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docbeard posted:Isn't there at least one other big series out there that's at least as blatantly Hornblower But In Space? There's the Seafort Saga by David Feintuch. It's been nearly two decades since I read it, but I seem to remember the first few entries to be pretty good. Much of it takes place during years-long isolated FTL transits, so it tends to be more focused on the internal ship and crew dynamics than major space battles. There's a weird undercurrent of society being super religious and vaguely theocratic, though honestly I can't quite recall whether that was just worldbuilding or the author's views seeping in.
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Jun 7, 2020 17:58
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Perestroika posted:There's the Seafort Saga by David Feintuch. It's been nearly two decades since I read it, but I seem to remember the first few entries to be pretty good. Much of it takes place during years-long isolated FTL transits, so it tends to be more focused on the internal ship and crew dynamics than major space battles. There's a weird undercurrent of society being super religious and vaguely theocratic, though honestly I can't quite recall whether that was just worldbuilding or the author's views seeping in. Does that start with Midshipman's hope?
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Jun 8, 2020 00:47
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Chapter Eight Jason is deciding what his next move should be. He really wants to hedge against further police activity, and is considering hiding in the jungle or remote South Pacific islands. He then tallies his resources: some money, is handsome, has Charisma, and 42 years as a six. He also has his collected experinces. He decides an apartment would be nice for now; but he can't put his own name on anything, as landlords are required to update the police on residences. So, somebody else that has an apartment, like a woman he seduces. After rolling it through his head a bit, he gets a quibble (apparently these are software piloted, so like a johnny cab) and directs it to fly to reno, to a specific hi-tone club he knows. He calls it up, and charms the matre'd by remembering the man's name. It all goes wrong, though, as he gives his name and the Matre'd says "try booking us in two weeks." Once again, denied, he grinds his teeth and sends "sheets of pain" through his mouth with his now destroyed filling now almost off entirely. Course correction for the Quibble: make it Las Vegas. Jason enters another hi-tone club, but no so hi-tone a nobody like him can't get in. He knew "classy chicks" hung out here, and gets lucky: he sees a woman he once had an affair with when Heather Hart was out of town for a few months. Her name is Ruth Rae. She's thirty-eight, still not bad looking, so Jason decides to go for it (after a lot of deets flash through his head as to how old she is - she wears bifocals at home!!!!!) Using the fact that Rae is unaware of their pre-existing relationship, Jason seduces a woman that as far as she's concerned is wearing a "seduce me" sign. The band that night is Freddy Hydrocephalic. Oh, and I guess the Saint's Row universe is nearby, as Rae thinks she recognizes Jason from the Phantom Baller Show. Oh, and Ruth thinks the ones that really protect you are strangers, as she destroyed a cash deposit last year of four $50 bills, and was nearly sent to the Gulag in Georgia (it was an entrapment sting) and her boss somehow made it go away. Anyway, so she says she considers Jason a friend, so he is in like Flynn.
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Jun 8, 2020 03:06
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"Some A&M in space knockoff, I forgot the name" by "some David Weber adjacent dude, I forgot the name" Not-Steven works as palace librarian in some remote, small & independent space kingdom. She moved there from space-Britain after all of her family was killed in some noble infighting. Then Not-Jack walks in, he is a lieutenant here with a diplomatic ship from space Britain. They discuss archaeology or biology and he offers to order some low ranking space sailors to rebuild her library and undercut the space-carpenter union. Later a space French diplomat meets her and blackmails her into helping with his secret invasion/palace-coup that seems to be supported by every living person in the book, except for our heroes. Frenchie also tells her that Not-Jack is the son of the guy who killed her whole family. She ends up challenging not-Jack to a duel. We later find out that she got expelled from her old university for killing to many people in duels. But before they can get their fight on, space France attacks and takes over the planet. All of not-jack's superior officers are executed, he was out womanizing so he is now the highest ranking brit in the system. Not-steven decides to side with space-britain and takes the scabbing sailors for a ride through the city, while pretending to be a space french commando team. They meet up with not-jack and end up stealing a wet water boat, which they crash into some deserted island. After a few days the cops come to arrest them and they steal their boat. They somehow make it to the spaceport and re-steal jack's original ship. During that they also capture Frenchie and when he tries to tell the space English about how she helped the space french take the palace she shoots him. There is a space battle against the space-french ship, which of course is larger and better then the space-british one. Not-steven spends the battle sneaking into the orbital command point for the planetary defence system. The space-britsh navy arrives and takes control of the planet. Frenchie had some clinically insane sidekick, who now is totally loyal to not-steven because she killed her previous boss. They return to space-london in triumph. Not-steven walks into her old family home and shoots a few of the people now living there, which returns ownership of her parents properties to her. The End. From what I remember from the many sequels: They go on many more adventures mostly cribbed from the later half of A&M. The protagonists never get romantic with each other. No sloths get debauched.
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Jun 8, 2020 12:37
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VictualSquid posted:We later find out that she got expelled from her old university for killing to many people in duels. Finally, a relatable protagonist.
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Jun 8, 2020 12:49
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Nebakenezzer posted:Does that start with Midshipman's hope? Yeah, that should be the first one.
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Jun 8, 2020 13:16
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This is a really fun and good thread so I'm gonna sticky it for the next seven days!
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Jun 8, 2020 16:00
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Aliens have conquered Earth, beings who see (and treat) humans like barely-intelligent animals. Our hero, Shane, is a translator-courier, an unwilling-but-comfortable collaborator with the aliens by virtue of his rare ability to speak the alien language. While on a mission he sees a woman get captured by the aliens and I guess she's hot or something because he intervenes on her behalf by insisting she's a natural linguist. She's not willing to play along until he tells her that he's secretly a vanguard of a massive resistance movement (a lie of course). Except it turns out she actually is part of a resistance movement, whoops. To keep the grift going (and thus to keep himself and the possibility of getting into Maria(?)'s pants alive) he invents a folk hero called the Pilgrim who can evade the aliens' surveillance and who is working for humanity's freedom. (This isn't as crazy as it sounds; he has access to certain alien technologies, and religious 'pilgrims' are one of the few groups allowed to travel relatively freely, so he is able to use the disguise to deface alien buildings and such in relative safety). Everything spirals out of control, and he ends up accidentally inspiring the worldwide revolution he made up. Even after he comes clean to Maria she forgives him because he's actually accomplished what he was only pretending to try to do, and he's committed to actually doing it now. It all comes down in the end to a confrontation between Shane and his alien master, the leader of the Earth occupation. Along the way Shane managed to help thwart an attempted coup (by an alien less sympathetic to humans) and earned a bit of his master's trust. Shane leads an army of 'pilgrims' against the alien forces, and while the alien tech is superior, it becomes clear that there are simply too many rebelling humans to make continued occupation worthwhile. The book ends with the alien commander admonishing Shane, telling him that the entire point of the occupation was to see if humanity was 'worthy' of joining the aliens in a war to liberate their own homeworld from an enemy threat. The aliens withdraw, basically telling humanity to go gently caress themselves in the process.
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Jun 8, 2020 16:19
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Book 12: Mission of Honor Okay, so it turns out the group that’s been manipulating Haven and Manticore into war is a planet called Mesa. They’re a planet of genetic slavers and there are several companies that specialize in custom slaves based that have been mentioned in past books. They want Manticore and Haven fighting each other and now they’re manipulating a third polity that I haven’t mentioned up until now: the Solarian League. The SL is headquartered on Earth and is, of course, huge and hugely corrupt. They’re far behind Manticore in terms of technology but have a lot more ships. Anyway they attack some Manticore fleet and both fleets get shredded. Then Mesa blows up all of the Manticore system. Really, they have more advanced technology than anyone else in the galaxy for some reason and fire a bunch of stealth missiles at Manticore’s orbital infrastructure. All of their space stations and shipyards are blown up and millions die. Oh yeah Mesa can also control people with nanobots and turn them into assassins without them knowing it. Finally Haven and Manticore realize that someone has been playing them against one another and the president of Haven and queen of Manticore sign a cease-fire. But uh-oh Mesa told the SL that the Manticore system is all messed up so now is a good time to attack. The SL dispatches a massive fleet but Manticore finds out they’re coming. Will they save their home system? Spoiler: yes because Honor is there and she cannot lose.
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Jun 8, 2020 23:10
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Book 13: A Rising Thunder So there’s this company that will take you back in time and let you shoot a dinosaur. Thing is that it was going to die in minutes anyway so this doesn’t affect the future. Anyway, the dumbest man in the world signs up for this and … poo poo, wait, that’s A Sound of Thunder. My bad. So there’s this planet that will grow you slaves for whatever thing you need a whole bunch of people for. Labor, sex … that’s pretty much it. They’re going to leverage this into taking over the galaxy by making everyone else fight each other. When we last left Our Hero, Manticore and friends was waiting for a massive Solarian fleet to attack the Manticore system. Honor is in charge of the defense so of course they win. Victory is achieved through the same strategy that has been used to win every other major battle for the last seven or eight books: the enemy fleet is lured in by one fleet but that fleet has reinforcements powered down/hiding behind a moon/waiting to make a short-range hyperspace jump in. The enemy fleet engages and then a bunch more ships show up. Repeat until you stop hitting #1 on the New York Times Best Sellers List consistently. Honor uses this time-honored (heh) tactic to blow up the entire Solarian fleet despite being outnumbered like 5 to 1 because the Solarian ships are obsolete compared to The Good Guys’. Anyway the corrupt group that really runs the SL spin this in a way that lets them keep the war going. But now they’re going to fight Manticore by commerce raiding instead of attacking them directly. There’s a subplot about a smaller nation that was in the Solarian sphere of influence but now realizes that Manticore is where it’s at and switches sides.
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Jun 8, 2020 23:37
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Book 14: Uncompromising Honor Mesa realizes the jig is up and Haven, Manticore, Greyson, and others (now stylizing themselves as The Grand Alliance) are onto them. So they start launching more and more terrorist attacks. Meanwhile Manticore is beating up the Solarian League left right and center despite a bunch of smaller systems getting their poo poo blown up. The Grand Alliance lands troops on Mesa but the conspirators nuke their own planet to frame the good guys. There’s one more big battle in the system that switched sides last book and another bunch of space stations are nuked by Mesa spys. The SL refuses to believe that Mesa is behind all of this so Honor says “gently caress this” and just conquers Earth. Well, not really, but she rampages around the solar system for a while until there’s a coup on Earth and the new government sues for peace. Another time-honored (double heh) strategy pays off in the end! At this point Weber goes “eh, I’m kind of sick of this series” and Honor announces her retirement. The End! Or is it? No moral.
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Jun 8, 2020 23:51
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Thank you for attending my TED Talk.
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Jun 8, 2020 23:52
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I will say it was unexpected of Weber to make the Western hemisphere the villain for the last couple of books. There are some lengthy diversions about developing worlds being plundered by corporations and crushed by GotLag fucked around with this message at 23:58 on Jun 8, 2020 |
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Jun 8, 2020 23:55
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Moon Slayer posted:Thank you for attending my TED Talk. Good posts with strong....memory energy, I enjoyed them! And now, another chapter out of a book I failed to remember: Chapter 9 So Jason and Ruth were loving, and Jason is amazed by how big her apartment is, the dog breeder man she married must have (or had) serious cash. Ruth smokes cigarettes, which is very very expensive, and also the only vice that is explicitly described as illegal. Jason is actually censoring his own thoughts as to how old Ruth looks, changing "prune face" to "weathered". I dunno, I think as far as showbiz goes, Dick knows of what he writes here. Hollywood wrote off Natalie Wood past 35 FFS Ahem. Anyway, Jason asks if Ruth remembers Monica Buff. Ruth does, as she was her sister-in-law for six years. She sounds like a catch: mentally ill with what sounds like schizophrenia, rarely washes, can go for days at a time saying literally nothing, would steal from anybody (like Ruth) if the opportunity arose. Naturally Jason had a "brief but intense affair with her" She was 19, he was 37. She spent all her days shoplifting so she could feed students (IE the bad literally underground rebels.) Despite being an unmedicated schizophrenic, she beat the police system entirely. Any time her paranoia said "pols gonna run a spot check" she would call the police about a man beating on her door, and then she'd manuver whatever refugee she was keeping out of the house, and then lock the door on them. The police would show up and find a student beating on her door. No more police problems! She also wandered off and vanished, and is probably dead now. While Ruth is trying to understand what Jason saw in a mentally ill teenager who stank, Jason remembers "hey, didn't McNulty ask about who planted the tracking dot?" Jason then spends an intense half hour in the bathroom, looking for the translucent purple dot and eventually finding it. Not only has this whole loving  ruse been for nothing, now Ruth's life might be in danger too. Bummer. Jason asks for coffee, which ruth gets out of her automat/replicator thing, in a big mug that says "keep on Truckin'" on it. After wolfing it down, tooth pain be damned, He then explains he has to leave, he doesn't know if the pigs are on his tail, but getting an innocent person police hassle is a sin he doesn't want, and besides, you're too old Ruth looks like "a warped, stomped doll", then runs to the kitchen and runs back with a stoneware platter with souvenir of knotts berry farm written on it. She at a run tries to cave Jason's head in with the platter, and Jason only just manages to intercept with his elbow. The platter shatters into three pieces, one slashing a deep gouge in Jason's arm. There's a pause. Ruth says she's sorry. Jason says he's sorry, too. Ruth asks why Jason said that to her, Jason says "because of my own fears of age. Because they are wearing me down, what's left of me." Jason does some first aid and wonders where Ruth has gotten to. If it's to get the police, after what I said, Jason thinks, he couldn't blame her.
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Jun 9, 2020 00:38
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A man's wife dies during child birth and he enters a fugue state, seeing the future that will be. In this future, the sun is gone and the world is in eternal darkness. The last humans survive in a singular great archology, knowing that this is the hospice of the human race. The knowledge to create this place is long lost and the power that sustains the building, which seems both geothermal and somehow spiritual, will eventually run dry. It will not be a fast process, and has been ongoing for millions of years, but will happen. The world has changed too, air is thinner so flying machines no longer function, the geography of the world is warped, you get the idea. Humans while their time away with pleasure and can psychically communicate. Its not a bad existence, and the humans are thankful that they have this existence at all. Outside the walls of the city things exist and all desire the death of humans. Some are physical, like creatures claimed to be offspring of humans and the darkness, while others are seemingly psychological like a cozy house that psychically lures you in and then puppets your soul to lure in more victims or a great city that seems both dead and bustling that no living human has ever dared visit. Above them all are the Watchers, five great things, taller than mountains who slowly, almost imperceptibly are moving towards the archology over hundreds of thousands if not millions of years. The new protagonist has a psychic vision of another archology and a woman in it. Setting out alone because groups of humans outside the walls acts like a feeding beacon, he braves the land to find her. He encounters a variety of horrors as mentioned above he can barely describe because focusing on them allows them to attune to human psyches and you know, commence the feeding. He eventually reaches the other archology and in what is honestly kind of a surprise it is not an elaborate psychic trap to murder him. There he meets the woman who he recognizes as the woman who died in childbirth like 100,000 words back which means he is our fugue author. They reunite and leave the dead archology whose power source dried up and return towards his archology. More adventure ensues, but the bleak, sad kind where the eldritch abominations are the fault of mankinds hubris and unfixable and the ability to surpass the past is impossible. As they arrive at the archology a conflagration of horrors arrive, seemingly to kill our heroes to their love. The two accept they will die since the archology wont expend the resources to save them. Just then the archologies guns turn on for the first time in possible a million years. The power drain to do this is so intense the archology goes dark temporarily, and has assuredly cut another chunk of years off the archologies lifespan. It does, however, blow the monsters to oblivion. As the two reincarnated lovers enter the archology, everyone celebrates and enjoys this moment and the book ends. You the reader wonder where the hell the frame narrative went. This book is like a mile long, and he couldnt spare a couple pages to wrap this up? What the hell? Is the moral just this guy would doom the entire human race to ensure he can be reunited in another life with his love? Is it even the future? Its so unsatisfying to just end in the
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Jun 9, 2020 03:15
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Moon Slayer posted:Despite being a white evangelical society with names like Jebbidiah and Enoch they have always dueled with katanas of course
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Jun 9, 2020 06:24
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So there is this guy and he is an extremely good dancer. He lives in space. He dances all of the dances that are available in his career as a space dancer. People tell him how good he is at it (extremely). Eventually, he opts to up the ante on his dancing proficiency by going to the planet of the super good "down to earth" dancer peoples who are said to know a dance that is particularly compelling. They're dying out though, and he learns the Super Cool Dance from the last old fart who knows it, and the old fart makes him promise to never dance their sacred dance again. It's only for them, and only for those who have gone through the long process of committing themselves to learning the Super Cool Dance. It's not for casual observers or for casual consumption, it is sacred to them. At one point, he sleeps with a female dancer and her vagina is corrosive so he messes up his dick something fierce. She's not to blame but he's got a bit of the ol' scabcrotch for a while. Anyway, he also gets into a relationship with a male snake person. Not like, a snake-person like a person with snake features. It's a giant snake but they're people. All the aliens are pretty alien (also he's an alien, there are no humans in this book). They're loving. Eventually, he decides the Super Cool Dance is too super cool to die out and now that the last of the old farts is dead, not dancing the Super Cool Dance means it's goddamn over. No more Super Cool Dance anywhere in the universe. And that's like a waste, yeah? So he puts on a performance of the Super Cool Dance and everyone is wowed. However, he loses his performer's license or something--I haven't read this book in a while--over it, and the cultural insensitivity of dancing a dance that he knows isn't "his" and which no one else outside of that dead culture was supposed to perform. Also I think he's a big jerk about it so they sentence him to some even worse punishment maybe? His solution is to get petitions from powerful persons in various respective governments. At another point, he goes to a planet with the Queen of the Bees. I'm pretty sure Bee Queen is like "fuckin dance whatever, I am a bee and I don't mind this." Eventually he goes back to see the snake guy he was loving and they gently caress some more. they're endgame. he fucks this snake for Real. what they have going on is the real deal. good for them. Finally, he gets the petitions he needs and is like "sorry you all died, but extinct cultures have no rights." And then he dances the Super Cool Dance. We're meant to be conflicted about this. Maybe we are. The Merrow Tree, I actually like this book a shitload if only for being a scifi book that has no humans and doesn't even have war as a topic. I should reread it.
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Jun 9, 2020 06:44
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Pick posted:of course Having recently re-read the series I can confirm that the movie The Seven Samurai is explicitly mentioned as one of Grayson's foundational texts. GotLag fucked around with this message at 06:48 on Jun 9, 2020 |
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Jun 9, 2020 06:45
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woah I actually remembered this book better than I thought godspeed you culturally appropriating snakefucker
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Jun 9, 2020 06:49
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Death sentence for refusing to honor somebody's last wishes is fuckin hardcore.
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Jun 9, 2020 14:22
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Moon Slayer posted:Book 12: Mission of Honor To be fair the SL navy at this point of the story has a huge fleet, but it's a huge fleet of the equivalent of Pre-Dreads that they're sending after the equivalent of the USN circa 1945 with a comparatively sized RN circa 1945 to assist. Mesa is pretty much Deux Ex Machina though.
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Jun 9, 2020 14:44
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And now for something that’s not military sci-fi. It’s the near future. Not Neil DeGrasse Tyson (NNDT) is livestreaming an astronomy camp when one of the kids goes “that’s weird.” He’s seen something launch from the moon. Later after some science they determine that actually something passed through the moon. They never do figure out what it was but think it was a microsingularity. It’s a moot point because the moon is now broken into three pieces. That wouldn’t be so bad except that there’s also a massive debris cloud. NNDT does some more science and realizes that they have about three years before all of this debris starts entering the atmosphere all at once. That many meteors will superheat the atmosphere, completely scouring the surface. Earth will be uninhabitable for two thousand years. We’re also introduced to a few other characters including the commander of the International Space Station and one of the scientists there. The ISS still exists and has had more modules bolted to it over the years, including a rotating ring so there’s parts with gravity. The commander is something of a pariah for some reason that I can’t remember despite seeming to be pretty good at her job. The scientist has a dad that is a miner in Alaska that she talks to on a shortwave radio. Anyway after much debate the world consensus is that the best way for humanity to survive as a species is in space. Their solution is to launch a bunch of cylinders connected to each other by a tether in pairs. These will be spinning around each other to create gravity. There will be limited maneuverability so most people will be stuck there forever. Each joined pair will have hydroponics and in theory will be fully self sustaining. The “cloud’s” leadership will be on the ISS. The current crew is told they won’t be coming home before all this goes down. Over the next few years Earth starts firing up as many rockets as they can. Accident rates and launch failures skyrocket because everyone is rushing. Every country on Earth is allowed to send only two of its citizens but they have to be approved by the space council. Highlights of the next few years include: - Venezuela tries to interdict the Guiana launch site to get more of their citizens on the evacuation but President Not-Hillary Clinton nukes them because hey they’re all going to die anyway in a little bit. - Russia has been doing most of the construction on the rapidly expanding ISS. Instead of spending the time and money training cosmonautes and making spacesuits they stick people in metal tubes with minimal life support and manipulator arms. These workers have like a 90% fatality rate but if they survive they get to stay up there. Lady scientist falls in love with one of the lady cosmonaut construction workers. - NNDT has a reconciliation with his estranged son. - ISS commander is demoted and a new (male) commander is sent up. - Not-Elon Musk comes up in a privately built spacecraft. He has an idea to go harness a comet and bring it back to orbit to ensure they have reliable access to fresh water. He and his crew fly off. - Former ISS commander’s husband is a Navy submarine captain and is being sent on secret missions. - Earth starts to send up its evacuees. The Pakistani couple includes Not-Malala. - NNDT is the public face of the effort and is ordered by the president to go up to the ISS to be a calming presence. The day of reckoning arrives (what they’ve referred to as the Hard Rain). Scientist talks to her dad on the radio as it goes down. He’s going to try and take shelter in the mine he works at with a bunch of people. Former commander’s husband says they’re taking the sub as deep as it can go. Shortly after everyone on Earth is dead they pick up a signal from an X-32. They bring it in and find Non-Hillary Clinton on board. Everyone is pissed because part of the agreement was that no world leaders could put themselves on the evacuation list. She claims the Secret Service did it without her consent. Things go badly pretty much from jump. Pods fail, a debris strike destroys the seed bank, people go crazy. The former president is a pathological manipulator and convinces a bunch of people to steal one of the auxiliary craft and try and go colonize Mars. She doesn’t go, of course. NNDT wants to land the ISS on one of the big moon chunks so they’ll be sheltered from debris but is overruled. Anyway they pick up Non-Elon Musk’s craft coming back with the comet. Everyone on board is dead or dying because the reactor wasn’t shielded properly. A team including NNDT, former commander, and scientist are sent out to retrieve it. Due to orbital mechanics they don’t get back for a year or two. When they do get back they find that everything has really gone to poo poo and most of the cloud is dead. One faction took their pods into a higher orbit and declared themselves independent and they’re still alive but they’re pretty much it except for the ISS crew. Crop failure and cannibalism is rampant. Because people have so much time on their hands they spend a lot of it arguing with each other over the space internet which leads to a lot of real world violence. With the comet back the faction launch an assault on the ISS to try and take it so they can eat the crew and have the water to themselves. Most of them are legless because they ate their legs because you don’t need legs in zero-G. Anyway there’s a fight and almost everyone dies. The only ones left are NNDT, former commander, scientist, cosmonaut, Not-Clinton, Non-Malala, the chief bioscientist lady, and another woman I can’t remember. They take the ISS to the moon chunk and land it there. NNDT succumbs to radiation poisoning he got on the comet retrieval mission. That just leaves the seven women and, fortunately, all the intact artificial insemination and genetic manipulation tools. They have a debate about the future of the human species and what kind of genetic manipulation they will do. They have to do some to make sure their children can survive in space but each future mother has a request. Cosmonaut wants her kids to be STRONG, Not-Malala wants her children to be incapable of violence, stuff like that. They go forward knowing that they’re going to end up creating seven new species of humans. That makes them the Seven Eves (that’s the title of the book!) SMASH CUT TO THE YEAR 5000 The seven human species live in a ring around the Earth. The surface is being prepared for habitation again. The oceans are being refilled with comets, a few plant species are able to be reintroduced, animals are cloned. A team including one of each of the species is assembled and sent to Earth to investigate some strange readings. They find an underground society descended from the miners who took shelter. Later they find a race of water-breathing hominids they theorize are descended from a secret underwater colony. There’s some intrigue with another nation on the planetary ring and one of their group is a spy. In the end they’re optimistic that Earth can be repopulated. This last section is like a third of the book but I honestly don't remember it nearly as well as the "present day" stuff. The End! Moon Slayer fucked around with this message at 15:25 on Jun 9, 2020 |
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Jun 9, 2020 15:15
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1968. Apollo 8 is going to make its flyby of the moon. Instead of orbitting the moon, it crashes in The Firmament, permanently cracking the sky, letting in the divine light, and proving that Judaism was the one true religion all along. 2017. People pretty quickly figured out that the the names of God will cause actual miracles IRL, and since that's pretty straightforward information, it can be copyrighted. The protagonist works at a cubicle farm where a computer puts up an autogenerated hypothetical name of God, and he reads it aloud in order that it might be given that divine spark from life, and if a miracle happens, that name gets copyrighted by his employer. He basically slips up and reads something not on the screen and turns out, THAT is a name of God, and a very powerful one, and thus starts an extremely long and convoluted caper where he tries to exploit his unopyrighted knowledge. The plot's mediocre but the worldbuilding has some cool as gently caress elements. Satan has literally poured out of Lake Baikal and the USSR had to develop a Kabbalic extension of Marxism-Leninism. Wall-Drug has become of one of the major hazards of the United States - if you do any long distance driving, there's a chance that you'll end up in Wall-Drug, SD and whenever you try to leave it you just wind up trapped in a loop of going back to Wall-Drug. Mythopoetic extensions of folk-lore become material, and puns become physically devastating. It eventually ends pretty much when the author gets tired.
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Jun 9, 2020 15:59
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Tulip posted:Death sentence for refusing to honor somebody's last wishes is fuckin hardcore. If I recall, at first everybody's just like, please don't perform the dance, it's not sensitive to this culture. Or do a modified form. And then he's a big dick about how he's an ARTIST and it's not FAIR and they're like fine if you do it you die. hows that huh.
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Jun 9, 2020 16:04
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Pick posted:If I recall, at first everybody's just like, please don't perform the dance, it's not sensitive to this culture. Or do a modified form. And then he's a big dick about how he's an ARTIST and it's not FAIR and they're like fine if you do it you die. hows that huh. This is basically how Socrates died.
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Jun 9, 2020 16:05
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I might actually do a read along thread and go through it again. The prose is little bit purple but I recall liking this book.
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Jun 9, 2020 16:12
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The one thing that I for sure remember though is that the book dicks around quite a bit before it gets to the point; Actually I would've much preferred if the back cover didn't give it away because it's not that much of the actual story by length. But it's a very good climactic challenge for this specific character. To be clear, I'm not lampshading how the artist totally wants you to be on board with their goofy snakefucker wearing a Lakota headdress, I really don't think that the book is necessarily suggesting to you that he is right. But it's a conflict you don't normally see in space!
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Jun 9, 2020 16:17
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In a future where LARPing is a multi-billion dollar industry, professional GMs are international celebrities, and not-Disney is the world leader in space exploration (actually, that one sounds plausible), a real life murder in a charity LARP adventure based on Inuit mythology proves the key to stopping Muslim terrorists from sabotaging humanity's efforts to colonize Mars. The Barsoom Project by Larry Niven.
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Jun 9, 2020 23:11
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Moon Slayer posted:And now for something that’s not military sci-fi. UGGGGHHHHHHHHHH I disliked this book so much and as soon as I read this I knew what you were doing I must correct you on one point: Not Hillary Clinton has children, which makes me think she is actually Not.....whoever that useless CEO of HP was that augered the whole works straight into the ground. Was briefly Ted Cruz's VP choice e2: [Carly Fiona. My brain kept fetching Fiona Apple, now I see why] I'm a serious fan of the writer and have read previously all his books except the (apparently) poo poo first one. This book is straight garbage, tho. OK, so the destruction of humanity is so 8 women can get into a room together and have a conversation. The theme of the entire book up to this is humanity making plans, all of which fail. So despite mankind somehow surviving all that, their FIRST GODDAMN MOVE is it start making even more grandiose plans concerning genetic engineering and loving with human evolution Like it has any number of interesting ideas in the abstract, but the, y'know, novel part of it is terrible Also humanity does nothing but suck and die. Like, you literally have the ENTIRE earth's economic output to play with, why the gently caress are you not building planetary mass drivers or a few 100 Gigaton bombs to drive the moon out of orbit? It's pathetic e: In a world where the casaba howitzer already exists I don't want to hear excuses for your pseudo-zombie grimdarkness Nebakenezzer fucked around with this message at 19:06 on Jun 10, 2020 |
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Jun 10, 2020 01:37
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We follow some rich kid from some upper-class family of the great galactic bastard empire. We're meant to feel bad for this family or something because they get the short stick of the great inter-family machinations to screw over the poor or something, and we're meant to feel some great admiration or kinship with this annoying kid because somebody did some mystic child abuse when he was small and said he would do great things. We don't really see him doing much of any interest for the first half of the book or so but we do get to hear the narration and the introductory chapter quotes and everybody's thoughts as they look at him like, wearing a suit or whatever and saying to themselves, Wow, thought Alien McFuckstick, What a brilliant person this boy is. I've never seen a stance so... inspiring and wonderful. Actually they do this with pretty much every emotion they have because the author apparently doesn't know how to show things when he can just have the characters repeatedly tell us poo poo with their internal monologues. Nerds loving love this book for some loving reason. So anyway after being badgered by every side character to love the poo poo out of this boy despite him mostly just arsing around, something finally happens in that his family gets assassinated. sadly not by the proletariat breaking the shackles of their oppression but instead by some other rich family, but at least that means there's less of them total i guess. anyway he escapes and has to go run away and live with the wacky tribe of natives that all the galactic bastards have been gleefully exploiting for space opium. then he does some dances with wolves poo poo where he ingratiates himself with the tribe and learns their Magical Customs and rides a big crazy space animal which is apparently very difficult to ride because everybody keeps saying it is difficult but he can do it effortlessly because if i remember right he is specially bred or some poo poo, that's where being a good person comes from, is good breeding. nerds just go loving hogwild for this book. they can't stop talking about how it's great. anyway then they go live in some caves and all i remember from this bit is how his sister or cousin or girlfriend or something who is also there i guess eats the space opium while she's pregnant and the baby gets superpowers. eventually they all go to space somehow and all have a big fight on a spaceship and then the annoying kid is king and everybody says how great he is. apparently there are other books where you find out that being king is bad actually or something, which the nerds also love except for the nerds that hate them and yell at the other nerds for liking them. i haven't read them and can't be bothered to. oh but angepain the later books add depth to the worldbuilding and i don't care i don't.
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Jun 10, 2020 15:13
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Time for some alternate history. In this timeline the Cuban Missile Crisis went hot. The public doesn’t know for sure what happened but the official story is that Kennedy had a mental breakdown in the Situation Room and the generals had to make the call to attack the missile sites. DC and some southeast cities were wiped out. Soviet bombers also hit the outskirts of New York City and some west coast cities. NYC in particular is walled off and officially abandoned due to radiation. In response, the US used almost its entire nuclear arsenal and Russia was pretty much completely wiped off the map. There's basically nothing left east of Danzig. Now it's the mid 1970s. America has devolved into a third-world country, riven by food riots, conscription, violent crackdowns on protesters, and ostracized by the rest of the world due to their disproportionate response against the USSR. George Romney is president and the new capital is in Philadelphia. Everyone knows, however, that former Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay is the real power. With America and Russia knocked out and China rejecting reforms to try and carry the torch as the only remaining communist power, the UK and a strong Franco-German alliance are the new superpowers. It’s mentioned that the UK has brought Canada and India back into a quasi-colonial relationship again, and the UK influence over the US is growing. It’s also mentioned that Franco-Germany put the first man on the moon a few years prior. Oh yes and there’s also an urban legend that JFK survived and, if you tune in your radio to just the right station at midnight, he makes secret broadcasts. Our hero is a freelance journalist and former Army special forces. He was an “advisor” in South Vietnam when all of this went down and was recalled along with the rest of the US military (he mentioned that North Vietnam rolled over the South a few years later). Anyway like most books I read I remember the setting in a lot more detail than I do the actual plot. He gets tipped off somehow about surviving documents from the White House and goes on a search but secret government hit squads are after him. He’s joined by a young BBC reporter and love interest. There’s some tension about whether she’ll sell him out since she’s British but of course she ends up doing the right thing for love. After some stuff I don’t really remember they talk their way onto a press tour of the NYC ruins. The government is preparing to reopen parts of the city. They notice for some reason that there’s a lot of Canadian and British military personnel there. They run off on their own (I think someone tries to kill them?) and in the subway stumble across a whole underground community of thousands. It’s run by a former NYPD officer and one of the pilots of a Russian bomber that was shot down before it delivered its payload. They say that they were abandoned by the government after the bombing and now they don’t want to admit their mistake. I think the government, with help from the UK, is going to gas them. Our hero is arrested and taken to see General LeMay (retired). He bad-guy monologues for a while about the greater good and then lets our hero go. Our hero then has a few more adventures and finds the cache of documents. It’s the transcript from the Situation Room on October 24th and in it General LeMay disobeys a direct order from the president and orders the bombers to attack the missile sites. In the end these documents are leaked to the press. Shortly after huge groups of people emerge from NYC and other walled-off cities and peacefully march out of the gate. Our hero is revealed to have been a true Kennedy believer and regularly tunes into the midnight broadcasts. The End! “Resurrection Day” (not a zombie novel), and I don’t remember the author’s name. I thought it was pretty okay but I also read it over a decade ago so who knows. EDIT: Oh yes, BBC lady and the protagonist meet in Boston and she has a line about how Boston is trying way too hard to be the new New York City which I'm sure got the author some angry letters. Moon Slayer fucked around with this message at 17:27 on Jun 10, 2020 |
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Jun 10, 2020 16:29
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Tulip posted:1968. Apollo 8 is going to make its flyby of the moon. Instead of orbitting the moon, it crashes in The Firmament, permanently cracking the sky, letting in the divine light, and proving that Judaism was the one true religion all along. Wtf is this one?? Sounds pretty awesome actually.
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Jun 10, 2020 17:41
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That reminds me of a different book in which the answer to the Fermi paradox is found when the first extra-solar human space ship crashes into and breaks a giant barrier around our solar system. Decades/centuries later humanity is still sending out exploratory flights but the results are hidden from the public as negative result after negative result has crushed morale. Every star with a planet capable of supporting life has a bubble around it that's invisible from the inside but impenetrable from the outside. Someone's been seeding the galaxy and so far humanity are the first ones to have broken out and it's depressingly lonely on a civilisational level. Eventually a human exploration flight finds another popped bubble - but investigation reveals it popped tens of millennia ago and its inhabitants have long vanished. On the edge of despair, the explorers finally discover and decode a message left by the aliens - they've gone to effectively hibernate just above the event horizon of a black hole, and we head off to meet them.
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Jun 10, 2020 17:54
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Remulak posted:Wtf is this one?? Sounds pretty awesome actually. http://unsongbook.com/ Overall quality is uneven, but when it's good it's good. GotLag posted:That reminds me of a different book in which the answer to the Fermi paradox is found when the first extra-solar human space ship crashes into and breaks a giant barrier around our solar system. Decades/centuries later humanity is still sending out exploratory flights but the results are hidden from the public as negative result after negative result has crushed morale. Oo this is neat
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Jun 10, 2020 18:58
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Angepain posted:anyway then they go live in some caves and all i remember from this bit is how his sister or cousin or girlfriend or something who is also there i guess eats the space opium while she's pregnant and the baby gets superpowers. eventually they all go to space somehow and all have a big fight on a spaceship and then the annoying kid is king and everybody says how great he is. apparently there are other books where you find out that being king is bad actually or something, which the nerds also love except for the nerds that hate them and yell at the other nerds for liking them. i haven't read them and can't be bothered to. oh but angepain the later books add depth to the worldbuilding and i don't care i don't. How do we fit the god-emperor of dune, an Atredies duke in the body of a kilometer-long sandworm into socialism
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Jun 10, 2020 19:08
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Here’s some more alternate history. I’m actually going to spoiler everything but the setting for this one because I think it’s good enough that people should read it on their own. Fair warning: it’s a book about slavery with a black protaganist written by a white author. It seemed fine to me when I read it but I’m a dumb white person so I did some Googling and the most negative reviews and think pieces I read were just “it’s fine but there are other black authors who have done the same thing” so take from that what you will. Okay, on with the setting: the point of divergence here is that the Crittenden Compromise prevented the Civil War. Basically put this was a series of constitutional ammendments that said Congress would not interfere with slavery in the existing states and territories but any new state admitted to the Union would be free. As such, in modern times slavery is still legal in four states: Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Carolina (North and South Carolina merged in the early 20th century). The Fugitive Slave Act also remains on the books and “slaves” have been rebranded as Persons Bound to Labor. Technically speaking goods made by slavery are illegal in the rest of the US and in the world and there’s some worldbuilding where cotton garments are advertised as being “cruelty free.” But of course companies can’t resist goods made without labor costs so there’s a lot of shady dealings. Also the rest of the world hates this; there’s a historical quote at the start of one chapter by Secretary Kissinger on the occasion of the US withdrawal from the UN, followed by a quote from the British ambassador that’s just “good riddance.” Okay, so the story begins in modern day Indianapolis. Our protagonist is an escaped slave and unwilling CI for a US Marshal. He’s being forced to infiltrate networks that help escaped slaves escape to Canada and if he refuses he’ll be sent back. He tracks down an “escaped slave” and learns that he is actually undercover for a Catholic abolitionist organization trying to expose a company illegally selling slave-made goods. The guy is killed though and our protagonist agrees to go get the information in Alabama. There’s a lot of back and forth whether he’s going to give this information to the abolitionists or use it to get his own personal freedom. Also about three or four different betrayals from people secretly working for the Marshal Service or the abolitionists. He’s teamed up with a white woman who had a child with a slave. She’s coming along to find out what happened to her child’s father. They get into Alabama and through a series of smuggling and sneaking adventures infiltrate the company HQ and get the information. Some exploration is made (but not enough IMO) of what a combination of modern capitalism and chattel slavery would look like. Spoiler: really bad! Brainwashing, implants, and eugenics are just the tip of the iceberg. Also, the information they get reveals that this company is experimenting with genetic manipulation to make slaves that are technically not human to get around what regulations there are about treatment of slaves.. They get out, there’s a shootout between his government handler and the abolitionists, and I can’t remember what actually happens with the information they went through all of this to get or what they find out about the lady's boyfriend. The book ends with protagonist and his lady friend planning to bomb companies that contract with the garment company. “Underground Airlines,” by Ben Winters Moon Slayer fucked around with this message at 23:01 on Jun 10, 2020 |
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Jun 10, 2020 22:58
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Chapter 10 We're back with General Felix, and it's difficult to tell what time it is. Either this is a continuation of the phone call we left off on, or this is the second call Felix has made to McNulty. McNulty has just told the General that Jason has just destroyed his last tracker dot. Felix is convinced now that Jason is someone deeply sinister who must be apprehended. His evidence is the total lack of police records on Jason. McNulty thinks Jason split Los Vegas the instant he found the tracker dot; General Felix says no; he's betting Jason is still there. He also orders McNulty who is most def home, high, and ready for bed to take a pill and return to HQ. As McNulty hangs up, Felix is irritated by McNulty's drug use. (Once again, quite likely perfectly legal.) Alys (who is reading McNulty's police file) says Felix should consider that maybe Jason is broadly who he says he is. She points out skill-and-appearance wise at least, his story fits what Kathy has told police. This is also irritating to Felix who tells Alys to GTFO. She unperturbed, speculates he might be the singer who sang the latest pornochord hit---- Felix cuts her off with a bribe. If she just GTFO at this juncture, she can have a perfectly centered one-dollar black U.S. Trans-Mississippi stamp. For stamp collectors, it is a holy grail. Alys, who like her brother is super into stamps, is kind of blown away by this and agrees, and leaves for the roof. Felix got it in a trade with a somebody heading to a forced labor camp; a stamp for freedom. By himself, Felix gets introspective about why he finds Alys so disturbing. Even as the Police General in a dystopian police state plays by the rules, he thinks. Hypothetically, no police general would have somebody killed if they did the state a favor first. But Alys: she doesn't play by the rules. If you try to force her, she just becomes more chaotic and even less rule bound. Felix is terrified of this. He half expects to get home and find Alys burned the stamp, just to demonstrate her chaos-ness. He also puts on some classical music and muses about poetry, thinking at last that the reason he is right about Jason sticking in Las Vegas, is because he can think like the enemy, not like a cop (viz. McNulty, who assumes that Jason is always acting rationally.) Jason might be huge, but he was revealed apparently through a fuckup of some sort. If you assume he's this important sinister dude, how did he end up in a fleabag hotel with no papers, and then get papers through the desperate stratagem of bribing the guy at the desk? Put on the one hand what it takes to vanish entirely from the databanks, and this amateur hour stuff on the other, 10 to 1 this was some sort of blunder. I mean: why not just stay in the hotel? What was so important that he had to wander around the edge of Watts with a PI? Herb (General Felix's Lt.) points out it is only by mistakes that they have any chance of catching the really sophisticated people - otherwise they would be an unknowable metaphysical entity. But now the General has noticed him, dum dum dum dum General Felix checks in with Las Vegas. He ordered Las Vegas to conduct a sweep of the upscale apartment complex Jason signal was last detected at. (Somewhat hilariously compared to today's tech, the dot only returns a signal accurately enough to say Jason is in this building.) So of the 36 or so units, 30 have been searched. No Taverner, though. Feeling vaguely disappointed, Felix rings off, telling the uniform to call him direct when they bag him. Waiting for McNulty to get to his desk and for the police squad to find Jason, he worries about the idiots doing the sweep and their noisy goddamn ways. (If you're picturing a bunch of Half-Life overwatch soldiers or a SWAT team, that actually seems a bit off. Written in 1972, SWAT was brand new, and these appear to be just a mob of uniform police.) Herb tries to make a bet with the General: five gold Kriegerands that they bag Taverener but this yields nothing. Intrigued, the general bets $1000 dollars that this opens a whole new vista of sinister....bad....guys for the police. Herb is nonplussed by this, because he frankly doesn't have that kind of money. New call for Felix, the police captain in Vegas reports radar/thermal imaging has detected a male about Taverner's reported size in one of the un-searched apartments. Felix orders the surrounding apartments be quietly cleared out, then move in to capture.
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Jun 11, 2020 00:45
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Tulip posted:Oo this is neat I had to do a bit of digging but it was the short story Crystal Spheres, by David Brin (published in his collection River of Time)
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Jun 11, 2020 03:23
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Nebakenezzer posted:How do we fit the god-emperor of dune, an Atredies duke in the body of a kilometer-long sandworm into socialism Clearly he seized the means of production.
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Jun 11, 2020 16:18
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Chapter 11 Jason finds Ruth smoking a cigarette in the living room, lit only by the lights of urban night outside. (Oh, apparently cigarettes are *rationed*, not illegal (because they give you cancer) and so of course the black market provides extra cigs, and Ruth in fact has a lung-shaped ashtray. She asks Jason if she loved Monica Buff. Jason says yes, qualifying it by saying there are many kinds of love. Ruth tells a story of a bunny rabbit a childhood friend once owned. Raised with cats, it always wanted to bring the cats back to a little nest the rabbit made out of cat fur. Cats being cats did not do this. Then one day it decided to play tag (which it always played with the childhood friend and the cats) with a German Shepard that was with another friend. The dog not knowing the rules (or who this strange rabbit was) bit and held the rabbit by its hindquarters, until people got him off. After that, the rabbit was terrified of dogs, but still kept trying to be a cat, because it wasn't very smart. This is why Ruth divested herself of animals entirely: their lives are short and then they die, and that hurts. Jason asks what the point of love is, then. From his experience people will just leave as they got a better offer on the love market, leaving you holding the bag of emotions. Ruth has a fairly long monolog on what love is, saying it's completely irrational and against most human instincts, which is survival. But survival always fails, in the end. No instinct can defeat death. So love is the thing that goes on; not with you, but with others, and that's why it alone gives the true peace and contentment. Jason's repost is that since love inevitably is irrational and leads to badness, you could cut it out of your life entirely. Ruth responds that saying that grief - this is really what is being talked about - is the thing that allows love its special value, as love with grief would be under or unappreciated. Ruth shares a ghost experience she had with the family dog. Grief as experiencing death for a time, then gradually you return to life. Jason plans to stay till morning at Ruth's apartment. He thinks it unlikely that the Police would turn on him that quickly. He ends on the disquieting thought that in this situation, he is the rabbit; something that doesn't understand the rules of the people around him.
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Jun 12, 2020 22:11
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