And yes, I am reading these for the first time in my 40s, one book every year or two. They're fully rewarding books to read as an adult, though I wish I had encountered them as a kid because they'd have been much healthier input than all the macho swordfighting fantasy I did read back then.
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Also eldang@weirder.earth
I'm currently the coordinator of the #SFFBookClub so a lot of what I'm reading is suggestions from there.
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el dang started reading The Farthest Shore (The Earthsea Cycle, Book 3)
Always such a pleasure to return to Earthsea.
el dang
boosted
Content warning SFFBookClub November: Remnant Population
The #SFFBookClub book for November will be Remnant Population, by Elizabeth Moon.
[CC @eldang@bookwyrm.social just so I can boost it from that account]
Translated with an Introduction by Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis
It was in China, late one moonless night, The Simorgh first appeared to mortal sight – He let a feather float down through the air, And rumours of its fame spread everywhere; Throughout the world men separately conceived An image of its shape, and all believed Their private fantasies uniquely true!
— The conference of the birds by Farīd al-Dīn Attār (15%)
...it's almost as if this 12th Century poet anticipated what Western Christians would do to all of Persian poetry centuries later....
el dang commented on Book of the Dead
I want to read this after it was extensively referenced in www.orionmagazine.org/article/upriver/
el dang commented on The conference of the birds
Translated with an Introduction by Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis
This translation is sort-of endorsed by www.patreon.com/persianpoetics who is on a mission to displace all the orientalised / de-Islamicised translations of Persian poetry with ones that they feel actually capture the spirit of the original.
(I say sort-of because it's not that they have an official "translations we approve of" list, but it's in a collection of ebooks they share with subscribers)
el dang started reading The conference of the birds
The conference of the birds (1984, Penguin)
The conference of the birds by Farīd al-Dīn Attār
Translated with an Introduction by Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis
el dang replied to Will :he_him:'s status
@whami@weirder.earth I'm definitely looking forward to Death's End. I had been wondering if it was going to be bleak, because so far this series seems to be inverting the usual upbeat-grim-happy order of trilogy endings.
el dang reviewed The Dark Forest
This is the second novel in the "Remembrance of Earth’s Past" near-future trilogy. Written by …
Wow
5 stars
This book is in a lot of ways more of everything that Three Body Problem was. It's a huger sweep, a pretty intense exploration of how getting thrown into responsibility can break people, and it builds on a lot of the ideas of the first book about how ununified people would be in response to a threat like this - stuff that now looks rather prescient after a year and a half of covid. It does also suffer from the same weaknesses, perhaps even intensified. In particular there's not much dialogue that is really characters being theirselves as opposed to Liu exploring an idea through his characters. But the good parts were so compelling that this was far from ruining the book for me.
I was left with a few questions, two of which seem like weaknesses of the book: 1) Why did Ye pick Luo to have the conversation …
This book is in a lot of ways more of everything that Three Body Problem was. It's a huger sweep, a pretty intense exploration of how getting thrown into responsibility can break people, and it builds on a lot of the ideas of the first book about how ununified people would be in response to a threat like this - stuff that now looks rather prescient after a year and a half of covid. It does also suffer from the same weaknesses, perhaps even intensified. In particular there's not much dialogue that is really characters being theirselves as opposed to Liu exploring an idea through his characters. But the good parts were so compelling that this was far from ruining the book for me.
I was left with a few questions, two of which seem like weaknesses of the book: 1) Why did Ye pick Luo to have the conversation with that she does in the preface? 2) How did any other humans know that Luo would be important? (that conversation with Ye explains Trisolaris's interest - clearly they'd have been surveilling her intensely) 3) How is there a third book? Three Body Problem left the story with an obvious lead in for a sequel, but the ending to this book could have been a series ending. I am now intrigued and want to see where Liu takes this next.
el dang replied to :teapot: Mari :nb_crossbow:'s status
@bouncinglime@spanner.works Did you see the review I posted at bookwyrm.social/user/eldang/review/57715#anchor-57715 ? And then there's a long conversation I've been having with @gwenfar, my last post in which mentions a few kind of important plot points that I'm still confused by, starting at: bookwyrm.social/user/eldang/comment/56748#anchor-56748 . I don't think I have the stomach to read it again, but I can see why someone would.
Content warning Blindsight spoiler-o-rama
@Gwenfar I did finish it, and I think I'm glad I bothered, but the flaws definitely do continue, and there are things I'm still confused by at the end of the book.
Very quick summary (I'm not sure exactly where you left off, so sorry if some of this is repetitive): They start exploring Rohrshach, and gradually figure out that it's a complex lifeform itself. It makes very clear from the outset that it doesn't want them there, and basically mounts an immune response, but they're able to make repeated trips. In one of those trips Szpindel is killed, and so they reanimate the backup biologist, who is a complete dick and who I doubly hate because I found Szpindel by far the most likeable character.
Anyway, inside Rohrshach they find these very agile many-limbed creatures that they call "scramblers", and they capture a few. The first one doesn't survive, the next 2 they keep as experimental subjects and make them do increasingly complicated problem-solving to try to learn about their abilities and communication. At first the backup biologist insists that they can't possibly be intelligent because they don't have brains, but they massively outperform humans on a whole range of pattern matching and inference tasks so it becomes clear that they must be.
Eventually the crew pieces together a notion of Rohrshach as spectacularly intelligent without consciousness, which is also why talking to it felt like talking to a Chinese Room. And the scramblers are individually intelligent but don't have any sort of self concept, and they realise that they only got away with capturing those two alive because Rohrshach allowed them to be captured as spies. The captive scramblers also start to get weak because they depend on Rohrshach's magnetic field for some biological regulation.
There's a lot of arguing about what it means to be intelligent without consciousness, including a line of argument which I'm not at all convinced by in real life but made sense in the fictional context: that consciousness is actually an evolutionary drawback because conscious thinking is so much slower than unconscious decision-making.
Then two things that I'm still confused by.
1) I'm not sure what the actual order of events is here, but ultimately Theseus gets closer to Rohrshach, Rohrshach starts actively attacking the ship, and the crew except Keeton all agree to fly into the thing as a massive antimatter suicide bomb. 2) Sarasti gravely injures Keeton to make some point about consciousness. I didn't follow why. There also seems to be an implication that maybe vampires aren't really conscious, but that didn't quite make sense to me.
The book ends with Keeton in an escape shuttle on his way back to Earth, his mission now being to bring the whole account of what happened back with him. It's implied that the suicide mission worked so Rohrshach is gone, but it's also implied that meanwhile on Earth the vampires have rebelled and slaughtered humanity, so Keeton might be the last living human.
el dang reviewed Blindsight
It's been two months since a myriad of alien objects clenched about the Earth, screaming …
Very mixed bag of a book
3 stars
First things first, some content warnings about the book: it contains a lot of violence, a narrator who uses ableist language and ideas repeatedly, and a sort of sensory-illusion body horror that I thought was one of the book's strong points but could be deeply disturbing for the wrong reader.
I want to like this book. It does a great job of imagining aliens who are very deeply alien and in unsettling ways. And at it's best it's a tautly narrated story of the terrifying encounter with them. It also plays some amusing games with vampire tropes, and poses interesting questions about what counts as life, sentience, intelligence, etc.
But I found some of the author's tics grating enough to really put me off. The voice is irritatingly macho-male, to the extent that it makes me, a cis man, want to yell at the author to shut up and cede …
First things first, some content warnings about the book: it contains a lot of violence, a narrator who uses ableist language and ideas repeatedly, and a sort of sensory-illusion body horror that I thought was one of the book's strong points but could be deeply disturbing for the wrong reader.
I want to like this book. It does a great job of imagining aliens who are very deeply alien and in unsettling ways. And at it's best it's a tautly narrated story of the terrifying encounter with them. It also plays some amusing games with vampire tropes, and poses interesting questions about what counts as life, sentience, intelligence, etc.
But I found some of the author's tics grating enough to really put me off. The voice is irritatingly macho-male, to the extent that it makes me, a cis man, want to yell at the author to shut up and cede the mic. In the first half there's a really clunky tendency to do foreshadowing very explicitly, which intensifies the macho storytelling feel. And the narrator is consistently casually ableist, even though there are aspects of the overall story and the narrator's life history which push back hard on the same.
I'm glad I read it, but not sure I can really recommend it.
el dang finished reading Blindsight
Blindsight by Peter Watts
It's been two months since a myriad of alien objects clenched about the Earth, screaming as they burned. The heavens …
@Gwenfar Oh, you're right. I was definitely getting an "older SF" sort of vibe from it along with generally thinking I'd have liked it a lot more when it came out. I hadn't connected those two thoughts, nor that the colonialist aspect of this one was so much of a piece with its other flaws.
I feel like it does some questioning of the colonialism, and at least has some female characters who have agency and aren't just there to be a foil for the men. But I am now thinking of it as sort of transitional: it represents some steps forward from bad-old-days SF, but not enough steps that I can enjoy it unreservedly today.
@Gwenfar I agree, but at the same time I really can't see a woman writing this book. I wish I could unpack what I mean by that more explicitly, but a lot of the worst things about the writing style feel intensely male to me, and that's even without the author having fallen into the really cliched male gaze type traps. That's a lot of why I specifically requested nominations not by white men for November.