The world, and especially the United States right now, sucks. So I have little rituals to keep me somewhat balanced by, for instance, reading a set of webcomics every morning. Of course, I still have to complain about them, but the intent is there.
The Far Side frequently cheers me up with comics featuring spiders. There’s one today:
Has anyone else noticed a fondness for multi-limbed aliens in recent SF? It only makes sense, since humans are chronically under-supplied with limbs, and the ones we’ve got are over-specialized to specific functions. Or maybe it’s just my taste in SF.
Although…the newest Andy Weir book, Project Hail Mary, is being released as a movie, with a cute 5-armed alien, and I’m not going to watch it. I’ve detested all of Weir’s books since The Martian, which I wanted to throw at the wall and then set on fire. In general, I’ve grown to dislike novels about rescuing all of humanity with some guy in a spaceship, and I especially dislike Weir’s style of episodic cliffhangers resolved with epically unlikely instances of plot armor.
Wait, I’m supposed to cheer myself up with this stuff.
OK, come on xkcd.
Naturally, the first spot I looked at was my home on the map. I’m in the western part of Minnesota, in what is called the prairie pothole region, surrounded by shallow lakes scoured out by glaciers. So that part is kind of right, but incomplete. I’d say the dominant force on the landscape around me is agriculture. We’ve only got tiny patches of native prairie left. The boundary waters farther north are pristine, so far, but the Republicans are scheming to open that up for copper mining. I’m going to have to redo that map and replace most of it with the legend “PEOPLE”.
One last attempt to salvage some optimism. I bought myself a Kobo e-book reader, and another ritual I have is to read something non-political every night before bed. I got this Kobo with a special deal: it came pre-loaded with every book Terry Pratchett ever published. Can’t go wrong there!
I recently finished Men at Arms, which is pure escapist fantasy. It’s got dragons in it. It’s also about a policeman who takes his civic duties as a servant of the people seriously. I know, dragons? I can suspend disbelief for that, but Sam Vimes is stretching credibility. Also, this book is about the importance of diversity, and efforts to widen representation in the city watch, another ridiculous fantasy element.
I’ve just started on Jingo, a very timely choice, since it’s about the vaguely Western medieval city of Ankh-Morpork going to war with the vaguely Middle Eastern empire of Klatch over a small island in the ocean separating them. It’s disturbingly relevant. It was reassuring to see Sam Vines resist militarizing the City Watch (they’re not a military authority, he says, they’re fellow citizens), but Pratchett better salvage some hope from this situation. I need it.
I hope you didn’t skip “Feet of Clay”, the book between “Men at Arms” and “Jingo”. The best city watch book in my opinion however is “Night Watch”.
i like the ‘geology’ labels, that clears it up XD
The “Great Unconformity” And Earth’s Missing Billion Years May Have A New Explanation
That is an understatement.
This morning, I heard screaming in the background.
It was my 401(K) plan. Again.
The Dow is down 8% in a month and it is looking like Trump is going to crash the economy.
Oh well, it isn’t like I/we needed that money for retirement or anything.
Bush did the same thing in 2008.
I noticed a few decades ago that most science fiction and fantasy is dark and dystopian.
It reflects the zeitgeist (spirit) of our time, which is dark and dystopian.
One of my favorite authors was Iain M. Banks with his Culture novels. They were upbeat about the future and the good people always won in the end.
I discovered him late, liked his Culture novels so much I promptly read them all, and within a year, he was dead.
The most unbelievable thing in Discworld is Havelock Vetinari – the absolute ruler of Ankh-Morpork, who is fully aware of the practical limits of power and genuinely dedicated to the improvement of the city. I have to admit I’d be happy to trade democracy for a despot like that these days…
i was wowed by the wess’kar series by Karin Traviss, about our attempts to colonize an alien planet. Kind of like an anti-Avatar. Human characters are a bit underdeveloped, but the various aliens are satisfyingly alien in appearance and thought, and they are serious deep ecologists. There’s some great worldbuilding and genetics stuff (PZ alert!) in the book, and some thoughtful ethics / philosophy quandaries. And yes the main aliens do have a coupla extra arms.
First one is City of Pearl.
Pratchett is heavily political but wrapped in such brilliant whimsical humour that it’s easy to swallow.
The US sucks. Majorly.
Been watching Starfleet Academy lately to help with the mental load, but I don’t know how long I can keep this up; I’m looking into canceling Paramount+ over the WB bullshit. Transformers? I haven’t been watching the newest series and I don’t want any more live action films; Paramount has mentioned bringing Michael Bay back and I want him nowhere near the franchise. Most of the things that have helped me mentally feel tainted now.
Oh, and Hasbro is gonna produce Harry Potter toys. So Joanne is gonna get paid by the manufacturer of Transformers, which makes me absolutely want to scream.
Currently, I’m playing through Pokémon Shield and next year we’re getting Pokémon Winds and Waves for Switch 2. I’m sticking with that. It feels safer than a lot of other things.
You might like “Spaceman,” with Adam Sandler. It’s about a lone guy in a spaceship rescuing humanity, but it has an intelligent friendly spider helping him. A really BIG intelligent friendly spider.
MY late wife had a phrase for those books that didn’t quite rate being thrown against the wall; “I don’t care WHAT happens to these people.” After that, she would but the book down and never pick it up again.
raven@4– The “good guys” don’t always win in the Culture novels, partly because Banks was allergic to black-and-white characters, and partly because the repeating concern in the Culture novels is how far a utopian society should go to protect itself from threats. Overall the stories tend to resolve in relatively good outcomes, I agree, but I can’t read Use of Weapons as good people winning.
I can’t believe nobody has made a movie or TV show out of Player of Games, which is imho the most exuberant and entertaining novel of the series.
raven@4– The “good guys” don’t always win in the Culture novels, partly because Banks was allergic to black-and-white characters, and partly because the repeating concern in the Culture novels is how far a utopian society should go to protect itself from threats. Overall the stories tend to resolve in relatively good outcomes, I agree, but I can’t read Use of Weapons as good people winning.
Oops. Accidental double post. Sorry, all.
I loved Jingo. My all time favorite though is “Small Gods”. Currently reading Making Money as it has sat on my bookshelf since I bought it in 2015 and I am now getting back into reading after a long pause…
Shortly after the 2024 election I reread some Pratchett books. While reading Guards! Guards! I realized the people of Ankh Morpork are MAGAs. They see a dragon take over their city, they think it can be a foreign policy asset, while almost entirely ignoring the risk to themselves, who are right there.
@14 killyosaur
What a coinkydink, in my current Pratchett re-read I’m also at “Making Money” right now.
If you are game for more comedic fantasy novels I can recommend the Zamonia-series by Walter Moers, especially “The City of Dreaming Books”. I can’t vouch for the quality of the English translation, but he’s the best German literature has to offer in that genre.
From one dyed-in-the-wool scifi curmudgeon to another, please do give Project Hail Mary another chance.
I, too, started reading it from the beginning and immediately threw it against the wall, set it on fire (the book, not the wall). Panspermia! Bah! Humbug! Hie thee hither to a monastery.
However, I tried another approach that worked much better. I searched in iBooks for “Rocky,” the cute, little puppet spider-ish alien, and started from there, skipping around but reading the ending, that was oddly satisfying. Once I had a comfortable base of what was going on I expanded toward the beginning ingesting small quantities of panspermia like acclimating to poison.
In the end, the book holds together and makes sorta sense.
So, move it, soldier! Get back on that horse and CHARGE!
It’s got panspermia in it, and you think that will persuade me to give it a second chance? Nope. No way. Another gripe I have with Weir is his glib, confident way of presenting nonsense as science. Yeah, right, all I need to survive on Mars is a few potato scraps. Yuck.
I will only get on the horse to trample it further into the mud.
SF authors playing games with well-established science is always a bit of a stumbling block. I love Ursula K. Leguin, but no: humanity evolved here from other primates; we’re not the descendants of humanoids who got dropped here by the Hainish a million years ago. (Ditto Larry Niven’s Known Space series — we’re neotenous Pak, in need of thallium to mature — but unlike LeGuin, Niven can be casually dismissed as a hack).
chrislawson, @ #11:
Not only that, but a lot of the time he’s tangling with genuine moral complexity, where it’s really not clear where the lines are – after all, the books mostly deal with Special Circumstances, who deal with situations that are “the moral equivalent of black holes”, where all of the normal rules break down. And he’s far too good a writer to just hit you over the head with his own answers – if you just read the novels, its entirely possible to come away with the view that the Culture aren’t nearly as good as they believe themselves to be. You’ve got to read the meta stuff he wrote to get a really good idea of Banks’ own views of the matter – and even then, he’s pretty clear that it’s not entirely black-and-white.