Category: Sci-Fi/Fantasy

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I’ve always been more on the Tsundoku side. I don’t need suggestions for what might be interesting to read. I have books. Lots of them, both print and digital. What I need is to prioritize!

1. Finish what I’ve started

  • Pick up the books I’ve set down and still want to get back to. I finally restarted To Each This World this month and it turned out to be really good! I also need to get back to The AI Con and The Gossamer Mage.
  • Finish series. I’ve got two books left in my Earthsea re-read, and I haven’t worked up the nerve to open The Rose Field or Parable of the Talents. There’s also Seanan McGuire’s alchemy series, of which I’ve only read Middlegame (and I probably want to re-read it before starting the next one).
  • Review all the books I’ve read this year.
  • Finish the older reviews sitting in my drafts folder.
  • Re-read and review the Les Misérables comic/manga adaptations I picked up over the last couple of years.
  • Finish at least the novels and story collections from that Le Guin bundle a couple of years ago, plus the remaining Hainish stories that aren’t in any of those collections.

(Minor update as I’ve filled in a few other books I forgot to mention.)

2. Make room

This will require coordinating with the rest of the household, but I can at least make a first pass.

  • To-read books that none of us still want to read.
  • Read books that none of us want to re-read.
  • Books that no longer spark joy, and merely spark “meh” (unless there’s another reason to hang onto them, like keeping the bad middle volume of an otherwise good series)
  • Same with my comic collection.

3. Try out some more eBook apps.

I’m mostly using NeoReader (the one built into the Boox Go 7) for DRM-free eBooks, and Kobo for books I’ve bought over the last few years. Ebooks.com has a new app that replaces their existing bare-bones app, and I’ve heard good things about ReadEra. Plus I should make the effort to really use KOReader on a couple of devices. I’ve bounced off it a couple of times, but people out there like it.

4. Cross-Post Reviews

I’ve gotten behind on cross-posting reviews to BookWyrm (which I trust enough to post the full versions) and various bookshop sites (which I don’t). But it’s worth at least rating the recent books I’ve liked by living authors at Amazon and Kobo for visibility in the Great Engines of Algorithmic Recommendation.

5. Keep up!

When I buy a newly-published book, read it while it’s still new, then go back to the to-read pile.

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We finished re-watching Deep Space Nine a few days ago. Quark’s rants in the second-to-last episode about rolling back the reforms regarding gender and worker protections, complaining that Ferengi society has been infected by a disease, and declaring that if he becomes Nagus he’ll bring back what made Ferenginar great again sound eerily familiar.

There’s even a bit about a latinum-plated toilet seat — I mean waste extractor.

It certainly sounds more like what Musk, Trump and Hegseth have actually been saying and doing than any other kind of “making Star Trek real”. Unless Musk’s obsession with eugenics and passing on his genes is enough stronger than his racism that he plans to make sure Khan exists. (Eeeeew.)

Wait, maybe that’s why Khan is white in the Kelvin timeline.

Seriously, though, the Ferengi have always been an extreme caricature of American culture and capitalism taken to absurd lengths. They were even compared to “Yankee traders” in their first appearance on TNG. In 2016, Trump campaigned as an extreme characature of a conservative, the kind that viewers a decade earlier would have dismissed as unrealistic. And since he won, the GOP embraced that caricature and has remade itself into a political/business alliance that makes Quark look downright progressive by comparison.

After all, Quark once brought up the horrors of Earth’s history: slavery, devastating wars, etc. Ferengi never had government death squads rounding people up off the street for being undesirables. They would have just let someone new in town pay the requisite fee and let them go about their business like a civilized culture.

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This is kind of funny. When I watched the movie Avatar way back in 2009, I was struck by the similarity of the premise to Timothy Zahn’s 2002 novel Manta’s Gift:

The main character, a human who’s suffered a severely disabling injury, is offered the chance to place his consciousness into an alien body and report back to the human expedition. Over the course of his time there, he finds that he has more in common with the aliens than with the humans who sent him, and pushes back against their exploitative agenda.

OK, so it’s a brain transplant, not a neural link, and it’s manta-like beings who live in the groundless atmosphere of Jupiter, not humanoids who are part of a literal Gaia.

I just discovered that the book was re-issued in 2020 (Timothy Zahn, 2002) with a tagline describing it as “A gripping first-contact adventure for fans of James Cameron’s Avatar…”

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I can go with your scifi/fantasy story’s super-impossible thing being associated with an eclipse. It’s activating or deactivating people’s super-powers? Sure! Certain magic spells can only be cast during an eclipse? Sure! The moon transforms into cheese? OK, whatever. (pun not intended)

But please, please get the basic mechanics right! Continue reading →

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Humble Bundle is offering 30 books* by Ursula K. Le Guin supporting the Literary Arts charity, including all of Earthsea, several Hainish novels, Catwings, short stories, Gifts/Voices/Powers, nonfiction writing…

I’ve read the Earthsea series (good-to-great) and most of the Hainish novels (some great, some good, some OK), plus Lathe of Heaven (great), and I’ve got copies of several more on my to-read pile, but I’m totally grabbing this for the nonfiction and short stories. Plus I get another format for my Earthsea reread that’s not the giant collected hardcover tome or my old fragile paperbacks.

I’m going to have a lot of reading material next year.

*As ebooks through Kobo

Update: Unfortunately they aren’t DRM-Free. Kobo does have some of her books without DRM, but as far as I can tell, the only one in this bundle is The Unreal and the Real.

The others I’ve found just now are: Worlds of Exile and Illusion, The Eye of the Heron, The Word for World is Forest, and The Beginning Place. Tor seems to be big on requesting non-DRM formats. These may be all of them currently available without DRM: eBooks.com, where I previously bought Forest, has a filter on their search for DRM-Free, and only turns up the same four books.

It seems kind of ironic to sell The Dispossessed (of all books!) encumbered with DRM.

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Today I found myself thinking of Terminator 3, specifically the plotline in which all kinds of random computer crashes are spreading across the internet.

For obvious reasons.

In today’s real world incident, it’s a bug in an auto-pushed update for widely-used security software by CrowdStrike, ironically used to protect mission-critical systems. In the two-decade-old movie (pardon me while I turn to dust), it’s Skynet spreading itself across the internet.

At the time, I thought the nuclear strike would wipe out a lot of internet infrastructure, destroying major nodes and leaving pieces of Skynet disconnected from each other. A commenter remarked that he’d been doing research for a novel and experts agreed that enough of the major nodes and infrastructure would survive the attack to keep the network functioning.

The interesting thing: Neither of us had heard the story that ARPANET (the internet’s predecessor) had been designed for that scenario. These days, it’s pretty much repeated as gospel… but apparently it wasn’t a design goal, and the idea that it was can be traced back to a 1991 article in Network World magazine that conflated ARPANET with a different network design, which was never actually built. (via)

From there it took on a life of its own for the same reason many urban legends (and conspiracy theories) do: it made a better story.

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Drawing of a silver person standing in the desert in front of a flying saucer.I really enjoyed the original run (Saucer Country) at Vertigo and the second run at IDW (Saucer State)…that ended on a cliffhanger, and I’m really looking forward to being able to read the conclusion!

Saucer Country is a dark thriller that blends UFO lore and alien abduction with political intrigue, all set in the hauntingly beautiful Southwest.

The comics by Paul Cornell & Ryan Kelly follow a presidential campaign whose candidate believes she has been abducted by aliens, what that means to her and the country, and weaves through every aspect of UFO conspiracy mythology you can think of.

The first volume ran from 2012-2013, and the second volume picked up in 2017…and it was really weird to see how prescient the first run had been, as well as how the 2016 election season influenced the second part.

Finally in 2022 they ran a crowdfunding campaign at Zoop (launching on election day, of course!) to fund the concluding chapters and a collected edition.

And now: It’s done! It’s printed! It’s shipped! I got my copy in the mail today! (And it’s been long enough that I’m going to want to start at the beginning anyway.)

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