What did you just read?

Arbitrary

Arbitrary

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Crazy shit.

Anyway I just finished

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Minute by minute account of a hypothetical nuclear war that begins with a "bolt out of the blue" ICBM launch by North Korea combined with some pretty extensive research and citations. It's a very tight package with the audiobook clocking in at under twelve hours and it's very good. It's a little pants-shittingly terrifying at a few points as an additional wrinkle of nuclear war gets explained that I hadn't previous considered the full ramifications of and that wrinkle is another apocalypse on a growing stack of them but that's what I signed up for.

Having seen A House of Dynamite it's pretty obvious theft but that movie is cheap trash. It ends before the NK strike even happens and this goes all the way to a cascading nuclear war involving errybody.
 
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F

FancyLad

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Im about halfway through this. Good read so far, she was a journalist embedded in OpenAi in 2022 and has good insights into the key players.

There's not much technical detail here, it's primarily about the leaders and buisness dealings. The meteoric rise of these companies is crazy... huge amounts of capital invesment and a lot of very cult-like behaviors percolate through the organizations as it becomes clear which way the winds are blowing.

Paints a colorful picture of Sam Altman and Elon Musk. The infighting and plays for power are juicy. Highly recommend.
 
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Kajiimagi

Kajiimagi

<Aristocrat╭ರ_•́>
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Finally finished the Hyperion Cantos, which was a omnibus of the 4 Hyperion books.

They are

Hyperion - This is the classic featuring our favorite bad? guy The Shrike! A 10' tall 4 armed blade covered Lord of Pain. Told in the style of stories of people making a trek to the time tombs.

The Fall of Hyperion - This felt like the end of the series to me. Not sure I need to spoiler a book written in 1990 but
after the humans nuked the farcaster network and basically brought the cyber people to an end
I thought this was at an end.

These 1st two books were really good and I do not regret re-reading them.

I didn't realize until I started that I'd never read these last 2, and they are a total retcon of the start of the series. I cannot count how many times I read 'You were told xyz, but that was a lie, and we will explain it when the time is right just trust me.'

Frankly when I was still 1000+ pages from the end of the last book and nothing was happening (just pages and pages and pages of descriptions of locations and people at meetings , I DNF'd and read the wiki summary.

Endymion

The Rise of Endymion

First 2 are some of the greatest sci-fi of modern times, right up there with Dune (IMO) but the last 2 sucked.
 
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Arbitrary

Arbitrary

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Hey, Dan Simmons. I just finished Carrion Comfort last week.

A secretive cabal of psychic vampires pull strings behind the scenes. Our main characters are a group of people that had their lives upended from one of the little games these elite like to play. With "The Ability" they can make anyone do anything including reducing a person to a mindless automaton. Use of this power also extends their life.

It's on the long side of things and very good. I'd read The Terror (good) and Summer of Night (ass) from Simmons before so this was kind of the rubber match. This and Summer of Night both
kill of a main character halfway through that we spent a ton of page time on with
which I do not get at all but it was not as detrimental here as it was with Summer of Night.
 
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Kajiimagi

Kajiimagi

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Recently finished 'Final Orbit' by Chris Hadfield

Final Orbit: From the the #1 bestselling author and astronaut Chris Hadfield, an edge-of-the seat Cold War thriller set against the backdrop of the real 1970s Space race between the US, the USSR and China.

chrishadfield.ca chrishadfield.ca

He is a retired astronaut and former commander of the ISS, test pilot and all around bad ass. This is historical fiction based around a character he made up and this is the 3rd book to feature him. It's set during the Apollo-Soyuz 'handshake' flight during the height of the cold war. It's pretty good stuff if you don't constantly look stuff up on Wikipedia cuz' it sounds implausible.
 
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INTHEMIDSTOFLIONS

INTHEMIDSTOFLIONS

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Kajiimagi said:
Recently finished 'Final Orbit' by Chris Hadfield

Final Orbit: From the the #1 bestselling author and astronaut Chris Hadfield, an edge-of-the seat Cold War thriller set against the backdrop of the real 1970s Space race between the US, the USSR and China.

chrishadfield.ca chrishadfield.ca

He is a retired astronaut and former commander of the ISS, test pilot and all around bad ass. This is historical fiction based around a character he made up and this is the 3rd book to feature him. It's set during the Apollo-Soyuz 'handshake' flight during the height of the cold war. It's pretty good stuff if you don't constantly look stuff up on Wikipedia cuz' it sounds implausible.
Click to expand...
Is it Scifi or just a historical fiction / dramatization of the Soviet + American joint mission?
 
Aaron

Aaron

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Bit of an outfielder here for most of you, but decided to post about it anyway since some of you might like it either for yourselves or your children. I'm currently re-reading Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazon series. For those who don't know, this is the short summary. Written mostly in the inter-war period, and set over the course of something like 4-5 years in the same period, they track the lives of about four groups of children aged about 8-14, mostly in a fictional setting in the English Lake District, or in the Norfolk Broads, though there are other settings. These books were my Father's favourite books, and I had the great pleasure of having him read them to me when I was young. Since then, I've probably read them myself at least twice. They are a sort of "comfort book".

What I find sets them apart, is that they are a bit like Stephan Zweig's The World of Yesterday, in that they portray with a lot of accuracy, a world that once was, but is now forever lost. While the children in the books are fictional, they are based on real people who did very similar things, sailing, camping, exploring and such, all with minimal to no adult supervision, because that was just how young people played and learned before the invention of "helicopter parenting". One of the first lines in the first book sort of highlights the attitude: "If not duffers (idiots), won't drown. If duffers, better drowned".

For those interested, you can find the entire series for free here: Search: fadedpage.com
 
Arbitrary

Arbitrary

Tranny Chaser
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97,828
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This is the last book in The Laundry series. Initially described as Dilbert meets Cthulhu when the series began it's really far more serious than that with an increasingly dark tone from book to book.

The author got 9 or so books in and then stopped telling stories about the fictional Laundry agency tasked with defending Great Britain from the horrors beyond spacetime to do a trilogy set in the same universe but with different characters and then a couple of unimpressive novelas. I've been waiting quite a long time for a story about a few of the main characters that had been on ice due to power creep and this was it while also closing up the series.

And it's fine. What I don't understand is bailing to do a parallel trilogy and a couple of novellas when this was all you were going to do anyway. The narrative escalation from book to book prior to the weird diversion was major. Power creep in a long running series and the difficulty in writing such characters isn't new but aside from the epic-ness of the climax the entire rest of this book could have been in the middle of the series. Again, it's fine, I liked it, I just don't know it took so long to get written.
 
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