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Summarize a novel that you read from memory. Look at nothing to do this. Bonus points if the author is Phillip K. Dick, Gene Wolfe, or any other writer where this is an especially poor idea. Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said? By Phillip K. Dick [...] [...] Goddamnit, I have read it but I can only remember: that the main character gets his identity stolen and swapped with...a police officer? There's a murder, but the person is murdered by...getting caught in a time warp and dying from old age, and the end of the novel is an extended scene that mirrors a passage from the bible I'm not familiar with. I'm now started reading the novel and it is basically all new to me Nebakenezzer fucked around with this message at 02:33 on May 24, 2020 |
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May 24, 2020 01:38
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Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said By Phillip K. Dick Chapter 1 Dick Taverner is at the top of his game. He's a famous singer with his own, mega-succsessful TV show. That's because he's a Six. It's not explained at this juncture, but he and his girlfriend/special guest that night Heather Locklear are both people who got themselves genetically modified - Stage six modification? They just finished Dick's TV show, and now have to run a gauntlet with police to get to Dick's Rolls-Royce skyflyer. Things are maybe not the best between Heather and Dick. They are a celebrity couple professionally but also a couple outside of that, and Heather is sounding burnt out. She hates People, especially her fans, and wants to give up being a celebrity, marry dick, have dick's kids, etc. Though this could just be burnout; she also thinks flying to the secluded house they have in Zurich is stupid. This surprises Dick, as the house was chosen especially so they could get away from People. (She does not look like Heather Locklear, being described as having a roman nose, red hair, and violet eyes, but the showbiz/30 million viewers immediately put me in mind of Locklear and Mary Hart, this kind of inhumanly perfect beauty, a flawless diamond, never scratched even as they bore through concrete at the end of a pneumatic drill.) Dick takes all this, and much else, in. Evidently being a six gives you one king-hell-rear end brain, as he's managing his GF on the brink of a psychological crisis, flying his Rolls, feeling smug at how awesome he is, thinking about some of Heather's secrets, flashing a big wad of cash, promising to use said wad of cash to buy Heather something nice, then dreaming of using said wad of cash to hit up a Vegas casino to play blackjack (Sixes win all the time, even beating the dealers) even as Heather rolls her eyes and calls him a selfish rear end in a top hat. Dick then gets a call. It's from Marylin Mason, who is some starlet Dick got an audition for. She's also having a nervous breakdown and threatening to kill herself, which Dick thinks is a sign she's pregnant. (Of course he's loving her on the side.) And after he got her *two* auditions, the first one for the president of Columbia records! Typical "ordinares"! She blew both auditions and can't process it, blaming Taverner instead. Dick's tired and already managing crazy, but MM is super insistent he stop by briefly. He lands on the field in her building complex. Heather waits in the skyflyer. There's something strange with Marylin Mason - spooky. Dick doesn't let it show , but Mason's mood is something hidden and dangerous. Before he can even begin trying to calibrate what's going on, Mason takes a plastic bag, and hucks an alien jellyfish at Dick. It attaches to his chest and begins boring through his suit with its 50 tentacles. As a Six, instead of screaming, Dick instantly grabs a nearby whiskey bottle, unscrews it, and empties it on the jellyfish. This kills the jellyfish in a few seconds, but now the tubes are inside him and can apparently survive jellyfish death, and continue to tunnel into his torso. Dick and Mason have a moment of "well, wasn't expecting that", and then Dick passes out. Dick comes to as he's racing through a hospital on a gurney. Heather is there. Apparently Dick was seconds from death at Mason's, and is being rushed to emergency surgery. Holding Heather's hand, Dick passes out again.
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May 24, 2020 02:31
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I made this for some Photoshop thread once and it largely sums up what I can remember about this book (other than a lingering feeling of disgust and exasperation): Now that I think of it, I think this was the one with AI Voltaire and Jeanne d'Arc having computer sex in front of an audience of millions as well. "Authorised by Asimov's estate".
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May 24, 2020 11:57
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So on this planet everyone wears masks and the mask determines your rank and social status and if its high enough other people will give you free stuff to like, be an influencer for them. Anyway our protagonist is a visitor to the world who has a really low rank mask and loving hates this high rank person who keeps messing with them. I remember none of the middle of this but for some reason he deduces the moth guy is a fake and proves it to the rest of the community for which he is awarded a free-stuff tier mask. Our hero then enjoys this new life of comfort that I seem to remember is devoid of any introspection about how hosed up this society is.
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May 24, 2020 13:27
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Oh god! Evil silver strands that eat carbon are falling from the sky! And worse, we just arrived after generations of space flight to colonize this shithole! Okay the plan is not to leave, the plan is to genetically modify these lizards into flying and breathing fire then we fly around fighting the death-rain once every ten years or so. *everyone starts playing the flute*
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May 24, 2020 14:26
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All right, so, you're in your early twenties and you've had a skiing accident and you're a quadriplegic and life sucks. But! What if - bear with me now - what if you could become a space manta? See, we've found out there's these sentient manta-like creatures inhabiting Jupiter, but it's kind of difficult to communicate with them and also Jupiter is basically death to humans, so transferring your brain into one of their newborns and having you live with them would be great for both our species! Think of it as a really hosed up exchange program. What've you got to lose? And hey, maybe you'll come to totally dig being a space manta and find a nice space manta female and settle down in a pretty toxic cloud and have adorable little space mantas of your own. Who knows, maybe your being human and special will even be instrumental in saving their entire species one day!
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May 24, 2020 14:44
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I can't decide if it's better to give the titles, or to leave them out. Also, correction: In chapter one of Flow My Tears... the main character's name is Jason, not Dick Wait, no correction, this was utterly intentional on my part. Yes. Intentional.
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May 24, 2020 15:06
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Chapter Two Jason wakes up. He is not in the hospital. He's in a fleabag hotel. The marks of the jellyfish are gone. Hanging in the closet is his silk suit, which improbably has that gigantic wad of cash he was flashing earlier. Understandably confused and on the brink of panic, Jason dresses and unsteadily shuffels to the lobby and its phone, as hotels as nasty as this don't have phones in their rooms. Using the payphone he calls his agent and his attorney, but neither have heard of Jason Taverner and blow him off as a crank. Jason checks a discarded LA Times, and the date printed is literally the next day - according to the date, the events of chapter one happened the night before. Jason's agent made a brief appearance in it. Looking through the paper, he can't find any of the ads or notices featuring him, his regular appearance at a fancy club, or a mention of his TV show. Now on the verge of freaking out, only Jason's Six status keeps him working. He decides to call someone else, goes to his wallet to get the number, and discovers all his IDs are gone. This is worse than you'd think. Y'see, fun story, America in 1988 is a totalitarian police state. Flow My Tears was published in 1974, and Dick has the campus protest movement become permanent - revolutionary structures have taken over the universities. The Government meanwhile, has formed siege lines around the universities, and most of the activity has moved literally underground, where students and professors do...something. Anybody caught without any ID is presumed to be an agent or an escapee from the radical underground, and thus someone who's going to spend the rest of their lives in a forced labor camp. So Jason has not only been reduced to nothing, he's a substantial negative person; an untermenchen as the Nazis used to say. Jason calls the Birth Registration control center in Iowa, and, nope, no record of his birth. Because of the terrifying possibilities of forgetting your IDs, everyone has an ID tattoo on their forearm, plus some stuff we'd call RFID chips today...but Jason is so paranoid now he doesn't trust that it will do anything. Six to the fore: first job is to get fake IDs. Jason doesn't want to end up with a pickaxe on the moon. The Hotel clerk is reading Box magazine. Jason takes a $500 bill and plops it on the hotel desk. Saying his cards have been stolen and he needs replacements ASAP, the clerk agrees to help. Oh and the clerk is telepathic and can read Jason's mind.
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May 24, 2020 15:34
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Addition, chapter one: Jason momentarily wonders if he's given himself brain damage using the "phone-grid transex network", but dismisses the through with a junkie's excuses: he didn't do it much, and there had been no premature aging or brain damage. (Point of fact Heather had noticed Jason needs to dye his hair, which apparently is unusual for a Six, so one of those signs is definitely a question mark.)
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May 24, 2020 15:44
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A few scientists live on a planet with and alien species, these aliens look like fairies kinda. They have big wings and can fly and also look super nubile, I think they're also naked. This planet has to be protected because these aliens can be tortured to make a super drug or something. Now, this planet just recently received a batch of tourists including: a child emperor who is also like a detective or someshit, a guy who is secretly evil, a guy who is secretly trying to hunt the evil guy, some more regular people I cant remember, And of course that staple character in any story, a movie producer and his young wards that he makes movies with. Which includes pornographic movies. These young wards are literal children and the fact that they've made these types of movies is repeated often, every character in the story seems to accept it. Everyone talks in the most annoying "aw shucks, gee williker" style. Eventually it's revealed that the evil guy wants to torture the aliens to get their drugs and all the other characters work together to beat him, this includes a sequence where the the actors have to use their acting skills to wrestle a gun away from him. The day is saved. The End. and that's what I remember about Brightness Falls From The Air. If anyone recommends you read James Tiptree Jr, maybe stick with the short stories.
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May 24, 2020 16:45
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Ok so like, a guy hires an ad agency guy (really needed an event planner but, whatever, nobody does research) to help him make a parade. The theme is "martian invasion". The agency guy thinks its stupid but the guy has money and so starts to really enjoy it and makes it a big wonderful thing. At the end, the martians do invade and the parade is held in their honor to celebrate their victory over mankind. The story ends there but I gotta assume the martians could have contracted some more people to work on this thing, and not doing that implies some real shoddiness with their global takeover.
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May 25, 2020 01:40
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So we're on Mars, humanity has been there for a little while but is still having a bit of hard time of things. There's at least three characters in the book. First there's some dickhead business man who sits in an office and screws people over for a living. he's probably got some kind of scheme to make some money or trade some stuff with Earth. earth is probably okay i think i don't remember. Second there's some kind of mother figure. I don't really remember what she does because this guy can't write female characters to save himself and only managed it once after Ursula Le Guin called him names and then he died. Also did she even figure in the story that much? Gollancz SF Masterworks did this whole thing with their covers at the time where a whole bunch of their books had a random woman standing in front of a sci-fi looking landscape, regardless of what role any woman at all played in the plot. was this to attempt to make it feel like the entirety of "canon" science fiction wasn't just men writing about dudes or was it some weird sex appeal thing. anyway i think the mother just wandered around looking for her kid or something. The third character was this autistic guy, or maybe he was schizophrenic, the important thing is that it's the 1960s when the author is writing this and he has no idea what the gently caress either autism or schizophrenia actually are, basically the guy's mental illness allows him to see time at a different speed, i think autism you saw time too quick and schizophrenia you saw it too slow? like there's just a loving processor clock speed in your cranium that gets set wrong and then it makes you have difficulty understanding social cues, the loving psychology understander has logged on okay so everyone just wanders around being on mars for a while, and then business guy comes up with a scheme to make some cash or something by using the time-bending-mental-illness man. But then some poo poo goes wrong and the entire timeline resets and he's back in his office like in the start. that's like halfway through. what the gently caress happens after that? god knows. everyone walks around mars being sad about things. I believe someone has a reality-questioning mental breakdown at some point, but you could guess that on account of it being a pkd novel. the moral of the story is mental illness is time travel. Martian Time-Slip
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May 25, 2020 02:12
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This woman is sent on a diplomatic mission to communicate with this group of totally backwards manly-men fighting warrior bastards. Just total dickheads. No redeeming qualities. She figures that the best thing she can do is start loving the leader so she does that and has a pretty good time of it. then they all move to their warrior bastard home planet where she isn't allowed to go outside most of the time and she doesn't like it at all. she falls in and out of favour with whatever ruling faction is winning in the warrior bastards and then she finds out that they have some secret evil science poo poo that will destroy the world or something. she tries to stop them but then she gets murdered. This all takes like six hundred pages for some loving reason. this is what managed to stick in my brain from Floating Worlds by Cecelia Holland a few years back
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May 25, 2020 02:29
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So there's a planet named Maljipoor. It's much bigger than earth, like with ten times the surface area at least, but is much less dense, so it has earth-like gravity and a earth-like biosphere. It's been colonized by humans but also by like at least six different other alien species, and they live under a weird but interesting government, kind of a tetrarchey. This government is necessary to effectively govern the impossibly vast planet without petrochemicals or nuclear isotopes, and a general technology level that seems to have pegged itself in late medieval. There's the Coronel, he or she is like a super king/emperor type thing. I forget entirely how they are chosen, it *might* be genetic but somewhat like the Holy Roman Emperor, there's some sort of vetting process that is reasonably effective. The Coronel lives atop Castle Mount, a ludicrously large mountain likely made with long-lost spacetech/terriforming, that is hundreds of thousands of feet high and has a series of seven cities built on it. The Castle mount itself is the mountian peak carved into the shape of a vast castle. Air is kept earth-like via spacetech. The Coronel is the figurehead of Government and a normal sort of superking. There's a cost to being the superking, however: there is a second post, called the Pontifix. For symatry reasons the Pontifix lives in the lowest level of The Labrynth, which is a cave in the same way castle mount is a hill. The bureaucracy that runs the entire planet is located there. There are two other posts: the lady of sleep and the King of Dreams. The Coronel becomes the Pontifix when the previous Pontifix dies. OK, so in this world there is technology that allows the entire planet's population to be observed in sorta telepathy. The Lady of sleep and her quasi-religious minions send dreams to comfort and guide the residents of the planet. Dreams can be messages, anything from "get over her already" to "it's time you move to another continent." The King of Dreams also can have a therapeutic/ I'm sending you a message dimension, but is mostly the justice system. Do bad poo poo, the King sends nightmares. If you do something really bad (say, kill a sentient being) no sleep for you! The most mind-shattering nightmares for the rest of your life, until you kill yourself or find some way to atone. I should say that this form of government works really well and Maljapoor is kind of a paradise So, in this world that is slowly illustrated via the novel, there's this dude who's just walking into a city that's having a festival to honor the new Coronel. He's pretty chill, and he gets to talking to these iteriant jugglers who are also going to this festival, and he then tries to pay for some sausages from a street vendor with a coin that is eight denominations larger than what people usually use to pay for street food. The chill dude, who gets the name Valentine, has lost his memory but is walking around with purse filled with coins usually used to purchase estates, so naturally he takes up juggling and starts traveling with the jugglers. There's a cute girl, another human, several ape-like aliens who are sorta blue Sasquatches except with four arms, and at least one small tentacled bug-eyed thing that are called vreens or vheers or something. Vroons? The book is a series of scenes and small stories set on this world, with the first act being Valentine hangin' out, the second the troop being given indisputable proof Valentine is in fact the rightful Coronel, somehow body swapped into a random dude, the third act is the troop trying to get the powers that be aware of some sinister plot to take over the government, and the fourth and final act being Valentine at the head of an army in a civil war trying to take Castle Mount back. The troop takes casualties (the sasquatch head of the juggling troop who's kind of a alpha hawg rear end in a top hat has a lot of brothers who die) as well as Other Human, but they also gain party members. The only one I can remember is a barbarian warrior type, with the change that a) she's a woman, and b) literally about ten feet tall. The bad guys are the doppelgangers. The OG residents of Maljipoor were DnD-style doppelgangers, who got a poo poo rep with the colonizing species and were eventually pushed back into a reservation the size of India. A group of doppelgangers using mystic arts swapped the Coronel out of his body and put their "man" (they hate that term) in his place. But in the end their scheme is undone and Valentine claims his crown again and marries the hot juggler, the end.
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May 25, 2020 02:54
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So there's a generation ship heading out towards some planet and things aren't going well, as usually happens on said voyages: equipment failures, mismanagement, disillusioned crew etc. who cares meanwhile, at the target planet, some spergy woman in a cryopod sleeps in orbit while spiders imported from earth gain sentience cut back to the generation ship and more of the same meanwhile, at the target planet, the spiders are learning how to chemically engineer ant pheromones in order to avert an apocalypse by reigning in the ants' atavistic tendencies generation ship: zzzzz... meanwhile, at the target planet, previously mentioned spergy woman wakes up from cryosleep because the spiders have reversed-engineered radio comms from an ancient landing craft and contacted her; she teaches them how to television and then is disgusted at what she hath wrought generation ship: gee wiz, spending your whole life ferrying a bunch of rich ice cubes to a planet they'll get to enjoy once you're dead doesn't sound like such a good gig meanwhile, at the target planet, the sperg gets a signal that a human ship is coming and decides she hates people even more than spiders and tells the spiders to kill all humans; the spiders begin spinning a tangled web of deceit and also a literal spider web around the planet generation ship: whelp, we've arrived at the planet and it's already occupied and they're broadcasting that we're not welcome here but in typical human fashion we only outfitted this ship with enough fuel and supplies to get here, not actually enough provisions to scout around a few systems to find someplace nice so let's get to genocidin' meanwhile, at the target planet, astrospiders have hatched a bold and cunning plan: a spacewalk assault on the generation ship, infiltrating and poisoning all the crew with a brainwashing serum of neurotransmitters designed to convince people that sentient spiders the size of leopards are their friends generation ship: we welcome our new spider overlords Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovski
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May 25, 2020 03:01
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Book 1: It's the near future, sometime in the early 2000's, and our hero is flying his shuttle on the far side of the moon when the moon grabs him and pulls him inside it. Turns out the moon is not a moon but in fact a giant warship from a long-dead space empire. The AI is still online though. The empire was fighting aliens (or maybe robots?) and losing so the crew mutinied and took the ship to this backwater. The AI drafts Johnny Spaceman, All American Hero, to be its new commanding officer and sends him back to Earth because the original crew is still around tens of thousands of years later. They used their technology to appear as gods and are all named Anubis and Set and the like, very Stargate but I think this preceded that movie. Anyways there's been a secret shadow war between factions of the crew and human secret societies raging on Earth since the dawn of civilization. This all gets wrapped up somehow but I don't remember how. But it's a good thing it did because uh-oh the aliens (robots?) that took down the old Empire are coming for Earth! Our Hero reveals the moon-warship to the world and says "hey guys we gotta start getting Earth ready, come on up and grab all this technology, also this AI is going to help us." Smash cut to a montage of Earth preparing for war. Now we've got a thousand laser satellites pointing outward and we're strapping advanced ancient alien weaponry to the space shuttles. Nobody seems at all concerned that the tides are all now completely hosed because the moon sailed off deeper into the solar system. Anyway Earth is saved I think I don't really remember that much about it. Book 2 (or maybe the second half of book 1?): Our Hero, who the world leaders let command the moonship because the AI won't accept anybody else as the captain, trains up a crew and flies off to see if there's anything left of the ancient space empire. They spend a while poking through ruins and find the Imperial capital. It's biosphere is completely wonky because they had a huge zoo with creatures from all over the galaxy that was blasted open and intermingled over tens of millennia, which is honestly a pretty neat sci-fi concept. Anyway they stumble on a computer center that's still working. Our Hero plugs in and the computer says "hey you were drafted just a few years ago but technically that makes you the highest-ranking member of our civilization, congrats you're now the Emperor." All the nations of Earth are cool with this because sci-fi authors loving love space monarchies. Book 3 (or maybe book 4? All that previous stuff may have been its own book): It's decades later and the kids of Our Hero and some other ancillary characters have all joined the Imperial (formerly Earth) navy and are on their first cruise. Something goes wrong (sabotage? I don't remember) and everyone except them dies. They crash on a former Imperial planet which has become a theocracy that hates technology (wind power is pushing it) but use religious rites to use some of the old Imperial tech (another kind of neat idea). Anyway Our Junior Heroes aren't going to let this stand so they join up with some rebels and using their advanced education and personal devices start a crusade against the capital-C Church. There's a lot of battles because if there's one thing sci-fi authors love more than monarchies it's discussions of 17th century military tactics. Anyway they beat the Church and use the old tech to call home and Emperor Dad is all happy and all the people of Earth (who of course love the Emperor and being a monarchy now) have a party. THE END. David Weber, I think. Moon Slayer fucked around with this message at 04:51 on May 25, 2020 |
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May 25, 2020 04:48
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So this guy winds up getting chosen for a trip to another planet in the solar system. I don't know which, but this was in the early early days of stories about space travel. They put him on a ship that was fired like a bullet into space, no guidance system built in. When on the alien planet, the story's mostly a travelogue with the guy talking about how he learned the language, speculating that the reasons why humans have the desire for pets is because other planets have multiple sentient species that coexist, which we're missing on earth. At the end of the story, he meets the lord of the planet, some creature with godlike power called an "Eldill" (which I almost certainly spelt wrong), who sends him home, and I think that's the end of the book. Twist: This is a book by CS Lewis. Everybody knows about the christianity allegory in the Narnia series, but not many people know that CS Lewis wasn't just a faithful christian, he was actually figuring out his own weird complex feelings about religion and expressing them in his writing. Narnia gets a little weird, this is his other book series that gets into his real weird stuff. One of the big steps along the way is when the guy describes Earth society as following "false Eldills". I think the space journey might've been the second book in the series, but I only remember it and the last book, which uh...drifts from the idea of sci-fi. So the next book opens on some prisoners on death row being offered some kind of deal by some shady person. First one absolutely refuses for some reason. Whatever's being offered, he thinks it's worse than death. Spooky. Cut to the introduction of the main character, and it's this woman who is happily married. She and her husband decided that they weren't ready to have kids yet, so she's working on her career and her husband is going to start a job at some institute. He reads about some miracle experiment that has been done to some inmate on death row. When the guy goes into his new job, it's at a weird science place. His new boss seems cheerful, but there's a description of him where he's managed to set up enough automatic responses and procedures in his head that he barely has to pay any attention and just lets his body do what it does while his soul drifts away from it and exists off in the depths of space. It's a hell of a description. The male lead also meets a dumb scientist guy who doesn't have much to say and is part of some fancy men's club/secret society like the freemasons. I think at this point, the story briefly cuts away to some weird old man wandering the streets of London looking for a sword, before cutting back to the husband getting brought into the secret society. The scientist guy presents his great new experiment: The recently executed man had his head cut off and attached to a machine that could keep it alive indefinitely. This in theory is the way of the future for humanity to gain immortality. I'm not sure what happens next, but somehow the husband and wife meet the weird old man who reveals himself to be King Arthur, finally back from Albion to make his promised return. He asks them how England has been since his absence, and the couple awkwardly explain to him that the Saxons that King Arthur spent so much time trying to fight off eventually won, and that everybody in England is descended from them. Then they meet some new wise man who will tell them how to confront the coming evil. There's some comparisons with Merlin in this, but when the wise man shows up: surprise, it's the guy who went to an alien planet in the other book. His time with Eldills blessed him with wisdom. He explains that the solar system was ruled by a number of Eldills, but the Eldill of Earth went bad and rebelled against the Grand Eldill (which I guess makes him Lucifer, and also means that the Earth is the only planet under the thrall of Satan. Great). Now Earth's evil Eldill is making some play for power in a cosmic alignment that they need to stop, and the Eldills will lend their power to the humans to help them. There's a whole sequence of the Eldills of different planets extending their presence to them, each with a different feeling to their aura corresponding to the roman god their planet is named after, Venus feels friendly, Mars feels warlike, either Uranus or Saturn gives them the feeling of the grand scale of all eternity. Somewhere in the middle of all this, either King Arthur or the wise man scold the married couple for not having children, not because it's a thing that all married people should do, but because for them specifically, fate and the cosmos aligned to make their child be destined to be the messiah or something. I'm not really sure what the secret society's plan was, and I'm not sure how they stopped it. I think there was some bit where the husband wanted to go along with the society more, but the wife wanted to listen to King Arthur and the space traveler and there were some hints of her wanting to be with the space traveler instead of her husband just from all the praise she gave him. The decapitated head says a lot of weird things, and it turns out that the secret society is taking orders from it (probably because it's animated by satan). When their plan is destroyed, the decapitated head cries out "GIVE ME ANOTHER HEAD" and the senior members of the secret society go to fulfill its will. They grab the scientist guy, who has a long inner monologue of how he doesn't understand why they're being so hasty, this isn't the the proper procedure for decapitating somebody to put their heads on the machine, and when the time would come for him to put his colleague's heads onto their machines, he would make it a peaceful and comfortable experience that would be just like a little blink.  There's no more scientist guy after that.I think there was a little more to the book after that, but that's what stuck in my head.
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May 25, 2020 06:22
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It's a normal evening on Nantucket island when the sky goes wonky and all communication is knocked out. The next morning they find out the entire island has been thrown back in time to the Bronze Age. Some people can't handle this and go nuts but for the most part people are okay with it. They start taking inventory and planting crops; fortunately the police chief is always calm and competent and takes charge. Also a Coast Guard training ship was sailing (yes it's a sail ship) by when this happened and was sent back too. The ship is commanded by a black, gay woman which is neat but she's from the south and the transcription of her accent is not great. Anyway, her first officer is kind of a dick. Anyway they get things sorted out so they're not in immediate danger and load up the ship and sail to Britain to trade for stuff. They pull up to a tribal village and freak everyone out but are eventually welcomed in. This tribe has been invading the island for a while and displacing the gentler inhabitants. The chief gives one of these people to the captain as a slave and she has to be talked down from murdering them all in the interest of diplomacy. Also there is a merchant from an Iberian city-state there and he goes back to Nantucket with them all. He and the first officer immediately start conspiring. Captain falls in love with her slave and is really conflicted but it all turns out fine and they get married. First Officer wants to lean into might makes right but the captain and chief seem to want to make a democracy and do peaceful trading which just sounds like no fun at all. So first officer manipulates some well-meaning hippies who want to go help the native Americans so that in two thousand years they won't be wiped out by the Europeans. They steal two boats and load them with supplies. First officer sails off for England leaving the hippies to go down to Mexico where they are immediately imprisoned, tortured, and gruesomely executed but not before spreading disease to the Olmecs. Ha! Take that stupid hippies. That'll teach you to try to do good. Anyways, first officer sets about building his own personal empire in England with his crew and a few up-timers he kidnapped along the way. Also his wife and number two is an Asian nurse who's super into BDSM. Nantucket knows they can't let this stand so they ally with the slave's tribe and go to war. There's a battle, the bad tribe is defeated and run off to Greece. Nantucket starts nation-building in Britain and North America is depopulated again. Island in the Sea of Time, by SM Stirling. It's actually exactly the kind of crap that I love so it was a fun read.
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May 25, 2020 17:04
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Filthy Hans posted:So there's a generation ship heading out towards some planet and things aren't going well, as usually happens on said voyages: equipment failures, mismanagement, disillusioned crew etc. who cares This sounds like a cool book
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May 25, 2020 17:16
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In book 2, an AI is basically trying to set up a revolution against her lovely colonialist masters, when the diplomat from the only more-powerful aliens gets killed in an accident. Everybody goes 'oh gently caress we have to do everything we can to make sure that the aliens know we're contrite and taking this seriously' and then there's like 200 pages of funerary practices. That and extremely heavy-handed "empires use arbitrary fashion markers to make their 'civilization' seem like a justified distancing mechanism from their brutality." It's loving great, esp the funerary practices. (Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie)
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May 25, 2020 19:12
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Turns out galactic society is arranged in such a way that your civilization gets status by uplifting another species. Earth is currently in the process of being uplifted and given a bunch of tech, but humans have also started uplifting dolphins and apes. The aliens are conflicted as to whether or not this is cheating. Anyway some researchers take a new kind of ship into the sun to do science and discover a kind of plasma-based lifeform living there. It's entirely possible I never finished this book even though I remember it being ok. Sure don't remember the name or author though.
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May 25, 2020 19:26
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Moon Slayer posted:Turns out galactic society is arranged in such a way that your civilization gets status by uplifting another species. Earth is currently in the process of being uplifted and given a bunch of tech, but humans have also started uplifting dolphins and apes. The aliens are conflicted as to whether or not this is cheating. Anyway some researchers take a new kind of ship into the sun to do science and discover a kind of plasma-based lifeform living there. It's entirely possible I never finished this book even though I remember it being ok. Sure don't remember the name or author though. There's a whole series but Sundiver by David Brin is the first one.
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May 25, 2020 20:06
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Chapter Three Jason and the hotel clerk (pencil mustache, slightly effeminate, telepathic) are in the clerk's quibble, driving to Watts. [Note: I'm not sure of a quibble is distinct from a skyfly, as right now the clerk is driving but quibbles also might be able to fly. I'm picturing an old Checker Marathon.) Because of the clerk's telepathy, he functionally has access to Jason's thoughts just like we do and comments on them. An elderly black man is crossing the street, and the clerk comments nowadays black people are like whooping cranes, rare and protected by extensive laws. So, fun story: apparently the civil rights struggle ended with African-Americans getting what they wanted: equal protection under the law, etc. The price they paid for this was genocide, with a forced sterilization program and the right to only have one child per couple. With the later police state, this has resulted in all [surviving] black people actually *retaining* all their old fashioned legal rights while everybody else lost theirs. The sight of the black man causes the clerk to say "I don't like your racist views, even if you are paying me $500". Jason responds "there's enough blacks alive to suit me." Watts is not only run down but abandoned. They reach their destination, a abandoned restaurant. The clerk and Jason go inside, where a wall opens to reveal a small but well organized and equipped workshop. Kathy is the forger - Jason thinks she's 15 or 16, [not much in tits, but with nice legs, he thinks] though for reasons that will soon become clear I sorta doubt this and think she must be in her mid 20s. Maybe she's like Sissy Spacek in Badlands(1973) in that was in her mid 20s in that role but really does look 16? Not sure. Anyway, Kathy charges Jason $2000 of his $5K wad o' cash for comprehensive documents, but appears to really know her fake document poo poo. At the same time, she's clearly a little lonely and intrigued by this well dressed non-student who suddenly needs all the docs. She hasn't heard of Jason, but like the clerk, quickly buys that for some reason Jason is a man who believes he was a big celebrity until yesterday. We learn her husband is dead, killed in national service. She then makes Jason guess her age (he guesses 16, she say it is 20) and then guesses his age to be "about 50" which enrages Jason, who tells between clenched teeth he's 43. Kathy is sorry for the accidental offense and turns to sorting Jason's poo poo out. But the troublesome conversation continues. She asks about Jason's career, and all the people he'd hosed over to get to the top. Jason (who in Chapter one briefly thought about exactly this) denies loving people over is a thing, saying it's a business so talent and rationality - he doesn't use the term meritocracy, but Dick would definitely find it amusing to use a term created specifically to mock the whole idea used with a straight face. As she's counter-fitting, Kathy confesses she thinks Jason is insane, which on the basis of his story and beliefs only makes sense. Eddie (the hotel clerk) is lurking in the background, smoking a big cigar. Kathy then gets into a booth with Jason on some counterfeit pretext [  ] and confesses both Eddie and herself are police informants. She shows him the subtle purple dots on his cards that act as tracking beacons and as microphones. She tells him this because she wants to help Jason escape. Her deal: get rid of all the tracking stuff on his cards and docs, slip Eddie an extra $500 to keep quiet, and spend the night with Kathy. Jason is angry because he has no choice but to agree. Or does he? He attempts to say "gently caress it then' and strides out of the little shop. Kathy stops him, first saying he's already got a tracker on him, and, in an eerie replay of Mason trying to put a lid on Jason says "cmon, one night, and you get everything. That's all I'm asking." So Jason, completely outplayed, agrees. Now operating under Phillip K. Dick levels of paranoia, he realizes this could all be a grift to squeeze a little extra money out of Jason before the big net descends.So once again, Jason is attached to a female who he has to make happy, or else. Nebakenezzer fucked around with this message at 00:47 on May 26, 2020 |
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May 25, 2020 20:35
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I think I read a total rip-off of Ender's Game where kids were unwittingly mining & genociding for an evil space corp. Or maybe that was Ender's Game IDK
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May 25, 2020 20:39
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Humans figure out how to travel between dimensions but not that good so it's really expensive and they only find one other dimension that doesn't instagib all humans, so they basically plant cameras in people's brains and they go act like DnD murderhobos in the alternate dimension and send the footage back to earth as like super high quality snuff films. A producer decides to jerk around an actor by threatening the actor's family so the actor goes on a multidimensional rampage that pulls a living god into Earth. (Matt Stover's Heroes Die) Angepain posted:So we're on Mars, humanity has been there for a little while but is still having a bit of hard time of things. There's at least three characters in the book. First there's some dickhead business man who sits in an office and screws people over for a living. he's probably got some kind of scheme to make some money or trade some stuff with Earth. earth is probably okay i think i don't remember. Honestly up to this point I thought you were describing Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy. oh but seriously I posted:I think I read a total rip-off of Ender's Game where kids were unwittingly mining & genociding for an evil space corp. Or maybe that was Ender's Game IDK Ender's Game was definitely just genociding for the government b/c OSC does not have a politics where corporations have political power.
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May 25, 2020 23:43
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reignofevil posted:This sounds like a cool book it really is, I recommend it
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May 26, 2020 00:22
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The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Phillip K. Dick It's the future, likely some time around 1998, and the Earth has become a miserably hot hellhole with just too many people. Also matter replication is totally a thing except for truffles, which are now money. No exploration will be made of the economic impacts of money being something that cant really grow anymore and has value because people want to eat it. The United Nations has decided to combat the humanity's collective problems in the most realistic way possible: by establishing a rigged lottery system to ship random people without enough truffles for a bribe out into space to colonize Mars and maybe the asteroid belt or one of the moons of Jupiter. Its just barely not a death sentence (also incredibly realistic because this is the hardest of sci-fi y'all) and what really keeps everyone sane is a drug that allows the user to experience life as Polly, who is basically barbie. No exploration will be made of the trans themes The Polly experience isn't just any old drug trip though, you experience the Polly life, but only with the accessories you've bought! It turns out accessory designer is a very important job, and our hero, and I use the term loosely, does just that, except some whippersnapper is gunning for his job because people are getting tired of pink corvettes or something, and anything other than continued success means death in the colonies. Also the company that makes the accessories and the drugs holds a monopoly on them, or at least it did until our hero gets fired right about the same time as some old guy returns from an alien star system with a new drug that either lets you use stuff not sanctioned by the old company or form a singular consciousness with other users, possibly both. People are amazed by Some Old Guy, and super stoked about the aliens he claims he met, but our hero is not so sure. He goes to check out Old Guy's spaceship, along with his secretary, who I don't think had any skin in the game but went to help anyway. Our hero meets Some Old Guy and they form a telepathic link, then our hero gets sent to mars after all and lives a horrible poo poo life as a colonist with a couple other people. His fellow colonists start using the Polly drug and do the whole collective consciousness thing, but our hero can't or won't, and he goes outside to dig a canal. At some point prior to this I think it was revealed that the old guy was actually a malicious alien instead of human like he presents himself as, but then along comes a martian coyote, which, in case you didn't know, are absolutely psychic. The coyote looks like its about to eat our hero when they start talking telepathically and the coyote is all like "actually the alien is Satan and you're too tainted to eat, cya"
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May 26, 2020 01:09
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The further you get from the galactic core the better everything works, both technology and the human mind. On a planet at the outer rim of the galaxy scientists accidentally revive a Something that wants to destroy Everything. Most of the scientists are killed but a ship escapes with 2 adults and all of their children in suspended animation, as well as a Secret Recipe to destroy the Something. It plunges deep into the core where things work like they do in reality. The planet they crash on is ruled by telepathic dogs who operate in packs and have developed medieval technology. Meanwhile, back in space, all hell is breaking loose. The Something is wrecking everything to try to find the Secret Recipe. The Secret Recipe has one hope, a long-dead adventurer whose body has been found frozen in an old space wreck. The adventurer is somehow revived. He hitches a ride with a chick and 2 sentient Christmas trees. They head for the doggie planet, pursued by a race of evil butterflies in thrall to the Something. The doggies are either in the midst of a civil war or the arrival of the humans touches one off. Anyway they're fighting. There's a lot of stuff about doggie society. The good guys arrive on the doggie planet only hours ahead of the butterflies. Turns out one of the Christmas trees is a Something plant (no pun intended). Adventurer guy figures out how to use the Secret Recipe and defeats the something and also the bad doggies. A Fire Upon the Deep, by Vernor Vinge. I enjoyed it, twenty some years ago.
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May 26, 2020 01:33
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This is technically a novella. Earth is hosed, so they've sent a whole bunch of space ships out to distant planets to see if they're any good or not. Each spaceship has a really simple signal transmitter that can only send two or possibly three signals, green (this is a great planet come over here), yellow (nothing useful here) or red (holy gently caress avoid avoid avoid aaaargh). One of these ships, filled with a diverse range of one-dimensional ethnic stereotypes, has found a potential candidate and has sent a ship down to see what the deal is. This has not gone well. Only one of the three astronauts has come back, and she's basically catatonic. They've brought back a weird plant inside but everybody's busy debating as to whether to even look at the thing given nobody has any idea what happened down there. The ship's doctor is trying to get her to start talking, but she's not going into a lot of detail. Also, members of the crew keep seeing her popping up at random places on the ship, even though the doctor is sure she's never left the sickbay. The faction on the ship who want to crack open the plant box to poke around at it are gaining ground with the useless drunk captain, though the doctor isn't as keen. They don't give a poo poo about what he thinks though. His patient is starting to say something, albeit just vague stuff about how nice it is down there and how you'll all enjoy it, how she didn't want to go back but the other two forced her back up with the plant. This creeps him the gently caress out but they're going to open the box regardless, so he goes down to have a look. They crack it open and everyone on the ship goes loving hogwild. Everyone who sees the plant is drawn toward it, unable to do anything other than approach it. People are running over from all over the ship. The doctor feels it too, but is able - with intense effort - to look away and close the door. I think he then turns it off somehow or jettisons it into space but the damage is done. Every other person on the ship has just gone completely plant-batshit. Maybe the captain's still getting drunk somewhere. Or dead. But everyone else who didn't get there in time is dead set on going to this planet and seeing more of this orgasmic joy plant. The doctor races over to the signal station to send out the red danger signal, but the strong engineer whose manly energy outmans the weak unmanly doctor has already beaten him to it, sent out the green, and completely broken the signal equipment so it can't be changed. Oh and also he's stolen the doctor's girlfriend and taken her with him down to the planet. And also some other girl. Did I mention the engineer was black? And the author specifically mentions his race as part of why he is so strong and manly able to command the ladies? I wasn't lying about the ethnic stereotypes! I was very much not misleading you on that point! So now the doctor is on an empty ship wallowing in his own failure to do anything, and has some time to philosophise over what the gently caress just happened. Or mostly alone. Strange versions of the rest of the crew keep popping up, even though they should all be down on the surface. They barely talk and just kind of shuffle around on autopilot. Sometimes they talk about visions of their own ethnic-stereotype vision of the afterlife. The Swedish lady talks about Valhalla, because apparently that's what Swedes believe in. didn't have the internet in those days to actually talk to anyone from Sweden, I guess. The doctor figures what happened is this: mankind is just a form of sperm. The plants were eggs. The entire purpose of human history has been to get humanity to the point where it can spread out around the galaxy looking for eggs to fertilise. What happens next the doctor can't even conceive of, any more than a sperm could imagine a human being. What kind of great cosmic organism that the humans and the plants produce. The only reason he was able to resist and isn't currently down there with them, concludes the doctor, is that he's a defective sperm. He's a bit sad about this. I mean yeah, he's not obliterated himself in a space plant, but on the other hand he's seen a glimpse of the primal joy of that obliteration and now has to live with not being able to access it. He won't survive to see the inevitable wave of ships come to settle here, but he will leave his diary behind. He doesn't think it'll do much difference in persuading people not to go down there. A Momentary Taste of Being, by James Tiptree Jr.
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May 26, 2020 01:38
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Most government functions have been privatized, and the old space program is in mothballs. A film producer recruits a couple of washed up astro/cosmonauts, a disgraced doctor, some genetically engineered movie stars, and a teenage stowaway (technically he doesn't recruit her) to steal an old NASA spaceship to film an epic blockbuster...on Mars. The book follows their journey through its many mishaps, complicated by the film's production company going bankrupt and their Earthside controller running the mission on the sly at his new job. (It turns out that getting AT&T to process a collect call over a 90-minute radio time lag is not easy.) They ultimately arrive on Mars, and discover something amazing; evidence that intelligent life had been there in the past. But technical problems result in a resource shortage, and someone must be left behind. The book ends with footage of the marooned astronaut on the silver screen, while we await the announcement of this year's Best Picture... Journey To The Red Planet, by Terry Bisson
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May 26, 2020 02:28
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Scott Lame posted:The further you get from the galactic core the better everything works, both technology and the human mind. On a planet at the outer rim of the galaxy scientists accidentally revive a Something that wants to destroy Everything. Most of the scientists are killed but a ship escapes with 2 adults and all of their children in suspended animation, as well as a Secret Recipe to destroy the Something. It plunges deep into the core where things work like they do in reality. The planet they crash on is ruled by telepathic dogs who operate in packs and have developed medieval technology. I love this book.
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May 26, 2020 02:41
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Scott Lame posted:The further you get from the galactic core the better everything works, both technology and the human mind. On a planet at the outer rim of the galaxy scientists accidentally revive a Something that wants to destroy Everything. Most of the scientists are killed but a ship escapes with 2 adults and all of their children in suspended animation, as well as a Secret Recipe to destroy the Something. It plunges deep into the core where things work like they do in reality. The planet they crash on is ruled by telepathic dogs who operate in packs and have developed medieval technology. It's really good. So humans have spread out over the stars but FTL doesn't work. Through suspended animation and time dilation you can make trips between solar systems, but it's a huge pain in the rear end and the vast majority of humans say 'gently caress it' and live for a few centuries on planets with little interstellar travel. There's an entire culture of nomadic merchants who rarely if ever spend time on planets, they don't really have any sort of government it's just a set of norms and tech, and they've got the advantage of being very disperse - solar system scale governments have a long standing tradition of collapsing into civil wars and such with weapons that throw them back to the stone age if they're lucky, earth specifically has been recolonized like 5 times. Anyway the merchants find a really weird star that has like a 50 year dormant cycle and they're pretty sure it has non-human intelligent life and they're like 'oh snap.' They get there at the same time as a group of fascists who have figured out how to surgically autism-enslave people. They call themselves "the Emergents" because their government is "the emergency government" (for like 300 years). The two sides backstab each other, and the fascists get the upper hand but still need the merchants in order to maintain an above-minimum survival existence so there's an unequal symbiotic government. Meanwhile the planet is overrun with very charismatic spiders who go through ww1-cold war while the humans have a cold war in space. A Deepness In The Sky by Vernor Vinge (Vinge is pretty good, his romance writing is terrible tho)
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May 26, 2020 03:40
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Ok, so like the evil Catmen decide its time to invade again, for like the 6th or 7th time. You frantically try to remember, is this the book where they use the ships engines as weapons, again? No, it cant be, you havent read this one yet, its new, well you feel pretty sure. It must be the number is so high now. Feverish, you pour over the pages, swearing that youve read this same dry prose about catmen invasions and tough people deciding things before. But it cant be? Maybe it is, maybe its the same book and youre just forgetting the earlier ones and you bought this by accident. You go to check but they all seem the same, and you cant even remember reading most of them. As you think as hard as you can, you no longer seem to remember what happened in them or if anything happened at all. As you panic with the covers strewn about the bed a horrifying thought creeps into your mind as you glance them over. Are they making the catmen sexier? Barudak fucked around with this message at 04:18 on May 26, 2020 |
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May 26, 2020 04:16
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Tulip posted:It's really good. I remember not liking Deepness quite as much, and if there was a romance angle maybe that was it. I've always wondered if either book could possibly work on film in some form. It would have to be an animated miniseries. Pham is a pretty unique hero. I've heard nothing good about Children of the Sky, the third book.
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May 26, 2020 04:29
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It's the far future and the planet is in deep poo poo, just total ecological death spiral. Some scientists have been doing some really hardcore simulations of the past and figured out that there's a huge turning point with Christopher Columbus. They simulate what happens if the Spanish crown turns down his voyage, and you get a world where the Aztecs conquer the world and it's way worse. They think however that if they can somehow convince Columbus to be a cuddly conquistador they'll be able evade both the genocide of Europe, the genocide of America, and the inevitable ecological collapse from colonialism. So they send a bunch of sexy scientists back in time to seduce Columbus and some strategic individuals in native Mexican politics. Pastwatch by Orson Scott Card, I was reviewing too many good books Scott Lame posted:I remember not liking Deepness quite as much, and if there was a romance angle maybe that was it. I liked Children of the Sky, but it is definitely worse. That said I liked Deepness the most. Vinge is really good at two things - giving different cultures consistent voices across multiple characters even with very bizarre cultures, and keeping track of the limits of highly imaginative technologies. He's pretty mediocre at basic plotting and just awful at inter character chemistry. Barudak posted:Ok, so like the evil Catmen decide its time to invade again, for like the 6th or 7th time. You frantically try to remember, is this the book where they use the ships engines as weapons, again? No, it cant be, you havent read this one yet, its new, well you feel pretty sure. It must be the number is so high now. 
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May 26, 2020 04:54
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A weird space internet crank who thinks humans have six legs makes a bunch of increasingly stupidly cryptic posts that no one listens to. He is correct about everything except the part about humans having six legs. Also A Fire Upon The Deep
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May 26, 2020 05:18
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Barudak posted:Ok, so like the evil Catmen decide its time to invade again, for like the 6th or 7th time. You frantically try to remember, is this the book where they use the ships engines as weapons, again? No, it cant be, you havent read this one yet, its new, well you feel pretty sure. It must be the number is so high now. I'm very ashamed that the minute you mentioned catment invading for the 6th or 7th time I knew exactly what you were talking about.
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May 26, 2020 05:19
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Someone just posted a lot (all?) of the human-kzin war covers in the awesome book covers thread over here for anyone who hasn't seen them.
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May 26, 2020 05:59
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You remember because it is so good; the book opens with a phrase "He awoke, and remembered dying". It portrays itself as a mystery, a man who wakes up on a ditch on mars searching for clues to who he is and why he remembers himself dying. You flip the first 20 pages desperate to learn more, like your grandfather clutching his dime store novel about hard boiled detectives. What is this world, how can it be? Every new fact seems significant and important in a way you cant puzzle out. Then the books slows down to discuss consciousness transfer and how its considered faster and better than, say, flying. The book suddenly has characters remove all mystery, expositing everything away. In its place is a very boring discussion of public works projects in space and using consciousness swapping to oversee them. Ah perhaps more mundane but still, interesting to explore a world where past yous are dumped by the side of the road. You think, they did this to set the ground for the real meat of the book, a workers revolution, perhaps? You are excited again, if only for the possibility. Then the loving starts. There is so much loving. There is enough loving to last two dozen harlequin romances and still have some leftover for the horny time traveling viking to ravish the NASCAR wife. The protagonist switches bodies, genders, appendages maybe, you aren't sure, theres just so much of it its hard to keep track. When loving isnt happening someone is discussing the right way to pour concrete or whatever the hell the book thinks its story is about now. Then, when your mind is dulled by the inanity there is more loving. Somewhere whatever needs to be resolved is resolved. The book then meekly remembers its opening and our protagonist shunts out a duplicate of himself in the desert where he started. That way the book can end with the same line it started with; like poetry, it rhymes. You dont remember time travel being in the story at all, but maybe it was in there. You think about going back to check but the thought of wading through the gently caress lake is exhausting. You put the book down. Time passes. You remember because it is so good; the book opens with a phrase "He awoke, and remembered dying". kraken! posted:Someone just posted a lot (all?) of the human-kzin war covers in the awesome book covers thread over here for anyone who hasn't seen them. There are 15 numbered Man-Kzin War books, not including all the spinoffs, a fact I curse you with. Barudak fucked around with this message at 13:43 on May 26, 2020 |
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May 26, 2020 13:18
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Scott Lame posted:The good guys arrive on the doggie planet only hours ahead of the butterflies. 
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May 26, 2020 14:44
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