceSeagull fucked around with this message at 21:07 on Dec 15, 2021 |
|
#
¿
Dec 15, 2021 20:53
|
|
|
StrixNebulosa posted:How to detect a heavy reader: they mispronounce words all the time, because they learned 'em all from books. Don't doxx me!
|
|
#
¿
Dec 18, 2021 04:28
|
|
|
General Battuta posted:Honestly the most unrealistic part about the vampires is that they can learn. Human social mimicry is a very specialized adaptation, and predators with narrow niches tend to stick to their scripts of being really good at a few baked-in things. You seem to need to be an omnivore with a kind of unpredictable diet to really get a generalist brain. What’s the bird book? Sounds interesting. As for Blindsight vampires, they’re an interesting idea but I think the crucifix thing is kind of silly.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 23, 2022 20:44
|
|
|
Rec me some sci-fi/fantasy that's set in a world where alternative/obsolete/pseudoscientific theories are actually true, e.g. the Earth is in fact flat and 6000 years old, alchemy and humor theory are valid models, etc. Such as some of Ted Chiang's stories, and Garfinkle's Celestial Matters.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 29, 2022 04:31
|
|
|
Embassytown has been on my to-read list for a while, thanks for the reminder. I heard it involves George Lakoff's metaphor theories, which sounds really interesting. Thanks everyone for the recs! Vergil Magus sounds especially interesting; those should keep me busy a while. And if you like Herodotus, I recommend The Travels of Sir John Mandeville for more fantastical accounts of far-off lands and their inhabitants. He also recounts the giant ant story. Happiness Commando posted:I've complained about Egan a lot in this thread, but I think Orthogonal is his best-worst. Best, in that it's the purest distillitation of his "what if" ideating, and worst in that the narrative is a pretty thin veneer over the science that he really wanted to explore and write about. It's kind of like instead of Neal Stephenson infodumping for dozens of pages about some particular niche of history, it's a sock puppet character lecturing about or experimenting to discover the implications of 4 dimensions of unified space-time. I've read some Egan including Orthogonal, and I'm inclined to agree. I liked the alien biology stuff, but the physics lectures were a big slog. I preferred Dichronauts, which features a modified space-time in the opposite way to Orthogonal-- instead of all dimensions being "space-like," two of them are time-like, which makes it impossible for anything to rotate and for light to travel in some directions.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 29, 2022 15:42
|
|
|
FPyat posted:Hanya Yanagihara has also written a Cloud Atlas-like book called To Paradise. Which apparently sucks: https://harpers.org/nc-redirect/?redirect_to=https://harpers.org/archive/2022/01/ad-nauseam-hanya-yanigihara-to-paradise-the-pandemic-novel/
|
|
#
¿
May 21, 2022 01:43
|
|
|
MockingQuantum posted:Also since it was mentioned in this thread fairly recently, The 13&1/2 Lives of Captain Bluebear is on sale on Kindle for $2.99 today I got this from the library last week because of this thread, it's a lot of fun!
|
|
#
¿
Mar 17, 2023 20:51
|
|
|
SimonChris posted:
Just decided to pick up the Kindle and I really liked it! I enjoy works of speculative fiction that use alternate cosmological theories, and this is one I haven't seen before. Also enjoyed your short story collection with the penguin tentacles (pentacles).
|
|
#
¿
Sep 15, 2023 06:04
|
|
|
Well if nothing ate them, what’s the problem???
|
|
#
¿
Mar 22, 2024 21:38
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 15, 2024 06:16 |
|
|
If you like philosophical stories, definitely check out Ted Chiang if you haven't already. And Greg Egan, though his newer work especially tends more towards alternate physics and biology (e.g. what if there were two timelike dimensions, or all matter and life forms existed on different scales, or people's cells were autonomous and could move from body to body) than philosophical questions per se.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 30, 2024 18:40
|
|