#sciencefiction

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The Void - Dark sci-fi space opera.

Loren Roth:

Spy and information broker operating within the criminal underworld, she is a woman with a horrific past who is trying to piece herself together again. More than happy to exploit the criminal community for her own gain.

Known to have some form of relationship with the notorious bounty-hunter Mira Candor, though details are unknown.

https://www.ratchman.com/characters/character-profile-loren-roth

@bookstodon

Image by mdw_jason. Loren Roth is a woman with a very cynical nature, and that distrust is often written on her face. She rarely smiles, and wears a sneer most of the time. She has an athletic build and has a distinguishing scar on the left hand side of her face. It is a thin scar leading from the side of her eye down to her jawline. Not too obvious from a distance, but becomes more apparent at close range. She is self-conscious of this, and often hides it with her shoulder length hair. She is stood in a defiant pose, smoking a cigarette, dressed in a maroon leather jacket and trousers, with a black shirt with the logo 'nihilist' emblazoned upon it.

I've finished: Roadside Picnic by Arkady Strugatsky & Boris Strugatsky

While very dated in its misogyny, smoking and technology, the inexplicable aliens trope feels modern.

I know works like Rendezvous with Rama were also published in the early 70s, but more familiar aliens that are easier to interact with are still more common in the genre, and going beyond the differently human sort of alien still feels revolutionary, or like playing sci-fi on hard mode.

Knowing that Roadside Picnic was written in The Soviet Union, it was also interesting to think about how this got through the political sensors, but when you understand that it is not set in Russia and can be portrayed as a critique of western decadence, things start making sense.

Red feels like an American hero going into the wilderness to seek his fortune. This could have been a western, about the last days of the …