(1) RELOAD THE CANON. Wealth of Geeks says these are the “60 Sci-Fi Books That All Science Fiction Fans Must Read”. I’ve read 30 of them. A bunch of things on the list are titles of series with three or more volumes. In other cases, only the first book in a series is named, like Foundation and Three-Body Problem. But as Asimov himself once wrote, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of petty minds.” Their list is broken down into categories. Here’s one example —
The Best Sci-Fi Books for Younger Readers
Take adventures through time and space, no matter your age!
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
The Murry children and Calvin O’Keefe crosses universes and space-time to try to find their missing father. Their tale is a mind-bending adventure of good vs. evil.
His Dark Materials Trilogy (The Golden Compass/The Subtle Knife/The Amber Spyglass) by Philip Pullman
The Golden Compass/Northern Lights begins this sweeping saga of two children, one born in a parallel universe, one born in our own. In Lyra’s world, people’s souls exist in animal form, called daemons. Her father and mother represent warring factions determined to control all universes. Filled with talking animals, witches, airships, and strange creatures, His Dark Materials packs an emotional punch.
The Apothecary Series by Maile Meloy
Set in the 1950s, The Apothecary starts this highly entertaining, thrilling adventure series in which American Janie Scott meets Benjamin Burrows, the son of an apothecary. After Benjamin’s father is kidnapped, the teenagers uncover a terrifying plot that could result in humanity’s end. They use potions with magical effects to try and stop the impending doom.
The Serpent’s Secret (Kiranmala and the Kingdom Beyond #1) by Sayantani DasGupta
The first of the Kiranmala and the Kingdom Beyond series, book one begins with Kiranmala discovering her parents are missing, and there is a demon in her kitchen! Two princes recruited her and sent to another dimension, where she must battle the Serpent King and the Rakkhoshi Queen to rescue her parents and save the Earth.
The Wild Robot by Peter Brown
This delightful middle-grade novel recounts a discarded robot named Roz and her search for love and acceptance.
(2) STUDYING D&D. Sign up to hear Professor Esther MacCallum-Stewart (also Bid Chair, Glasgow in 2024 Worldcon) talk about the game – “‘How do you want to do this?’, Dungeons & Dragons at 50” – on February 28.
The lecture is free to attend and will be online. I will be discussing how and why Dungeons & Dragons is experiencing such a massive revival at the moment. I’ll trace some of its history, as well as discussing how Twitch streaming and Actual Play games have contributed to making the game a spectator event as well as helping it become an easier, friendly experience to play.
I’ve been writing and researching games for all of my academic career, and playing for even longer. I’m proud of games becoming a more recognised art form and topic of critical debate. And I’m really excited to be talking about this in the lecture!
Register here – “Inaugural Professorial Lecture – Professor Esther MacCallum-Stewart Tickets | Eventbrite”.
(3) CLAIMING SPACE. The Smithsonian’s Afrofuturism conference is running January 27-29 – the “Claiming Space Symposium”. All events are free but registration is required. (However, videos are being posted afterwards at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum YouTube channel.)
The Smithsonian Afrofuturism Series is a collaboration between the National Air and Space Museum, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and the National Museum of African Art.
Smithsonian scholarship and collections address the topics of futurism and Afrofuturism from many angles. Each of the three collaborating museums brings a perspective on the topic including:
- The prevalence of Afrofuturism in science fiction and how visions of the future affect space exploration and today’s technological landscape
- How technology is used to enact or enforce existing power dynamics, or to resist those structures
- How the sources and impact of Afrofuturism are rooted in Africa’s and the African Diaspora’s arts and history as well as their global influences
Not limited to fictional depictions of the future, this collaboration will examine what the future looks like today and how that future addresses issues like postcolonialism, climate change, and urbanization.
(4) SCANNERS LIVE IN VAIN. Camestros Felapton adds another artifact to The Museum of Right-Wing Gadgets & Sundry Devices: “The M of RWG&SD Exhibit 3: The :CueCat”.
…OK, so I can’t actually blame Covid-19 on the CueCat (or “:CueCat” — the initial colon was part of its name). However, this weird computer peripheral did manage to anticipate many of the curses that would fall upon us in the new century. The basic idea of a device that would enable users to scan printed material as a way of accessing websites/online information is one that has become ubiquitous via QR codes and smartphones. Of course, nobody particularly likes QR codes (aside from marketers) and it has taken a worldwide disaster with 5 million+ people dead for their use to become part of everyday life and only then because of public health orders….
(5) PLAYING ALL THE ANGLES. An introduction to the 19th century classic Flatland in “Aspiring to a Higher Plane” at The Public Domain Review.
Edwin Abbott Abbott, who became Headmaster of the City of London School at the early age of 26, was renowned as a teacher, writer, theologian, Shakespearean scholar, and classicist. He was a religious reformer, a tireless educator, and an advocate of social democracy and improved education for women. Yet his main claim to fame today is none of these: a strange little book, the first and almost the only one of its genre: mathematical fantasy. Abbott called it Flatland, and published it in 1884 under the pseudonym A. Square.
On the surface — and the setting, the imaginary world of Flatland, is a surface, an infinite Euclidean plane — the book is a straightforward narrative about geometrically shaped beings that live in a two-dimensional world. A. Square, an ordinary sort of chap, undergoes a mystical experience: a visitation by the mysterious Sphere from the Third Dimension, who carries him to new worlds and new geometries. Inspired by evangelical zeal, he strives to convince his fellow citizens that the world is not limited to the two dimensions accessible to their senses, falls foul of the religious authorities, and ends up in jail.
(6) LIFE IMITATES ART. “An uplifting pandemic drama? How Station Eleven pulled off the impossible” – the Guardian explains.
…The book, which was a bestseller in 2014, was discovered anew as the real-life pandemic made us seek out stories to help process the emergent threat. (See the spike in streams of Steven Soderbergh’s 2011 pandemic thriller Contagion; the return of Camus.) Its author, Emily St John Mandel, is often declared to have “predicted” the future, a claim she resists.
“There are tiers of how much it blew your mind,” says Station Eleven star Mackenzie Davis by phone from Los Angeles. “Talking about a virus making its way round the world from Asia to Europe to Chicago, and then halting production to let that actual event happen – it was really quite chilling.”
If the collapse of fact and fiction was coincidental to the book, it is inherent to the show – and the source of its substantial pathos. Premiering in the UK this week but recently concluded in the US, it has been hailed as a rare uplifting story of the pandemic. Its creator, Patrick Somerville (who also wrote revered post-apocalyptic drama The Leftovers), describes it as: “a post-apocalyptic show about joy”….
(7) CANNED GOODS. Evolution List assembled clips to show the “Evolution of Iron Man in MCU Movies & TV 1978 – 2021”.
Iron Man in MCU Movies & TV Evolution is a list video that includes all Iron Man in MCU Movies & TV changes through the years from 1978 to 2021!
(8) MEMORY LANE.
2007 — [Item by Cat Eldridge.] Fifteen years ago, Patricia McKillip’s Solstice Wood, the sort of sequel to Winter Rose which can be read independently of that novel, wins the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature. Other nominated works that year were Susanna Clarke’s The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories, Peter S. Beagle’s The Line Between, Susan Palwick’s The Necessary Beggar, Kevin Donahue’s The Stolen Child and Tim Powers’ Three Days to Never. It was the year before she received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the same organization. Lest you ask, yes, it is my favorite novel by her.
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
- Born January 28, 1910 — Arnold Moss. Anton Karidian a.k.a. Kodos the Executioner in the most excellent “The Conscience of the King” episode of Trek. It wasn’t his only SFF role as he’d show up in Tales of Tomorrow, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and The Girl from U.N.C.L.E., The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, Time Tunnel and Fantasy Island. (Died 1989.)
- Born January 28, 1920 — Lewis Wilson. Genre-wise, he’s remembered for being the first actor to play Batman on screen in the 1943 Batman, a 15-chapter theatrical serial from Columbia Pictures. His only other major role was as Walt Jameson is the Forties serial Craig Kennedy, Criminologist. (Died 2000.)
- Born January 28, 1929 — Parke Godwin. I’ve read a number of his novels and I fondly remember in particular Sherwood and Robin and the King. If you’ve not read his excellent Firelord series, I do recommend you do so. So who has read his Beowulf series? (Died 2013.)
- Born January 28, 1944 — Susan Howard, 78. Mara, the Klingon woman, on “The Day of The Dove” episode of Star Trek. Was she the first Klingon woman? She also showed up on Tarzan, The Flying Nun, I Dream of Jeanie, Land of Giants, The Immortal, The Fantastic Journey and Mission: Impossible.
- Born January 28, 1959 — Frank Darabont, 63. Early on, he was mostly a screenwriter for horror films such as A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, The Blob and The Fly II, all minor horror films. As a director, he’s much better known because he’s done The Green Mile, The Shawshank Redemption and The Mist. He also developed and executive-produced the first season of The Walking Dead. And he wrote Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein that I like a lot.
- Born January 28, 1973 — Carrie Vaughn, 49. Author of the Kitty Norville series. She’s also been writing extensively in the Wild Cards as well. And she’s got a relatively new SF series, The Bannerless Saga which has two novels so far, Bannerless which won the Philip K. Dick Award, and The Wild Dead. Sounds interesting. She has had two Hugo nominations, the first at Renovation for her “Amaryllis “ short story, the second at Worldcon 75 for another short story, “That Game We Played During the War”.
- Born January 28, 1985 — Tom Hopper, 37. His principal genre role was on the BBC Meriln series as Sir Percival. He also shows up in Doctor Who playing Jeff during the “The Eleventh Hour” episode which would be during the time of the Eleventh Doctor. He’s also Luther Hargreeves in The Umbrella Academy which is an adaptation of the comic book series of the same name, created by Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá.
- Born January 28, 1998 — Ariel Winter, 24. Voice actress whose has shown up in such productions as Mr. Peabody & Sherman as Penny Peterson, Horton Hears a Who!, DC Showcase: Green Arrow as Princess Perdita and Batman: The Dark Knight Returns as Carrie Kelly (Robin). She’s got several one-off live performances on genre series, The Haunting Hour: The Series and Ghost Whisperer.
(10) COMICS SECTION.
- Scott Johnson captures the pause between heroics:
(11) MAN NAME CHUCK UP FOR AWARD NAME BRAM. Chuck Tingle shared his excitement about making the preliminary ballot for the Bram Stoker Award.
(12) TODAY’S THING TO WORRY ABOUT. “Quantum Computing Threatens Everything — Could it be Worse Than the Apocalypse?” – MSN.com thinks this would make a good nightmare.
What is a quantum computer?
A quantum computer is a machine that uses the laws of quantum theory to solve problems made harder by Moore’s law (the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles about every two years). One example is factoring large numbers. Traditional computers are limited to logical circuits with several tens of transistors, while the number of transistors in a quantum processor may be on the order of one to two million. Meaning, these computers will have exponential power, solving problems that traditional computation can’t even identify or create solutions for.
The dangers of a quantum computer
In the near future, quantum computers will be so advanced that they will have the capability to simulate very complicated systems. This could be used for simulations in physics, aerospace engineering, cybersecurity and much more. However, once this computer is built, it has the potential to unravel data encryption protocols. It could also potentially compromise air gaps due to its ability to scan vast distances for nearby networked devices or applications that are open. This means that it can become even simpler for external hackers. They may already have access to your computer or computer system via other avenues, like vulnerabilities in web browsers. They could find it much easier because you’re not locking up all the doors….
(13) WITH A DINO BY YOUR SIDE. The Bristol Board shows off James Gurney’s beautiful poster for “New Book Week”. (Item submitted there by Kurt Busiek.)
(14) TRUE GRIT. “British men play board game ‘Dune’ for 85 hours to break Guinness record” reports UPI.
A quartet of British men broke a Guinness World Record by playing a board game for more than 85 hours.
Lea Poole, Dale Poole, Adam Bircher and Luke de Witt Vine, members of the Herefordshire Boardgamers group, played 79 rounds of the board game Dune, based on the same Frank Herbert novel as the 2021 film of the same name, for a total time of over 85 hours.
The previous record was 80 hours, set by four men in the Netherlands in 2017, and Guinness World Records told the British team they would have to best the record by at least 5 hours to be considered for official recognition.
The gamers were allowed five minutes of break time for each hour played, and they allowed the break times to accumulate so they could get a small amount of sleep. They said they had 21 minutes of break time unused when they finished their record attempt….
(15) UNSPECIAL DELIVERY. The Guardian keeps track as “Out-of-control SpaceX rocket on collision course with moon”.
A SpaceX rocket is on a collision course with the moon after spending almost seven years hurtling through space, experts say.
The booster was originally launched from Florida in February 2015 as part of an interplanetary mission to send a space weather satellite on a million-mile journey.
But after completing a long burn of its engines and sending the NOAA’s Deep Space Climate Observatory on its way to the Lagrange point – a gravity-neutral position four times further than the moon and in direct line with the sun – the rocket’s second stage became derelict….
Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at Harvard University, wrote that the impact was due on 4 March but was “not a big deal”.
Nevertheless, space enthusiasts believe the impact could provide valuable data.
Berger believes the event will allow for observation of subsurface material ejected by the rocket’s strike, while Gray says he is “rooting for a lunar impact”.
“We already know what happens when junk hits the Earth; there’s not much to learn from that,” he said.
(16) INTENTIONAL LANDINGS. The Hakuto-R lander could be part of the international lunar hit parade: “Japanese Company Joins March Back to the Moon in 2022”.
A Japanese company is pushing ahead with plans to launch a private moon lander by the end of 2022, a year packed with other moonshot ambitions and rehearsals that could foretell how soon humans get back to the lunar surface.
If the plans hold, the company, ispace, which is based in Tokyo, would accomplish the first intact landing by a Japanese spacecraft on the moon. And by the time it arrives, it may find other new visitors that already started exploring the moon’s regolith this year from Russia and the United States. (Yutu-2, a Chinese rover, is currently the lone robotic mission on the moon.)
Other missions in 2022 plan to orbit the moon, particularly the NASA Artemis-1 mission, a crucial uncrewed test of the American hardware that is to carry astronauts back to the moon. South Korea could also launch its first lunar orbiter later this year.
But other countries that had hoped to make it to the moon in 2022 have fallen behind. India was planning to make its second robotic moon landing attempt this year. But its Chandrayaan-3 mission was delayed to mid-2023, said K. Sivan, who completed his term as the chairman of the country’s space agency this month. Russia, on the other hand, remains confident that its Luna-25 lander will lift off this summer.
The M1 moon lander built by ispace is the size of a small hot tub. It is in the final stages of assembly in Germany at the facilities of Ariane Group, the company’s European partner, which built the rocket that recently launched the James Webb Space Telescope.
If structural tests go as planned in April, M1 will be shipped to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida for a launch on one of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets….
(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In “Hawkeye Pitch Meeting” on Screen Rant, Ryan George says that in this show a dog attacks a villain because “the man’s a bad guy and the dog’s a good dog.” The dog gets rewarded with a pizza but we don’t see the doggy diarrhea that takes place when a dog snarfs up a lot of cheese. Also, Hawkeye knows LARPers, who help him by “Making some costumes, tampering with police evidence, and risking their jobs and lives.”
[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, Chris Barkley, John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, and Michael Toman, for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jim Janney.]
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In re Carrie Vaughn, I liked her QUESTLAND out last year.
(1) I’ve only got sixteen, but some of those seem pretty odd choices. (But I suppose that would be true of any similar list to an extent.)
Vox has a cover reveal and interview for Tamsyn Muir’s Nona the Ninth.
9) Day of the Dove was Klingons, not Romulans, as the item currently states. I rewatched the Original Series of Star Trek about a year ago, so I remembered just well enough to be prompted to check.
(1) 31/60
(9) Carrie Vaughn has written a lot of stuff I’ve really enjoyed. In addition the works mentioned, I like her superhero duology (Dreams of the Golden Age and After the Golden Age)
(1) 31/60. That is kind of an odd list.
Susan Howard (as Mara) has the most beautiful smile when she finally has something to smile about, i.e., the cessation of hostilities:
https://66.media.tumblr.com/00bbaa7dd75f14c62a8367d180784d2e/tumblr_n13jtf1aWC1rgcauho1_1280.jpg
gottacook says Susan Howard (as Mara) has the most beautiful smile when she finally has something to smile about, i.e., the cessation of hostilities:
This is indeed a truly radiant smile. Mind you it looks like she’s ready to stab someone…
So does anyone know if she was the first Romulnan woman to appear on the series?
Now listening to Laura Lam & Elizabeth May’s feminist space opera Seven Devils
@Cat – she was the first Klingon woman to appear on the series. No Romulans in that episode!
(Kang’s wife, and their science officer)
(4) thanks for the link. I realised only later that I should have put a QR code of the URL to the post in the post itself.
1) 37/60, and at least one of them would only figure on my Best Books To Put Unter A Short Piano Leg list, personally. Idiosyncratic, I think, is the word for that list. Or, at least, it’s a decent excuse to use “idiosyncratic” in a sentence.
P J Evans says she was the first Klingon woman to appear on the series. No Romulans in that episode!
(Kang’s wife, and their science officer)
Ouch, I’ll get Mike to fix that when he returns his meeting, and I had not enough sleep when I wrote that originally several years back.
There’s a lot left out of that list of 60.Y/A, and no Andre Norton, or Zenna Henderson? No superscience, like Doc Smith or Ed Hamilton? No Poul Anderson? No Zelazny, or John Brunner?
On another note, quantum computers. I see they’re a million times to puny to break SHA-256. So, 10 years from now, you can forget Bitcoin and most of the rest.
Relevant to yesterday’s scroll: A comic book store in Knoxville TN has organized a fundraiser to give away copies of Maus to any student who wants one. I feel that some here might be interested in kicking a few buck their way.
Project: Maus
(12) The “Quantum Computing Threatens Everything” article might possibly be the worst quantum computing article on the entire internet.
For the last several years, the NIST has been working on Post-Quantum Cryptography Standardization. The chances are pretty good that a quantum apocalypse will be prevented. What might be a problem is organizations warehousing copies of our secure messages for decryption later when the technology is available. That’s essentially a social problem. It will be interesting to see if anything is done about it.
There is a vast amount of quantum computing hype, If you would like a refreshing antidote, read What if Quantum Computing Is a Bust?
@Nancy
I went there and kicked in a few bucks. Their goal was $20,000, and they’ve already blown past it to the tune of nearly $31,000 in twelve hours.
(7) The footage in this video described as a 1978 take on The Avengers is nothing of the sort: it’s lifted from Exo-Man, an unsuccessful 1977 tv pilot co-created by Martin Caidin (whose novel Cyborg became The Six Million Dollar Man).
Steve Green: That makes sense. I wondered why the early example looked so little like Iron Man.
12) Someone tell the author of that article about Roko’s Basilisk. They seem dumb enough to fall for it.
Thanks for the title credit!
(12) Which will we see first (or ever): quantum computing, practical fusion generators, self-sustaining moon colonies, or robo-taxis? Prediction is hard.
I read a story once, yes really, about a guy working for a company whose stated goal was to do the impossible. (Spoiler: it didn’t go well). He made a point during the job interview of acting eccentricly brilliant, going so far as to lie down on the floor “to look at the problem from a different angle.” I’m almost certain it was in an old F&SF, but I’ve never been able to find it again. Does that sound familiar to anyone?
14) So Guiness-Book-of.Records have changed their policy to not accept “Longest X marathons” anymore? There was a time where you have to find a lot of poeple doing stuff for 48hours instead of these marathon sessions (for health reasons).
12) Quantum computing appears to be slowly progressing. The biggest risk is not to encrypted messages but the system of signatures and certificates used for authentication. Factoring large numbers, for instance, is exactly what you need to break the RSA algorithm.
12) Whatever else its faults, the article has something drastically wrong with the numbers of transistors it’s throwing around. Apple’s base M1 processor (for example) contains 16 BILLION transistors.
Clickity
Trapped in 5300 C.E.
1) At the risk of further exposing myself as a petty mind, if Asimov wrote, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of petty minds,” he was misquoting Emerson in “Self-Reliance,” substituting “petty” for “little.”
In re Quantum Computing, I am reminded of the “Slow Zone” of Vinge’s Fire Upon the Deep verse…
Regarding Maus,
Bay Area comic book shop sends free copies of banned Holocaust graphic novel ‘Maus’ to Tennessee
@1 42/60, if you count a book I didn’t finish and a series I didn’t finish. Two other books are on Mt. Tsunduku. I’ve not even heard of ANY of the “indi” picks. Has anyone here read any of them? Would you recommend them?
1) Only 14/30 for me.
Von Dimpleheimer: That’s my memory of the quote from the edition of the Foundation Trilogy I read. I am not alone in that memory — would you believe Sarah A. Hoyt attributed the same quote to Asimov’s in her 2016 post announcing Sad Puppies 5? However, Google also returns a example of Asimov using the correct quote (“little minds”) so it would take some digging to explain the earlier memorable misquote.
1.) 32/60, and there’s some on the list I wouldn’t even use to support a table leg.
Someone commented about the indie authors. I consider myself to be tuned into that community (as an indie author myself), and…I don’t recognize those names. That said, they’d probably say the same about me.
1) Dotson’s list is beyond idiosyncratic. And down at the bottom of the indie-author recommendations is her own series. (With its overall title marked with the ®.)
I have to say that Wealth of Geeks is an odd place to look for literary commentary–though listicles seem to be its principle product. Or maybe I’m just out of touch with the personal-wealth-growing subculture. “Want to make money gaming? Looking to launch a new side hustle?? Need some extra cash for bills??? Download our Mega List of apps of that pay cash”
(12) I realize it’s pointless to focus on any one ridiculous statement in that farrago, but… “It could also potentially compromise air gaps due to its ability to scan vast distances for nearby networked devices or applications that are open”? What the hell are they talking about? At least with the rest of the article I can sort of tell what kind of fact they were misinterpreting, but…
By the way, the author’s bio on entrepreneur.com says he’s “an American internet entrepreneur, digital-marketing expert, founder of social-networking service Lyfeloop and CEO of international web-development agency Coastal Media Brand.” Literally every mention of Lyfeloop I can find online is marketing material and copied press releases, mostly focusing on an alleged commitment to “free speech” with a very similar phrasing to the pitch for Gab, etc., making me think it’s aimed at a far-right crowd. Malonson seems like a pitchman and scam artist who’s writing deliberately ignorant clickbait (based on the repetitive and garbled style of this piece, I wouldn’t be surprised if he used a text generator to “write” it), and there’s no particular reason to showcase his crap here rather than any one of the other million goobers on the Internet who don’t know what they’re talking about. It’s not in any way a news story – msn.com is reposting random garbage from bottom-of-the-barrel hype shops who are hoping to gain some misleading cred by the association with a familiar brand name, not unlike the Forbes blog.
1) 36/60. None of the indie titles.
Not the list I would make, but I’m sure mine would be equally oddball for everyone not me.
I associate the “foolish inconsistency” line with Terry Pratchett, who, I believe, used it when asked about Discworld continuity. But I also believe that he cited Emerson as the source. (And I know it wasn’t the first time I’d heard it.)
As far as must-read SF, I believe I have the canonical list. And I’m fairly certain all of you will score 100%! Want to see it?
Want to see it again? 😀
@Xtifr: I get a division by zero error when I try to calculate my percentage score. But I get your point.
9) “Firelord” is still on my shelf to read; pretty sure I read “Sherwood” and “The Last Rainbow.”
But “Masters of Solitude” and “Wintermind” are old favorites. Am still peeved that Marvin Kaye and PG never published the third book; I think the draft was tied up by PG’s family or something.
(1) 35/60 and no indies, nor have I heard of any of the indie authors (just to be clear – I would not necessarily expect to have heard of indie authors, as I don’t particularly seek them out).
(8) I read Solstice Wood a while back (Spring of 2017, according to goodreads). I don’t remember it well. I was just discovering McKillip. I haven’t read Winter Rose. I’m planning to read Od Magic soon. I recently read In the Forests of Serre and enjoyed it, as usual with McKillip. Her storytelling and writing style is almost soothing to me.
kathodus says I read Solstice Wood a while back (Spring of 2017, according to goodreads). I don’t remember it well. I was just discovering McKillip. I haven’t read Winter Rose. I’m planning to read Od Magic soon. I recently read In the Forests of Serre and enjoyed it, as usual with McKillip. Her storytelling and writing style is almost soothing to me.
Winter Rose is technically the prequel to Solstice Wood but there really isn’t in my mind that much of a connection between the two novels. The latter novel is also unique in being a contemporary fantasy that downplays the fantastical elements more dominant in her other novels.
That ‘article’ about quantum computers may be the worst written explanation of anything that I have ever read. It gets nothing correct and explains nothing appropriately. I don’t think it even reaches the ‘network of tubes’ level.
I have heard worse explanations (autocockup wanted ‘explosions’, which may actually be better) but only from very very drunk speakers
9) Parke Godwin was a family friend and also a great writer. He’s written and co-written some underrated classics (I put The Masters of Solitude and Wintermind among my favorites as well), and I’m glad to see he’s not completely unknown among the filers.
@Joyce Reynolds-Ward
Same for me and I have at least heard of a lot of indie authors, but I haven’t heard of any of these. I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out that they are the list creator’s writing group.
In general, I got 34/60.
@Cora Buhlert, if you haven’t heard of those indie authors, then that says a lot…and I agree about the likelihood of them being part of the list creator’s writing group.
14) but did they finish a game?
I recall epic sessions but it made my brain hurt when played back in university days. Interesting win conditions though.
1) That list was written by someone who put her own book on it, last book under “indie authors”.
I especially liked Parke Godwin’s shorter fiction. I should see if it’s available. The rumor I once saw was that they were too depressed after writing Wintermind to do the 3rd book.
(1) 19 of 60 … more than I usually get when comparing lists hereabouts (but I still really ought to read more of the near-current crop; call it Mt. To-Be-Obtained [I suspect I wouldn’t be alone in pleading lack of budget]).
Lace! Thank you for the link to the Tamsyn Muir interview! It made me cackle happily. It is so very HARD to wait for Nona‘s release date.
I re-downloaded my ebooks of Gideon and Harrow to get the extra content, but I’m saving it for when my husband and I can slot it into our date night read-aloud sessions. (After Harrow we switched gears entirely and I read him The Long, Slow Way to an Angry Planet. We just finished, and he liked it very much even if I was a hot mess trying to get through the last chapters.)