Bookshop.org is the alternative to Amazon that supports independent bookstores, so when it offers something of mine, I provide their link to the book. The science-fiction / technothriller crossover, SUBORBITAL 7 is a paper book here (and at Amazon etc)--and is also an #ebook.
@JohnShirley2023 Congrats, looks like a good read ... I've got a birthday comng up so I'll start dropping some hints about what I might want as a present 🙂 And then if nobody gives it to me I'll just buy it myself 😂
Watched it for the umpteenth time last night. 42 years old and as long as you're not watching the original theatrical release, it's a near perfect film. A pure masterclass.
In the surprisingly bleak “Masquerade” (1941), metamorphic aliens on Mercury’s radiation-blasted surface parrot human actions. Beneath their clownish behavior is a plot, a plot to takedown an Earth corporation. #scifi#sciencefiction
In “Tools” (1942), the unchecked capitalist vastation shifts from Mercury to Venus and a new form of power. Instead of harvesting the sun’s rays as in “Masquerade,” the monopoly Radium, Inc.—which “owns the Solar System, body and soul” (122)–exports shiploads of radium from the Venusian mines harvested by specialized robots with ‘radon brains.' #scifi#sciencefiction
10 authors, of whose books I've read at least five:
Ursula Le Guin
Kim Stanley Robinson
Octavia Butler
N. K. Jemisin
Becky Chambers
Iain M. Banks
Martha Wells
M. R. Carey
Lois McMaster Bujold
Vonda McIntyre
10 authors, of whose books I've read at least five:
Terry Pratchett
Brandon Sanderson
Neil Gaiman
Piers Anthony
Brian K. Vaughan
Warren Ellis
Garth Ennis
Kieron Gillen
Bryan Lee O'Malley
Matt Fraction
Gosh that was harder than I thought it would be. I felt like using #GraphicNovels might be cheating but I guess I don't read a ton of longer series otherwise.
Karen Joy Fowler: Cory told me that you, and I quote, "knocked it out of the park" last week.
Me: (flustered) Uh … I … well, I, uh, wrote a story I thought he might like. As I did with Bob … I mean, I don't TAILOR my stories to each instructor but–
KJF: –but you thought @KellyLink and I would enjoy a story about eating children?
Me: Uh …
Anyway, the story that @pluralistic liked is in ParSec #10 today:
@angusm@KellyLink@pluralistic This reminds me of a barnstormer of an argument I had with my agent circa 2008, culminating in her sending me an email saying "FOR GOD'S SAKE, YOU CAN'T HAVE THEM EATING THE BABY'S FACE! YOUR READERS WILL HATE YOU!"
(My reply was something like, "Caitlin, are you projecting much?" (She'd just had another baby.))
@angusm@KellyLink@pluralistic We agreed to submit the MS to an editor of mine who had three toddlers. They agreed the baby-face-eating was in the best possible taste and published the book. (That was 10 Laundryverse novels ago.)
Yes. Heinlein's novel Sixth Column aka The Day After Tomorrow is a drastically re-written version of John Campbell's All. Done with Campbell's permission.
For instance: in Sixth Column the freedom fighters invent a crazy religion as a cover story. They pretend to believe the religion in order to fool the invaders.
In All, the freedom fighters actually believe the ridiculous religion they invented.
#SciFi#ScienceFiction#SpaceExploration#Mars#Capitalism#SiliconValley: "If you listen to the libertarians pushing the notion of space settlement, you could be tricked into believing that Mars is some kind of distant paradise-in-the-making that we need only seize and remake for our species. As the crises escalate here on planet Earth, the solution isn’t to do all we can to make a world that works for all, but to find a new frontier that will magically cure all of our ills. Except there isn’t an ounce of truth in those stories.
Mars is no backup planet. It’s a hostile world where humans can’t breathe without technological assistance, can’t walk freely on the surface without a space suit, and would have to live far underground to avoid developing cancer from the radiation on the surface since the world has no magnetosphere. As Zach and Kelly Weinersmith explain in A City on Mars, the soil on Mars is toxic and not as easy to clean as boosters of space settlement like to suggest. There’s also very little research on the social and biological considerations of long-term habitation in space, particularly reproduction and child rearing in a hostile environment that lacks the gravity we’ve evolved to live with. And that’s before considering the legal questions that people like Musk pretend don’t exist.
There’s no future for humanity in space — or at least not for such a long time that it’s pointless to make sacrifices to try to realize it in the present. Intergalactic travel and adaptation to different planets seems easy in science fiction because the challenges can be ignored or explained away so as not to get in the way of the story — and there’s nothing wrong with that. Science fiction’s job isn’t to predict the future, but to use an imagined universe as a setting to probe the problems of the present." https://disconnect.blog/what-if-we-never-live-on-mars/
Just finished watching The Orville New Horizons and... wow - how awesome was THAT! This season was great, and much more serious than previous ones with a lot of good character development and some really good stories too!
I always said that The Orville did Star Trek better than Star Trek does (even when it was more comedic at the start) and that was even more true in this season - the Moclan and Kaylon story arcs were really meaty and were really well done! And they even tied up some of the loose ends leftover from previous seasons too (though I do wonder what the deal was with the Chak'Tal...).
The last episode was more like an epilogue but even if they don't do another season (it doesn't seem likely at this point) I think it had a really good run and did what it set out to do. I would love to see more of this setting, in some form (books? comics? cartoons?) but I'd also be OK if this is all we're going to get. "Future Unknown", indeed!
if you're still on the fence about this and you like sci-fi, then I would definitely recommend that you start watching it - it's very good stuff! #scifi#TheOrville#NewHorizons