|
I have not personally read it but people very rarely mention it in any context so it must have been super forgettable.
|
#
?
Sep 16, 2022 04:24
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 20, 2024 00:50 |
|
|
DACK FAYDEN posted:he started out trying to explain why all Star Trek aliens had the same level of tech and looked mostly human and by god he succeeded I always loved the Traveler RPG's reasoning for the latter part, it's still kind of forbidden knowledge so spoilers: Imagine the God Emperor of Mankind from warhammer 40k was born, but instead of being born into humanity's frothing pool of psychosis he was born into a race of exceedingly chill little lizard people. A lot of the galaxy's races are just leftovers of him tinkering with genetics trying to find good help/make slave races and therefore mostly follow his body plan. Then he had 420 babies, killed them all in an interstellar war because he decided kids were a pain in the rear end and peacefully retired to a pocket dimension, leaving weird pockets of humans and near-humans all over the joint. It also sets up a fun juxtaposition between races because there are definitely a lot of standard Star Trek head-makeup races as a result but also a ton of other non-humanoid races who are Big Weird. You want a pirate crew of Regular Guy engineer, Dog Man captain, 6 legged rhino medic and psionic tree-in-a-terrarium that handles your finances? Aight.
|
|
#
?
Sep 16, 2022 06:16
|
|
|
Lead out in cuffs posted:Yeah I was gonna say, Musk is neither a hacker, nor an engineer, nor a "software designer". He's a rich kid with a BS in economics and physics who just watched too much Star Trek in the 80s and then built up a cult of personality around himself. my favorite is how our modern captain planet is from a family the end of apartheid in south Africa and his personal money used to start Paypal etc is literally from slave gem mines lol. trust me this guy and his family are really good for the planet and society,
|
|
#
?
Sep 16, 2022 06:28
|
|
|
Sinatrapod posted:I always loved the Traveler RPG's reasoning for the latter part, it's still kind of forbidden knowledge so spoilers: I love some of Traveler's weird rules, like every hyperspace jump takes exactly one week, no matter how far you are going.
|
|
#
?
Sep 16, 2022 10:54
|
|
|
Poldarn posted:I love some of Traveler's weird rules, like every hyperspace jump takes exactly one week, no matter how far you are going. I liked the far far future computers that take up a whole room.
|
|
#
?
Sep 16, 2022 11:07
|
|
|
TOOT BOOT posted:I have not personally read it but people very rarely mention it in any context so it must have been super forgettable.
|
|
#
?
Sep 16, 2022 11:24
|
|
|
I've been reading KSR's Mars recently and while it's good and seems to hold up pretty well, the Socialist Steve Jobs guy who runs the Praxis megacorp feels fairly dated in lieu of the billionaire CEO "saviors" we actually ended up with.Sinatrapod posted:It also sets up a fun juxtaposition between races because there are definitely a lot of standard Star Trek head-makeup races as a result but also a ton of other non-humanoid races who are Big Weird. You want a pirate crew of Regular Guy engineer, Dog Man captain, 6 legged rhino medic and psionic tree-in-a-terrarium that handles your finances? Aight. also they're all like 45 and having a midlife crisis due to character generation.
|
|
#
?
Sep 16, 2022 11:44
|
|
|
Sinatrapod posted:I always loved the Traveler RPG's reasoning for the latter part, it's still kind of forbidden knowledge so spoilers: The mongoose traveller rewrite of the campaign about him is fun, and contains the phrase 'Chekhov's FGMP"
|
|
#
?
Sep 16, 2022 11:46
|
|
|
C.M. Kruger posted:
Campaign Proposal: 4 Dads of various species set out on a roadtrip across the stars in their tremendously expensive, sporty Jump6 starship with no weapons or cargo space. They have a 1 year leave of absence from their respective mundane paper-pushing jobs and trained in exactly one spacefaring skill at a competent level. There's an Embarrassment mechanic that's kind of like Cthulhu style Sanity - your stupid escapades slowly chip away at your embarrassment stat as you get blackout wasted at starport casinos and fruitlessly hit on a parade of shamefully young bar patrons, until you either succeed at accomplishment of such legendary stature that you redeem your misspent youth and prove your virility, or go limping back to your wife/husband/egg circle/nesting creche/whatever to quietly fade away. Much like Call of Cthulhu, the latter is much more likely. this is the worst idea I ever had
|
|
#
?
Sep 16, 2022 12:11
|
|
|
branedotorg posted:well thanks for that Proustian wave of nostalgia as i realised the author of the death of grass also wrote the tripods books and then watching the TV adaptation as a young lad Oh poo poo, me too. I remember the paperback cover vividly but absolutely nothing about the books.
|
|
#
?
Sep 16, 2022 12:25
|
|
|
Sinatrapod posted:Campaign Proposal: Four Dads in a Spaceboat by Genome K. Genome more like the best
|
|
#
?
Sep 16, 2022 12:28
|
|
|
A Proper Uppercut posted:Oh poo poo, me too. I remember the paperback cover vividly but absolutely nothing about the books. I remember the prequel book most vividly, the tripod trilogy starts after Earth was long conquered. I recall the prequel being quite good, but I read it when I was like 13.
|
|
#
?
Sep 16, 2022 15:04
|
|
|
C.M. Kruger posted:I've been reading KSR's Mars recently and while it's good and seems to hold up pretty well, the Socialist Steve Jobs guy who runs the Praxis megacorp feels fairly dated in lieu of the billionaire CEO "saviors" we actually ended up with. I've said it before and I said it again, it's a real treat to read across the arc of his career and see characters turn to increasingly radical solutions as the actual problems KSR (we all) are living with get worse and worse. It doesn't, like, solve them at all, but at least I don't feel like a lunatic when I read headlines like "insect populations are cratering" or "rainwater is not safe to drink anywhere on Earth" and think about how capitalism seems to be accelerating toward a cliff
|
|
#
?
Sep 16, 2022 15:44
|
|
|
I haven’t finished Blue Mars but I’m not sure the Praxis CEO is meant to be read as a “good” guy or a savior. He’s sort of a weird and possibly malevolent kook, isn’t he? He just chooses a likeable minion to be a POV character. In general the Mars trilogy seems strongly anti-capitalist and does that shockingly rare thing of imagining a near future in which capitalist power erodes and people move to something new.
|
|
#
?
Sep 16, 2022 16:05
|
|
|
I also just hit the first sex scene that seemed genuinely misguided to me, late in the third book; I’m suspicious of framings of erotic politic that run roughly “liberated women will do all the stuff men enjoy and fantasize about because it amuses them to control men through their predictable desires.” A feminism that loops full circle back to ‘hot babes are freely available and comply with the male gaze’, I dunno, I don’t trust it. I’m glad the book tries to engage with these questions even if I don’t really dig some of the answers. Jackie is my least favorite character in that nobody, including the narration, seems to have any empathy or respect for her. By contrast Maya is frequently a caricature of Women, Amirite - jealous, flighty, bipolar, vain, covetous of the power of younger women - but at least gets her own POVs in which she accomplishes stuff and we get some insight into how she thinks about herself. And there are women like Nadia and Ann to be very different from her.
|
|
#
?
Sep 16, 2022 16:13
|
|
|
Thankfully the weird sex stuff is, IIRC, absent from Ministry for the Future (and maybe other recent work? Haven't gotten around to Red Moon or Shaman or anything like that.) I haven't read the Mars books in ~10 years or so. But what I love about them and KSR at his best is that he wants to think about the intersection of real problems, plausible technology, and social history in exactly the ways that, say, Stephenson is allergic to. The first revolution in Red Mars (spoiler for a decades-old book?) fails spectacularly, because though the motivation is there the technology isn't--Mars can't support life, and the corporations who own Mars can exploit that. So Mars exists for generations as this planetary Siberia, because Earth needs new resources to exploit because that's how capitalism works. But that desire for independence doesn't go away, and the terraforming process doesn't stop because it serves the interests of both sides. And all of this climaxes in Green Mars when the same "destroy life support to (literally) deprive the revolutionaries of oxygen" trick is tried again, and instead everyone realizes they can just strap on a rebreather and evacuate to freedom. I don't think that excuses its treatment of Jackie or how weird the narration is around Hiroko or anything. But I do think it makes a really interesting contribution to hard-ish SF, and it absolutely blew me away when I hadn't grown past space operas and chosen one bildungsromans.
|
|
#
?
Sep 16, 2022 16:53
|
|
|
Sinatrapod posted:Campaign Proposal: A Type-S Scout/Courier has 2-rated drives (twice as fast as the yacht!), 4 staterooms, a life support system that canonically starts smelling bad petty quickly and requires either a service or some bodging, an unarmed turret, 3/4 of a stateroom of cargo space, and an open-topped air/raft. It may also be made available for free to a retired member of the scout service who spent their entire career doing paperwork. It is the ultimate mid-life crisis ship. E: it can land on a planet, and also "wilderness refuel" by floating in a lake sucking up and purifying water while four dads fish. 90s Cringe Rock fucked around with this message at 16:58 on Sep 16, 2022 |
|
#
?
Sep 16, 2022 16:56
|
|
|
Sinatrapod posted:Campaign Proposal: Wild Space Hogs
|
|
#
?
Sep 16, 2022 17:09
|
|
|
Opopanax posted:Apparently there was another Hitchhiker's guide by the Artemis Fowl writer. I'd assume it's a write off but it says he was asked to do it by Douglas Adams' estate, any good? Is the story somewhere that the 6th book in the trilogy could've gone? Probably. Would Douglas Adams have included Dirk Gently in it like he talked about doing? Probably. Is it okay, everything considered? Probably. If you can get it for free or cheap, you probably should. It's worth noting that there's a BBC Radio version of it that's been broadcast and released at some point, which ties it back to how the original story was done - and if memory serves, it's been streamlined somewhat.
|
|
#
?
Sep 16, 2022 17:14
|
|
|
General Battuta posted:I haven’t finished Blue Mars but I’m not sure the Praxis CEO is meant to be read as a “good” guy or a savior. He’s sort of a weird and possibly malevolent kook, isn’t he? He just chooses a likeable minion to be a POV character. it's anti capitalist in the same way that people who think anti racism is about being polite are, I suppose. like yeah capitalism erodes in that book... sort of. it's more like the multinationals just fall over dead on Mars because none of them know how logistics works. which seems odd considering they were interplanetary freight companies. anyway they end up being replaced with uh, polite capitalism
|
|
#
?
Sep 16, 2022 17:38
|
|
|
i read almost all of Daemon by Daniel Suarez yesterday by simply saying up until 3am. now another hundred pages or so and en entire nother book to go  20% through when the hummer from hell shows up and obliterates a bunch of cops 
|
|
#
?
Sep 16, 2022 18:01
|
|
|
AARD VARKMAN posted:i read almost all of Daemon by Daniel Suarez yesterday by simply saying up until 3am. now another hundred pages or so and en entire nother book to go IIRC if anything Freedom gets even crazier.
|
|
#
?
Sep 16, 2022 18:11
|
|
|
Larry Parrish posted:it's anti capitalist in the same way that people who think anti racism is about being polite are, I suppose. like yeah capitalism erodes in that book... sort of. it's more like the multinationals just fall over dead on Mars because none of them know how logistics works. which seems odd considering they were interplanetary freight companies. anyway they end up being replaced with uh, polite capitalism I mean it outright says capitalism must end which is more than most SF manages. The multinationals die of climate change b/c they can’t figure out Market Valued Ways to respond to Earth flooding and to the longevity vaccine. The new economic system comes out of collective disaster response.
|
|
#
?
Sep 16, 2022 18:24
|
|
|
General Battuta posted:I mean it outright says capitalism must end which is more than most SF manages. Just finished Nona and now I kind of wants some kind of crossover where Gideon Nav meets Baru Cormorant even though it's possible that every reader would end up dying of femme-thirst.
|
|
#
?
Sep 16, 2022 18:45
|
|
|
I'm starting Speaker for the Dead ten years after I finished Ender's Game. Young me spurned reading it because of the lack of epic space war. I'm still totally thrown for a loop by the subplot of Ender's siblings taking over the world and its political discourse by posting online.
|
|
#
?
Sep 16, 2022 20:12
|
|
|
The sequels get dumber than that.
|
|
#
?
Sep 16, 2022 21:21
|
|
|
FPyat posted:I'm starting Speaker for the Dead ten years after I finished Ender's Game. Young me spurned reading it because of the lack of epic space war. I'm still totally thrown for a loop by the subplot of Ender's siblings taking over the world and its political discourse by posting online.
|
|
#
?
Sep 16, 2022 21:24
|
|
|
Which part of using the Internet to manipulate public sentiment is unrealistic?
|
|
#
?
Sep 16, 2022 21:44
|
|
|
pseudorandom name posted:Which part of using the Internet to manipulate public sentiment is unrealistic? That it happens on the strength of the genius kids' arguments, without sockpuppet troll farms and such. And that only exactly one person on Earth is able to doxx them.
|
|
#
?
Sep 16, 2022 21:51
|
|
|
nobody is ever going to Twitter famous themselves to becoming emperor of Sol
|
|
#
?
Sep 16, 2022 22:09
|
|
|
habeasdorkus posted:I remember the prequel book most vividly, the tripod trilogy starts after Earth was long conquered. I recall the prequel being quite good, but I read it when I was like 13. I remember there being an element of S&M eroticism in the second book of the trilogy which was weird
|
|
#
?
Sep 16, 2022 22:14
|
|
|
The Best of Gene Wolfe: A Definitive Retrospective of His Finest Short Fiction - $0.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B002ASFQ5E/ The Black Prism (Lightbringer #1) by Brent Weeks - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003JTHY76/
|
|
#
?
Sep 16, 2022 22:31
|
|
|
Anyone sleeping on Wolfe's short stories should grab that. ¢99 is a drat steal
|
|
#
?
Sep 16, 2022 22:45
|
|
|
Larry Parrish posted:nobody is ever going to Twitter famous themselves to becoming emperor of Sol
|
|
#
?
Sep 16, 2022 23:42
|
|
|
DACK FAYDEN posted:wow huge slam on Gideon the Ninth outta nowhere Oh please, John Gaius was clearly a Tumblr weirdo not a Twitter weirdo
|
|
#
?
Sep 17, 2022 00:02
|
|
|
Never occurred to me before that there's no FTL in Ender's Game.
|
|
#
?
Sep 17, 2022 00:53
|
|
|
yeah there's FTL comms and the molecular destabilizer weapon and that's it as far as sci Fi bs afaik. no artificial gravity or anything
|
|
#
?
Sep 17, 2022 02:01
|
|
|
Larry Parrish posted:yeah there's FTL comms and the molecular destabilizer weapon and that's it as far as sci Fi bs afaik. no artificial gravity or anything I'd say the central premise of a small evenly distributed geographicly population of genetically superintelligent humans who peak in their early teens is more important to the series as far as sf bs goes.
|
|
#
?
Sep 17, 2022 02:22
|
|
|
Sinatrapod posted:Campaign Proposal: This sounds really fun tbh. I would play it
|
|
#
?
Sep 17, 2022 03:41
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 20, 2024 00:50 |
|
|
Larry Parrish posted:yeah there's FTL comms and the molecular destabilizer weapon and that's it as far as sci Fi bs afaik. no artificial gravity or anything The people who could have invented them would have been gay and any gay people in Card's world get exterminated.
|
|
#
?
Sep 17, 2022 04:57
|
|